Why Professor Megan Davis Challenges You to Stop Being an Ally

I watched the National Allyship Summit online on 18 September 2026. The program at UNSW billed Professor Megan Davis to “offer a provocation on the future of allyship and the role allies can play in advancing justice and reform.”¹ She delivered one. My account rests on my notes from the live stream. As I heard her, she told a hall of allies that the ally names a relationship the cause has outgrown: First Nations people bear the burden of making the case, while non-Indigenous Australians decide the outcome.

Ten days later I joined a follow-up discussion. By then the provocation had shrunk to a question of vocabulary. Must we use a different word now? Are we colleagues? Partners? Why can we no longer be allies, when we are making progress?

The question may be understandable, but it is misplaced. Davis was speaking to the Australian people as a whole, as one body, and she told that body that the relationship itself, and no choice of word for it, is the obstacle. Every replacement on offer, whether colleague, partner, or supporter, leaves the arrangement she attacked in place unless the undertaking behind the word changes: we are here, they are there, and only the name of the gap remains in dispute.

She had already said why the arrangement fails. A year earlier, asked what went wrong in 2023, she pointed at a structural decision rather than at anyone’s attitude: “Unlike Turnbull and Gillard, Albanese wouldn’t allow us to have non-Indigenous Australians on the committees with us. So it looked like it was a separatist Black issue, and it wasn’t. It was a nation-building one.”³ The referendum machinery put First Nations people out in front and everyone else behind them, and voters judged what they saw.

Take her challenge at its word. If the ally goes, what remains for non-Indigenous Australians to do? They keep the Constitution, and with it the obligation to complete the nation’s constitutional founding. To complete it is to settle, in the Constitution, the relationship between the First Nations and the Australian people on the terms the Uluru Statement proposes. That obligation concerns the institutions of the state; it forecloses no claim of sovereignty and confers no claim on First Nations’ country.

In practice that asks four things of those of us who are not First Nations, each set out in section IV. We need to know our own Constitution well enough to explain it. We need to tell the truth about the history our own side made, starting with the records our councils and churches still hold. We need to organise the people where we live, so that the work of persuading No voters stops falling to First Nations advocates. And we need to refuse any future republic that leaves the Uluru Statement unanswered.

I. The position

Davis’s case for the reforms returns, across eight years, to one constitutional premise, and her challenge to the ally follows from it. Under section 128, Parliament proposes an alteration and the electors decide it, by a national majority and a majority of voters in at least four of the six states.⁸ Lawyers call the body that can make and remake a constitution the constituent power, and in Australia that body is the people at a referendum. In plain terms, the only people who can change the Constitution are the voters, acting together at a referendum, and that includes every one of us. The Uluru Statement therefore addressed that body, and asked of it the one thing only it can do.

The Uluru reforms address an unresolved defect in the constitutional foundations of the whole polity, so no position of moral spectatorship exists for non-Indigenous Australians, and “ally” is the name of that position.

She did not arrive at this in 2026. The thread runs back at least eight years, and at every point the addressee is the same.

2018: the people hold the pen. In her Henry Parkes Oration, Davis explained why the Uluru Statement went to the public rather than to a prime minister: “We deliberately issued the Uluru Statement to the Australian people, because it is we who can change the Constitution.” More pointedly: “The amendment mechanism placed into the Constitution was for us.”² A non-Indigenous voter is therefore no supporter of constitutional reform. They are the party without whom it is legally impossible, the final and indispensable authority over the founding document.

2018: two polities. The same oration pairs a Voice to Parliament with an Australian head of state as “inextricably linked proposals for reform and recognition for two polities in our country: the First Nations of Australia and the Australian people.”² Each polity has its own reform, and each reform completes the other. The parties to the relationship she describes are peoples. Allyship as help is an ethic for persons. An ally is the wrong kind of subject for a relationship between polities, whatever attitude the ally brings to it. The two polities overlap. First Nations people are both voters and members of distinct peoples with collective rights; shared citizenship covers the first of those, not the second.

