After 30 years, Nick Greiner laments slow progress on indigenous affairs

Former NSW premier Nick Greiner said indigenous affairs was one of the few areas where government hade made little progress.

Former NSW premier Nick Greiner. Picture: Kym Smith

Former NSW premier Nick Greiner said the issue of indigenous affairs was one of the few areas of policy in which the government has made less progress than any other over the past 30 years.

Mr Greiner made the comments during a wide-ranging discussion to mark the release on Tuesday of his government’s cabinet papers from 1989. Among the many policy positions and deliberations discussed in the sealed realm of the cabinet room were the deregulation of the egg market, legislation to protect the ozone layer and life sentences for convicted murderers.

But when it came to the country’s First People, Mr Greiner, who as premier directed that the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio be brought within the auspices of his department, said little had changed in a material sense since the 1980s.

“We’ve made less progress there than in most other aspects of policy,” he said.

Moments earlier, the NSW ­Aboriginal Affairs Minister Don Harwin, who was seated next to Mr Greiner, said NSW had been a “first mover” on indigenous land rights. But he qualified this by ­adding that legislation governing these land rights often clashed with separate laws of native title.

“Native title impedes many of the claims put in under the Land Rights Act,” he said, pointing out that the Land Rights Act would soon undergo its routine five-yearly review. “We’ve never really been able to mesh them well.”

Mr Greiner, who led the state between 1988 and 1992, described that era as a time when governments found it easier to set policy because there was no internet or social media, and people felt less scepticism towards expert opinions. “It was easier to get things done,” he said. “It is much harder to get things done now. There was much more willingness to accept expert advice.”

Ironically, the quandaries facing his government in 1989 remain similar in some ways to those currently facing state and federal governments. Mr Greiner’s cabinet wrestled with climate change and the emission of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere, as well as freedom of speech issues around the introduction of a ­Racial Vilification Bill.

Then, as now, debate raged over how to deal with the issue of religious exemptions; an original draft of the bill contained one but this was later removed on the basis that it would be caught by a separate aspect of the legislation.

“It will still be possible for statements made in a bona fide religious context to fit within the category of ‘other purposes’,” a cabinet minute noted. “But less protection will be afforded to extreme religious leaders who make racist comments.”

Mr Greiner said one of the reasons he was so passionate about laws was because he’d been teased as a “fat Hungarian when I went to school”, though he stressed there were other more pressing reasons why the bill was necessary.