Published: 24 May 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Mark Leibler was there when the Uluru Statement was declared. Now he thinks he will be here when it becomes law
AFTER 20 YEARS of working for reconciliation, Mark Leibler believes Australia turned a corner with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s commitment to the Uluru Statement in his victory speech on Saturday night.
“I always believed it would happen, but I didn’t know if it would happen in my lifetime. I’m coming around to the view that it probably will,” he told The Jewish Independent.
The Jewish community leader was one of very few non-Indigenous Australians present when 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders signed the Uluru Statement from the Heart in May 2017.
The Statement calls for the establishment of a First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution and a Makarrata Commission, to supervise a process of truth-telling and agreement-making between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. (Makarrata is a Yolngu word for a process of conflict resolution, peacemaking and justice.)
It’s very difficult to see on what basis you can oppose this except by referring to a very extreme sort of right-wing agenda.
Leibler described the statement by Anthony Albanese as the “one shining light” of election night. “I was extremely elated,” he said.
Leibler called on Jewish Australians to be active in supporting the implementation of the Uluru Statement, which he thinks will go to a referendum in the life of the current government.
“The Jewish community has a history. We have had 2,000 years of suffering; we have had the Holocaust. We understand suffering.
“We live in this wonderful country, a land of freedom and opportunity. Really, setting aside Israel, there is no better country in the world for Jews to live in.