2023: reconciliation as a private substitute for structural change. After the referendum she wrote that “the Australian homemade brand of reconciliation is pure Howard-era DNA,” that it “exists in a time warp,” and that two decades of it “has asked nothing of the state other than the commitment of taxpayer monies to fund private reconciliation activities.” Drawing on the American scholar Charlotte Lloyd, she concluded that Australians are left “ill equipped to understand ... Indigenous aspirations for social change that would have to be driven by structural political reform rather than by voluntary gestures from private individuals.”⁴ She told the Australian Financial Review the same month that “reconciliation is dead.”¹² The same essay describes the Uluru Statement as “the offer of friendship” and “the olive branch,” and the 6.2 million who accepted it as “a movement of the Australian people,” in which “we the people believe in recognition and rights.”⁴ Reconciliation failed, on this account, because it dissolved the body she addressed into individuals and handed each of them a voluntary task.

2024: an Australian issue. In her University of Queensland NAIDOC lecture: “If we can cultivate this sense of Belonging, then this isn’t a First Nations issue, this is an Australian issue. This is an issue for all of us.” Full belonging, she said, “confers a right of full standing, rather than conditional or partial standing.”⁵

2025: the ally re-tasked. Two years after the referendum, interviewed alongside Aunty Pat Anderson, she named the failure and the remedy. “We had no non-Indigenous faces standing next to us. It looked like it was just a singular Aboriginal thing when in fact it was meant to be an Aussie thing.” Then, in remarks the interview prints with its own ellipses: “We don’t even see them as allies. We can’t do this separately to them … They need to be walking next to us, not behind us … We want their active input because it’s their democracy and it’s our democracy.” And on what the movement was always meant to be: “The whole idea was working with Aussies across 151 electorates, actually going and talking to them. They would build the movement because it needs to be us together.”³

Taken together, the remarks remove the ally in one breath and supply the replacement in the next: the Australian people, building the movement themselves, seat by seat.

2026: whose Constitution is it? On 26 May 2026 she delivered the Federation University Annual Reconciliation Lecture, “Beyond Reconciliation: What the Referendum Revealed,” at The Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne.⁶ Only Oxfam’s summary of the address has been published, not a transcript. On that account she carried the argument past the administration of Indigenous policy to constitutional belonging: for whom the Constitution exists, and whom it still excludes.

The summit provocation concluded a long argument. She delivered it, moreover, at a summit that Allies for Uluru convened: invited by allies, to tell them, as I heard it, that their category had expired.

II. Why the word matters, and why it does not

Start with what the challenge is not. “Ally” can describe a serious commitment. Many who use the word organise, accept correction, and work for changes in law, and nothing here is aimed at them. The follow-up discussion was right about one thing, too: you may use any word you like, and that is the point. If any word will do, holding onto one defends an identity rather than an idea.

The trouble lies in the relationship the word so often assumes: voluntary assistance to a cause that belongs to someone else. That conception, call it allyship as help, is the target of Davis’s challenge, and the only target. Under it, goodwill sets both the extent of the commitment and the date it ends. “Ally” confers a moral position, the good side of the line, and it sets the terms of engagement as generous and bounded. An ally gives time, money, and attention on their own schedule, and withdraws without breaching any duty. Reconciliation rested on the same foundation: the Reconciliation Action Plan, the Acknowledgement of Country, the NAIDOC morning tea. Davis has put the point to a festival crowd as well as to a summit. Writing on Garma in 2025, she quoted Denise Bowden of the Yothu Yindi Foundation to the attendees: “Don’t be fooled by the beauty of Garma ... Don’t think your attendance here is enough.”¹⁸ Davis’s complaint concerns design rather than sincerity. The design of these rituals leaves the constitutional order untouched while making everyone feel they have settled the matter.

The barbecues and casseroles of the Yes campaign, which Davis thanks in her post-referendum essay, were a different thing. They sustained a movement; the morning teas stood in for the state.⁴

Allyship as help is the progressive rebrand of that arrangement. It keeps the individual as the unit of action, keeps the action revocable, and adds a commandment reconciliation never had: step back, centre Indigenous voices, and follow. Davis’s own explanation of the “separatist” look points at the committee structure, and her 2024 lecture names “a cocktail of negative influences: racism, politicisation, disinformation, and let’s not forget plain old inertia and fear of change.”⁵ No single cause lost the referendum. But the posture that ethic prescribes, standing behind, matched the picture the machinery produced. When respect for First Nations leadership becomes a reason for political reticence, it leaves First Nations people making an argument the whole country needs to make, and in 2023 it left them making it alone at the front. Whoever hears her provocation as a complaint that allies did too little misses the harder point: the ally’s defining virtue, deference, had nothing to say when the reform most needed non-Indigenous faces beside them.

