Let’s start this weekend with Ken Wyatt. When Wyatt addressed the National Press Club on Wednesday, he recounted the moment when Scott Morrison offered him the job of minister for Indigenous Australians. The first Indigenous person to hold the ministry was out by the Hills Hoist, hanging up the sheets, when the call came.

Wyatt described the feeling of being so overcome by emotion he couldn’t speak. He had expected to be offered his old spot in the ministry, aged care, not the Indigenous portfolio.

“It took me a full two minutes to answer him. In those two minutes, the emotions of our story, as Indigenous Australians, welled up in me. It’s hard to express what I actually felt and what it meant to me at the time”.

Wyatt’s speech was an interesting one on a few levels, not only for its expressions of humanity, but for its conception of how politics could work if people worked together with goodwill.

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There was a lot of talk from Wyatt about co-designing a proposal both on constitutional recognition and on the voice to parliament that originated in the Uluru statement. This talk was both sincere, and, presumably, strategic, given all hell would break loose internally once it was clear the voice wasn’t going to be enshrined in the constitution, but it wasn’t entirely dead and buried either.

The last thing to say about Wyatt and Wednesday is this. The minister for Indigenous Australians introduced himself in his new role not as a great man of history, even though he was acutely conscious of the historical dimensions of his appointment, but as a man rooted in a community and a continuum.

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This expressed collectivism was both comforting and complicated. There would be company on the journey (“I take great comfort in knowing I’m not alone – indeed, I couldn’t do this alone”). But there was also the curse of great expectations that would inevitably accompany the first Indigenous man to ever hold the Indigenous portfolio. (“I know the expectations on me are high. I know I won’t live up to all of them. But I will do my best. Our leadership role and our communities will need to walk with me, leaving our footprints for others to follow”).

Having captured Wyatt in his opening moment carrying this debate, let’s pan out now to the rocky terrain around him. Australia has not embarked upon a wonderful new journey this week. Sadly, we are just grinding away on well-worn territory.

On the first day of the constitutional convention in 1998, the then Australian Republican Movement chair, Malcolm Turnbull, said: “We believe that the preamble [to the constitution] should be amended. If it is to remain a statement of history, then it should pay appropriate regard and respect to Aboriginal history.”

John Howard raised the need to recognise Indigenous people in a new preamble in October 1998, and an option was drafted with the assistance of the poet Les Murray. The preamble was defeated in the republican referendum in 1999. More recently, Julia Gillard flagged a referendum to achieve constitutional recognition in 2010. That didn’t happen. Tony Abbott revived the push before he was bundled out of the job.

Chuckles would be in order if this kind of hold-my-beer bullshit hadn’t succeeded in derailing progress for at least a couple of decades.

Given the debate had obviously gone round and round without resolution, the campaign to achieve constitutional recognition then found itself superseded by the Uluru statement. That proposed the voice to parliament concept, which was put to the sword by Turnbull, who chose to categorise the constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament as a “third chamber” – even though that characterisation was profoundly, lethally disingenuous.

Leapfrogging the more minimalist recognition with the voice was a repudiation, as Pat Dodson put it this week, of “failed path of soft reconciliation measures making white folks feel like they are doing something good for blackfellas and yet doing nothing to heal the nation’s wounds and achieving unity and respect”.

So now we arrived at the opening of Morrison’s prime ministership. Wyatt was deployed in Naidoc Week to set the terms for the new/old debate. The new minister was deliberately ambiguous about some points of detail (always risky in a political and media environment of zero tolerance for nuance, but kind of necessary if you are telling stakeholders you will walk on the journey with them).

But by the end of the presentation, at least to my ear, Wyatt was pretty clear in what he said – although the prime minister’s office evidently thought otherwise, deploying after him to make the key point explicit.

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Wyatt said there would be a proposal for constitutional recognition and there would probably be a version of the “voice” from the Uluru statement.

Without being absolutely definitive, he signalled the voice would not be enshrined in the constitution, noting it was “possible and likely that there will be a legislative structure as we work through the co-design process” (which is what Morrison’s office subsequently briefed as a prime ministerial “veto” on the constitutional option). Sticking with softly softly, don’t trigger the ranters, Wyatt also suggested a treaty was a matter for state governments, not for Canberra.

Voice 2.0, in Wyatt’s telling on Wednesday, sounded a bit like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission – some kind of representative body that would roll in existing state structures and provide advice to the parliament. But there are two problems with this concept - one political, the other historical.

Even though the representative body could be created legislatively, not enshrined in the constitution - in essence defusing Liberals who really don’t like tinkering with the founding document - that might still be too a high a hurdle for the coterie inside the Coalition prone to bursts of pious hollering about the evils of dividing Australians on the basis of race.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator Pat Dodson has his face painted with ochre during a smoking ceremony at Parliament House on 2 July Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images

It really is hard to wrap your head around an argument that says the only time racial division happens is when someone tries to end racial division with an act of reconciliation. You might laugh at the absurdity of this if it wasn’t so Orwellian. Chuckles would be in order if this kind of hold-my-beer bullshit hadn’t succeeded in derailing progress for at least a couple of decades.

Apart from the rancid politics problem, Indigenous Australians have already seen a representative body enshrined in legislation abolished with the stroke of a pen. It’s safe to assume that history will make people reluctant to sign on to a proposal they already know through lived experience is suboptimal.

Some Indigenous leaders have already expressed that view. Wyatt’s counter to that on Friday was a constitutionally enshrined voice is unlikely to be accepted at a referendum, so it would be “folly” to put it up, and “sometimes we have to use legislative processes”.

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It is unclear whether Wyatt will have sufficient powers of persuasion to convince sufficient numbers of Indigenous Australians to accept what they would regard as the suboptimal version, even if he proves to have the capacity to neutralise people within his own ranks, who, if you scratch them, are hostile to anything at all apart from practical measures. It really is hard to reason with people fixated on finding more Band-Aids while studiously ignoring the root cause of the wounds.

Apart from whether Wyatt can build a viable constituency for change both internally and externally, a couple of other things are also unclear. Labor has signalled it is prepared to come to the table to try to secure a joint position, but Linda Burney is expressing noticeably more patience about that prospect than Pat Dodson. If there’s no joint position, then the prospects of success are zero.

Then there’s Morrison. Wyatt already has the odds stacked against him, but he can’t carry a debate of this weight without the prime minister in his corner, and being seen to be there. No minister can.

Morrison has opened the reconciliation conversation for a new round, that’s clear, but currently unclear is whether the prime minister intends to sink any personal capital into securing a positive resolution if the going gets tough, or whether he will wilt at the first whiff of grapeshot.

Tests of leadership in politics are a terrible cliche, deployed by political writers at the drop of the hat, but in this case, the cliche holds.

This is a test of Morrison’s prime ministership.