After the Voice referendum: how Australian Catholics should approach recognition

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Last Wednesday, October 14, we marked the third anniversary of the Voice Referendum.  Its defeat was a disaster for the nation and a tragedy for our First Australians.  It also left Aboriginal representative and consultative organizations with the deeply painful sense that they had proved inadequate, gone unheard or somehow been subjected to both judgements at once.

Such a legacy demands more than regret. As I have argued since then, it demands an honest reckoning with what went wrong, and a clearer understanding of the conditions a wiser national course would require.

In July 2025, I published ‘The Bishops and the Flawed Referendum’^[1] in the Australasian Catholic Record.  I need not retrace that ground today. Instead, I will take an aerial view and ask a larger question. If Australia again seeks to recognize our First Australians in the Constitution, how should Catholics – and their bishops – approach the task?

The answer lies neither in apportioning blame nor in defending entrenched positions.  It lies in holding four realities together: the distinctive place of First Australians; the equal citizenship of all Australians; the rigor demanded by constitutional change; and the Church’s duty to unite moral conviction with prudent judgement.

The Voice failed because those realities were allowed to drift apart. Any lasting settlement must bring them once more into principled and lasting accord.

Equality, Recognition and Common Citizenship

The tension between recognition and common citizenship long predates 2023. In the bicentenary year of 1988, 14 Australian church leaders proposed that the new Parliament’s first act should be a unanimous resolution of Aboriginal recognition.

I was entrusted with the task of dealing with the Hawke government and the Howard opposition. The church leaders suggested a resolution affirming:

1. the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and heritage; and
2. the entitlement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to self-management and self-determination, subject to the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth of Australia.

The Hawke Labor government strongly supported the proposal. At the final stage, however, the Coalition sought to qualify the entitlement to self-determination with the words ‘in common with all other Australians’. Church and Aboriginal leaders regarded the qualification as assimilationist and could not accept it. The motion passed but without Coalition support.

Fred Chaney, one of the Liberal Party’s most enlightened and passionate advocates for Aboriginal Australians, was leader of his party in the Senate.  He explained the Opposition’s concern in these terms: “We, like the Government, have made mistakes but I think one mistake we are not prepared to make is to hand a weapon to people who might use that weapon as a stick to beat a path towards the concept of two nations in this country. The very clear view of the Opposition is that that is a totally counterproductive way to go and the great bulk of Aboriginal people that I have met agree with me.”^[2]

The apprehension he expressed in 1988 would return, almost word for word, in the ‘No’ campaign of 2023.

Australia has not yet completed that journey from anxiety about separation to confidence in recognized difference. Many “No” voters, churchgoers and others, would have found Chaney’s warning of 1988 more persuasive than his reflection of 2023. This is where we failed.

The challenge, then, is not just to assert that equality can accommodate difference. It is to make that truth intelligible, and reassuring, to Australians who fear that recognition may fracture our common citizenship. And it’s where we have real work to do in future.

Catholic teaching offers a foundation for that work.  In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote: “It is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and their cultural traditions. They are not merely one minority among others, but should be the principal dialogue partners, especially when large projects affecting their land are proposed.”^[4]

At Alice Springs in 1986, Saint Pope John Paul II had declared: “The establishment of a new society for Aboriginal people cannot go forward without just and mutually recognized agreements with regard to (your) human problems, even though their causes lie in the past.’^[5]

Bishops and the Church can help our nation understand that equal dignity does not require historical amnesia or uniform treatment. However, recognition cannot rest on moral affirmation alone. To endure, the claims of history must be reconciled with the bonds of common citizenship and expressed in a form the Australian people can understand, trust and freely endorse.

In a democracy, a just claim acquires constitutional authority only through consent. The question, then, is not just whether recognition is right, but how a rightful aspiration becomes a national settlement.

Should there be another referendum on this issue, there is still a lot of work to be done by our bishops and church leaders if most people in our pews are to be convinced that First Australians deserve a special, distinctive place at the table. That task requires more than a just cause and sincere advocacy. It requires words that can withstand legal scrutiny; a process broad enough to command political legitimacy; and persuasion patient enough to convert apprehension into trust.

