It seems having a rock star like Peter Garrett in cabinet is starting to rub off on some of his colleagues.
Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, a former lawyer, announced that her department will be spending $44,000 to produce a song and music video to promote the proposed referendum on recognising indigenous people in Australia’s constitution.
The proposed referendum seems certain to go to the ballot box across the country as both sides of politics recently embraced a report on the issued commissioned by the government.
On receiving the report Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared it was time ”to say yes to an understanding of our past, to say yes to constitutional change, and to say yes to a future more united and more reconciled than we have ever been before”.
According to The Age, the $44,000 has already been allocated in the form of a grant to the Wantok Musik Foundation who will use the money to write, record, and produce the song.
According to the project brief written by the Government the song will feature topics such as “recognition of the prior occupation and unique identities of Australia’s first peoples, racial equality and the importance of indigenous languages and culture.”
Aboriginal singer-songwriter Dan Sultan and Shellie Morris have been commissioned to perform the song but there are hopes that others artists such as Missy Higgins, Bernard Fanning, and Jimmy Barnes will join the project.
“We do want to appeal to a mass audience and go far and wide in terms of being a popular song,” said Patrick McCloskey, who came up with the idea of producing a song to support the referendum proposal and is the projects producer.
The plan says McCloskey is to try and emulate previously successful political songs such as Paul Kelly’s ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, which was written as a protest song about the Indigenous land rights movement, and Archie Roach’s ‘Took The Children Away’ about the stolen generation.
If all goes to plan the government is aiming to hold the referendum at or before the 2013 election. But the prospect of defeat weighs heavily on the minds of those in Canberra. Of the 44 referendum proposals held, only 8 have been successful.
