Later this year Australians will be called upon to vote in a referendum on a proposal which, if approved, would amend the Constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the First Peoples of Australia through the creation of a body to be known as 'The Voice', which would represent Indigenous views to the Federal Parliament and Executive.
 
This talk will explain the proposed change and the core features of The Voice model. It will seek to place The Voice model in perspective, explaining its comparative strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis other possible models for constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples and protection of Indigenous interests. It will address some of the controversies that have emerged in public discourse, with a particular focus on the legal ramifications of The Voice model and the potential role of litigation and the courts.
 
Professor Jason Varuhas will join us on 8th June for our lunch talk on the proposed Voice to Parliament and the Executive.

Bio:
Jason N E Varuhas is a Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School, Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies, Director of Studies for the Law School’s Government and Public and International Law programmes, and Director of the international series of Public Law Conferences. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional, administrative, human rights and private law, including authoring leading treatises on damages, judicial review, and the law of torts, and publishing in leading journals such as the Law Quarterly Review and Cambridge Law Journal. His scholarship has been cited regularly by higher courts in Australia and across the common law world, including by the High Court of Australia, UK Supreme Court and New Zealand Supreme Court, and he has made significant contributions to law reform, including most recently reform of the English judicial review procedure. He has previously held academic posts at Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Cambridge and UNSW, and has held visiting positions at Oxford, Yale and McGill universities.
 
In terms of his Cambridge connections, he graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in 2011. His thesis was awarded the Yorke Prize for best doctoral thesis in law at Cambridge. The thesis formed the basis of his monograph, Damages and Human Rights (Hart/Bloomsbury 2016), which is the only work to be awarded both the UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the Inner Temple New Author Book Prize. As a doctoral student he was a member of Sidney Sussex College, and during the 2009/10 academic year he was also a bye-fellow at Downing College. In 2010 he was elected Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, where he also served as the College’s Keeper of the Statutes. Since moving to Australia in 2013 he has retained his links to Cambridge as a Fellow of the Law Faculty’s Centre for Public Law, and was responsible for establishing an ongoing research partnership between Melbourne Law School and the Cambridge Faculty of Law.
 
Two course lunch with wine will be $75.

The address of the venue:
The Lyceum Club
Ridgway Place, Melbourne VIC 3000
 
Last Call: please register by 6th June.

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