Parliamentary process in 1988

The 1988 parliamentary resolution had already shown how readily a worthy proposal could lose the breadth of support on which its authority depended. John Howard warned of “the perception of separate development and the impression of divisions in the Australian community.”^[6]

Ian Sinclair, the leader of the National Party, raised “the possibility of setting up a separate apartheid state.”^[7] Those claims were of course strongly contested. But their political force could not be wished away. If unresolved fears could deny unanimity to a parliamentary resolution, they posed a greater danger to constitutional change.

The lesson from this failure was clear.  Not enough work had been done to get the Coalition opposition parties on board for a simple parliamentary resolution.  So much more work would be needed for an attempted amendment of the Constitution establishing the Voice.

Bob Ellicott and the architecture of consent

Australia’s referendum history bears out that caution. Of 45 proposals to amend our Constitution, only eight have succeeded. Labor has carried only one, in 1946, when the Commonwealth acquired power to legislate for a range of social services.  There is probably no one alive who voted yes in that 1946 referendum.

The most successful referendum sponsor was the late Bob Ellicott, who secured three of four proposals in 1977, less than 18 months after the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government by Sir John Kerr.  The fourth proposal — simultaneous elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives — failed despite the support of the major parties.

Reflecting on that defeat, Ellicott observed: “A small group of senators in 1977 actively opposed the proposal for simultaneous elections. They were able to obtain a majority in sufficient States to reject the proposal based on its perceived threat, as they saw it, to the States. The fact that this proposal had been adopted by a Constitutional Convention representing the major parties and the States and would save considerable expense and inconvenience to the electors was not sufficient to obtain approval. It had an overall majority of 1.8 million votes but only three States supported it.”^[8]

The force of Ellicott’s reflection lies in its constitutional realism. Agreement among political leaders and States, evident administrative merit and even a national majority had still proved insufficient to overcome concentrated opposition in the requisite number of States.

When the Gillard government’s Expert Panel published its discussion paper on Indigenous recognition in August 2011, Ellicott accordingly looked beyond the worthiness of the cause to the preconditions under which the Australian people might confidently assent to it.

The Expert Panel identified four preconditions intended to join moral legitimacy to constitutional viability:

1. It must contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation;
2. It must benefit and accord with the wishes of our Indigenous peoples;
3. It must be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the political and social spectrums;
4. It must be technically and legally sound.

Ellicott endorsed these preconditions without reservation, saying: “These are demanding principles and, I think, can be accepted as a test to be met by any proposal.”^[9]  Both the 2012 Expert Panel and the 2017 Referendum Council professed adherence to them.

Yet by 2023, through a succession of shortcuts, the third and fourth preconditions had effectively fallen away, leaving, arguably, only the second intact. This was no technical defect at the margins. It went to the legitimacy and prospects of the enterprise itself. A worthy object cannot redeem an inadequate process.

The greater the moral significance of the proposed change, the greater the obligation to test its language, broaden its ownership and build consent before asking the people for an irrevocable judgement.

While writing No Small Change: The Road to Recognition for Indigenous Australia,  I discussed these questions with Ellicott at length. He distilled the principles into practical discipline: bipartisan acceptance; broad public consultation; clarity – containing no element of possible substantial confusion on legal or other grounds; and finally, the support of the people most directly concerned. ^[10]

For a complex proposal, he believed those conditions were best secured through a constitutional convention bringing together the Commonwealth and State parliaments, relevant groups and the wider public. ^[11] His purpose was not procedural neatness, but the resolution of uncertainty before it set into opposition.

A week after the Uluru Statement, I applied that reasoning in the Lowitja Oration marking the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. The Uluru Dialogues resulted in the ‘call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’ despite the fact that it had been rejected out of hand by Prime Minister Abbott.

