Australia’s indigenous leaders head to Uluru for ‘historic’ meeting
Four-day convention on constitutional recognition is expected to change the nation’s relationship with its first peoples
More than 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders will fly into Uluru this week before a significant meeting on constitutional recognition that could change Australia’s relationship with its first peoples.
The national convention on constitutional recognition, also known as the Uluru convention, is the cumulation of 12 community dialogues that have taken place around the country in the past six months.
Seventeen delegates from each of those meetings will attend the four-day summit, which begins with an opening ceremony in the Anangu community of Mutitjulu on Tuesday. The Referendum Council chairwoman, Pat Anderson, said it was a “historic meeting”.
“Without being too histrionic, this is one of the most important decisions that this generation, those of us over 18, will make,” she told Guardian Australia.
Anderson said the message from the community dialogues was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would reject any purely symbolic attempts at recognition and demanded substantive, structural reforms dictating how the Australian parliament, and Australian people, related to Indigenous Australians.
Resolutions from the Uluru convention will inform a report outlining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander positions of recognition, due to be handed down next month. Politicians are barred from attending the meetings but will pick up the debate from July 1, when the Referendum Council will be disbanded.
The coverage of the meeting has already been refracted through the prism of the 1967 referendum, under which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were included in the census and the federal government was given power to make special laws.
The 50th anniversary of that vote is on May 27, and was the original target date for a referendum on constitutional recognition when the former prime minister Tony Abbott committed to the process in 2013.
In the timing of the proposed reform, as in its substance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have opted for thoroughness over symbolism.
Anderson said it would be a “complex and difficult conversation” to bring non-Indigenous Australians along with the change, but said there could be no doubt the current state of affairs was not working.