The conversation about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament has so far centred around the relationship between Indigenous Australia and mainstream (read white) Australia.
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Yet non-Indigenous, non-European Australians are an increasing proportion of our population.
So how will the Voice affect us?
A constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament will rightly recognise the special relationship that First Nations Australians have developed over 65,000 years on country, as well as acknowledging - and providing a mechanism to remedy - the centuries of institutionalised racism that has led to abysmal outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
Recognising that special relationship also explodes the myth of white Australia.
The myth of white Australia began long before federation in 1901, and persisted long after it.
For three decades from 1990 I was frequently asked, after identifying myself as an Australian diplomat, "where are you really from?" - often by fellow Australians. Yet non-European migrants have lived in Australia for almost as long as Europeans.
The British brought labourers from India to Australia from 1800. The earliest known migrant from China was Mak Sai-ying, who came as a free settler to Sydney in 1818, well before his compatriots sought their fortunes in the 1840s and 1850s. In another shameful episode, British brought indentured labourers from the Pacific islands from the 1850s.
Indigenous leaders point out, rightly, that the race power in the Australian constitution has only ever been used in relation to Indigenous Australians.
Yet all colonial parliaments, starting with Victoria in 1855, passed laws restricting Chinese migration, with penalties for infringement of up to a year's average weekly earnings.
The very first legislation to pass the new Australian Parliament in January 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act - the basis of the White Australia Policy that endured until the 1970s.
Indeed the race power was originally intended, in the words of the first prime minister Sir Edmund Barton, "to regulate the affairs of the people of coloured or inferior races who are in the Commonwealth".
But haven't we moved on from white Australia? We are no longer "ethnics" (as in the 1980s) or "New Australians" (as in the 1990s - regardless of how many generations our families had been here).
We no longer require non-white migrants to pass dictation tests but, since 2020, would-be citizens are tested on "Australian values".
In 2018, a federal minister falsely claimed "African gangs" were terrorising Melbourne.
The same minister bemoaned the migration of people from Lebanon in the 1970s, because three of their descendants were charged with terrorist offences (no mention of those of British descent convicted of similar charges).
In August 2021, a state minister justified stricter COVID lockdown rules in western Sydney than in the eastern suburbs: "there are other communities and people from other backgrounds who don't seem to think it is necessary to comply with the law" (no recognition of the crowded flats and casual work that made lockdown so difficult for some).
Science has shown us race is a social construct, not a genetic phenomenon. Those social conditions seem to persist.
So how does an Indigenous Voice to Parliament help? Some argue a Voice, by elevating Indigenous Australians, is itself racist. But the Voice is not about race. It is about a special ancestral relationship to country that First Nations have developed over millennia.
The First Fleet did not bring the first white people to an empty land; the non-white migrants who have arrived since 1788 are not foreign interlopers on white land.
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The Voice to Parliament will not stop people outside Australia from asking non-white Australians "where are you really from?" It will not stop people within Australia from telling non-white Australians to "go back to where you came from".
But the country's highest legal authority - the constitution - will finally recognise that First Nations Australians have a special place on their ancestral country, to which the rest of us have come from all corners of the Earth.
The Voice to Parliament is not racist but anti-racist: by recognising the special place of First Nations people, it levels the cultural playing field for all who have arrived since 1788, not into a terra nullius (literally "nobody's land") settled by white Australia, but into a place whose people have extended a generous hand of friendship to walk beside them in the country we can all call home.
- Janaline Oh is a former Australian diplomat. Her mother is a nyonya of Singapore and her father a Teochew of southern China. She grew up on Wurundjeri country and now lives on the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.
