Hybrid | Sidney Seminar: The First Nations Voice Proposal and Australian Democracy

The First Nations Voice Proposal and Australian Democracy

Speakers: Professor Gabrielle Appleby (UNSW) and Professor Megan Davis AC (UNSW)

Chair: Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)

About the talk

On 14 October 2023, the Australian people voted ‘No’ in a constitutional referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through a ‘First Nations Voice’. The Voice proposal was to create a new constitutional body that would ‘make representations’ to the Executive and the Parliament on behalf of Australia’s First Nations. It was intended to provide a vehicle for the expression of self-determination for Indigenous people in the Australian state, as well as an enhancement to the practice of Australian democracy.

Reflecting both popular sovereignty and the country’s federal roots, constitutional amendment in Australia requires parliamentary support as well as the support of a majority of voters across the country and a majority of voters in a majority of states. The Voice referendum was defeated by more than 60 per cent of the vote nationally, and did not win a majority in any State.

This seminar provides reflections on the accommodating vision of democracy that the Voice offered for Indigenous people, and Indigenous women in particular, in Australia’s democratic spaces; as well as an analysis of the experience of distorted democracy that contributed to the referendum defeat. The Voice concept was developed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over the course of more than a decade to mitigate the impact of Australia’s constitutional order and denial of rights, democratic participation and rule of law for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The No campaign against the Voice referendum perverted arguments about race in the Australian Constitution and the equality of Australia’s democratic institutions that were, ironically, the foundations for the Voice proposal itself. Australia’s regulatory framework within which democracy is conducted was ill equipped to address the distorting influences of disinformation and misinformation during the referendum campaign, leading to the silencing of representative Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices. Ironically and tragically, it was this silencing that the Voice proposal sought to address.  

This seminar is part of the Sidney Seminar Series.

About the Speakers

Gabrielle Appleby is a professor of constitutional law at the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice and is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Pro Vice Chancellor Society at UNSW (Sydney). She is the constitutional consultant to the Clerk of the Commonwealth House of Representatives, a Director of the Centre for Public Integrity and was a constitutional advisor to the Regional Dialogues and First Nations Constitutional Convention that delivered the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

 

 

 

 

 

Megan Davis AC is the Whitlam Fraser Chair at Harvard University and Visiting Professor Harvard Law School (2024-2025) and the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law. Megan is a Pro Vice-Chancellor Society at UNSW (Sydney) and a Scientia Professor and Director of the Indigenous Law Centre at UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice. Megan has been the leading constitutional lawyer working on constitutional recognition since 2010. She served on the Prime Minister's Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians (2011) and the Prime Minister's Referendum Council (2015-2017), where she chaired the Indigenous Steering Committee and designed the First Nations Regional Dialogues and the National Constitutional Convention. From 2022-2023 Davis served on the Prime Minister's Referendum Working Group and Referendum Engagement Group and the Attorney General’s Constitutional Expert Group.

About the Chair

Erin Delaney is Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at UCL Faculty of Laws. She is the Inaugural Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. She retains an affiliation with Northwestern University where she was Professor of Law at the Pritzker School of Law and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Letters. She is currently the Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law, Co-Editor of the Hart Series on Judging and the Courts, Co-Editor of the International & Comparative Law Section of JOTWELL, and a member of the editorial boards of Public Law and the Brill Series on Studies in Territorial and Cultural Diversity Governance. 

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.

Book your place

You can attend this event in person or online.

Book your place