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The Prime Minister has told Australians the Uluru Statement’s call for a Voice will unite Australia. An FOI request has revealed the opposite.

The Uluru Statement — the document behind the Labor Government’s Voice Referendum — is actually 26 pages long and may require a “percentage of GDP” to be paid as “reparations” to Indigenous Australians, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed.

The revelation contradicts Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s claim that the Uluru Statement is a “two-minute” read that can “fit on one A4 page” and is merely about Aboriginal recognition in Australia’s Constitution.

The PM has likened the Uluru Statement, written in 2017, to the Gettysburg Address. He has called it “a short document long in the making” that is a “masterclass in spare eloquence”.

By contrast, the full Uluru Statement — released by the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) in response to an FOI request by Senator Pauline Hanson in March — recounts a long list of grievances against mainstream Australia and suggests strategies for mass wealth transfer to Indigenous people.

The Voice is only the first step in a process that would make way for a treaty, which is “the culmination of our agenda,” according to the document, which also provides a roadmap towards treaty. It explains that “reparations” would be made by taxpayers handing over a “fixed percentage” of GDP to Indigenous Australians through “rates, land tax and royalties”.

According to Sky News host Peta Credlin, the tenor of the full Uluru Statement from the Heart is actually one “of anger, grievance, separatism, and the need to undo, as far as possible, the last 240 years of Australian history”.

The Uluru Statement and Two Australias

The full Uluru Statement imagines two Australias instead of one, perpetually dividing those charged with the sins of British settlement from those who still see themselves as victims of the events of the 18th century.

“The invasion that started at Botany Bay is the origin of the fundamental grievance between the old and new Australians,” the document states. “Our sovereignty preexisted the Australian state and has survived it.”

Ironically, while calling for truth-telling about history, the statement is notably one-sided in its depiction of past events.

In recounting the history of British settlement, the Uluru Statement is almost Rousseauean in describing Australia’s original inhabitants, casting them as noble savages whose way of life was pristine and uncorrupted: “Our songlines covered vast distances, uniting peoples in shared stories and religion.” Absent is any hint of the inter-tribal violence and brutal systems of justice that were commonplace before the arrival of Europeans.

Moreover, the statement implies that all non-Indigenous Australians alive today are in the same category as colonisers whose “relentless inhumanity” and “violent dispossession” established modern Australia. It calls for “non-Aboriginal Australians to take responsibility for that history” and the “legacy it has created”.

Crucially, the full Uluru Statement speaks of the “potential for two sovereignties to co-exist” in Australia, dividing the nation along racial lines but binding the two halves in treaty. “By making agreements at the highest level, the negotiation process with the Australian government allows First Nations to express our sovereignty,” the document reads.

It adds that the “unfinished business of Australia’s nationhood includes recognising the ancient jurisdictions of First Nations law”.

The details in the full statement, previously hidden from the Australian public, cast a shadow over Mr Albanese’s hope that the Voice referendum “will lift up the nation” and provide “an opportunity for national unity”.

The Uluru Statement and the Treaty Commission

Credlin warns that “the Voice is just the start of a whole series of steps to establish a treaty commission” which will act as “an umpire sitting above the parliament and the executive government in negotiations with the Voice”. She adds:

The full Uluru Statement also reveals (on page 23) that parliament would begin work establishing this commission even before legislating the Voice. And we know this is under way because Labor have already committed $5.6m in the budget to a Makarrata Commission, of which some $900,000 has already been spent despite Indigenous Minister Linda Burney refusing to reveal in the parliament on “what”, or “where”.

The full Uluru Statement also sets out in granular detail (on page 22), things such as the Voice being “accommodated on an appropriate site within the parliamentary circle in Canberra” and that it “must also be supported by a sufficient and guaranteed budget, with access to its own independent secretariat, experts and lawyers”.

The end result, Credlin laments, will be a divided nation: 

So be in no doubt that if the Voice gets up, there will soon be two classes of Australians. Those with ancestry extending back tens of thousands of years, increasingly consumed with a sense of grievance and entitlement, even though modern Australia is almost entirely colourblind. And those whose ancestry in this country goes back no further than 1788, who will be expected to pay reparations for the privilege of living in the nation that they and their ancestors have helped create. It’s all there in the documents now available, whatever smokescreen the PM and other Yes campaigners try and throw up.

The full Uluru Statement of the Heart can be read HERE.

Image via Unsplash.