For months, Megan Krakouer has been one of WA’s leading campaigners for a “no” vote on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
But the Menang woman has declared she has changed her mind, and is now set to vote in favour of enshrining The Voice in the Constitution when the idea is put to a referendum before the end of the year.
Ms Krakouer said her views had shifted after having a “serious, hard look” at the issue and she now believed the Voice would bring positive change.
“I had to really think about ‘what do I want now, what do I want in the present?’ What can I actually help these families with?” she said.
“Right now, that is the main reasoning behind this, because I’ve interacted, I’ve mixed, I’m immersed in the grim reality, and I want to stop and end the pain of our First Nations people.”
Proposal not perfect, but a start
Ms Krakouer said while the proposal for the advisory body was not perfect, it was a start.
“This is not the best of what there should be. In fact, it’s the least of what there should be,” she said.
"But right now, there is no one central body … so it can be very disjointed in terms of trying to save lives and improve life circumstances.
“This has been a really difficult decision to come to, but I’m really happy to come to this decision.”
A spate of suicides in her community over the last six weeks led to Ms Krakouer changing her mind.
“All this is saying is let’s have a representative voice. Let’s have a group of people representing people right across the nation, about being fair and kind, and ending a lot of the challenges that we know exist as First Nations people,” she said.
“It’s a no-brainer when you’re wanting to save people’s lives and improve life circumstances.”
She said despite her previous reservations, she now believed Australia needs to take the “next step” on offer and vote in support of the Voice.
“The Constitution preambled by the First Peoples is a must for the Australian identity,” she said.
“Our right to a Voice is the very least Australians should grace, not deny.”
Advisory body can influence change
Ms Krakouer said a lot more work needed to be done to educate people and ensure information about the body was consistent, especially for people in remote and regional areas.
“The reality is that there’s no veto power. It is an advisory body. But if the advisory body has well intended people, people that are immersed in the issues, it’s a body that can influence change.”
The Voice would be an independent body to advise government and parliament about things affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
It would have no power except to provide advice.
Ms Krakouer had previously told the ABC she did not believe The Voice would result in enough practical changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, describing it as “tokenistic” and “distraction politics”.
“It is merely just an advisory body. Our people deserve more. We need to be able to compel changes, hold government to account,” she said last month.
The Indigenous advocate had also spoken about confusion in the community around what The Voice would achieve.
“I have people saying ‘I don’t know what The Voice is, is that John Farnham The Voice, is that the TV show The Voice?’” she said.
I’m in Victoria and there’s a fairly sizeable First Nations led “progressive No” case that’s been made here. Much of it quite well founded and rational, often with direct experiences of the promise of land rights and its eventual dilution into Howard’s idea of native title or the ongoing issues with representation in Victorian First Nations politics (something which now interestingly has been given specific voice in Gary Murray’s election to the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria).
This from Krakouer seems to track with a lot of what I’ve been hearing here as well. That this is far from ideal but that it’s a necessary stepping stone, either on its own merits or just by virtue of what the vote is going to mean beyond the Voice itself.
All that said, there’s going to be some people rightly furious if this is put up to a vote and fails given how pissweak the formal Yes campaign has been so far. A popular endorsement of the status quo will see decades of work on Treaty pushed back a generation or more, and I expect will either drastically curtail or end any serious relinquishment of assumed power and supremacy of the Crown in the state treaty processes.
It reminds me of the failed ETS and the lost years that came from that.
If the Yes vote fails we definitely won’t see anything like it for a generation. The only reason we had some recovery from the ETS is because there is pressure from the rest of the world, there’s no pressure for indigenous recognition.