Her 2026 address, as Oxfam summarises it, names the register in which that happens: Indigenous rights framed through policy and administration rather than through constitutional belonging.⁶ Allyship as help lives in the register of service, alongside Closing the Gap: it answers a question about standing as if it were a question about delivery. Service can implement structural change; it cannot decide whether the structure changes. The ally and the program officer are cousins. Both answer a constitutional question in the administrative voice.

Her own spatial language makes the point. “Behind us” is the ally’s posture: deference, following, amplifying. She replaces it with “next to,” the posture of co-owners.

The test, then, whatever word we use, is whose problem we think this is. If the honest answer is “theirs, and I am helping,” the ally is still there under whatever name. Nor does “citizen” solve the problem by becoming the preferred description. Citizens can stay paternalistic or idle. The word earns its place only if it changes what we will undertake and sustain. Allyship as help cannot express duties we already have, however much help we give.

III. The difference that stays

Her opponents will reach for one overreading. Davis proposes no dissolution of First Nations distinctiveness into a common, undifferentiated citizenship. She reminds readers that “First Nations are collectives, not individuals.”¹³ The Uluru Statement affirms a sovereignty that “has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.”⁷ Voice, Treaty, and Truth all presuppose a standing difference. So does Makarrata, “the coming together after a struggle,” in which, as Davis reports Galarrwuy Yunupingu saying of Uluru, the aggrieved party has called out the party they allege has done them wrong.¹⁶

What dissolves is the ally’s distance from the problem. The ally runs three things together. Everyone owns the defect. A Constitution that keeps a race power in section 51(xxvi) and still contemplates racial disqualification from state voting in section 25 belongs to every citizen under it.⁸ Davis dates the ownership: Australia “can no longer point to the 1890s drafters and say that the racism imbued in our constitutional order is the legacy of ‘old, white, rich, dead men’. Modern Australia owned that on October 14, 2023.”⁴ The remedy’s design belongs to First Nations. The Regional Dialogues and the national convention at Uluru authored Voice, Treaty, and Truth, and Davis has spent a decade refusing non-Indigenous redesign of that content, whether a preamble, a minimalist recognition, or legislation offered as a substitute for constitutional change. Constitutional enactment belongs to the people alone, because section 128 permits no one else to perform it; treaties, commissions, and a legislated Voice run through parliaments and governments that the same people elect. Defect shared, design First Nations’, enactment the people’s. Allyship as help misplaces all three: a problem that is theirs, a remedy I may assist, an outcome I hope for on their behalf.

The line the split protects is plain: no instrument overrides what First Nations have decided they want. The split gives an orientation, but it settles no question of authority by itself. Who sets priorities as circumstances change? Who speaks for a community? The Dialogues supply a mandate; respect for that mandate includes respect for continuing First Nations deliberation, and it licenses no outsider to freeze the agenda at one moment in 2017 or to pick whichever Indigenous opinion confirms a preference already held. Authority over a people’s aspirations and representation is one thing; the drafting of every instrument that implements them is another. Treaties are negotiated, and Davis asks for non-Indigenous “active input.” A non-Indigenous group that takes up its share of the defect must say whose views it represents, how it sets its priorities, and how it will hear complaint about its conduct.

The word she reaches for in place of ally confirms the split. Writing after the referendum of the 6.2 million who voted Yes, she called them “six million Australian brothers and sisters who walk with us,” “six million confirmed friends that we never knew we had,” and “we six million ... bonded together now.”⁴ She said it of the Yes voters, the part of the body that had already acted. I read her choice of words as an invitation to understand the relationship as enduring, one that binds, unlike a role a supporter takes up and later abandons. An ally adopts a role and may drop it. Brothers and sisters remain so after the argument. That is the substitution: from a role one chooses to a bond one already has.

