If voters reject the Voice at this year's referendum, it will be a sad day for Australia.
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That is because if a majority of people say no to a modest request by Indigenous Australians for a greater say in policy decisions that affect them directly, it could set reconciliation back by decades.
Recent polling, which shows support for the Indigenous Voice to the Parliament and the executive has fallen from 58 per cent to 53 per cent in the last month, reflects the Coalition's conscious decision to drive in the wedge.
It is also a sign the "Yes" camp's attempts, headlined by the Prime Minister, to make its case are not gaining traction.
The Voice, the logical next step on the long road to reconciliation and a Makarrata, or treaty, is too important to be a political football.
Far from being a "third chamber", as many of its critics inside and outside the Coalition claim, the Voice is an attempt to redress a power imbalance dating back to 1770 when Captain Cook claimed the eastern half of Australia for the Crown.
The dispossession of the Indigenous population began in earnest just over 17 years later with the arrival of the First Fleet.
Over the next 235 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders saw their traditional ways of life destroyed, were the victims of numerous massacres and abuse, and were exposed to European diseases such as smallpox - to which they had no acquired immunity - which wiped out entire communities.
They have been victims of deliberate and, until relatively recently, state-sanctioned discrimination that denied them equal wages for equal work, the right to enter hotels and other "white only" venues, and restricted access to housing, education and employment.
Prior to the 1965 "freedom ride", organised by Charles Perkins, Aboriginal children were barred from the Moree swimming pool.
In Walgett, the local RSL only allowed Indigenous Australians, including war veterans, to enter on Anzac Day.
In many parts of Australia, apartheid was just as pervasive as in South Africa and below the Mason-Dixie line in the US.
The one positive was that when Indigenous activism made the broader population aware of the many injustices, the country voted overwhelmingly in favour of a referendum amending the constitution to count Aboriginal people in the population and to make laws in respect of Aboriginal people.
The latter change gave the Commonwealth the authority to override Jim Crow-like discriminatory state legislation such as the Aboriginal Protection Acts which legitimised the "stolen generations".
The 1969 referendum, like the current Voice campaign, was seen as an opportunity to end a long and sorry history of injustice and exclusion.
One "Yes" vote poster of the period read "Right wrongs, write Yes for Aborigines on May 27", a slogan that is just as appropriate today.
Australians, to their credit, rose to the occasion with 90.77 per cent of voters supporting the amendments.
So how is it that more than half a century later support for the Voice has dwindled from 63 per cent late last year to just 53 per cent today?
Can it be that modern Australians are less compassionate, tolerant and understanding than their parents, grandparents and great grandparents were?
Given the reach and influence of the Voice will be determined - and can be amended by - the Parliament, scare campaigns about "lawyer's picnics" and "unforeseen consequences" are mischievous at best.
The "fake news" and misinformation needs to stop.
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