With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.
Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.
The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.
Giving a relatively tiny disparate population “a vote” doesn’t actually address any of their needs.
Yes.
No.
High quality education is not readily available to them, nor is the infrastructure they need to thrive and the government has invested little to nothing into their infrastructure in comparison to what they invested in abusing them over decades, what they’ve invested in white cities and towns, and what the value of the land and resources that were stolen from the indigenous people actually are.