Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Cash, with the greatest of respect, you repeatedly seem to not come to grips with what the Voice is about. The Voice is about giving our First Peoples, our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, an opportunity to have a say on matters that affect them. You seem to want to keep constraining or seeking limits around the types of things the Voice can make representations on, how they will be dealt with, who will be on there. The point of this exercise is to actually empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to make recommendations to government, rather than having the same top-down approach that governments of both persuasions have engaged in for dozens of years, with the evidence being before us in the lower educational attainment, lower health outcomes, higher incarceration, poorer housing, all those other quite shameful statistics that disproportionately affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

So I'm not going to get into the game of trying to constrain this and narrow it down. This government has confidence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be able to prioritise their work, to be able to run the Voice effectively, to be able to work out for themselves what are the priority issues, what are matters specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. They don't need me to tell on that. With respect, they don't need you to tell them that. They don't need me to tell them what are the issues that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples differently to other people in the Australian community. I reckon they've got the smarts to be able to work that out for themselves, and I think we should listen to them.