With a two-letter word, Australians have struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, major media outlets reported, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.
Early results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters had written No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.
The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass.
As an aside for people reading the comments here, and I’m not going to comment on people’s comments correcting them because this isn’t the place ( and it says it in the article as well)
I was told recently, that we should not be using the word Aboriginal. I know this will cause an onslaught of people saying "what do they want to be called now?! " but when you think about the word “Aboriginal” and other words like it, it’s not very friendly. “abhorrent”, “abnormal”, etc. Aboriginal means not original.
We should be saying “indigenous peoples” as it encompasses all and is more accurate. I’ve been told First Nations is also acceptable.
You raise an important point, though “Aboriginal” doesn’t mean “not original”. It’s derived from the Latin “ab origine”, meaning “from the beginning”.
Damn haha. TIL
I’m just going to stay away from it