The National Indigenous Australians Agency has written to Coalition senator and no campaign leader Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to flatly deny her claims that it told her the Uluru statement from the heart was a 26-page document, again confirming it is a one-page document.
It is likely to further escalate tensions in the parliament over the voice referendum, after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, described Coalition questions about the Uluru statement as “conspiracy theories”. Prof Megan Davis, the Uluru Dialogue co-chair and architect of the Uluru statement, claimed opponents were seeking to “confuse the mainstream media and our political leaders”.
“The Uluru statement from the heart is one page,” the NIAA chief executive, Jody Broun, wrote to Nampijinpa Price on Wednesday.
Nampijinpa Price told Sky News on Tuesday that her office had contacted the NIAA about the Uluru statement, following scrutiny of documents released under freedom of information about the processes leading to the 2017 statement. The documents were released in March, but have attracted renewed attention following recent reporting by News Corp.
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The Uluru statement from the heart is a one-page document that calls for a First Nations voice in the constitution and a Makarrata commission to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling. However, the documents released by NIAA under FOI collate the one-page statement and a further 25 pages together in one document, classified as “document 14”.
Critics of the voice, including the Coalition in parliament’s question time this week, used the documents to claim the Uluru statement was 26 pages long, not one page as Albanese has repeatedly said. Coalition MP Colin Boyce, asking one question, claimed Albanese was being “deceptive”.
On Sky, Nampijinpa Price claimed: “My office today sought clarification from the FOI team at NIAA to determine whether the Uluru statement from the heart is simply one page, or the full 26 pages. My staff got a phone call at 12.54 this afternoon with a verbal clarification that the document is in fact the 26 pages and not just, of course, the one page.”
But in a letter sent to the senator today, obtained by Guardian Australia, the NIAA said her claim was incorrect.
“The Uluru statement from the heart is one page, signed by delegates at the national convention in 2017. The authors of the Uluru statement from the heart have confirmed this. The additional pages contained in document 14 of FOI 2223/016 are background and excerpts drawn from the regional dialogues,” Broun wrote.
“The NIAA did not provide verbal clarification that the Uluru statement from the heart document is 26 pages long. What was verbally confirmed was that the publication of the correspondence on the Right to Know website between the NIAA and an individual, was accurate.”
Davis, the first person to read the Uluru statement aloud in 2017, referred to the 26-page document as a “draft of conference floor butcher’s paper” in a tweet on Tuesday. In parliament, Albanese called the further pages “minutes from meetings with a whole lot of verbal statements from whoever to whoever”.
The additional 25 pages are titled “Our Story”. The 2017 final report of the referendum council, which produced the Uluru statement, described those pages as “a synthesis of the records of meetings of the First Nations regional dialogues”, which “recounted the themes that emerged”.
The information is displayed prominently on the Uluru statement’s website, under the heading “Our Story” on the site’s main navigation bar.
An NIAA spokesperson told Guardian Australia the additional 25 pages in document 14 were “background information and excerpts of regional dialogues that informed the one-page Uluru statement from the heart.”
Nampijinpa Price’s office was contacted for comment.
Broun’s mention of Right to Know, a website that helps citizens track FOI claims, refers to an exchange published between the NIAA and a person lodging a request for the Uluru statement. The exchange shows an FOI officer for the NIAA responding, “the information you have requested is published on the NIAA disclosure log as document 14”, linking to FOI 2223/016.
A further email shows the NIAA FOI officer describing document 14 as “Uluru statement from the heart – long”. Broun’s letter to Nampijinpa Price confirms the veracity of those emails.
In a statement, Davis referred to the main Uluru statement as a “one pager” and said her campaign had always encouraged people to read the Our Story section that followed.
“The fact that a single no advocate has used her privileged media platform to confuse the mainstream media and our political leaders so dramatically about the voice, tells you everything you need to know about the way Indigenous issues are treated in this country,” she said.
“When we encourage all Australians to inform themselves by reading deeply, that is distorted and weaponised by a no campaign that has no alternative and is intent on misinformation and division.”
First reported at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news