MEDIA

Queensland schools are preparing young people for jail, a prominent Indigenous leader says.

Constitutional recognition of Australia’s original inhabitants needed to come before referendums on other issues were held, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson argued on Thursday.

On the panel: Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion; Professor of Indigenous Studies Marcia Langton; Founder, Cape York partnership Noel Pearson; Garma Festival director Denise Bowden; Yothu Yindi Foundation board member Djapirri Munungirritj; and CEO Nyamba Buru Yawuru Peter Yu. Our panel discussed: housing, Indigenous art, inequality, a treaty and Indigenous health.

Graham Richardson is entitled to his opinion on indigenous constitutional recognition but not his own facts.

Only 62 per cent of Indigenous girls on Cape York graduate high school, and it is even harder to finish when you fall pregnant.

The Referendum Council’s two simple recommendations this week break the impasse presented by previous reports on recognition of indigenous Australians. The report identifies a single proposition that can be guided through the narrow window of constitutional opportunity.

It was in the final days of John Howard’s time as prime minister that the current discussion around constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was ignited.

Australia’s nine major human rights bodies have rebuffed the Turnbull government over its sceptical reception of the Uluru Statement, strongly backing the proposal to enshrine a “First Nations Voice” in the constitution.

Today it is 25 years since the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of Eddie Mabo and his Meriam people in rejecting the old fiction that Australia was terra nullius: a land without owners.

Soon Australians will be able to consider the Referendum Council’s report, the culmination of almost two years of work on what form constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders should take.

One of the key lawyers in the Mabo case, Bryan Keon-Cohen, has described the proposal to enshrine an Indigenous voice in the constitution as modest and conservative, and challenged “gutless politicians” to support it.