Voice to Parliament: The deliberate design features of the Voice to Parliament

The 2023 Senior Australian of the Year has spoken of the strong credibility of the Voice proposal while decrying the instant experts on constitutional law and a general lack of awareness in the general community of the professionalism of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies.

In an interview with The Canberra Times, the Chancellor of the University of Canberra said Indigenous people get "every eye in the sky looking at us", but the discussion surrounding the Voice proposal is best by misinformation and naivety.

"That is the frustration. It is the naivety. It's a bit like COVID times when everybody became an expert on epidemiology, and all of a sudden people are knowledgeable about constitutional law," he said.

"And they think they are anyhow. And they pass comment on all these things that are very naive and they don't have first-hand information. So it is very frustrating when you're confronted with this all the time."

"We want everybody to get behind this and to know that it's a very credible body that's being proposed."

The Voice members, 24 people on the advisory committee from around the nation, would fall within the scope of the National Anti-Corruption Commission or the Commonwealth Ombudsman, but it has barely been discussed that there is also an independent ethics council built into the model, sitting outside and looking in.

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It is a key design feature of the body of work created by the Voice Co-design Group to guide Parliament on the make-up and manner of the Voice should the October 14 referendum achieve a double majority result.

Professor Calma and Professor Marcia Langton were co-chairs.

"There is no other body in the nation that we know that has got an ethics council. They might have an ethics committee to provide advice on ethics, but not to look at the governance of their own organisation," Professor Calma said.

"This is just a support body for them to help guide that committee to make good judgements and good practices and be a sounding board for them.

"They'll provide advice, they'll guide them, you know, mentors. Mentors in anybody's life are a valuable asset."

Under the proposed design, such an ethics council would be independent, impartial, and advisory with the ability to scrutinise the eligibility of members and deal with issues such as serious misconduct.

Constitutional law expert and member of the Board of the Centre for Public Integrity George Williams said the ethics council proposal was groundbreaking.

"I'm not aware of any other body of this kind," Professor Williams said.

"At a time when people are questioning the integrity of people in public office, when there's high levels of distrust, this is exactly the sort of thing that might help remedy that.

"It would mean that there is a mechanism that would ensure that members of the Voice operate with integrity, they can get advice, and the powers of this body will be quite wide ranging. They should provide public confidence in the governance and operation of the Voice in a way I think people would be reassured by."

The co-designers said in their report that it was "vital" that a strong ethics and probity-focused mechanism was in place that was "above reproach".

Professor Calma, a Kungarakan man from the Northern Territory, said Indigenous people get "every eye in the sky looking at us" and insists the ethics council proposal and powerful NACC oversight should deal with governance criticism.

"We look at pork-barrelling and the criticism that ATSIC (the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) got over pork-barrelling. And yet it's a common practice within the commonwealth and the state and territories," Professor Calma said.

"That's only accepted if you're a politician. It is not accepted if you're a body like ATSIC or any other body. So we wanted to make sure that we are ethically doing well.

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been on this road before and we know what we need to do."

It all goes back to 2008. Professor Calma, when trying as Social Justice Commissioner to help establish a national indigenous representative body, drew from mid-1990s experience in the UK when the Parliament created a Committee on Standards for Public Life.

The committee has what is called the Seven Principles of Public Life, or the Nolan Principles: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Double-dipping on MP allowances soon saw a conflict with the principles.

"So I came up with the concept of an ethics council. Somebody who would look at these Nolan Principles, which were very good, and would ensure that they are applied and that they're adhered to," he said.

"Long story short, when the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples was established we established an ethics council."

It is all yet to be determined with the vote, but it has been done before and Professor Calma and Professor Megan Davis were the last ethics council co-chairs at the now-defunct National Congress.

He said both major parties have been strong supporters of the Calma-Langton report.

"If [Labor and the Coalition] are all still to their word, that'll be tested, if [the referendum's] successful, how close they want us to monitor what was in our report," he said.

"Remembering that our report was very open, very inclusive, and all Australians had the opportunity to contribute to it."