An Ordeal of Peoplehood: Indigenous Australians and the Debates over Sovereignty, Treaty, and Voice

The Australian government's 2009 commitment to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples did not make Indigenous Australians a “people.” In 2017, in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Indigenous Australians asserted peoplehood and asked Australians to recognise this via a constitutional amendment that would have created an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and Executive. Public debate revealed Indigenous Australians to be ideologically diverse. We use survey data to document some of this, including a lack of commitment, among some, to the historical perspective underpinning the Uluru Statement. However useful it was to the No case during the Voice debate, disunity of opinion hardly disqualifies the Indigenous claim to peoplehood. More significant to Indigenous Australians was whether a single body could represent the many First Nations, and the relationship between recognising the Voice (with or without constitutional amendment) and negotiating a treaty. The No campaign, with some Indigenous support, made much of the issue of whether Indigenous Australians are “peoples” with collective rights, or a “race” made up of many individual citizens with no distinct collective rights within a liberal polity. Distaste for “race” (as concept and legal term) was found, in different forms, on both sides of the referendum debate.