Indigenous recognition still faces gulf: Noel Pearson

Indigenous recognition still faces gulf: Noel Pearson | The Australian

“Recognition” includes many separate aspects and hence
should be many referendum questions.
They cannot all be lumbered into a single question.  It is possible one or some might pass but not
all.

Most Australians support Constitutional Recognition of
Australia’s First Peoples, which apparently can be done within the body of the
Constitution or in a Preamble.  The
latter gives it prominence and separates it from the rest of the Constitution
lest it be read together with any other part.

Certain so called “racist” provision should rightly be
removed, and this would also be supported by most Australians if it had bipartisan
support and no vocal opposition.

However noble it might appear to ban “racism”, such a clause
would have legal consequences that would take it way beyond anything now
foreseen and for that reason so called Constitutional Conservatives oppose
it.  With a vocal opposition, it would
not succeed at a referendum, but that would not stop the first one or two
measures from succeeding.  Surely,
Aboriginal people will not reject this chance for a very significant symbolic
gesture of recognition at the start of the Founding document of this nation,
because it does not go far in the opposite direction to utterly bad all racial
discrimination to make up for all the already experienced discrimination.