Our home is a meeting place. Our families are the coming together of people from communities with long histories of conflict and division. Our sons can name the places of their kulkulgal ateh, their Maltese nannu, their German oma, and the grandmother they call aka. The conflicts and divisions our family lines represent are not metaphorical. War lingers in unexpected ways. Our ancestors stared down the barrels of each other’s guns and starved each other, and we no longer live in the places any of them called home. Our love is an irreconcilable peace. It is not forged in the identification and priority of our likenesses, any more than race divides us. Our home is a meeting place because here these temporal and geographical trajectories interact in ways that are beautiful and hard and joyful and unexpected. We forget sometimes that not everyone lives here.

The trajectories of our lives have produced a differentiated commitment to democracy. Sana uses democratic principles as a way of holding the existing political system to account. She is not much invested in this democracy, given that so much violence and injustice has been done by the state to Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders while Australia has called itself democratic. Her engagement with democratic theory is more along of the lines of, “well, if you wish to call yourself a democracy, perhaps you should be one.” Daniel does not disagree with this, but points out the ways in which democratic principles, when sincerely practised, do lend themselves to achieving a more just world. Democratic principles can be effective tools for justice.

The national referendum on the proposal for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament has focused our attention upon the different democratic grounds for supporting it. Three key claims are made: first, democracy is more than the aggregation of votes; second, the Voice addresses systemic and structural injustice; and third, renewal ensures that our democracy adapts to the changing fabric of society and politics. From one perspective, these arguments are grounded in a commitment to democracy. From another perspective, these arguments are grounded in a commitment to justice in a place where democracy has so far failed to deliver it.

These points are all made by Professor Davis at different points in her essay. We emphasise them here because as campaigning for and against the Voice to Parliament heats up, it is becoming apparent that one central argument of the No case is that the Voice will somehow undermine the democratic foundations of Australia. We want to highlight that this view relies upon an understanding of democracy that does not capture the values and practices of existing liberal democratic societies. It adopts an extraordinarily narrow conception of democracy that is, frankly, out of touch. It also wrongly presumes that democratic institutions and processes automatically operate to the benefit of all, when in fact they need to be designed to reflect the communities they govern. If one is genuinely committed to principles of equality, the rule of law and a fair go – to repeat the rhetoric of public naysayers – then there are fundamental democratic reasons to support the Voice, rather than to oppose it.

In short, we view the Voice to Parliament as a democratic imperative – expanding democratic representation, redressing structural injustice – and as a form of renewal by which our democracy responds to contemporary social and political conditions.

Opponents of the Voice often assert that a special advisory institution for Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders undermines the democratic role of elected parliamentarians. This is to reduce democracy to the processes that elect parliamentary representatives and ensure their accountability through the ballot box. In fact, modern democratic politics involves a broader range of representative processes and practices through which diverse peoples and their political institutions are empowered to discuss, contest and decide the course of their common life together despite deep divisions and disagreements.

Democratic politics is more than the filling of parliamentary benches. Representative democracy demands more than a right to vote. Representation is a process mediated by a variety of actors and institutions – it includes the state, politicians and political parties, but also unions, lobbyists, NGOs, the media and protest movements – which together enable forms of political participation and contestation in which all members of a community can engage.

It is these broader processes of deliberation and contestation that expand representative politics beyond the ballot box and actualise democratic societies by meaningfully connecting parliaments and the people. Political theorist Nadia Urbinati writes in Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy that “the multiple sources of information and the varied forms of communication and influence that citizens activate through media, social movements and political parties set the tone of representation in a democratic society by making the social political. They are constitutive components of representation, not accessories.” A Voice to Parliament does not supplant a much wider, more diverse field of Indigenous representation that takes place beyond the reaches of the colonial state. But it does expand that field specifically to facilitate the connection to political decision-making.

In this view, values that are integral to contemporary democracy include: the mechanisms of accountability citizens can exercise outside of elections; the deliberative capacity of political communication; the autonomy and impact of civil society; and importantly, the inclusion of affected people in policymaking and the empowerment of the historically marginalised. Seen from this vantage point, the Voice will enhance Australian democracy.

