I just noticed this post on the Indigenous Constitutional Law blog titled Submission: The imperative of constitutional enshrinement. This as a submission to the co-design consultation by 40 public law experts.
A short section I want to comment on;
In this submission we explain the reasons behind our consensus view that the Voice be constitutionally enshrined, and that the government commit to a referendum to enshrine the First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution after the current design process is concluded.
What we mean by “constitutionally enshrined” is that the existence and core function of the Voice should be included in the written text of the Constitution, alongside a power enabling the Commonwealth Parliament to determine its composition, additional functions, powers and procedures in legislation.
If the Uluru Statement proposal asked for the Voice to be included in the written text of the Constitution Act, there would be no need for these experts to qualify this statement with the four words; “What we mean by…”. These 40 experts should not have to offer up an interpretation on what “constitutionally enshrined” means. The meaning of constitutional enshrinement should be crystal clear from the offer alone.
How many experts were working on the original Referendum Council process? How many millions of dollars were spent on legal consultants? And apparently at the time, none of them thought to include something as basic in the Referendum Council Final report as clarifying exactly what “enshrined in the constitution” means! Honestly, how hard is it?!
This qualifier; “what we mean by….” is a tell-tale sign that what I have written on this before (here and here) is correct. The proposal does not ask for a change to the text of the Constitution Act.