IV. What the Australian people owe

Here most writing on allyship takes a wrong turn that looks like the right one. Asked what replaces the ally, they answer with a better individual: better informed, more active, more willing. But Davis addressed the people as a whole. Reconciliation failed, on her account, because it converted the Australian people into a crowd of well-meaning persons, each with a private task. A list of private virtues, however demanding, repeats the conversion. The citizen who replaces the ally is a member of a constituent power.

Power alone creates no duty. The duty arises from the injustice and from our present relationship to the institutions that sustain it. We vote under a Constitution that keeps the race power, hold titles that run back through dispossession, and elect the parliaments that decide what a Voice or a treaty may do. A person who takes part in an arrangement that wrongs others, and who has a share of the power to change it, owes a contribution to changing it, measured by that power and by the opportunities at hand.

Her premise leads me to four obligations, each a component of a constituent act. Each begins with one person, and a person discharges it only by joining organised, sustained effort with others; the movement answers for the outcome, the citizen for the contribution.

Everyone shares the obligations, and no one shares them equally. A council that holds land obtained through dispossession owes a different repair from a tenant with little money or influence. Whoever controls budgets, records, or policy has duties that arise from those particular powers. A common obligation to contribute should make such differences visible rather than flatten them.

1. We need to know our own Constitution, and make that knowledge public provision

Among Davis’s post-referendum judgements, the one about ignorance reaches furthest into the majority. “The poor level of civics knowledge in Australia made many vulnerable to these non-factual assertions about the Constitution recognising all Australians equally.” And: “That so many do not know race resides in the Constitution ... means we are a country that does not know itself.” Her next line but one: “We are a country with no memory.”⁴

This is a failure of citizenship, and it belongs to the majority. The first duty is to understand the race power in section 51(xxvi), the racial disqualification that section 25 still contemplates, the absence of any treaty at the national level, and how section 128 works, well enough to explain all of it to a sceptical neighbour.⁸ The ally studies Indigenous culture. The citizen studies their own founding document as well.

Private study cannot close a national deficit. The collective form of this duty is civics as public provision: the school curriculum, the citizenship test, the adult-education program, the library series. A body that “does not know itself” learns through institutions, and the majority elects the governments and boards that run them. Locally, that can be as plain as asking the local library or council to host an evening on sections 25, 51(xxvi) and 128, led by someone who can field a hostile question. A program that counts attendance without asking what people understood has mistaken activity for an outcome.

2. We need to tell the truth about our own side, as a community

The Uluru dialogues asked “for non-Aboriginal Australians to take responsibility for that history, and this legacy it has created.”²

In the ally version of truth-telling, non-Indigenous people listen while First Nations people recount harm. Listening matters, and it leaves the listener’s own side unexamined. In the citizen version the direction reverses. We research the pastoral run that became our suburb, the revoked reserve, the council minutes, the letters of the state-appointed “Protector” who controlled where Aboriginal people could live, work and marry, the massacre site near the school. We are telling the truth about the side we inherited, as its descendants or beneficiaries. Davis wrote after the referendum that she was “sceptical that truth-telling would help at this point,”⁴ and her scepticism attaches to the ally version: testimony offered to a country that will not remember. The citizen version asks the country to recover its own record, which is the memory she says it lacks.

Queensland’s record can be specific. In 1899 a Salvation Army member, William John Thompson, opened discussions with the government about an Aboriginal mission in the Nanango district. The government gazetted a reserve at Barambah in March 1900, revoked it, and in February 1901 gazetted a larger one three miles away: the place now called Cherbourg, to which the state’s own community history counts some 2,079 documented removals between 1905 and 1939.¹⁹ Each of those steps left paper in a gazette, a departmental file, or a church’s correspondence. The record of councils runs into the present. When Brisbane City Council commissioned cultural heritage studies for the Northern Link tunnel in 2008, they identified York’s Hollow, Barrambin, in what is now Victoria Park, as the most important Aboriginal cultural heritage site known within the corridor.²⁰ In 2021 the Council’s LNP councillors voted down a motion to use the name Barrambin more widely.²¹ A council’s minutes record what it chose to do, and they belong to the ratepayers who can ask to read them.

The people and institutions it implicates have a particular responsibility to do this, and the institutions to which they already belong are the right instruments. A council can investigate its own decisions about land and reserves, open its archives, fund the participation of Traditional Owners, agree with them how it will use their testimony, and then report publicly on what it changed. A church can examine its records, from the registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths it kept on its missions to its correspondence with government, and its part in government policy. A business or university can trace the sources of its assets. Those who keep the records should never expect First Nations people to bear the whole burden of bringing that history into view. A Makarrata Commission for agreement-making and truth-telling, for which the Uluru Statement calls, is the national form of the same duty.⁷

3. We need to organise our own electorates

More than nine million Australians voted No. The burden of persuading them should never fall mainly on First Nations advocates, whom the campaign cast as the other party to the question. That work falls on the majority, and on the people inside it.

Davis’s post-referendum strategy has a structure. In 2024 she described “yarning with Aussies across the spectrum without a politician or camera in sight. This is the silent work of the people.”⁵ In 2025 she recalled the original design: “working with Aussies across 151 electorates, actually going and talking to them.”³ And in October 2025 she added: “we need to get out into Australia and have these conversations about what happened, what we think went wrong.”¹⁵

What follows is my proposal, not Davis’s; her published remarks supply the premise and the map. Allies amplify First Nations voices, mostly to people who already agree. Citizens take on their own uncle, their own club, and their own workplace, and that is where the votes are. But the electorate map, now 150 seats,¹¹ is the map of a body, and the collective form of this duty is the electorate organised as a body: a standing local group in each seat. Residents run it, do its work, and choose how to make the case to their neighbours. On matters concerning First Nations people, it answers to the First Nations organisations of its region, which set its priorities, rather than to a campaign headquarters. It persists between referendums and connects education with meetings with representatives and support for First Nations campaigns. Such a group speaks for its members, never for its seat; it is a minority seeking a majority, and it earns support as any movement does, by persuasion and by results. Its accountability to First Nations organisations needs an agreed form: a named relationship with the Traditional Owner corporation or community-controlled body of its region, a standing invitation to that body to set the group’s priorities on matters concerning First Nations people, and an undertaking that where those bodies disagree the group waits rather than chooses between them. None of that should add to the load First Nations people already bear; the group does its own homework and asks only for direction it cannot supply itself. The Regional Dialogues gave First Nations a deliberative structure that produced a mandate. The majority has no equivalent. Until it builds one, persuasion stays private, and the cause keeps looking like First Nations business alone.

Two cautions apply. A movement need not convert every No voter; it needs a national majority and four states, a large enough task.⁸ And the referendum’s loss leaves the persuasive power of conversation unmeasured. Davis’s team found at the start of 2023 that “if you had dinner with an Aboriginal person, you’re more likely to vote ‘yes’.”¹⁵ That is a finding about contact. I know of no strategy for moving millions of votes built on that finding, and local groups are where someone would build one.

4. We need to make the Uluru Statement a condition of any republic

Of all the ways in which non-Indigenous Australians might reinvent the country, this one is the sharpest, and the least discussed in allyship settings.

In 2018 Davis argued that a republic and Indigenous recognition must travel together. “To move to a republic without addressing unfinished business would be, in excluding Indigenous peoples, unjust.” Without structural reform, “an Australian head of state is, to put it crudely, putting lipstick on a pig.” And: “To have a republic before addressing unfinished business is to taunt.”² She also endorsed Mark McKenna’s view that the Uluru Statement is “the blueprint for an Australian republic.”¹⁷ In October 2025 she confirmed that “the republic is still on the agenda,” alongside the insistence that “the Voice is still needed. Nothing has changed.”¹⁴

Any future re-founding of Australian sovereignty, whether a republic, a new preamble, or a new head of state, is a decision of the majority. The people can make it a condition that no such re-founding proceeds without the settlement the Uluru Statement sets out: a constitutional Voice, agreement-making, and truth-telling. The ally cannot do this. Only the body that would be re-founding the country can refuse to do it incompletely. Of the four obligations, this one already operates at the level of the body, and it is the most consequential application of the principle: a condition the majority can attach to its own next founding act.

V. The uncomfortable part

Followed to its end, the argument asks something allyship programs rarely ask. It asks the majority to limit its own power, durably and by law.

