My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcottin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily oz It's the last day of winter. Thanks God for that. Thursday, the thirty first of August.
I'm Zara Seidler, I'm Sam Kazlowski. It's official.
We now have the date that Ozzi's will go to the polls and vote in the referendum on an Indigenous voiced Parliament.
Today I announced that referendum day will be the fourteenth of October.
So what exactly is going to happen on that day and what is it that we're actually voting on. We'll let you know in today's deep dive. But fair Sam, some inflation numbers yesterday.
That's right. Inflation has slowed for the third month in a row to four point nine percent in July. That's according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It means that prices were four point nine percent higher in July than the year prior. That's down from five point four percent in June. It's the lowest inflation rate since February twenty twenty two, and the result is expected to influence the Reserve Bank's next cash rate decision. Ahead
of its meeting on Tuesday. The RBA has kept the cash rate the same it's four point one percent at their last two meetings.
Minimum employment standards could be introduced for delivery and ride share drivers. A federal government proposal is expected to be announced later today, and that will detail payment terms and insurance agreements aimed at better protecting workers in the gig economy. The reforms would also protect workers from being unfairly deactivated by digital platforms such as ride sharing apps.
New Zealand is one step closer to lowering the voting age for local council elections to sixteen after draft laws were introduced to Parliament now now be considered by a committee, but change won't be legislated until after the upcoming October election. The legislation comes after the country's Supreme Court found that the current voting age of eighteen was inconsistent with the
human rights of children. If the current Labor government does not win the election, it's unlikely the voting age will change.
And the good news a world first cancer treatment that is aiming to treat patients faster will be rolled out for more than three thoy five hundred patients in England. This treatment will be administered as an injection. The immunotherapy treatment is expected to provide faster care for patients and its demand on the healthcare system. Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi has announced the referendum date for an Indigenous voice to Parliament.
The idea for a voice came from the people and it will be decided by the people. Today I announced that referendum day will be the fourteenth of October. On that day, every Australian will have a once in a generation chance to bring our country together and to change it for the better.
So this is something that all Australians who are over eighteen are going to have to vote on, and that really means it's on us to understand what it's about. Let's start with the big question, what is the Indigenous voice to Parliament?
So Essentially, in a nutshell, an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be a representative body, an official representative body that would give First Nations people in Australia a say in the laws and the policies that affect them. So pieces of legislation that might pass through Parliament that would affect the lives of First Nations people would go to this consultative body. And so that is this idea of an
Indigenous voice to Parliament. Crucially, the government wants to include this voice in Australia's constitution, which doesn't currently recognize First Nations people. In order to change the constitution, though, you do need to have a successful referendum, and that's.
What we're going to do on the fourteenth of October. How that process actually work, So.
As I said, a referendum is a public vote to change the Australian Constitution and it's compulsory for all Australian citizens aged eighteen and over to vote, so similar in the way that an election is run. Here for a referendum to succeed, it's a bit confusing, but bear with me. The majority of voters across Australia, as well as the majority of voters in a majority of states, so we call it a double majority must approve it.
It's a pretty high bar, right.
It is a high bar. It's really hard to change the constitution. And I mean the last referendum was in nineteen ninety nine. That one was to establish Australia as a republic, so to separate us from the monarchy and to implement an alien head of state. Granted we are still under the king. That one didn't pass, No, it didn't get up, and that was the last time that
we had a referendum. But interestingly, one of the questions that keeps coming up every time we either do a podcast on this or we post about it is what about the marriage equality vote in twenty seventeen. And I do think that the confusion here is very valid, So let's just quickly get into that. So, as I mentioned, a referendum is a vote to change the constitution. When Australia voted in twenty seventeen, it was actually to change legislation,
not the constitution. So the vote was on whether the Marriage Act should be updated to allow for same sex couples to marry in this country. And it was a voluntary postal survey, so it wasn't compulsory to vote in like an election or like the referendum that we're going to in October, and ballots were mailed to voters. So I mean, it feels like forever ago, but we didn't actually go in somewhere to vote.
Okay, So this one's a referendum. We're all going to have to go to the polls on the fourteenth of October to answer a specific question. What is that question?
So it's a yes or no question. Those are the only two answers that you can give to the following statement, and I quote a proposed law to alter the Constitution to recognize the first peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? So that is what you're going to see when you go to vote in October, and you're actually going to be asked to physically write down the answer of yes or no on that.
Ballance as inspel the word y yes or so you'll.
Read that question and you will have the opportunity to either say yes, I accept that or no, I reject that. And that is how the referendum will go down.
I remember we were together on election night in May of last year and Anthony Alberinezi, when he was giving his speech that said, you know, I'm the new Prime Minister, committed to doing this referendum as one of his first promises.
The first promise. It was the first thing after he got elected that he said he would die.
It wasn't something that he made up though, no where exactly did it come from.