Although voting rights were incrementally accorded to Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders from the 1960s, they have had very little effective political power and influence in the corridors of Canberra. Even as we see increasing numbers of Aboriginal members of parliament, we are reminded that each alone cannot represent all Aboriginal people and nor are they empowered to. Moreover, there are yet to be any Torres Strait Islander representatives at the Commonwealth level, and so we know that existing voting rights and political institutions alone cannot represent the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to the federal government.

History has taught us that treating the most marginalised members of a society as we treat everybody else can be the source of their disadvantage. In pursuit of substantive equality, often we must treat people differently: we must consider the specific needs and histories of marginalised groups in order to create opportunities for them to participate in society. Special measures are justified when they empower historically and structurally marginalised groups to participate more fully and meaningfully in society. Such measures are not mechanisms that divide the country; rather, they work to bring people together by giving everyone a fair go.

In political communities made up of structurally disadvantaged peoples with unique experiences of the world, it is not only democratically legitimate but a fundamental democratic imperative to create specific mechanisms that redress this disadvantage. To do so deepens the democratic character of a nation and does not in any way diminish or reduce the rights of others.

Consequently, recognising the dispossession of this continent’s First Peoples and rectifying the sustained marginalisation and disadvantage that the existing political system has delivered is the primary democratic justification for the Voice. As Davis’s essay reminds us, the stakes are high. Her essay does not enumerate exceptional failures, worst-case scenarios or outlier events. Her essay tells us that the torment of powerlessness – from child removals, burning communities to the ground, the gross mismanagement of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy and more – is Indigenous governance as it is designed to be. This is not a case of good intent gone awry, or benevolence misplaced; this is not a bad-apple bureaucrat, or a case of not doing better before we knew better. Structural injustice does not exist because we do not know our history or the truth. Structural injustice exists because that is how our political system is structured. We are getting exactly what the system was designed to deliver. A Voice to Parliament alone cannot specifically redress every injustice, but it will connect people to power in a way that currently does not happen. Democracy demands nothing less.

Democracy is an unfinished project, which must be continually renewed in the light of changed social conditions. John Dewey wrote that “Every generation has to accomplish democracy over again for itself . . . its very nature, its essence cannot be handed from one person or one generation to another, but has to be worked out in terms of the needs, problems and conditions of social life.” The point is that the capacity of democracy to adapt itself in response to changes in the world, including changing social norms and attitudes, is part of what helps to keep democracies democratic: it supports plurality, not just within generations but across them, and in doing so guards against hegemonic concentrations of identity and authoritarian rule.

Those who argue that the safeguard of a democracy is its unchanging nature are wrong. Renewal is how nations inoculate themselves against new forms of division and conflict that emerge when the people and the power continue to diverge. This is exactly what constitutional reform to protect an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament works to achieve. The proposal for a Voice takes seriously the weaknesses of Australia’s democracy and proposes a constitutional remedy. The Voice endows with a political power of representation a group that Australian democracy has marginalised – not by accident, but by design.

On lazy Sunday mornings, Sana’s voice will become increasingly loud and argumentative: democratic renewal is not an analogy for Indigenous justice. It is not the job of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to improve a political system that has failed us so consistently. Before Daniel can clarify that he is actually agreeing, and is only pointing out that the Voice remains a democratic imperative even if improving democracy isn’t the end goal, our youngest child bursts in: “Please, don’t fight!” Our children hear Mum and Dad vehemently agreeing about something from their different worldviews, their different ontological commitments. This is the meeting place. It is a place where even agreement is noisy. It is where common interests have sharp, broken edges. Where the peace is fragile. Where understanding is often incomplete. It is where the past and the present and the future converge in moments that seem like they should break us apart, but don’t.

Sana Nakata is a Torres Strait Islander and Principal Research Fellow at the Indigenous Education and Research Centre at James Cook University. Daniel Bray is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe University. They work and write together on childhood and democratic theory.