The Voice was such a limit. The proposed section 129 would have secured the existence of a body able to make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government. It had no veto and imposed no explicit general duty to consult it before every decision, and the Constitution itself would have remained alterable under section 128. Its hard guarantees were existence and a voice: no ordinary Act could abolish the body or strip its right to make representations.⁹ That is all the majority had to give up, the power to silence the body by simple majority when it became inconvenient, and the majority refused. The modesty of the ask measures the size of the refusal.

The bill for it has begun to arrive. In August 2025 the government made Indigenous “economic empowerment” its flagship policy at Garma, and Davis’s verdict on it names the missing institution: “The opacity of economic empowerment policy is a consequence of there being no representative Voice. The status quo has supercharged the one thing the Voice was designed to mitigate – elite capture.” The government, she wrote, “has doubled down on the very dynamics the Voice sought to disrupt,” and she cited Michael Dillon, who once ran the federal portfolio: “Picking winners is fine until you begin picking losers.”¹⁸ Without the body it refused, the majority’s government now selects which First Nations interests prosper, and answers to no one for the selection. The Uluru Statement has a phrase for that condition: “the torment of our powerlessness.”⁷

Treaties do the same kind of work, and Victoria’s Statewide Treaty, in force since 12 December 2025, shows that a government can do it and shows where: in the jurisdiction concerned, on the terms of the agreement concerned.¹⁰ Truth commissions with real powers do it too. Davis said after the referendum that the No “doesn’t mean a legislative Voice is off the table,” and that voters “didn’t Vote No to Truth-Telling. They didn’t Vote No to Agreement Making.”⁵ Judge each of these instruments by the authority and the accountability it establishes; none of them requires the others to wait.

Reinventing the country therefore means agreeing to institutions that constrain the majority itself. A better Australia designed on First Nations people’s behalf would repeat the old arrangement with better intentions. The commitment becomes real when we support an institution’s authority on the day its intervention is inconvenient, costly, or critical of us.

Whether the ally has gone shows here. The ally gives revocable goodwill; the citizen gives up some unchecked majority power, in a form built to outlast enthusiasm. That is a harder thing to offer than a new word, which is why the conversation keeps returning to words.

VI. A changing “us”

Davis’s co-keynote at the summit was George Megalogenis, speaking on “Australia’s changing population.”¹ The pairing was apt. The “non-Indigenous Australian” is increasingly a migrant, or the child of migrants.

At the 2021 Census, 27.6 per cent of Australians were born overseas, and 48.2 per cent had at least one parent born overseas.²² Much allyship language leans on inherited guilt and personal atonement, which says little to people whose families arrived in 1995. Davis’s framework fits them. They inherited the Constitution, and on the day they became citizens they acquired a share of the power in section 128. A resident without a vote still acts through a workplace, an association, or a local campaign. Their civic obligation rests on the same ground as a sixth-generation grazier’s, membership of the polity, though their particular duties may differ; and it requires no claim of ancestral culpability before anyone takes present injustice seriously.

An argument grounded in citizenship rather than guilt can reach Australians the reconciliation model never could. It also addresses the body rather than the person, as her whole argument does.

VII. Honest limits

Four weaknesses remain.

First, the source base. My account of the summit address rests on my notes from the live stream; her published record supplies the rest. The May 2026 lecture reaches me only through Oxfam’s summary. I know of no published recording or transcript of the summit address; if one appears, I will check this account against it.

Second, the capture problem. If every Australian is a principal rather than an ally, what guarantees that First Nations keep authorship of the reform once the majority is fully inside it? One can hear “it’s their democracy and it’s our democracy,” uncharitably, as an invitation to majoritarian capture. The three-way split in section III narrows it: everyone shares the defect, enactment belongs to the people, and design stays with First Nations, in the Dialogues’ mandate and in whatever they deliberate next. The answer holds only while the majority accepts a remedy it did not write, and that acceptance is what the referendum tested. It remains the point most open to attack. Two years of the status quo have shown where capture comes from in the meantime: from a majority government choosing among Indigenous interests with no representative body to answer to, the arrangement Davis calls elite capture.¹⁸ The Voice was the guard against it, and refusing the guard produced the thing feared.