With Ellicott’s many warnings sounding in my ears, I concluded the oration with this call:

“Australians will not vote for a constitutional First Nations Voice until they have first heard it and seen it in action.  The work needs to begin immediately on legislating for that First Nations Voice, so that it is operating as an integral part of national policy and law making, attracting national support for constitutional recognition …

“The Referendum Council should recommend that the government commence immediate consultations how best to set up a new Indigenous advisory council as a First Nations Voice.  It should recommend that Parliament legislate for the creation of such an advisory council.  It should recommend that any referendum be delayed until the advisory council is established and working well.  The Parliament might then, and only then, consider legislation for a referendum proposing relevant changes to the Constitution.”^[12]

The proposition was simple: establish the institution, earn public confidence, and then and only then seek constitutional protection.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten favoured that course.  First Nations members of the Referendum Council did not. Over the ensuing five years, Prime Ministers Turnbull and Morrison also rejected a constitutionally enshrined Voice.  So there it was.  By 2022, three successive Liberal prime ministers – spanning the party’s ideological breadth – had opposed it. That fact did not settle the merits of the proposal, but it defined the political terrain on which any referendum would have to be fought.

In his book The Twilight of Exceptionalism, Paul Kelly confirms how forbidding that terrain had become. Kelly drew on interviews with Noel Pearson, who was the original proponent of the Voice, and senior Coalition figures including George Brandis who was attorney-general in the Turnbull cabinet, as well as Turnbull himself and other ex-prime ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.

Kelly records Pearson’s judgement that the cause was effectively lost when the Turnbull cabinet rejected the proposal in October 2017.  That was nearly five years before Anthony Albanese announced, on the night he won the election, that Labor would have the referendum in his first term of government, and then putting forward at the Garma festival a first proposal of what the formula of words could be for constitutional change.

Abbott had ruled out a constitutional Voice in August 2015.  Two years later, Turnbull’s cabinet unanimously rejected a joint submission from Nigel Scullion and George Brandis.  Brandis recalled Turnbull opening the discussion with a blunt question: did anyone not think it “a terrible idea?”  No minister dissented. ^[13]  And remember, Peter Dutton was a member of that Cabinet.

The government then argued publicly that an additional representative body, available only to Indigenous Australians, was inconsistent with equal civic rights and had no realistic prospect of winning a majority nationally and in a majority of States. ^[14]

The rejection was plainly incompatible with the Expert Panel’s requirement that any proposal “be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the political and social spectrums.”  There was just no way that a proposal labelled “terrible” and unanimously rejected by a Turnbull cabinet could ever satisfy that requirement.

Pearson later told Kelly, “Our cause was dead once the Coalition turned against us.”^[15]  In hindsight, we must all accept that Pearson was right.  The danger was visible well before polling day. The objections advanced in 2017 largely anticipated those that prevailed in 2023.

For the bishops, and all who favoured recognition, the question was, therefore, not whether the end was just. It was whether fidelity to that end required endorsement of the means proposed, or a more deliberate effort to build a broader foundation.

Should each of us have done more to urge caution once Anthony Albanese was elected with a commitment to give a referendum a go in his first term?

The 2023 Referendum process

I understand those advocates for the Voice who believed that the moral urgency of recognition required wholehearted support for the proposal advanced by the prime minister and his handpicked group of Indigenous advisers. I made a different judgement. The process and wording were incapable of attracting the parliamentary breadth that constitutional change demands.

So, I thought advocates should do more to insist on a political process and a proposed wording more likely to win support from the overwhelming majority of the members of parliament.

More should have been done to caution against proceeding with a referendum which was so flawed both in process and in contested wording as to win support from less than a handful of sitting Coalition members.  In the end, only three sitting Liberal and National members – Julian Leeser, Andrew Bragg and Bridget Archer – publicly supported Yes.

A proposal carrying so little support across the parliamentary divide was not only politically exposed; it placed a cause of profound national importance at grave risk. Our leaders were tampering with the nation’s soul.

