Editorial:
Words are important

Through a decision of the Federal Parliament last week, the Australian 
people are having a badly worded and empty piece of rhetoric foisted on 
them as a Preamble to the Constitution. The Preamble does not have the 
force of law such as other aspects of the Constitution so in one sense it 
is no more than a list of good intentions or statements of position on 
certain questions.

But a Preamble to a Constitution is actually a brief summing up of a people 
and their history and carries substantial weight.

A word that has already been picked up is "kinship" when referring to the 
relationship of the Indigenous people to the land. Custodianship is a more 
accurate word but ownership and occupancy are even more precise. ATSIC 
leaders say that "the word custodianship has become accepted among 
Indigenous people as the English word most closely approximating to our 
deep and enduring relationship with our country."

Political leaders stubbornly refuse to face up to the historical fact of 
the prior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ownership of the Australian 
continent. In doing so they are formally writing the dispossession of 
Indigenous people into the introductory document to the nation's 
Constitution.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) spokespeople have 
declared that the preamble is "fundamentally flawed" and has been 
"insensitively drafted" and have called for the preamble question to be 
dropped from the forthcoming referendum.

The Preamble speaks of "honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 
has, from the time of its election, set out to rewrite history, to bury the 
legitimate claims of Indigenous people as the original owners of the land, 
even depriving them of common law rights.

The Preamble must contain recognition of the real rights of the Aboriginal 
people to the land which was once theirs but was stolen from them.

The Preamble is held together by verbal rivets to give its non-class 
pretensions a veil of legitimacy and to bring it together as a single 
whole: "upholding", "honouring", "recognising", "mindful", "supportive". We 
are given abstract notions of "upholding freedom, tolerance, individual 
dignity and the rule of law". At the same time the Parliament is asked to 
adopt Reith's Workplace Relations Bill, legislation specifically designed 
to destroy trade union rights and individual freedoms. This is the concrete 
class nature of such notions.

Likewise the call for the Australian people to "commit ourselves to this 
Constitution proud that our national unity has been forged by Australians 
from many ancestries". What national unity there is in Australia was forged 
by the working people themselves, brought together by common needs and 
aspirations, while overcoming great adversity.

Australia's history is one of convict slave labour, of the early formation 
of trade unions and of great battles by the organised working class for a 
better life.

While it may be unrealistic to expect that those formulating the Preamble 
would take this view of the history of our country, such a document should 
reflect the great contribution made by the working people to the 
development of Australia as a nation.

There is also clearly a determination to include "God" in the Preamble; the 
document now commences: "With hope in God ..." This ignores the fact that 
over 20 per cent of Australians are non-believers according to the last 
census. It would be much more appropriate if the Preamble upheld the 
concept of Australia being a secular state and eliminated this reference to 
God.

Some argue that it is better to have a flawed document than none at all. 
This is a false argument on this occasion. Far from it being a Preamble 
that Australians can be proud of, it is a draft which is so deliberately 
bereft of meaning and badly written that it will at best become an 
embarrassment.

In its consideration of the draft the CPA came to the conclusion that it 
should be voted down. The CPA Central Committee meeting over the weekend 
called for the Preamble to be abandoned. If the Preamble is put as part of 
the referendum, throw it out!