Fearmongering about the impacts of the proposed Indigenous Voice has made the debate difficult, independent senator David Pocock says.

As parliament continues to debate the Indigenous Voice, Senator Pocock said the referendum would be a chance to address multiple long-standing issues affecting Indigenous people.

Senator Pocock hit out at Voice opponents who claimed there was not enough detail surrounding the proposal, arguing false claims were impacting broad sections of the community.

"We have to acknowledge how tough this debate is for many people and would really like to call out some of the misinformation that we have seen thrown around - the fearmongering," he told parliament.

"We have an opportunity to start to address the many issues that we talked about here and the many more issues that we wouldn't even know about."

After talks continued well into the night on Wednesday, senators are set for another late-night debate on the referendum on Thursday.

A final vote in the Senate to establish the referendum is expected to be held early next week.

The referendum is due to be held between October and December.

Senator Pocock said previous approaches to issues affecting Indigenous people had not worked, and the Voice would be a new way to address them.

"I agree that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but we need to face up to the fact that it is broken," he said.

"Decades of governments on both sides have grappled as best as they knew how to try and deal with entrenched disadvantage in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and we still see the gap reported every year."

Earlier, Liberal senator Andrew Bragg said the debate surrounding the Voice should not be treated as a political issue.

He rejected claims by other senators the Voice would add the element of race to the constitution.

"We have race-based laws at the national level," he said.

"We have a country that has had race at its heart for 250 years.

"To argue that (the Voice) is the introduction of race today is fundamentally untrue."

But Liberal frontbencher Anne Ruston claimed the Voice could make the government "inert".

"The prime minister's Voice will wrap government administration and decision-making in a whole new level of complexity and we know that more bureaucracy slows things down," she said.

"We know that more bureaucracy slows things down, and this change has the potential to render the government inert."

Andrew Brown - AAP