Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

The Prime Minister has pledged to implement the Uluru Statement “in full”. It would be nice if he’d read it in full.

On Tuesday morning, Melbourne’s 3AW’s Neil Mitchell interviewed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

While discussing the Voice to Parliament, Mitchell quizzed Albanese on the 26 pages released under a Freedom of Information request and labelled “Document 14” — pages that have also been labelled as the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

His response was startling: the Prime Minister hasn’t read them.

Albo: They know the Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page. Is one page – not hundreds of pages.

Neil: But what are the other 25 pages? And I’ve read them, what are they?

Albo: What they are, is, a record of meetings, some of them. They’re records of the big lead-up that happened, in the lead-up to, ironically, the lead-up to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Neil: Do you agree with most of what is said in those 25 pages?

Albo: I haven’t read it.

Neil? You haven’t read it?

Albo: There’s 120 pages. Why would I? I know what the conclusion is. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page. That’s the conclusion.

Documents and Dialogues

Mr Albanese hasn’t read Document 14. Nor has he read the pages from Document 14, quoted in the 2017 Final Report of the Referendum Council – otherwise he would surely have said so.

Document 14, combined with 13 other documents, totals 112 pages (the ‘120 pages’ Albanese referred to).

Albanese claims that Document 14 contains the “record of meetings” and “records of the big lead-up that happened”.

But that is simply not true of Document 14.

Documents 1 to 13 have titles such as “record of meeting”, “statement of record” and records of “dialogues” written all over them. Those dialogues were held all over the country in the big lead-up to the National Constitutional Convention at Uluru on 23­–26 May 2017.

But Document 14 is not labelled as a record of a meeting. It is labelled, on page one, as the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Extended Uluru Statement

There is further evidence the Uluru Statement is a longer document than the Prime Minister claims.

The Final Report of the Referendum Council explicitly calls the content beginning on page 2 of Document 14 “extracts from the Uluru Statement from the Heart.”

The extra 25 pages in Document 14 are clearly a consensus summary deriving from the meetings and dialogues. These pages are not a record of the process that led to the Uluru Statement. They are a result of the process.

The Final Report places these Uluru Statement extracts from Document 14 in shaded grey sections. When the number of these pages from Document 14 are counted, it totals 17. Adding the one-page Uluru Statement: 18 pages.

This is why it has been repeatedly said that the number of pages of the Uluru Statement in the Final Report is 18 pages.

1, 18 or 26 Pages?

Pat Anderson was one of the co-chairs of the Referendum Council that produced the Final Report, and one of the architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The ABC recorded Pat Anderson on 9 August unequivocally testifying that the Uluru Statement was one page and one page only. 439 words, to be exact.

There’s one big problem though. Before this point in time, she was saying it was 18 pages.

So too Uluru Statement drafter Professor Megan Davis. She tweeted as recently as 14 April that “the Uluru Statement is more than one page.”

She has made many claims in public explaining that the Uluru Statement is 18 pages long.

It is now clear why the Uluru Statement can be given lengths of one, 18 or 26 pages.

• It can simply refer to the one-page “invitation to the Australian people”.
• It can refer to the 18 pages contained in the Final Report.
• As confirmed by the NIAA, the 26 pages of Document 14 are the “Uluru Statement from the Heart – Long”. (The extra eight pages contain flow charts, tables, and an outline of the process going forward).

Constitutional Short-Change

Even if the architects of the Voice proposal, chairs of the Referendum Council and the FOI Legal Team at the NIAA somehow all wrongly labelled the extra 25 pages of Document 14 as the Uluru Statement, it wouldn’t change the importance of their contents for the upcoming referendum.

It is evident that the one-page Uluru Statement “invitation” was never intended to be read as an isolated document. The one-pager has always been the summary. Its context and explanation are found in the remaining 25 pages.

This is the crucial point that must not be missed.

Yet incredibly, the Prime Minister believes the one-page invitation can (in fact must) be read in isolation. Of course he does: he’d rather the Australian people know as little as possible about the radical politics of its drafters.

If Albanese is serious about listening to Indigenous people, he would do well to start with Megan Davis who said,

“I urge everybody if they do have the opportunity to look at the Referendum Council report and read the whole document, which we call the Uluru Statement from the Heart.”

Davis said elsewhere that Australians must read the extra pages if they are to have an “informed vote” at the upcoming referendum.

Remarkably, at present, our Prime Minister does not.

He has pledged to implement the Uluru Statement “in full” while never bothering to read the full statement. Until last week, he knew precious little about it.

The Uluru Statement is crystal clear: its goal is to see a treaty implemented. Yet Albanese refuses to hear these words, and simply repeats that the Voice “has nothing to do with a treaty”.

The Prime Minister’s incredible double-speak holds that Australians should listen to the Uluru Statement while closing their ears to nearly all of it.

___

Photo: Wikimedia Commons