Keeping hope alive: the push to revive the Statement from the Heart

Steeped in the dark arts of campaign strategy, Mark Textor still has iconic standing in political circles as a former poll-whisperer to Coalition prime ministers from John Howard to Malcolm Turnbull.

So there are few better names to have harnessed to your cause when a Coalition government is in power.

This week, Textor's firm, the CT Group (formerly Crosby Textor), emerged as a key partner in a renewed push for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations' Voice to Parliament, in line with the landmark Statement From the Heart signed by Indigenous leaders at Uluru in May 2017.

The new awareness campaign, dubbed "From the Heart", was launched on Tuesday at the start of National Reconciliation Week to coincide with the Uluru declaration's three-year anniversary.

Influential backers include the Cape York partnership's founder Noel Pearson and its co-chair Danny Gilbert (chief of law firm Gilbert + Tobin) who, with a raft of prominent Indigenous leaders, are hoping it will drive constitutional recognition back onto the national to-do list.

Textor, who was raised in the Northern Territory and is a long-time personal friend of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, believes the pandemic has made the times more propitious for such an initiative.

"A national 'whatever it takes to fix this' mood exists," he told the Herald. "National cabinets, non-traditional economics, a proposal for a new accord, are examples of casting aside ideological stances in favour of structures that get real results – and this offers great hope for a new approach to solutions that close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians."

The director of the new project, Dean Parkin, says it will build awareness for a constitutionally enshrined Voice by demonstrating its fairness and practicality, as well as its contribution to national unity.

"People have seen [through the pandemic] what we can achieve as a nation when governments and decision-makers listen to experts, and particularly experts on the ground," he told the Herald. "And that is what a Voice to Parliament is all about – listening to the voices of our experts who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in their communities."

Driving the new campaign's messaging are insights gleaned from a nationally representative poll (of a quality consistent with those run for political campaigns) which CT Group carried out in February.

Of the 2000 Australians surveyed, 49 per cent said they would vote in favour of a constitutional change to underpin an Indigenous Voice advising the parliament. This was a significant result, given that about half the sample hadn't read or heard of the Voice proposal at that stage.

Only 20 per cent responded in the negative, while 31 per cent were undecided. Of those fully aware of the Voice proposal, 61 per cent supported the idea.

Fairness was a key driver of positive feelings towards the Voice proposal, with 73 per cent agreeing it would deliver "genuine fairness and equality in Australian society". And there was a powerful "it's time factor" at work.

"We know from the qualitative research we have done, going back for 10 years, that there has been a growing frustration among non-indigenous voters that Indigenous issues were simply not being fixed, or were being treated like a political football," Textor says. "That frustration from left, right and centre voters has created a mood to do something different from the failed approach of the past."

Yet the path to constitutional recognition remains rocky. The Uluru statement lost traction when then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissed its Voice proposal as an unworkable "third chamber of parliament" — a characterisation used as a weapon by conservative opponents inside the Coalition party room.

Morrison also appropriated the "third chamber" label after first becoming prime minister in August 2018, though since winning last year's federal election, he appears to have taken a more nuanced position.

Days after his unexpected election victory, he told the Herald that he was "committed to getting an outcome" on constitutional recognition. He also made history by installing Ken Wyatt as the first Aboriginal man to hold the portfolio of Minister for Indigenous Australians.

But Wyatt dashed the hopes of many when he told an audience in August last year that any referendum question the government devised would "not result in what some desire and that is an enshrined Voice to Parliament".

Instead, he set about decoupling the Voice from constitutional recognition, picking up a recommendation from a joint parliamentary committee (delivered in November 2018) that Indigenous leaders and the government should jointly co-design the Voice before determining its legislative or constitutional fate.

Swallowing disappointment, Indigenous leaders have now climbed aboard Wyatt's co-design process. But for many, the quiet hope remains that once a model is worked out, it can still be tethered in some way to a constitutional amendment that will protect it from being abolished at the stroke of a future government's pen.

Professor Megan Davis, an Indigenous leader and constitutional law expert who sits on the board of the recently formed Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, insists the work on the Voice cannot be "decoupled" from the Uluru statement.

"I see this Voice process as utterly consistent with the Uluru statement, because the legal form of it will be determined after the co-design process," she says. "I think what people really grappled with after Uluru was, can you enshrine a Voice to Parliament without seeing what the detail is? And the politicians decided they needed to see the detail first."

Both Davis and Parkin were struck by Morrison's words during a landmark speech he gave earlier this year on Closing the Gap when he acknowledged the "honest yearn" of Indigenous Australians for constitutional recognition.

Morrison referenced the findings of the joint parliamentary committee and its recommendation that the legal form of the Voice, "constitutional or legislation" be considered after its design was complete. "We support finalising co-design first," Morrison said. But he did not reiterate a veto on a constitutional anchor for it.

Parkin is convinced this means Morrison is not closing the door on some form of constitutional underpinning of the Voice despite what senior Coalition figures have said.

"I don't think the importance of the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap speech has been properly appreciated by very many people," Parkin says. "He made it very clear that after this current process of co-design is complete, there will then be a process to determine the legal form of the Voice … From my perspective, constitutional enshrinement remains very much a live option."

Others, too, remain hopeful that Morrison may come to see constitutional enshrinement of the Voice as something that would burnish his legacy. "What is going on now is a campaign of mutual signalling, to make sure that no one shuts the gates too early," an inside player says.

This might be overly optimistic, given that on Friday Wyatt reiterated to the Herald that "the Morrison government does not support a constitutionally enshrined Voice".

"Our priority is ensuring that Indigenous Australians are empowered to have their say, and that their views are heard by all levels of government," Wyatt says.

He added that he welcomed "this week's announcement that two groups have been established to progress work on identifying potential words and changes for Constitutional Recognition."

His office later clarified he was referring to From the Heart and a $1.25 million Balnaves Foundation donation to the UNSW Indigenous law centre, to support Megan Davis' work.

Professor Marcia Langton, appointed by Wyatt as co-chair of the senior committee advising on the Voice, says the desire of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have a national representative body "goes back decades".

She points out that the last time such a body existed was in 2005, when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

She remains guarded however on whether a national Indigenous Voice would have real practical purpose and power if it lacked constitutional enshrinement.

"I think everybody working on the Voice co-design is mindful that that is the main question," she says. But she adds the committee is not permitted under its terms of reference to consider any constitutional issues.

"We have a responsibility to ensure that whatever we recommend in fact does work for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are working in their service organisations, their community council and in their communities to overcome the disadvantage and to create a better future for themselves," she says.

The committee is now planning how they will manage consultation about the Voice models once Wyatt has approved their release. Consultation was to begin in mid-2020 though pandemic restrictions have slowed that work.

Textor, meantime, has told friends he is "personally committed to the cause" as long as it exists. The chief obstacle remains the Coalition party room where apathy and suspicion of the Uluru objectives remain entrenched, though moderates such as Senator Andrew Bragg are supportive.

Pearson has often used a building metaphor to explain how the Voice would work. You design the house, deciding its layout and function. Constitutional recognition is the roof over the top to protect it. And a referendum would be the 'Velcro' glueing the two together.

Put that way, it sounds simple.