The Voice will sink Australia to be ruled by two powers: the Voice and the Commonwealth

They would need to establish:

1.    That they continue to hold rights to their land and waters arising from their traditional, substantially uninterrupted laws and customs – the ongoing and continuous relationship; and

2.    those rights have not been legally extinguished by an appropriate authority.

If you now have a look at the two paragraphs again, you will see this as an attempt to have a blanket constitutional recognition and universal acceptance by the people of Australia of the current of future Native Title rights claims of Indigenous people.

Native Titles Act 1993

Within 12 months of the High Court’s Mabo decision, the Australian government delivered a comprehensive framework to judiciously deal with Native Titles claims of Indigenous people in the form of the Native Titles Act 1993.

Is it not strange that, despite the Native Titles Act 1993, which was particularly enacted to provide for and undo the injustices of the past done to the Indigenous people, we time and again see some Indigenous leaders continuously throwing claims of their ‘continuous relationships’ and ‘Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded’ into the public domain rather than making applications under the Native Titles Act 1993?

Do they not want to make changes to the Native Titles Act 1993 to suit their claims?

Only they would know.

Clearly, it is not about recognition anymore; it is whole lot more at stake.

You would not be surprised that when in 2010 an Expert Panel of Indigenous elder Pat Dodson and lawyer Mark Leibler AC was appointed by the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard to find appropriate ways to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution, one of the recommendations was to acknowledgethe continuing relationship of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with their traditional lands and waters.

The Panel went a lot further and recommended that section 51(xxvi) of the constitution – the only section giving the power to the parliament to make laws for Indigenous people - be repealed.

It suggested that a new ‘section 51A’ be inserted after section 51 which would make that power of the parliament to make laws relating to Indigenous people subject to: