Harnessing good to do right thing

ON this day 50 years ago the good voters of the then Darling Downs electorate joined with the broader Australian community in doing a good thing.

They voted YES to the tune of almost 90 per cent to “the Aboriginal” question in the 1967 Referendum. To date it is still the most successful referendum ever to be held in this country.

During the past few decades a myth has crept into our community that Toowoomba voted NO. This is wrong.

The YES vote was far more than symbolic. Prior to 1967 if you were an Aboriginal person living on a reserve or mission in Qld you couldn’t vote, you couldn’t marry, you couldn’t own property freely, you couldn’t have control of your own children, you couldn’t move freely, you couldn’t earn award wages and you couldn’t drink alcohol.

It’s not easy making constitutional change and Australians rightly need a lot of convincing before they take this most important step. On this occasion Australians didn’t act out of a notion of charity or care for a poor and oppressed victim. Instead this vote came from a sense of fairness and justice.

Fifty years on in 2017 there is still a huge gap between the descendants of our First Peoples and the wider community on almost every social indicator.

Delegates at a conference held today at Uluru, the spiritual heart of our nation, are calling for real and substantial change. Much of the good will that was present on May 27, 1967 is with us today in 2017.

If the arguments for constitutional change are strong enough and the push for change is led by our First Peoples I believe that this good will can be harnessed once again to do the right thing.