At the National Press Club on 9 November 2022, Professor Megan Davis said the Uluru leaders had chosen to ‘leave the politics for the politicians’ and reported ‘strong support’ among LNP members. My own soundings did not bear out that confidence.  So that same day I wrote to the Prime Minister urging:

1. Now is the time to set up a parliamentary committee process allowing anyone and everyone to have their ‘say’ on the proposed words of amendment to place in the Constitution and;
2. Now is the time to return to formal bipartisan cooperation between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition so as to maximize the prospect of Coalition support for the referendum.

The Prime Minister chose to take neither step until the wording had been settled with his handpicked Indigenous leaders.

I continued to critique the proposed amendment wording while the parliamentary process remained open. Once that process had concluded and the question was fixed, I supported a “Yes” vote, notwithstanding my reservations about both the wording and process.

Paul Kelly describes the referendum campaign as “a story of ambition and tragedy,” its prospects already dimmed well before the Coalition left office in May 2022.^[16]  In his account, common ground between Pearson and successive Liberal Prime Ministers had disappeared as early as 2015.  What remained, he writes, was “goodwill and pretense.”^[17] Neither can be a substitute for the political compact on which constitutional change depends.

First Australians must have a decisive voice in articulating the recognition they seek. But the Constitution belongs to all Australians.  It can be amended only by an overwhelming majority of us.

The late Fr Michael Tate, who had carriage of the disastrous 1988 referendum proposals through the Senate, was right when he said to me: “You only attempt constitutional change when there is a crisis or consensus.”

In 2023, Australia had neither.  And so the question passed from government and campaigners to every institution claiming moral authority: what does responsible leadership require when the justice of an aspiration is clearer than the adequacy of the means proposed to secure it?

The Church’s public responsibility

For the Church, this was not an abstract question. Several bishops stated that they would vote Yes.  The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) adopted no formal position, but urged Catholics to attend closely to the statements by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council (NATSICC), inviting it to contribute to the annual social justice statement.

In doing so, the Conference ensured that the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics, and NATSICC’s support for the referendum, were heard across the Church.

The ACBC had to hold two responsibilities in balance. The first was moral: did the dignity, history and legitimate aspirations of First Australians call for a collective witness from the bishops?

The second was prudential: had the proposal emerged from a credible process? Were its words sufficiently certain and legally sound? Did it offer a realistic prospect of uniting the nation rather than dividing it further?

Catholic Social Teaching does not detach moral concern from practical judgement. Nor does it permit prudence to become a respectable name for indifference.

The question was whether this proposal, in this form and at this time, warranted the institutional authority of the Church. Such discernment is not an evasion of leadership, but one of its highest demands: justice must define the destination; legitimate process must provide the path; and prudence must judge whether the nation can sustain the settlement proposed.

The ACBC did not treat the referendum as a matter beyond its proper concern. It considered the proposal after receiving briefings from NATSICC and me. Like many other Australians, some bishops retained serious reservations about wording and process.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge — Archbishop of Brisbane and President of the ACBC from 2018 until July 2022 — subsequently offered a thoughtful account of that tension.  His perspective carries particular weight in light of Queensland’s 68.21 percent No vote.  In his recently published autobiography A Strange Way Home, Coleridge writes:

‘”For the Church, a new engagement with the Indigenous peoples needed to begin with the ear:  the Church had to listen to and learn from Indigenous peoples.  The same was true of the nation.  That was why I supported the Yes vote in the referendum, as did my auxiliary Bishop, Tim Norton SVD.  I heard the arguments in favour of a No vote, and none of them convinced me; some of them appalled me.  It was said that the Voice would be divisive; yet the nation was already divided in ways both seen and unseen.  The question was not, How to keep the nation together? but, How to bring the nation together?”

Coleridge also acknowledged the failures of process, observing:

“Many mistakes had been made by all involved in a process that was far from Australia at its best.  The vote had been politicized from early on, for which our political leaders bore responsibility, given that no referendum in Australia can pass without bipartisan support.  The process of framing the question for the referendum was also flawed; and racism played its part in ways both seen and unseen.”^[18]

Coleridge’s judgement held together what public debate too often forced apart: the moral imperative to listen and the prudential obligation to proceed with care. The Church could not be indifferent to the first; nor could it responsibly disregard the second. That unresolved tension survived the referendum and now shapes the work of recognition still before us.

