The director of UNSW’s Indigenous Law Centre says there are concerns that a referendum will result only in symbolic recognition without any real power

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Many Indigenous people are just going along with the constitutional recognition movement because they feel they have no choice, an academic says.



Megan Davis, the director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of NSW, said: “there is an increasing position that anything is better than nothing”, and that Indigenous people are being left out of the debate.



In a keynote speech to the biennial National Rural Health Conference in Darwin on Monday, she said Indigenous people are concerned that a referendum, to be held in 2017, will result only in symbolic recognition without any real constitutional power.



Davis was a member of former prime minister Julia Gillard’s expert panel on recognition and said she travelled widely to consult with Indigenous people.



There is bipartisan support for recognition of Indigenous people in Australia’s founding document, although there is so far no model for how that would be done or what a referendum question would entail.



“We do get a sense that a lot of the mob are going along with it because they feel they have to,” Davis said.



“We can’t ignore the fact that the pursuit of wholly symbolic constitutional recognition often neglects the valid grievances about how power is wielded by the state over the group in question,” she said.



“We need to be cautious in suggesting ... that recognition will close the gap, that recognition will fix race relations. The kind of hyperbole I’m hearing is creating unrealistic expectations about what the law can achieve.”



Indigenous people are divided on the issue, Davis said, and there is a gap between what they and the state want from recognition.



She said many Indigenous people still want to talk about sovereignty and a treaty but “the political class often roll their eyes at that because they’ve kind of just given up”.



“It’s OK for mob to question whether recognition is what they want right now, and it’s OK for mob to ask whether it’s a distraction,” she said.



There are many forms of constitutional recognition that would result in significant gains in closing the gap, as evidenced in other countries, Davis said.



“But Australia has tried none of them, yet resists all of them.”