Chief Justices and Lost Tjurungas

In the last two weeks of July, two former Chief Justices of the High Court, Murray Gleeson and Robert French, came out publicly to endorse the concept of a “Voice” in parliament for Australia’s Aboriginal population. Both agreed that a national advisory board, with a membership composed of people of indigenous descent, was needed for their interests to be put to the parliament. Both felt the need to go public to persuade the government to go ahead with a referendum to change the Constitution so the Voice could be established.

In his speech to the Garma Festival on August 3, Noel Pearson lavished praise on Gleeson’s paper in particular. He called it “the last word on the legal integrity of the Voice and its seamless compatibility with the constitutional history of the Australian Commonwealth”. Pearson said the judge had demolished the conservative case put by the Institute of Public Affairs and journalist Andrew Bolt that “race has no place” in the Constitution….