Jonathon Hunyor | Voice to Parliament is choice of possibility and hope

And for Tinsley-Hook, there are two teams.

On one side, the cynics who say that things won't change: it's foolish to even try; we'll always have injustice.

And on the other, those who admit they don't know how things will turn out but have decided to work for change anyway.

She concedes there are times when both teams seem right, but in the end: "If I'm going to stick with somebody, I'd rather stick with people who have a sense of possibility and hope. I just know that's the side I want to be on."

Tinsley-Hook's words have been on my mind in recent weeks, as we enter the final stretch of the long road to constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Because on voting day, the choice will be binary: "yes" or "no". We will need to pick our team.

And I am confident the Australian people will choose the side of possibility and hope.

Voting with a sense of hope doesn't mean trusting the vibe or being naive or romantic. The Voice is a fundamentally practical proposal, borne of decades of experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who cannot accept more of

the same failure by government. First Nations people want a seat at the table because they have the solutions, if only we can listen.

But voting "yes" does mean backing ourselves.

It's here that I'm surprised by the lack of faith that many "no" proponents have in Australians and our institutions. Do they really think we can't make a Voice work?

The proposal is clear: we vote on the principle of having a First Nations Voice in the constitution and then it is for Parliament and First Nations people to settle on a model in legislation. This is an orthodox approach (we have never put detail in our constitution) and if we really want to understand what the model might look like, we can review some of the detailed work that has already been done.

The 2018 joint standing committee on constitutional recognition, jointly chaired by Liberal MP Julian Leeser and Labor senator Patrick Dodson, considered the design of the Voice and developed principles to underpin it. The committee contemplated options for structure and membership, its function and operation. The final report examined examples of past and current advisory bodies and presented three indicative proposals that might inform the design of the Voice.

In 2021, the Indigenous Voice co-design process, chaired by professors Marcia Langton and Tom Calma, advised on options to improve local and regional decision-making and for a national voice. Their report - 269 pages all up - proposes a model that features 24 members for a national voice, with membership linked to local and regional representative bodies.

It's reasonable for people to have questions about the Voice and how it will work. But rather than helping people find answers to their questions in the many pages of detail that exist, the cynics sow confusion and doubt.

The cynics also question whether the Voice would make a practical difference. But as Aunty Pat Anderson has pointed out, First Nations people are not going to allow a Voice to be ineffectual. The product of decades of tireless struggle, the Voice will be there to drive outcomes.

READ MORE:

This is a chance to back Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people - in the knowledge that when people have a say in the issues that affect them, we get better results. And when we do things "to" and not "with" people, we simply repeat the mistakes of the past.

Finally, the cynics stoke fears of court cases, suggesting legal challenges must be avoided at all costs. But we have a carefully worded proposal that has passed muster with the country's most esteemed legal experts, including the former High Court Chief Justice Robert French. Our High Court is not known to suffer time wasters. We can trust its seven eminent and sober jurists to do their job, just as the Court has done since 1903.

For what it's worth, Tinsley-Hook also thinks those on the side of possibility and hope seem happier. When we wake up on the morning after this historic referendum, let's do so buoyed by the knowledge that we have backed ourselves and First Nations people to succeed.