Australian laws have shaped Aboriginal people, sometimes with "protection and strength" and other times with "marginalisation, silence and harm," Larissa Behrendt says.

Delivering the ABC's Boyer Lecture, the lawyer, academic and filmmaker reflected on the dual nature of Australia's legal system - praising the independence of the judiciary and the resilience of the electoral system, while noting the law itself has never been neutral. Instead, she said, it has long been a "tool of the colonial project".

"My study of law had given me a deeper understanding of the role it had played in colonisation," she said.

"It had justified the dispossession of Aboriginal people; it had continued to impose a structure that protected colonial land systems while ignoring Indigenous connections to country; it stood mute as Aboriginal people were massacred; it failed to protect the rights of parents and children to their families and their cultural heritage; it reinforced and made legal systems of segregation, discrimination and exploitation."

The Eualayai/Gamillaroi woman and Laureate Fellow at the University of Technology's Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research said the Australian Constitution still carries a "structural wound," having been built to allow racial discrimination.

She noted many of its framers wanted to "ensure that the Australian states would have the power to continue to enact laws that discriminated against people on the basis of their race".

"My assertion is that, based on the ideological underpinnings of the framers and the choices they made to allow racially discriminatory legislation, we have a constitution - a founding document - that today still permits racial discrimination - only prevented by the Racial Discrimination Act to the extent that it provides a shield," she said.

"And what we have seen are governments willing to suspend those baseline protections."

The Racial Discrimination Act, which marks its 50th anniversary in 2025, has been central in protecting equality before the law. It was upheld in Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982), where the High Court ruled that state policies could not discriminate on the basis of race, and again in Mabo v Queensland (No. 1) (1988), which invalidated a Queensland law designed to extinguish the Meriam people's Native Title claims and led to the famous Mabo case in 1992.

It is an act that's not symbolic, Professor Behrendt noted, but one with "real legal force, capable of overriding discriminatory laws". Nonetheless, she warned, "what the parliament gives, the parliament can take away".

She argued Parliament has shown it can override these rights, pointing to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge dispute and the Northern Territory Intervention - the latter "widely considered to be an abject policy failure," which has likely increased incarceration and suicide rates while worsening educational outcomes.

"As a rule of thumb," she added, "if the government is seeking to repeal the Racial Discrimination Act, it's probably doing something that is racially discriminatory".

Reflecting on the failed 2023 Voice referendum, Professor Behrendt urged Australians not to interpret the result as a rejection of First Nations people but to see reconciliation as a shared national project. Rights, she said, are not a zero-sum game - protecting one group strengthens the whole.

"I stress that recognition in the constitution is not the same as undoing its structural racial discrimination, but it should be seen as part of a political project that understands that there is still a racial bias within the constitution that needs to be addressed," she said.

Professor Behrendt rejected the idea that acknowledging Indigenous rights takes something away from others, instead arguing "Recognising the truth of our past does not diminish non-Indigenous Australians; it deepens our shared history".

"This is a colonised country. And no country that has experienced colonisation escapes its darker legacies. Colonisation is designed to erase the colonised and privilege the coloniser. An honest, inclusive national story is the antidote and provides a richer, inclusive national identity," she added.

Professor Behrendt used her lecture to call for a national Bill of Rights to protect freedoms, equality, and due process; a truth-telling process to foster honesty and unity; and greater investment in storytelling, arts, and education to strengthen democracy.

She concluded by urging Australia to draw on Indigenous philosophies of interdependence - valuing reciprocity, community, and care for Country - as principles for a more just and sustainable democracy.

"Including First Nations world views would not just enrich our democracy, it would transform it - broadening it beyond the confines of Western liberal traditions and grounding it in values of respect, reciprocity and shared survival," she said.

"This is the conversation that could carry our democracy into a more inclusive and enduring future."