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Gulkula, Northern Territory: The Voice to parliament is urgently needed to tackle Indigenous disadvantage, according to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who will reboot the Yes campaign in a major speech at the Garma festival in East Arnhem Land on Saturday ahead of a referendum vote expected on October 14.

Albanese will say the Voice to parliament is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity for real, overdue and much-needed change”, promising “there will be no delaying or deferring this referendum” as some supporters of the Yes vote have suggested.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, partner Jodie Haydon (left), Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney (right) and Member for Lingiari Marion Scrymgour (rear) arrive for a meeting with the Dilak Council at Garma.Credit: Rhett Wyman

“We will not deny the urgency of this moment. We will not kick the can down the road. We will not abandon substance for symbolism, or retreat to platitudes at the expense of progress,” he will say, according to speech notes.

After a week of bitter debate in parliament about whether a Voice would lead to a national treaty with Indigenous Australians, the prime minister does not mention treaty at all in his speech and nor does he name the date for the referendum.

On Thursday, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton launched a blistering attack on Albanese, claiming he was a “phoney and a fraud” who had “embarrassingly walked away” from his previous commitment to a treaty.

But asked at a press conference on Friday whether he was still committed to implementing in full the Uluru Statement from the Heart – which in 2017 proposed the Voice followed by a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of truth-telling and agreement-making – Albanese said “yes”.

The prime minister said he was open to discussions about treaty while at the festival.

“I will be listening to the views of people here”, he said, pointing out that “there are processes for treaty under way in Queensland with bipartisan support of the Labor Party and the LNP, in Victoria, and indeed in the Northern Territory”.

Albanese said Australians did not want a long, formal referendum campaign and foreshadowed a final four-week campaign blitz before the vote is held, adding it would not be held on a football grand final day.

“There will be a focus in the weeks leading up to people voting, particularly in the four weeks leading up because this is an issue in which this isn’t about politicians. It isn’t about Canberra. This is about every Australian getting one vote,” he said.

This masthead revealed in February that October 14 is the most likely referendum date. Multiple sources in the Yes camp, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, believe the four-week parliamentary sitting break from September 14 provides an opportunity for clear air for a final campaign blitz, while holding the vote in November or December during the northern wet season could cause logistical difficulties for the electoral commission.

In a rallying cry designed to unite Australians and win over the high proportion of undecided or ‘soft’ voters – which the most recent Resolve Political Monitor indicated had risen to 22 per cent and which the Yes camp has estimated to be as high as 40 per cent – Albanese will warn in his speech that voting No would deliver more of the same for Indigenous Australians.

“An eight-year gap in life expectancy in the home of the fair go. A suicide rate twice as high, in the lucky country. Shocking rates of disease, in a nation with some of the world’s best healthcare,” he will say.

“Surely, no leader can honestly say this is good enough. Surely, no leader can pretend ‘it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Surely, no leader can imagine that change is not desperately and urgently needed.”

Anthony Albanese meets Yolngu Elder Djawa Yunupingu at the Garma Festival.Credit: Rhett Wyman

“That’s why, with every passing day, it becomes more and more obvious that the No campaign are desperate to talk about anything but the actual question before the Australian people. Because even they understand that more of the same is not just unacceptable, it is indefensible.”

The prime minister will point out that the No campaign, including Dutton, support a legislated Voice to parliament rather than one that is constitutionally enshrined and that “undermines every other argument they make against it. Clearly they acknowledge it is needed – otherwise why legislate it?”

On Friday, Albanese also highlighted the local Dilak Council in East Arnhem land, where the Garma festival is held, as an example of how the Indigenous Voice to parliament would work. The Council includes senior cultural leaders of 13 clan groups in a decision-making body based on traditional structures.

Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson said on Friday on the ABC the debate about treaty over the last week had potentially been “really confusing for the ordinary Australian out there. It is a complicated debate”.

“It will happen, those discussions, but we have not had the conversation about how this is all going to work for us. And of course as we are speaking, there are a whole lot of treaty negotiations happening in the various states.”

Speaking on a panel event at the festival, Central Land Council policy executive Josie Douglas said it had been 35 years since Yunupingu presented the Barunga Statement to then-prime minister Bob Hawke, which called for an elected Aboriginal representative body and for a treaty to be negotiated with First Nations people.

“Here we are today, making the same ask but we’re calling it a Voice to parliament. That has to come first,” Douglas said.

“At Central Land Council meetings, people are well aware the treaty process will take decades, it may not happen in their lifetime … if we don’t get the referendum up this year, in whose lifetime will we have this change in Australia that we need?”

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