Given this Saturday is the 56th anniversary of the 1967 referendum and Friday marked 25 years since the first Sorry Day, how much longer do Indigenous Australians have to wait for a Voice that will be heard?
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This question should be weighing on the minds of all Australians, regardless of how long they have been here or where they came from.
The unfortunate reality is that due to the politicisation of the Voice debate - and all sides of politics have been guilty of this to a greater or lesser degree - the "yes" campaign is not travelling well.
If current trends continue the referendum will either fail outright or pass with a barely discernible majority.
Either would be disastrous for Australia and send shockwaves around the world. It would leave us a divided nation in much the same way Britain was scarred by the Brexit vote.
Recognition and reconciliation would be set back for years, even decades, and the Indigenous community would have no choice but to conclude current generations care less about them than the Australia which voted overwhelmingly "yes" for recognition more than half a century ago.
Make no mistake; the Uluru Statement from the Heart, released on May 26, 2017, was a thoughtful, well considered and courteous offer by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to move forward in concert with the broader community while acknowledging the errors of the past.
The result of decades of consultation, negotiation and activism, its ultimate goal is a Makarrata or treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.
That treaty would embody truth telling and an acknowledgement great harms have been committed on those who first settled the land we now share, and who made it their own for more than 60,000 years.
The Voice is an important step along the road to Makarrata. It has nothing to do with giving the Indigenous community power over either the Parliament or executive government. It has everything to do with ensuring Indigenous Australians have a say when decisions are made that affect them directly.
This is not, as Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison have both claimed this week, an attempt to divide Australia along racial lines. It is actually an attempt to address the consequence of Australia having been divided along racial lines since the First Fleet.
Anyone who doubts Australia is already "divided along racial lines" should take stock of the unacceptably high rates of incarceration, poverty, educational disadvantage and poor health amongst the Indigenous population.
Almost half of all Indigenous men and more than a third of Indigenous women die before their 45th birthdays. As "racial divides" go that one is hard to beat.
How can it be that although we live in one of the wealthiest and most well-endowed nations on earth that tens of thousands of our First Nations peoples are living cheek by jowl in overcrowded hovels? How can it be that they are suffering from malnutrition, depression, an epidemic of youth suicides, and dying of diseases that were eradicated in the broader community a century ago?
Nobody in their right mind can say what we have been doing is working and that if we just keep on doing it things will "get better".
That's just kicking the can down the road for another generation.
Anthony Albanese's favourite question about the Voice sums it up in a nutshell: "If not now, when?" The obvious corollary to that is: "If not us, who?"
It's time to say "yes".
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