The unfinished work of recognition

The unfinished work must begin with an honest acknowledgement of the hurt on all sides. Those who committed themselves unreservedly to Yes acted from deep conviction; those who sought changes to process or wording often feared that a rare national opportunity was being placed at risk. In the Australasian Catholic Record a year ago, I wrote:

“I admire those Australians who throughout the referendum campaign committed themselves unreservedly with their time and resources to advocating for the proposed amendment, despite the shortcomings of process and wording.  Having been an advocate for Indigenous rights in the public square for the last 40 years, I thought it necessary to do all I could to improve the process and the wording.  I failed, as did many others.  I am sorry for the hurt caused to those who thought I should overlook the shortcomings in the hope that the public would get with the vibe, go with the flow, and vote Yes in overwhelming numbers.  But that’s just not the way that constitutional change has ever happened in Australia.  And it won’t next time, either.  Buckets of money from the corporate sector in support of a worthy cause are no substitute for the hard work of getting the wording right and winning cross-party support in the parliament.  Let’s all have the humility to admit our mistakes, regroup, forgive the hurts, and move on, seeking the due constitutional recognition of First Australians. We won’t ever amend the Constitution unless we first get most members of parliament on board, and unless we can assure the public that there is nothing to fear, and that there is no unresolved legal complexity and uncertainty.”^[19]

In his address to this Society on 16 August 2026, Danny Gilbert  spoke of the ‘deafening and unworthy silence — with few exceptions — of Bishops and Catholic clergy during the 2023 Voice referendum’.^[20]

Danny was a great advocate for the Voice: he supported key Indigenous leaders, mobilized the business community, and secured the endorsement of eminent lawyers. But conviction, however admirable, does not confer a monopoly on moral judgement; nor does it render every different course unworthy.

In my opinion, Danny’s sweeping charge is unfounded. To describe the bishops’ reticence as “unworthy” is to prejudge the very question the bishops were obliged to discern. It overlooks the Conference’s engagement with NATSICC, the public support expressed by individual bishops, and the serious reservations held by others about the proposal’s wording, process and prospects.

Those reservations were not evidence of indifference or want of courage. They were matters of conscience and prudential judgement — and the scale of the eventual defeat shows that they could not responsibly be dismissed.

With greatest respect to Danny, his criticism leaves too little room for that distinction. People acting in good faith may agree on the justice of an end while differing conscientiously about the means. My own position rested on precisely that distinction.

I had advocated constitutional recognition long before the Voice was advanced as its answer, but feared that the Garma wording and the absence of a credible process placed a rare opportunity at risk. I sought to improve both. Once the question was settled, I supported Yes. I do not claim that every judgement was correct.

I claim only that support for recognition did not relieve any of us from the duty to ask whether the course chosen was equal to the cause it served. A mature national debate must make room for such good-faith disagreement.

After such a comprehensive defeat, reflection was unavoidable — not to reopen wounds or distribute blame, but to prevent a repetition that would further injure First Australians and diminish confidence in reconciliation.

The urgency of 2023 was understandable: a new government had made a clear commitment, and Indigenous leaders were determined not to lose another political moment. Yet urgency could not displace the disciplines of constitutional change.

A constitutional convention, or a searching parliamentary inquiry before the wording was fixed, might have tested competing concerns, clarified institutional design and broadened political ownership. There never was that opportunity.

I remain convinced that the whole exercise was a ‘crash or crash through’ approach by a new Prime Minister and his key Indigenous advisers. They saw no lesson to be learnt from Bob Ellicott, who knew more than anyone else in the country about how to run a successful referendum.

