Back to podcast

Jenelle McMaster

Hi, welcome to season five of Change Happens. I'm Jenelle McMaster, and I have the great privilege of speaking with influential and interesting leaders on their experiences of leading change and the lessons that they've learned along the way.

This podcast is called Change Happens, but what about when it doesn’t? Today, I spoke with Professor Megan Davis, a constitutional lawyer known for her work on creating the Uluru Statement from the Heart and for her advocacy work for the Voice Referendum. That's the referendum that didn't get passed. It's the change that didn't happen.

News Headlines

“Australia has said no.”

“…overwhelmingly rejected a Voice to parliament.”

(Prime Minister Albanese) “This moment of disagreement does not define us, and it will not divide us.”

Jenelle McMaster

In this conversation, Megan shares the highs of being the first indigenous Australian to be elected to a UN body, the highs of working on the Uluru Statement, to the deep woes of the no vote. Megan is very clearly a constitutional lawyer, a deep thinker with that kind of lawyer-like detachment that you need when you're taking on this kind of structural reform, except that there are those moments. You know, the ones that really get you, when you're reminded of just how deeply it impacts lives.

Megan Davis

“Aunty, I'm really scared.” That's the first thing she said to me on the referendum day. You didn't go into this thing to make children feel unsafe. We did it to give them a better tomorrow.

Jenelle McMaster

In this episode, Megan takes us through her journey from lawyer to leader and discovering the power of leading not just with the head, but also with the heart.

Well, hi, Megan. Thanks so much for joining us on Change Happens.

Megan Davis

Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Jenelle McMaster

I've heard you described a number of different ways. I've heard you described as shy, stubborn, very measured, an introvert, someone with a great brain, someone who, you know, when they speak people listen. I know that you're the middle of five children and your sister Lucy has described you both jokingly, and I dare say lovingly, as bossy and a nerd who carried the constitution around when you were a kid. Tell me, how would you describe yourself?

Megan Davis

I don't know. I mean, I suppose all of those things. Lucy calls it nerdy, but certainly I see myself as a deep thinker who takes indigenous rights and Australian democracy very seriously. Definitely stubborn, but I carry my opinions lightly, meaning if there's a plausible argument for me to change my position, I'm not an inflexible thinker. So I will change when faced with evidence, but yeah, I mean all of those things and none of those things I guess.

Jenelle McMaster

I understand. What was it about the Constitution that could capture a 12-year-old's mind?

Megan Davis

Although we weren't a very political family, meaning neither of my parents were particularly politically involved, we were definitely schooled in Australian politics and part of that was an understanding that decisions made by Australian politicians have a really acute impact upon indigenous populations. The Constitution is an important part of that because it contains the rules about what the Commonwealth can and can't do. So, if you don't understand that rule book, it's hard to understand how the system works.

Jenelle McMaster

But as a young girl walking around, there must have been something that intuitively or inherently you grasped about that. That I imagine might not have had these kinds of words applied to it, but it ignited something in you back then.

Megan Davis

Probably my mum, who she, she's really brilliant and you know, we laugh about it now, but I believed everything she said. Everything! There's one family story where she used to say to us if you kids drink your Milo or cup of tea with a spoon in it, she’d tell this story about a family in which the mother’s eye popped out and rolled onto the table when the spoon... Anyway, I believed it right until quite late actually, a bit embarrassing on my part. But she has all these kinds of funny myths. She should have authored fairy tales or cautionary tales, but she, I suppose she was really articulate in not just Australian politics, but global politics. I remember being in grade 6, 7, 8 debating reasons for World War One and World War Two over the dinner table. Like she was just a very worldly, intellectual kind of person. But also Dad's family at a very young age, you know you, you start talking about things like Protection Act. You start to realise that lengthy period of racial segregation that our people experienced and you talk about different reserves and missions, Aunty this and Uncle that visiting from this reserve, this mission. At an early age, you're pretty cognisant of the fact that these are laws that are passed to restrict your movement, restrict your freedoms, and maybe it was just that's what I was meant to do, meaning I was attracted to the notion of rules and laws and how they're used to oppress people but can be used to redeem people as well.

Jenelle McMaster

With all those conversations, and I've heard as well you talk about discussions with your family, about giving voice to the voiceless amongst all those conversations. Was there an end game that you and the family sort of talked about what you hoped to achieve or see change?

