Migrant groups pledge support for Yes voice campaign

Esme Bamblett from Victoria's First People's Assembly (SBS).jpg

Esme Bamblett from Victoria's First People's Assembly

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Migrant and faith groups have come together in Victoria to pledge their support for the Yes campaign in the upcoming Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum. Despite a trend in recent opinion polls showing growing opposition to the referendum proposal, leading No campaigners say they can't get complacent.


Esme Bamblett is from the First People's Assembly of Victoria.

She's been campaigning in support of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament - but says she wants it to be a group effort.

"We need allies to get the Voice over the line. We need allies to vote yes, because we can't do it on our own. We didn't do it in the 1967 referendum on our own. 90.77 percent of the people who voted were non-Aboriginal - and they voted yes."

Now there's been a show of solidarity for the Voice from more than 80 Victorian cultural and faith groups.

Azmina Hussein is the chairperson for the Islamic Museum of Australia.

"It's essentially living from our own experiences. If we don't provide an opportunity or a platform for our First Nations people to be heard, I don't know how we advance equality and opportunity for everyone."

Chair of the African Music and Cultural Festival Fred Alale AM says the migrant experience shares crucial similarities with Indigenous Australians.

"We empathise with those barriers and those challenges that the Aboriginal communities in Victoria and Australia have been through, or are experiencing. Barriers such as being different, barriers of not having as many opportunities as others do, barriers such as being accepted and feeling welcome and feeling a sense of belonging. Australia has been good personally to me... however I know a lot of migrants don't have the same story and have more challenges, and I think there's still work we need to do."

Nearly 60 percent of people who speak a language other than English at home intend to approve the question posed in the upcoming referendum - according to a recent poll.

But other surveys indicate a general downward trend in support, with campaigners like Northern Territory senator Jacinta Price still rallying against calls to vote yes in an interview with Sydney radio 2GB.

"And I think Australians will turn around and say, no. We won't be told; we won't be told how to suck eggs as a nation. And they'll demonstrate that at the referendum when they go to vote I think."

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is also still firmly in the no camp, insisting on Nine's Today that Anthony Albanese and his government haven't explained the Voice properly.

"I think millions of Australians just want to be treated like adults. They want the information from their Prime Minister, and the PM has taken a deliberate decision not to supply the information about the Voice and answer the questions that are validly being asked."

But the migrant groups push for the yes campaign has found some political support.

Victorian parliamentarians like Gabrielle Williams, the state's Minister for Treaty and First Peoples, see opportunity in the state's diverse communities - and a yes vote.

"It is our greatest gift in this country - but we send no stronger message about that than delivering a yes for the Voice, by showing that respect to our founding Australians, our first Australians, about what we need to be as a country going forward."


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