Having been privy to most of Noel Pearson’s dealings with politicians on this issue, Shireen Morris, who has been fond of labelling me “Black Robe” in the long-running referendum debate from 2015 onwards, reached this conclusion: bipartisan and Indigenous agreement on the amendment should have been Labor’s first step once elected.

Morris added: ‘such negotiation could have run concurrently with a bipartisan process to finalise the operational details of a Voice, to be legislated after the referendum.’^[21]  With political agreement and institutional detail remaining unsettled, we had the electorate being asked to supply a trust that the institutions proposing change had not first secured among themselves.

No single person, institution or intervention explains a defeat recorded in every State and by a national margin of roughly 60–40. In different ways, we failed to bring moral purpose, constitutional method and political persuasion into sufficient alignment.

The proper response is neither vindication nor recrimination, but humility: an acknowledgement that the cause was greater than any campaign, that good intentions did not guarantee sound judgement, and that the responsibility now passes, as both burden and bequest, to another generation.

The book The Year Our Voice Broke: The Indigenous Voice Referendum and the Australian Public by accomplished academics Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, moves the discussion beyond personal recollection. They argue that Liberals sympathetic to the Voice “needed a public forum — ideally a ‘constitutional convention’ — devoted to finding words that were widely agreed to be constitutionally safe.”^[22] 

By the time the parliamentary committee was established, however, the words were set in stone and the government was proceeding on the assumption that it might prevail without Liberal support.^[23]  The polling showed how precarious that assumption was: support was broad but shallow.

Coalition voters were overwhelmingly opposed, and Labor voters — unlike Greens voters — were not overwhelmingly in favour.  And so “once the idea of a Voice in the Constitution met vocal opposition, the level of support — much of it weak and contingent rather than strong and unconditional — began to slide.”^[24]

Goot and Rowse caution that bipartisanship alone may still not have secured success. The 1967 referendum was understood — however imperfectly — as extending rights already enjoyed by others. The Voice asked Australians to entrench a distinct institution, giving the language of division considerable force.

A future proposal must, therefore, do more than unite political leaders. It must show how recognition of a distinctive history can deepen, rather than diminish, the equal citizenship we share.

The challenge is larger than designing another referendum: it is to rebuild the civic trust in which recognition may one day be received not as a concession from a divided country, but as the act of a nation reconciled to its history and confident in its future.

That is the national obligation bequeathed by 2023. Australia must honor the distinctive history, culture and standing of First Australians in a way that strengthens our common citizenship. The defeat of the Voice did not extinguish the aspiration for recognition; it revealed the distance between a just cause and a lasting national consensus.

I believe our bishops have a distinctive responsibility in that task: to affirm the dignity and enduring place of our First Australians; to teach that equality does not require sameness; and to insist that any future proposal be worthy both of its moral purpose and of the Constitution it seeks to amend.

Where a proposal is just, legally sound and capable of commanding national confidence, the Church should speak with clarity and courage. Where those conditions are absent, prudence is not timidity, but fidelity to the gravity of the task.  And when it comes to attempts to amend the Australian Constitution in this polarised social media age, we must all accept that bipartisanship in the Parliament is a necessary though not sufficient condition for success.

The referendum of 2023 need not be Australia’s final word on recognition. It may yet become the beginning of a wiser national undertaking — one that listens before it speaks, builds agreement before it seeks assent, and pursues recognition not as the triumph of one side, but as an achievement in which the whole nation can share. That work now passes to another generation.

It will remain unfinished until Australia, proceeding with constitutional care and the freely given consent of its people, reaches an agreement that accords the First Peoples of this land their rightful place of honor.

In doing so, we would not diminish our common citizenship, but deepen it — strengthening our unity, enlarging our common future, and drawing us closer to the promise we proclaim in our national anthem: that we are, in truth, ‘one and free’.

This is an edited version of an address delivered to the Australian Catholic Historical Society at St Patrick’s, Church Hill, on Oct. 18, 2026, that first appeared in Eureka Street.  Republished with permission by Global Catholic.

Listen to the full address here: https://soundcloud.com/frank-brennan-6/achs-address

Footnotes: