Australia will soon be holding a referendum to decide whether our Indigenous peoples should have a Voice to Parliament. Whether the most ancient race on the planet should have a say in their own destiny, forming an advisory body to put its views on their health, housing, education and employment to the decision makers in Canberra, Australia’s political capital.

A simple and straightforward question, one might say. An agreement from the voting population of Australia to recognise our First Peoples who have occupied this land for over 65,000 years. To offer this group of Indigenous people not sovereignty, not honour, not power, but simply Recognition and basic rights. A no-brainer, you might say. Why on earth would anyone vote against it?

It turns out that those who campaign for a “No” vote have put forward many reasons why our Aboriginal peoples should not be given a Voice. Some make sense, but on examination the vast majority of points made by the No campaigners are based on inaccuracies. Those reason include fear of having to make retribution for the terrible wrongs made by colonialism to our First Peoples, fear of a permanent change to the Australian Constitution, even fear of “losing our backyards” to their imagined demands for stolen land to be restored. Yet there can be no such compensation without a court order, which is beyond the powers of The Voice.

But the major fear put forward by the No campaign is that an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would “divide the nation.” As if we are not already divided, with Indigenous peoples who were the original inhabitants of this land living impoverished lives, stripped of dignity, opportunity and respect.

It is the split between the “Yes” voters and the “No” voters that is the newest division in Australia, with each side taking shots at each other; the No’s call Yes voters elitist snobs, bleeding hearts, dangerous radicals, while the Yes’s have been accused of calling their opponents stupid, uneducated, mean-spirited.

Through all this battle for supremacy, aren’t we forgetting the real struggle? That to make the first step towards equality, to start to close the huge gap between white settlers and Aboriginal founders, we need to at least consider the views of our First Nations People themselves?

Anita Heiss, an Australian Indigenous author, writes: “If you support the Uluru Statement from the Heart in principle, if you believe in principle that we deserve recognition, that we deserve a say in the affairs that impact us, then there is your answer.”

If the referendum did not pass, Heiss said, it would be a “monumental setback psychologically in terms of where First Nations people exist in the psyche of the nation, our place, our equality, our rights to be recognised and heard. And I think we’ll have Buckley’s chance of getting a treaty up in the near future. What government will touch a treaty if the Australian people have refused to even recognise in the Constitution, our long and deep connection to country.”