ABSTRACT
In the following speech, which opens the 2048 Women’s Constitutional Convention, we set out the wider mandate for enshrining gender equality and make the specific case for Constitutional reform in three distinct yet interconnected ways: crafting an inclusive preamble which enshrines equality and sets the blueprint for the kind of nation we want to be; proposing the inclusion of an ‘equal protection clause’; and making amendments to the mechanisms by which political and legal authority is assigned. Taking place in the wake of a better imagined future (where the Uluru Statement from the Heart has already been enacted in full), this Convention is about remedying the exclusionary and masculinist ethos of our nation’s founding document. Our proposed amendments seek to remedy that exclusion.
