Aborigines deserve voice in nation’s future

It would be good if more media commentators read about the history of the recognition movement.

Megan Davis, Pat Anderson and Noel Pearson. Picture: James Croucher

Don’t divide this nation by race. In the era of identity politics — or what Noel Pearson in the 1990s referred to as “ethnic essentialism” — it sounds like a reasonable rallying cry.

To Aboriginal Australians left out of constitutional discussions by the founding fathers, it sounds like: “Get back in your box.” In their eyes the nation is already divided by race. Markers of health, wealth and longevity show black Australians a long way behind the mainstream.

I first heard a Labor left faction minister for family services complain back in the 1990s that Aboriginal kids were being left in dangerous family situations his department would never leave white kids in. That minister was Queensland’s Paul Braddy, and he was bemoaning the unintended consequences of the Stolen Generations report on family welfare policies. Yet Aboriginal kids are still taken from dangerous family environments at 10 times the rate of other children.

As usual in Australian media the reaction to the Uluru Statement has been polarised.

Critics demand activists drop their push for an Aboriginal advisory body — and eventually a treaty — on the grounds these would privilege one group on the basis of race, and they clearly would. Supporters foolishly criticise conservative opponents as racists.

It would be good if more media commentators read about the history of the recognition movement, which really got a march on when Tony Abbott as prime minister foreshadowed a referendum to mark last week’s 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum allowing Aborigines to be counted in the census.

Abbott, a constitutional conservative, was thinking about changes to recognise the prior ­occupation of Australia by Aborigines, who were never consulted by the founding fathers in the establishment of the federation and constitution.

“I am prepared to sweat blood on this,” Abbott said in 2014.

Many conservative media figures, prominent among them ­Abbott’s friend Andrew Bolt, feared such a change — now rejected by the Uluru Statement as too symbolic — would have unintended consequences. Fair enough. While the wording of the two questions in the 1967 referendum seemed so innocuous that a “No” case was not run or fin­anced, in fact that referendum has been widely interpreted by the Hight Court since.

While last week’s Q&A panel spoke of 1967 as simply “being counted”, that referendum gave the commonwealth power to make laws affecting Aborigines, previously subject only to state laws. The newly implied constitutional race power was then used in legislation to protect the Gordon River catchment, in the Tasmanian dam case and finally in the High Court’s Mabo determination finding native title, 25 years ago last week.

All this is not well understood. Conservatives continually claim no laws or rights should be race-based. They already are. Native title is a form of legal property right available only to Aboriginal people.

Despite the race element at its heart, the Mabo decision was entirely fair. The High Court found areas proven to have been in continuous use by native claimants since before white settlement, and where title had not been alienated by grant of alternative title, land should be the preserve of the original inhabitants and their descendants. It was entirely within the “fair go” ethos of the national character.

Yet Mabo was met by a wild scare campaign. In the years since, native title has proved neither the windfall for Aboriginal claimants that farmers and opponents had claimed nor the disaster for the agricultural and pastoral industries that farmers had feared.

The case of the Anangu people, the original tribal owners of Uluru and Kata Tjuta where the Statement from the Heart was signed, is a 50-year microcosm of the history of black dispossession.

When the Rock began to take off as a tourism destination in the 1950s, many of the Anangu were removed to nearby Curtin Springs, near Australia’s second-largest rock, Mount Conner. They fought for return and for control of the ­national park excised from their tribal lands to be handed over by the NT administrator and finally won their battle in 1983, when the Hawke government returned the park to the tribal owners.

It is a late 20th-century example of what has happened to traditional peoples ever since settlement. Yet for at least 10,000 years these people had lived in the shadow of the Rock. The Dreamtime legends of the Anangu are the stories of their creation and hunting patterns in the lands surrounding Uluru and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and the role of both formations in creating water reserves in this harsh but beautiful environment. Yet across the ­nation such relationships between traditional people and their homelands remain unacknowledged outside native title tribunal claims.

Noel Pearson on Monday on Q&A suggested the Statement from the Heart that would allow Aboriginals to be “heard” as well as “counted” could be the start of a long, patient campaign. Criticisms by Mark Latham and Alan Jones on Sydney radio 2GB on Wednesday morning of Pearson and the statement will ring true with many Australians more interested in the practical welfare of Aborigines than constitutional reform. As Paul Kelly and Father Frank Brennan implied in this paper that morning, the push for an advisory body for makarrata (treaty) will be a difficult battle.

Perhaps, as federal MP Linda Burney says, a more symbolic and more immediate statement of recognition of prior occupation via a referendum is still desirable as a marker on the way to where the Uluru delegates want our country to head. It would be wrong to think Aboriginal leaders such as Pearson are unconcerned with the practical improvement of ­Aboriginal lives.

Pearson first wrote about his advisory body proposal in a Quarterly essay in 2014, in an effort to move away from potentially inflammatory changes to the race power in any referendum. But much earlier he wrote about the need for welfare reform in the 1990s in his book, Our Right to Take Responsibility. He is a fierce advocate for direct instruction education, alcohol management plans and personal responsibility in family life.

Andrew Bolt invited on to his program Pearson’s Cape York Institute lawyer Shireen Morris on Thursday night for a riveting discussion of the issue. Morris is a believer in Pearson’s responsibility agenda.

Pearson backed John Howard’s NT Intervention on day one in 2007 but learned from its failure the need for grassroots community consultation if such programs were to succeed. Hence he suggested local elections in traditional tribal areas for the proposed advisory body. Pearson and Morris are well aware of the need to avoid the mistakes of the “strong man” politics of the failed ATSIC experiment.

Yet if the 1967 referendum had more profound constitutional implications than were foreseen, what sort of consequences would an elected body recognised by the Constitution have? Imagine, for example, the House and the Senate rejecting a “suggestion” from the advisory body. How would a future High Court reconcile the competing powers of the parliament and the advisory body?

And in a country in which Warren Mundine has argued that all levels of government spend $55 billion a year on Aboriginal advancement yet Aboriginal welfare only seems get worse each year, is there any real reason to believe, as the Statement from the Heart claims, that only an advisory body to the parliament can address such problems?

Conversely, do conservatives really think black aspirations will be sidelined in the wider interests of a privileged nation that has presided over a long litany of failure in Aboriginal affairs?

A treaty, which could take decades to bring to fruition, would be unlikely to have the material benefits the statement suggests. There is no evidence in New Zealand that the 177-year-old Treaty of Waitangi has lifted Maoris out of poverty and violence.

But is that really a reason not to strive for what our original inhabitants believe is their right when even Tony Abbott thought a recognition of the historical truth of European settlement was needed? Does anyone really believe if a constitution were being drafted today no representatives of the original inhabitants would be sitting with our founding fathers?

Chris Mitchell is an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.