Third, the method. Obligation 3 depends on organising that has yet to work at scale, and on a measure of success better than attendance: whether people end up better informed, more willing to act, and able to sustain action together. Until a local group somewhere can show that, the proposal remains an untested design.

Fourth, the standpoint. I write as a non-Indigenous Australian interpreting a First Nations leader’s argument, and the four obligations are my extension of her premise, not her program. Where I have misread her, the correction belongs to her and to the Uluru Dialogue, and I welcome it.

Conclusion

The follow-up discussion asked what word to use now. Davis’s challenge answers a different question: what is this country, and who is responsible for finishing it?

The ally stood beside a cause that belonged to someone else. The citizen has no such distance available. The Constitution is theirs, the history is theirs, the neighbours who voted No are theirs to persuade, and the next founding moment will be theirs to decide. And because only the people acting as one body can change the Constitution, no one can discharge any of it one good person at a time. That is what remains when the ally goes. It is a great deal more than a change of vocabulary, and no number of morning teas will settle it.

Each of us should be able to say what we have undertaken, to whom we answer, and what changed because we took part.

Notes

1. Allies for Uluru, “National Allyship Summit 2026”, program for 18 September 2026. The account of the address and the follow-up discussion rests on the author’s notes.

2. Megan Davis, Henry Parkes Oration, 22 October 2018, “And remind them that we have robbed them? Re-imagining a nation: Indigenous recognition, constitutional reform and a future Australian republic”. Edited transcript, Henry Parkes Foundation.

3. Marie Claire, “Where Do We Go From Here? Two Years On From The Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum”, 25 September 2025. Interview with Megan Davis and Pat Anderson.

4. Megan Davis, “Truth after the Voice”, The Monthly, December 2023 to January 2024 edition; the Uluru Dialogue announced it on 13 December 2023.

5. Megan Davis, 2024 UQ NAIDOC Keynote Lecture, published by the Uluru Dialogue on 19 July 2024.

6. Oxfam Australia, “Beyond Reconciliation: What the Referendum Revealed”, 10 August 2026. Oxfam’s summary of Davis’s Federation University lecture of 26 May 2026. Venue and date: Fed Square, “National Reconciliation Week 2026”.

7. Uluru Statement from the Heart, 26 May 2017.

8. Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, sections 25, 51(xxvi), and 128. Federal Register of Legislation.

9. Parliamentary Library, Bills Digest, “Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023”, 2022 to 2023.

10. Victorian Government, “Treaty timeline”, including Royal Assent on 13 November 2025 and commencement of the Statewide Treaty on 12 December 2025.

11. Australian Electoral Commission, “1,456 candidates to contest 2025 federal election”, 12 April 2025 (150 House of Representatives seats).

12. Australian Financial Review, “Hatred of politicians killed the Voice: Megan Davis”, 6 December 2023.

13. Megan Davis, “Voice of Reason: On Recognition and Renewal”, Quarterly Essay 90, June 2023 (extract).

14. NITV, “Two years on from the Voice referendum, its architects remain committed to the cause”, 14 October 2025.

15. AAP, “Voice referendum to provide springboard for recognition”, The Canberra Times, 23 October 2025, reporting Davis’s Centre for Public Integrity oration of 22 October 2025.

16. Megan Davis, “The long road to Uluru: Walking together, truth before justice”, Griffith Review 60, 2018.

17. Megan Davis, “The status quo ain’t working”, The Monthly, 2018.

18. Megan Davis, “Garma chameleon”, The Monthly, September 2025 issue, published 27 August 2025.

19. Queensland Government, “Cherbourg”, community histories. See also Philippe Foubert, “Cherbourg: history, survival and self-determination”.

20. Philippe Foubert, “Barrambin Cultural Heritage Statement”, with the Brisbane City Council Northern Link cultural heritage studies (2008) and Queensland Heritage Register listing 602493; and “Queensland Removed Them, Then Asked Them to Prove They Never Left”.

21. ABC News, “Brisbane’s LNP councillors vote down motion to use Victoria Park’s Indigenous name more widely”, 4 August 2021.

22. Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2021 Census: Nearly half of Australians have a parent born overseas”, 28 June 2022.