Opponents of the Voice say it will change how the country is run. Megan Davis says that’s the point.
In February 2017, Megan Davis helped chair a meeting of leaders from across the Kimberley and Pilbara regions. They had gathered in Broome to discuss self-determination and a pitch to the federal government for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to be acknowledged in the Constitution.
“When the cynicism would really get quite acute, I would remember what she told me about law reform being an exercise in imagination. It doesn’t work unless at the very beginning, you suspend your disbelief and you dream.” Working group members say Davis draws authority from both Pearson and her close friend Pat Anderson, who rose to prominence for her work in Indigenous health and was a co-author of the 2007 Little Children are Sacred report on child abuse. Davis is seen as persuasive and bridges different generations, despite the complexity of Indigenous leadership structures based on age, gender and cultural authority.
“They don’t have a sense of how difficult it is to change the Constitution, because they were all involved in the most successful one that the nation’s ever produced,” Davis says. “We would talk about how only eight of 44 referendums have succeeded and they’d say it was all fine. They got the highest result ever, it was all going to be all right.
Most critically of all, they said, was that the more people talked about Calma-Langton, the more it would become the de facto model, a fait accompli. Davis played a key role in moving the debate away from the nitty-gritty to the bigger picture.“You really cannot design a fully fledged model before you vote, because you do risk enshrining that model in the Constitution,” Davis says.
Her mother, who is not Indigenous, was an English teacher. “She believed education was the key to social mobility in Australia. School was the key driving force of the household.” Davis studied law at University of Queensland and her work in Aboriginal rights saw her gain a fellowship at the United Nations in Geneva. Her PhD was on the relationship between Aboriginal women and liberal democracy, completed in 2011.
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