Megan Davis

Maybe no. You know, she used to talk about speaking up for people who can't speak for themselves. And I'm not diminishing that people have a voice. But it's a metaphor for power and power structures that I think it wasn't just about being Aboriginal, growing up it was about being poor. So that underclass very rarely have advocates who advocate for the rights of the underclass, because people just assume if you're poor, you're poor because your family didn't work hard enough. Well, when in fact we know that there's all sorts of reasons why people are poor or impoverished. If we look at Aboriginal people, you had generations of people that worked for 60, 70 years, 80 years for some people, as servants and their wages that they earned were stolen from them by the State. In the early ‘80s, Joh Bjelke-Peterson, he built highways and hospitals using the money of Aboriginal people who had worked their entire lives on the railway, you know, as domestic servants, et cetera. So part of Aboriginal intergenerational poverty is that property and income were taken from people. There's a complexity around poverty.

We lived in a family that was a housing commission family where mum didn't have savings. If something went wrong, we had no money to draw upon. We had no one to help us. And that feeling of vulnerability never leaves you really. It always stays with you. For people who just don't have options, that really drove that idea of how do you - how do you find a voice in a world that doesn't think you deserve one?

Jenelle McMaster

If I just fast forward a bit, one of the many memorable achievements that you've accomplished was becoming the first indigenous Australian woman to be elected to a UN body. What did that kind of milestone mean to you sort of coming from that background you've just outlined there? What did it mean to you and how did it then impact your career?

Megan Davis

So, it's actually the first indigenous Australian because people think Mick Dodson was the first, but he wasn't elected. So, Mick was appointed. And so, I was the first indigenous Australian to be elected to a UN body. It was, it was really important. I mean, I started at law school looking at international human rights law, that's when I first went to do some UN work at UN conferences when I was working for an Aboriginal organisation in Southeast Queensland, and then in my final year of law school received a UN Fellowship in Geneva. So, I started that work at a very young age, then came back to Australia and continued to participate in the drafting of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And then I did my PhD in the area, and my masters in the area, and it was an important trajectory.

The position came open and Jenny Macklin was the Minister who asked if I would like to be Australia's candidate. I am still eternally grateful for her because if it was any other Minister, it would have been an Aboriginal man, a “usual suspect”, who got that position and probably not qualified to have that position. So, I was really grateful for the Minister, to actually know that I was qualified in this space and that she chose a young Aboriginal woman to do that role, and so I ended up serving 12 years all up. It's been a huge piece in my professional career, that sometimes I forget about actually, when I think, when I'm doing all the all the Uluru work. It's been good post referendum to be able to kind of return to some of my international roots.

Jenelle McMaster

You certainly have made a huge contribution in that period of time, but you are, as you make reference to the referendum, your moment of change came from the work on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. You ran many dialogue sessions during that time, you spent a lot of time with government, a lot of time with community. What did you learn about engaging stakeholders through that?

Megan Davis

I learnt a lot from the first process, the expert panel process, because we were as appointed as experts. I learnt a lot about making sure First Nations people are properly included and consulted on what those options are, otherwise it's all decided for them by other people and in that consultation, I learnt about how governments, when it comes to Aboriginal issues, are really unimaginative and they choose the path of least resistance, and they call it political pragmatism. That's politically pragmatic. That's what we’ll get up. And there's no time for them to reflect, nor do they want to, on the merits of a particular option. I learnt a lot about governments and politicians in this process as well. I don't think they realise they're patronising people. Even people like Aunty Pat, who's my colleague and is 83 years old, they almost infantilised citizens and say, look, you don't understand how politics works. But citizens have changed the world in many ways beyond the ballot box, and one of the lessons post-Uluru was very few of them had read the Uluru statement or the report, and so we were always grappling with a political elite that were illiterate on what Uluru really was about.

Jenelle McMaster

How do you keep going when you are trying to drive that kind of change and there is double talk, I guess, around the need to be pragmatic or the cultural illiteracy? How do you keep yourself motivated and continuing to push forward?

Megan Davis

It was a difficult year last year and then you get to the end of a process, which is an earnest process, that so many of our people participated in. It's frustrating. You just have to keep smiling. It's tough, partly because you feel frustration that, yes, you're in the door advocating for this but so many of our people desperately needed that change, particularly in relation to disadvantage and poverty. And having many, many people speak on your behalf, it's frustrating for them. You keep going. The seven months after the referendum were really difficult, but you know, I feel really energised by the 6.2 million who voted yes. There's so many kind Australians stopping me everywhere who said they voted yes, that support the reform and that's what keeps you going. Like, I feel energised to keep pushing on.

Jenelle McMaster

You have lightly touched on the seven months period there and I think about that huge set of roller coasters that you've been on, whether it was the high of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the low of the rejection from the Turnbull government in 2017, perhaps the high again of it going to referendum, then as we all know that the referendum was ultimately unsuccessful. Let's just start there with the day of the vote. What was that like for you before, during, after that day?

Megan Davis

I mean, before, we were just very nervous because the polls didn't look great. I was more worried about my staff, about the Uluru use and the impact that the campaign and the referendum result would have on my nieces and nephews. I'd really thought about it as a constitutional lawyer, but I do recall the morning, so my little niece, Mimmy, who's named after me, she’s called Megan. But Mimmy said, “Oh, can I sleep in auntie's room?”. So she slept in my room and we had this big, beautiful king size bed and I remember waking up in the morning, because she's got the most stunning, snow white, cascading curls, and I woke up and her little face was kind of staring at me and the sun's coming through and she looked at me and said “Auntie, I'm really scared”. Like, that's the first thing she said to me on the referendum day, “Auntie, I'm scared” and you know, that was awful cause you didn't go into this thing to make children feel unsafe. We did it to give them a better tomorrow. I hadn't really thought about the impact on all the jarjums on Monday who had to go to school and to be faced with an Australia that was seemingly hostile to them. And for so many little kids who've grown up in an era where they learn language, they do welcomes or acknowledgements, you know, kindergarten and those early years are really precious, but have been magnificent in teaching. They learnt about the stolen generations, they know about NAIDOC, they know about reconciliation, and we've seen them grow up through this. It never happened in my time. And then I felt like, you know, are we undoing all that good work because now they go to school knowing, at least in Mimmy's electorate, most of the mums and dads voted no. It was tough to see the impact on the community. That's been the hardest is to see how hurt people are.

Jenelle McMaster

How have you navigated those feelings? What's the conversation that you had with Mimmy?

Megan Davis

Her mum was a really big – she ran her organisation in Southeast Queensland called Mob 23 so they were really actively really involved in the campaign and she's really cleverly walked them through it. I think most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families kept their kids home from school for the first few days, if not week. And we've spoken, they understand, you know, obviously in our family we do a deep dive analysis based on the data about what went wrong and you know we don't want them just running around this world saying well the vote went down because the nation's racist. I don't think that's why the vote went down. And so we work with them to make sure they understand in a nuanced fashion what happened. You know, post referendum our people just hug their kids and held them tight. My oldest brother kept his kids home for three days and they flew the flag and watched Aboriginal movies or listed to Aboriginal songs and I think that's what the community did. We got each other through it. It still hurts and I think many people feel really hurt and rejected. I just stayed at home. I mean, I was obviously over tired, so I slept for about 7 weeks, but it's a bit different from me because it's so intellectual in my head and I lived it 24/7 for 12 years. You know, it was a lot of work.

Jenelle McMaster

I wanted to ask you about that because a lot of what you've talked about is the, you know, the head part, the mechanics of the Constitution and how the architecture works, and then most moments that you talk about with Mimmy and the community is heart and what have you learnt when you think about driving change around the head and the heart and what needs to happen to engage both?

Megan Davis

I've learned so much. In the early days of the dialogues, you know, a lot of the old people kept saying reconciliation was the wrong framework. And I remember, I've heard it so many times from elders over the years that I just kind of switch it off because, you know, mentally in my head, I'm like 1991 the Act was passed and then there’s Council did it’s work and then brought out its recommendations and John Howard said no in 2001 and then, you know, I've got this trajectory and I can think it through intellectually, but I started listening, which is the point of dialogues, and really hearing what the elders were saying, which was reconciliation presupposes that there's a relationship and that we're actually just reconciling a friendship that had a conflict or attention. And they kept saying, but we're not reconciling because we haven't met. I learned a lot about listening and not being such a know it all in that space and actually what the elders were saying was probably true. The choice of the centre of the country was about the heart. I don't want to keep crying through this interview. That was a big lesson about love. Our elders have been through so much. I was so blown away by their generosity and the dialogues, because they're the ones that went through compulsory racial segregation. They're the ones that ate, you know, rice and flour and peas with weevils in them. You know, some of our senior elders now are kids who grew up in that protection era. They've had their children removed, they've grown up away from family. The things that they've seen and experienced and they come together and like all the young generations, angry and the older generations saying, let's offer an olive branch to the Australian people. You know, we need to coexist and we need to work together and they need to belong to our culture and we need them to feel like they belong to our culture because they grow up here and they - they're born here and they die here. I mean, I remember sitting there in some of the dialects, just going holy, what? And it's the most extraordinary thing. And there was so much love put into those dialogues and so much, you know, there was anger, but there was a lot of love and care about the messaging and about the fact that Australians need to feel a part of this Aboriginal footprint because it's part of them too. And that was Uluru, it was meant to be an invitation to Aussies to feel a part of us. I learned a lot about emotion and heart and maybe switching off that part of your brain, which is so structured and only thinking about acts and only thinking about courts. It's why it was so heartbreaking to see it just deteriorate into this terrible campaign that suggested that these people, who weren't the usual suspects, they were just ordinary people from communities that were picked by their own people, were derided as being elite. You know, people in low-income jobs, low satisfaction jobs. It was heartbreaking, but I did learn a lot about softening, I guess, my approach to listening and law reform and change.