So this request for an Indigenous voice to Parliament came from what's called the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and that was a statement that was delivered and endorsed by two hundred and fifty First Nations leaders in May of twenty seventeen. The Ulurus Statement outlined the path forward for recognizing First Nations people in the Constitution and it's essentially broken up into three requests. So the first request was to implement a voice to Parliament, and that is of
course the stage there weren't now. It then asked to establish a Macarata Commission and that would then involve both a treaty and a truth telling process. And these requests that were made in the Ullu Statement from the Heart were designed to be implemented in order or sequentially. So the idea was that the Voice would come first, then the Macarata Commission, and so that's why the government is trying really hard to implement this voice before going to the next steps.
And when you're talking about the voice, what does the voice itself actually look like.
So we heard from the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Bernie, earlier this year about what the government could tell us around how that voice would look in practice. We did do a full episode at the time. It's called an Update on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, so I'll throw linked to that in the show notes, but just to summon up really quickly now, Linda Bernie said that the Voice would be an independent representative advisory body chosen by
local communities. For local communities, she said that there would be representatives for every state and territory, the Torres Strait Islands and specific remote communities. She also said that the Voice would be gender balance and that it would include the views of young people. She said that there were four key priority areas for the Voice, so those were health, education, jobs,
and housing. So in the mind of the government, these are the areas that they would like if this referendums seeds the voice to really be focusing on after it's set up.
So throughout the year we've heard from the government and also the opposition and the whole cast of characters inside Parliament House, and I don't want to put too much emphasis on the positions they're all taking because at the end of the day, you and I have as much of a say as any member of Parliament in this referendum. We get one vote each.
As powerful as the Prime.
Minister, right exactly. But in saying that, it's good to understand where political parties are sitting give me a sense of their positions.
So we'll start with the Labor Party, who are of course in government in this country, so they are in favor of the Voice. As I said, it was Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi's first commitment upon winning the election, and you could almost call it a defining feature of his prime ministership, like he has very much associated his government with a successful referendum, so there is a lot on the line for his government here. He said things like
it's an inspiring and unifying Australian moment. We heard from him yesterday when he launched it in Adelaide. The government is absolutely supporting a Voice to Parliament. The Greens, who sit further to the left of Labor, are also in favor of the voice, and they've said that it's an important opportunity for the country to show its support for progress for First Nations people. I think it's important to note that somebody who sat with the Greens was a
party member of the Senator Lydia Thorpe. She actually left the party over their position on the voice. She now sits on the cross bench and has been quite vocal in the fact that she will be voting no. Alongside her in that no camp is the opposition. So the Liberal Party, led by Peter Dudden, the Liberal Party has said that they don't believe that a Voice to Parliament will quote resolve the issues on the ground in Indigenous communities.
I will just add a caveat there that there are some Liberal Party members who will be voting yes and have been quite explicit in recognizing that, but ultimately the party is taking the position of voting no. The Nationals, who are in coalition with the Liberal Party also oppose the voice, and they've said that they don't believe that this will genuinely close the gap between Indigenous and non
Indigenous people. So I mean that's a fairly rudimentary and quick overview, but that's where we understand the political parties to lie on the spectrum of yes to know. And there are lots of reasons that we won't get into now, and we'll hear that from First Nations people themselves about the reasons for and against the voice.
So let's move away from Canberra then and look at how the entire country is feeling, or at least how we think the entire country is feeling. There's been some polls out. What are they telling us about attitudes towards the referendum.
There's been a fair bit of polling and I think that we can expect it to ramp up and probably change a bit as we head closer and closer towards that October date. But the latest poll that was published widely was an essential poll, so that's published by The Guardian, that found that forty seven percent of respondents intended to vote no, forty three percent of respondents intended to vote yes, and ten percent at the time was still undecided.
That's across Australia.
But another thing worth looking at in this data, I think is how the polling looks state by state because of that double majority point I said before, So at the moment, according to that same essential poll, the only state where the yes vote is ahead of the No vote is in Victoria. The closest margin after that is South Australia, where the No vote has forty eight percent and the Yes campaign has forty five percent.
And we've done some of our own polling on this question as well.
We have, but I mean again, I'm sorry that this whole podcast seems to be caveats, but we speak to a very specific audience. We are trying to provide a platform for young Australians to feel like their voices and their opinions can be heard. But that means that there is going to be an overrepresentation of the youth voting block, and I think we just need to put that there before we continue. But at the time of recording, we
had over one thousand people who had responded. Eighty three percent of them said that they intended to vote yes. Sixteen point seven percent said that they intended to vote no. Interestingly, when you compare those figures to what I'm about to say, Fifty one percent said that they thought the referendum would succeed,
but forty nine percent of them said that it would fail. Interesting, eighty one percent said that they felt they had enough information to make an informed vote, one nineteen percent said that they didn't. And if you are part of that
nineteen percent and you're listening today, don't worry. We will absolutely be giving you as much information as we can in the lead up to this vote, because the best vote is an informed vote, and will endeavor to bring you podcasts and videos and content as much as we can on this so that you feel really confident when you have to go vote on the fourteenth of October.
Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Os and we would love to know your thoughts on the Voice to Parliament. That poll is still live, there's a link in the show notes and we'd love to hear from you. We'll be back again tomorrow. Until then, have a great day.