MEDIA

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has urged Indigenous people to “rise above” the Adam Goodes booing saga and look towards the “blue horizons of hope” at the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land.

Indigenous Australians have an important decision to make and we need a clear process to make it in an informed way.

The nation’s two most significant Aboriginal leaders have crafted a plan to secure Indigenous consensus on a referendum question to recognise the first Australians that could be put as soon as the next year’s federal election.

Tony Abbott called it an important and historic day, and it was, with the Prime Minister expressing optimism that a referendum could be put to the Australian people in May 2017 to end “that echoing silence” on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the nation’s founding document.

Noel Pearson has blasted the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader after a summit on Indigenous recognition in Sydney, saying while the event was “a good start”, it was “stage-managed” and left a “bitter taste” in his mouth.

Cape York Indigenous leader Noel Pearson has criticised a historic summit on recognising Australia’s first peoples in the constitution as “stage-managed”, saying he should have sent a “cardboard cut-out” of himself to the event.

Support for recognising Indigenous Australians in the constitution has reached a record high of 85 per cent as the Prime Minister hosts an unprecedented summit of Aboriginal leaders to plot a “road map” to the referendum.

Our beach shack at Elim has no walls and the wind blows through it. The buoys on the ceiling depicting an orrery of the solar system swing in the wind. Guugu Yimidhirr people have called this place Yuurrgubarraalbigu since time immemorial.

Noel Pearson has turned on the advocate of the “modest” Indigenous recognition in the constitution, accusing Jesuit priest and law professor Frank Brennan of setting himself up “as some kind of final arbiter of what is good for the natives”. The Cape York Indigenous leader has also strongly defended his proposal to include in a more substantial referendum question the…

Noel Pearson says Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a stumbling block to constitutional recognition.

A meeting of more than 100 Indigenous representatives has passed a motion calling for an official constitutional convention to be held at Uluru in six months, before a final model for recognising Indigenous people in the founding document is settled.

The Prime Minister has called a bipartisan summit of Indigenous leaders for July 6 to discuss the timing and wording of the referendum for the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution.