Marcia Langton, one of the key architects of the voice to parliament proposal, found herself at the centre of a fracas midweek when comments she’d made last Sunday during a public forum at Edith Cowan University appeared on the Australian newspaper’s website shortly before question time on Tuesday.

The Coalition had resolved to use the final parliamentary sitting week before the referendum to go full demolition on the voice, and the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, opened the batting in question time.

This whole stink bomb turned on whether or not Langton harboured views about the prevalence of racism in her own country, and whether her observations about this phenomenon amounted to a provable thought crime.

Examples of institutionalised racism include but are not limited to: the lie that there was no one here when the British arrived; the documented atrocities of frontier massacres; the policies of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families – practices that have contributed to a prevalence of intergenerational trauma, a studied phenomenon in survivors of the stolen generations.

As the Olympian and former Labor senator Nova Peris argued this week, a constitutionally recognised advisory body will allow the lived experiences of First Nations people to be seen.

Langton was perfectly within her rights to posit that some Australians who are resolved to vote no on 14 October will do so because they harbour racist views, or are being influenced by a toxic sludge of negative messaging.

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