WHY we need to VOTE "YES"!

On October 14, Australia will be asked to vote on the Voice referendum. Longtime Yes campaigner Professor Megan Davis believes the nation is on the cusp of change

- Megan Davis

When she was 12 years old, Megan Davis was handed the autobiography of controversial governor-general Sir John Kerr, igniting a lifelong fascination with the Australian Constitution. One of five children raised by her single mother in a housing commission home in Brisbane, Davis – whose mother is white and whose father is Indigenous – has grown up wanting to give a voice to the voiceless. It drove her to become an international human-rights lawyer and the first Indigenous Australian woman to be elected to a United Nations body. It also drove her to help create 2017’s Uluru Statement from the Heart. And it drives her to push to establish a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

“I’ve always been interested in the way that our constitutional system has set up a robust rule of law that has enabled many generations of Australians to flourish, but it hasn’t served our people well,” the Cobble Cobble and South Sea Islander woman tells marie claire. “I think that’s been part of the fascination: that in a country like Australia, which is quite extraordinary in its innovation and pioneering capacity, in all of this glorious achievement of Australia, the one issue we seem to fail to be able to come at is the recognition of First Nations peoples.”