Sydney Peace Foundation Submission to support the Voice Referendum
INQUIRY INTO THE ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLAND VOICE REFERENDUM
Constitution Alternation (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023
The Sydney Peace Foundation is a supporter of the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full. It supports the proposed amendment to the Constitution, and considers the wording delivers on the mandate of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Established in 1998, the Sydney Peace Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation of the University of Sydney. The Foundation is supported by the City of Sydney, and by additional organisations and individuals committed to peace with justice. The Foundation seeks to create dialogue and partnerships between business, media, community, government and the public service.
The Sydney Peace Foundation has an esteemed 25-year record of awarding the International Sydney Peace Prize to extraordinary and inspiring laureates and has deep and ongoing relationships with its laureates in the dialogue of peace with justice.
Our latest recipient of the SPP was the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2022. Professor Megan Davis was awarded the prize with Pat Anderson and Noel Pearson. In her Peace Prize Lecture, delivered at the Town Hall in Sydney on 10th November 2022, Professor Davis told us:
“Aboriginal peoples know only too well: that the law can oppress, and the law can redeem. We know much about how the law can oppress. The law has played a role in the dispossession, oppression and subjugation of First Nations people from the Frontier Wars to Australia’s lengthy period of compulsory racial segregation benignly known as “the Protection era” to forced assimilation and stolen children and stolen wages.