IN THE bewildering misinformation surrounding the Voice referendum, your ‘yes’ vote matters.
There is no better way to explain why than Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech: “It begins … with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.”
Your ‘yes’ vote recognises this and begins the necessary process of putting it right for Australians who have been here for 65,000 years, the longest Indigenous tenure of any country in the world.
Janet Field
Swan Hill
