To The Age Ken Wyatt states that Australians "need to ensure Indigenous voices are heard" ("New design to give voice to unheard Australians", 30/10). Such voices have been being heard for many decades, with huge support from both the media and governments. Policies being espoused by the current federal government amount to an unjustified over-privileging of that small minority of Australians that happen to have some Aboriginal ancestry. The term "Closing the Gap" is misleading. Scientific evidence suggests that that such closure cannot and will not happen; thus the term can be used, politically, as a never-ending cry for more and more wealth and power for some Australians at the expense of the great majority of others. Why should our taxes fund another unjustly constituted body? Why should those calling themselves "indigenous" not set up their own representative bodies at their own expense? That, surely, would be a fairer way to go. Or they could interact with Parliament on the same footing as the rest of us.
Nigel Jackson, Belgrave