MEDIA

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has urged Australians to embrace the nation’s Indigenous history through constitutional recognition during a speech at the Woodford Folk Festival, north of Brisbane.

Australia’s newly announced Referendum Council will gather for its first meeting today, one week after its membership was announced.

Australia’s newly announced Referendum Council will gather for its first meeting today, one week after a referendum on constitutional recognition may not have been the best option. The Referendum Council is due to report to Government by June 30, 2016. READ: ABC

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will have the key role in deciding what form of “substantial” constitutional recognition will be put to Australians in a referendum.

Noel Pearson calls it the “plain as dog’s balls lesson” and he absorbed it the hard way, over the two years of Tony Abbott’s failed prime ministership.

Noel Pearson has delivered a withering critique of the political right and left in Australia, suggesting the ideologies of both are loaded against the “social uplift” of Indigenous peoples.

Last week, law professor Frank Brennan delivered an oration on the “prospects and contours” of indigenous constitutional recognition. He said Malcolm Turnbull would not support a constitutional amendment to ensure indigenous people had a voice in laws and policies made about their affairs. Indigenous conferences have not yet started. Political discussions between indigenous people and the new PM have not…

Teachers are reporting that a Direct Instruction literacy program, championed by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, is having a dramatic impact in the Pilbara.

My dad played local football when I was growing up. I used to go to watch him play matches. He would run onto the field and people would make monkey noises at him. I didn’t know what it meant. In the car ride home I’d ask my mum, “Why do people keep doing that at dad?” At first mum always…

One of the most influential Aboriginal leaders in the country has questioned how a multinational company has won preferred status to mine a rich bauxite deposit on native title land.

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson says today’s meeting with Prime Minister Tony Abbott was the “rumble we had to have” to resolve differences on recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution.

Key Aboriginal leaders will turn to private funding after the Prime Minister shunned their push for Indigenous-led consultations on the best model for recognition in the Constitution.