Why it’s time for new Indigenous leaders to step up

Janet Albrechtsen says it's time for a new generation of Indigenous leaders to step forward.

Linda Burney is gone. Noel Pearson has fallen silent, as he promised he would following the failure of the voice. Megan Davis appears to have little clue about the real reasons the voice failed. Garma risks remaining a festival of past ideas. The Greens? They are a sad bunch, stuck on victim tropes.

The need for passing the torch to new Indigenous leaders has never been clearer.

Burney, the former Indigenous Affairs minister, retired last week after a lifetime of working to ­improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. Disagree with her policies, by all means, but she ­deserves respect for stepping up. Public life is tough. Ditto the voice debate. That said, changing direction, the work of a new generation, will be tougher.

Though it seems Pearson won’t be part of a new direction – he has maintained his public silence since the referendum – no one should underestimate the groundwork he has laid.

Like no other, he exposed the miserable cycle of welfare, of ­victimhood. Before any other ­Indigenous leader, he demanded Indigenous kids be taught to read with explicit instruction. Pearson cut through the soft expectations and education claptrap.

“Aboriginal children are no different from other human children,” he said. “They have the same capacity and they have the same learning mechanism … there’s nothing sui generis about Indigenous children. They’re human. If they’re taught with effective pedagogy, they will learn.”

Ten years ago, at The Australian’s 50th anniversary dinner, Pearson gave a tremendous speech about the need to speak the truth. He lauded this newspaper for bringing Indigenous affairs into the mainstream of national reporting and policy debate, of being open “to all shades of debate and Indigenous leaders and commentators: no other mainstream platform comes close”.

In the decade since, this newspaper has continued on that path, reporting Indigenous stories like no other media, presenting a wider range of voices about the solutions, with no rival.

Last year, Pearson said that if the voice failed “it will be up to a new generation to chart a new course because we will have been rejected”. Like Davis, Pearson must understand the country did not reject them personally. A majority of Australians rejected a proposal to permanently entrench in our Constitution different civic rights for different classes of people. It was so fundamentally un-Australian, so illiberal and so unequal, it was always going to be rejected.

A voice for the poor, or for the disabled, or for women may all have attracted initial emotional sympathy but ultimately all fail the real hurdle. One of most fundamental civic values is that Australians have the same rights, privileges and obligations under our Constitution. Making race the point of difference added a repugnant layer to the voice proposal.

Megan Davis

Noel Pearson

I read Davis’s recent piece about the failure of the voice with sadness. Sadness for Davis – and for the country. It’s hard not to empathise with the personal pain that a woman who spent more than a decade in passionate pursuit of the voice proposal must feel at the massive rejection by ordinary Australians of that proposal.

Still, after a period of reflection, it’s a terrible shame that Davis continues to portray those she disagrees with as people of bad faith, or ignorant victims of alleged ­misinformation. We must learn to disagree well.

That Davis cannot see that entirely honourable motives – but different views – drove most Australians to vote No is the ultimate sadness both for her and for us ­because it could condemn us to continual re-runs of these divisive debates.

It wasn’t the racism, the lack of bipartisanship, the inherent conservatism of Australians, the terrible Yes campaign, the backlash against corporate Australia and celebrities, or any of the multitude of reasons or rationalisations that have been given.

The voice failed for one single, simple reason. It was a terrible idea.

Can Labor’s new Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, come up with better ideas? Only if Labor replaces its attachment to an Indigenous rights agenda with one that seriously advocates for Indigenous responsibility. That will require the kind of truth-telling the Albanese government has shown no appetite for.

Forget the Greens. They are part of the problem, wedded to promoting Indigenous victimhood. Greens First Nations spokesman Dorinda Cox said last week that a truth-telling commission was needed to close the gap. And, if we take this path, she said we could probably keep Australia Day, Cox said. Gee thanks.

Senator Dorinda Cox

Cox doesn’t explain how telling the “difficult truth that there were frontier wars in Australia” will help a young girl being sexually abused in an Indigenous family, or a kid who roams the streets high on drugs, or a parent who has had no education, no job to support themselves, let alone a family.

Last week, when Jacinta Nampijinpa Price took to the stage to celebrate this newspaper’s 60th anniversary dinner, it marked the public passing of the torch from Pearson to Price.

The opposition spokeswoman for Indigenous Affairs who led the charge in the No campaign is demanding a new and dynamic attitude to helping Indigenous Australians help themselves.

Like Pearson, she firmly believes that if we create the same kind of economic opportunities for Indigenous Australians that non-Indigenous Australians have, we are much more likely to close the gap than if we continue the current welfarist approaches.

Unlike Pearson, Price realised the voice was the wrong way to do this.

Price upsets many with her truth-telling about Indigenous dysfunction and family violence. How could she not, given the country is weighed down by a 50-year-old Indigenous industry premised on blaming family violence on colonisation.

Price could have chosen her words differently at the National Press Club last year when she said she didn’t believe Indigenous people suffered from negative impacts of colonisation. “I’ll be honest with you, I do not think so. A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food,” she said.

But Price’s critics, those wedded to blaming colonisation for Indigenous dysfunction and family violence, missed her point.

Price was critical of Indigenous organisations that “demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement”.

“If we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency and giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being, to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that is what I refuse to do.”

The country needs more champions of agency. More people like Professor Peter Yu whose aim is greater economic empowerment. Vice-president (First Nations) at the Australian National University, Yu is part of the Murru waaruu report that “at its simplest … calls for a new fiscal relationship with First Peoples, one based on Indigenous wealth creation not welfare”.

This warrants careful scrutiny to ensure we’re not substituting one form of welfare dependency for another, or facilitating a new form of separatism. If it genuinely focuses on empowerment not ­victimhood, self-help not government intervention, Yu will be part of the new generation charting a new course.

The old, failed path started in our universities, among apparently smart people who became intellectually in-bred, theoretical, and divorced from reality.

Witness the devotion of Australian law schools to loopy theories about sovereignty which reject the notion of a single indivisible Australian sovereign in favour of “co-sovereignty” between Australia and Indigenous peoples. Witness their role in the voice.

The new direction for Indigenous people will need people who think differently about Indigenous dysfunction, people brave enough to step up, people who speak up, not down, to Indigenous Australians, people who value agency and responsibility, not special rights and victimhood.