More than two years on, you’d be forgiven for thinking the story of the failure of the referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice has been neatly folded away and filed as a story of inevitable loss. Bipartisanship was essential. The country was not ready. Racism raised its ugly head. The proposal was too radical.
As we explore in our recently released book, contrary to some accounts, the Voice referendum was not doomed from the start. It was a carefully developed proposal for constitutional reform, crafted over more than a decade, supervised by successive federal governments from both sides of politics.