The Voice campaign entrenched immature politics. We must do better for First Nations people

The defeat of the Voice referendum was not simply a political loss. It was a political and cultural failure. It exposed, yet again, the profound immaturity of Australia s political life when it comes to First Nations people. It s an immaturity that s shared, in different ways, by governments, by sections of the Australian public and by parts of the Indigenous body politic itself. For more than a century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have said the same thing in different ways: