KEY POINTS
- Noel Pearson says Australians can "hold us accountable" if a Voice to Parliament is established.
- The Yes campaigner says the Voice would "empower our people" to combat disadvantage.
- He highlighted rheumatic heart disease as an area for practical change.
Noel Pearson says Australians can "blame us" for stalled progress after backing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, arguing it would make Australia's colonial past "our history, rather than our legacy".
But the prominent Yes campaigner accepts his people feel a "mixture of hope and terror" over the verdict Australians will hand down on 14 October, saying "no-one wants their invitation of friendship and love to be unrequited".
Speaking to the National Press Club on Tuesday, No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine said the Voice framed Indigenous people as locked in a cycle of "victimhood and oppression" and unable to make their own decisions.
But at the same venue on Wednesday, Pearson insisted the "modest ... but profound" change would allow them to "take responsibility" for combating disadvantage in their communities.
"Our victimhood ends with our own power. Have the same expectations of us as you would your own ... Blame us when you give us a Voice. Hold us accountable, too, when we do this," he said.
"Allow us to empower our people [and] to take charge of our children, our families, and our people's destiny. We have many talents and gifts to contribute ... We would like Australia to be kinder and friendlier to our children."
Successive Closing the Gap reports have laid bare disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, with the former experiencing lower life expectancy, higher incarceration rates, and being less likely to graduate from university.
Pearson framed the referendum as a chance for Australia to unshackle itself from the legacy of colonisation, saying no current Australians were "guilty for the past".
"[By voting Yes] we can draw a line on the colonial past because we choose to make it our history rather than our legacy," he said.
"Voting No is an active choice to take us nowhere. Voting No leaves us suspended in the neverland that exists when two peoples love the same homeland, but have not yet learned to love each other."
Despite polls, we had to test Uluru's call: Pearson
Polls have consistently shown the Yes camp on course for defeat, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rebuffed suggestions the referendum should be postponed or its question altered.
The Voice was first called for in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, and enjoyed majority support from voters as recently as last year.
But despite flagging backing, Pearson claimed Indigenous Australians "had to ask" the questions posed at Uluru, whether that desire was driven by "naivety or faith".
"[But] we would be untruthful if we didn't say we have a mixture of hope and terror about the answer to this referendum. No-one wants their invitation of friendship and love to be unrequited," he said.
The Voice would be an advisory body, providing non-binding input to parliament and executive government on issues particularly impacting Indigenous people.
The No camp has repeatedly demanded detail on how it would operate, something parliament would be tasked with working through after a Yes vote.
"If there's any parliamentarian demanding detail, I suggest they go to the bathroom and look themselves in the mirror [to] find out who is responsible," Pearson said.
Voice could combat deadly heart disease, Pearson says
Pearson pointed to a failure to combat rheumatic heart disease (RHD), a preventable condition disproportionately killing Indigenous children, as an area for practical improvement.
Despite making up roughly 3 per cent of the overall population, Indigenous Australians accounted for 87 per cent of RHD cases in Australia between 2014 and 2018.
"[It] inflicts lifelong damage to the valves around a child's heart, causing early death. But it's the lifelong damage to the ears of our nation's decision makers that has allowed this disease to prowl around Cape York decades after it [was] eradicated everywhere else in mainstream Australia," Pearson said.
"I have observed both the fundamental power of listening and the devastating consequences of wilful deafness ... [This] is a disease of the unlistened to."
Pearson said the long-serving federal member representing Cape York, Liberal MP Warren Entsch, had not raised the disease once in parliament until it was highlighted during the Voice campaign.
"We need a full-court press in order to eradicate the disease. We need a Voice. It hasn't happened," Pearson said.
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