Not fucking side-stepping at all mate, doubt much of the world know about the internal going-ons of Australia, so always happy to share a yarn.

I'll break it down, but I'm by no means an expert and will probably get it a bit wrong.

I'm confident about this. Sky News is Murdoch's Australian version of Fox, he's started pumping out freely to rural Australia, where they usually have to pay for view and satellites and shit. It's picking up background steam and infiltrating the right wing of Australia, trying to do what it did in the US (hopefully he dies before this gets too far on). It's also shown for free in lots of gambling/sports betting places and pubs etc, where tradies/working class people are more likely to congregate.

He's making a spin-off channel dedicated solely to talking about a single issue, the creation of a layer between the two houses of government that is made up entirely of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples, they wouldn't have any legislative power, but a special advisory layer? to give a more enshrined voice to the the original inhabitants of Australia. This is called 'The Voice'.

The Voice, is part of a petition called the "Uluru Statement from the Heart". To quote the wiki "These reforms can be summarised as Voice, Treaty and Truth." Treaty should be pretty self-explanatory (and something that will finally get the Kiwi's to stop feeling so bloody special) and is proposed to be done through a commission (a public inquiry) called the "Makarrata Commission", and the Truth - which is I guess creating a historical record of what exactly happened, to who, to where, to what, to why, when and acknowledging all the bad shit done.

The truth and treaty aren't getting much flack, but the right is trying to create this impression that the voice would allow Aboriginal people to unfairly control the democratic process (despite having no authority) and is trying to drum up dog-whistling racist shit.

tl;dr: Just the slow, monotonous drum of the Americani~~z~~sation of Australia and an attempt at going the opposite path.

Some futher links: https://ulurustatement.org/ https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1617/Quick_Guides/UluruStatement

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that it will be a non voting position for an indigenous person in parliament to directly address parliament. Indigenous people have been very marginalised and suffer from multi generational discrimination. This will just be a way to hear and recognise their opinions directly rather than it having to go through the filter of politicians.

The counter to it is that it undermines democracy where the majority speaks. Personally I don't buy that; the hallmark of a civilised society is helping those in need - and we've pushed our indigenous people into a deep hole.