Jenelle McMaster

Megan, when we spoke in the lead up to this, you mentioned that you didn't see yourself as a leader and that, you know, somehow you found yourself in a role that was being asked of you or you were in that position. Tell me about why not and where you are with that now and your, I guess, comfort with that mantle.

Megan Davis

I remember the day Turnbull ruled out a referendum and the Voice and I remember one of my lawyers, we were driving to an award or something and she just burst into tears. We had to pull the car over because she was driving, so it's really dangerous, and I remember thinking to myself, I've been up all night on the phone to Noel and Pat worried about the reform and I thought oh, I haven't thought about the impact it has on my team and how they must be feeling because they are all young and they've never experienced the Australian government saying no. And they just didn't understand why he would just say no. And I remember consoling her and thinking this is what leadership is, like, this is what it means to be a leader. I became a leader in that movement, I guess. That obligation, we felt very strongly about it. I'm in a position where I can do that as an academic, whereas most of the mob have to go back to work. They don't have the time and the resources to devote 24/7 to structural reform. Yes, I'm there because I'm a constitutional lawyer, but you also do become a leader in that space. And I'd like, you know, I’d like to get to that place where I don't always have to explain and justify, you know, to, you know what I mean, hey, like?

Jenelle McMaster

I do, I do.

Megan Davis

Not always having to say I'm not a leader, I'm not a leader and I'm sorry and apologising all the time.

Jenelle McMaster

What's next for you, Megan?

Megan Davis

Next is a chair at Harvard Law School. So, I'm teaching a couple of classes on recognition and another class on indigenous peoples in international law. And we'll just spend, you know, the year there regrouping. We've started a listening tour, so we're already out talking to our 6.2 million Aussie friends. We've been doing a lot of research on who those friends are. They're very staunch in their vote, which is terrific. They're deeply saddened by the loss. It's important and we can see many, many issues happening across the Federation of the past seven months, where, you know things would have been different if the voice to parliament had have got up. For example, the new Rapid Review Violence Against Women Committee doesn't even have an Aboriginal woman sitting on it when Aboriginal women have been at the forefront of activism and advocacy and law changes in relation to violence against women, we’re still being not included. We're still not at the table, and in fact that particular group appointed an Aboriginal man to the committee who will now speak on behalf of Aboriginal women. It's urgent. We're not closing the gap. It's just, it's not happening.

Jenelle McMaster

Megan, if I was to ask you what you feel most proud of as you look back on the many things you've done, what would your answer be?

Megan Davis

Uluru. Yeah, the dialogues I'm really proud of.

Jenelle McMaster

And the legacy you want to leave behind?

Megan Davis

Well, I hope at one point, we will have some form of constitutional recognition. It's the only thing we haven't tried as a nation. The only thing. We want to leave a better Australia, right? And if that means more Australians feeling a part of Aboriginal culture and more Aboriginal people feeling a part of Australian culture, that's the kind of nation that we want to nurture.

Jenelle McMaster

I think that's well said, and I hear in you still a lot of fire, a lot of hope, a lot of positivity and lot of determination in there and I think that probably harks back to those attributes that you opened the interview with, you know, you said you're stubborn but a flexible thinker, and I've seen that borne out with the way that you've been operating here and I do feel like I've gone on a bit of a journey with you in this discussion when you were talking about structural reform. I could see that deep thinker that could really understand the framework of change that needed to happen and then towards the end, as you were talking about your learnings and the emotion, your whole affect moved with that and it was beautiful to see. Thank you for sharing with us those moments, you know, vulnerability never leaves you. I could - I could hear it in your voice as well from your upbringing to now, the fire of democracy is built to change. And so therein lies the impetus to do exactly that. And I think that, you know, your willingness to lean into the hard stuff, not take the simple, superficial answer, but move into the complex and really get to the heart of it, the power of listening, the power of driving community to create solutions, the realisation of how head and heart have to work together. The last thing I'll say, Megan, is that I hope that you never from here on in, apologise for being a leader. Be proud that you are. That's exactly what you are. And so doing it all day, every day out there and long may that continue.

Thanks for your time, Megan.

Megan Davis

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jenelle McMaster

The Change Happens podcast from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

End audio recording