A couple of days ago it was Australian Citizenship Day.
This is a day when we reflect on what it means to be an Australian citizen and celebrate the things that unite us.
It is a day for taking pride in our citizenship, celebrating the values that are important to us and reflecting on the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen.
Australian values are based on freedom, respect, fairness, and equality of opportunity.
Our bond as citizens has helped us create a stable, peaceful, and prosperous society.
If you can trace your connection to this land back 65,000 years or if you became an Australian citizen last week, let us all celebrate our common citizenship and the many wonderful things about this country that we share.
It is interesting to look at the values Citizenship Day represents and the vote that is coming up in October.
This referendum will change our system of government.
It will give one particular group a second way of influencing public policy that goes beyond the benefits of our great democracy that is already enjoyed by all citizens regardless of race.
It introduces into our constitution a race-based lobby group, which gives one ethnic group the ability to have an additional say on every law and administrative decision.
The Rule of Law Education Centre has said: The jurisdiction of the Voice extends beyond matters that relate only to Indigenous affairs and includes any matter that relates to Indigenous peoples.
The Voice is free to involve itself in any debate that affects the broader community so long as it relates to Indigenous peoples.
On January 23 Noel Pearson told Patricia Karvelas on ABC radio: “There is hardly any subject matter that Indigenous people would not be affected by and would not want to provide their advice to parliament.
If the government had wanted to focus the Voice on Indigenous affairs, or on matters that relate only to Indigenous people or even primarily to Indigenous people, it would have included such qualifications in the words that would be inserted into the Constitution.
Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay said as a former constitutional law academic, I know just how much the details matter when it comes to any constitutional amendment.
In this case, the few details we have been given make clear that this is not, as some have called it, a modest proposal.
She also points out that voting no to the Indigenous voice to parliament does not in anyway mean you reject human rights.
It is an interesting irony that with all this talk about the referendum on the voice to parliament and what Australian Citizenship Day represents that it was the former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke who said so eloquently back in 1988 “In Australia, there is no hierarchy of descent, there must be no privilege of origin, the commitment is all, the commitment to Australia is the one thing needful to be a true Australian.”
