Redfern address 'made no practical difference'

PAUL Keating speechwriter Don Watson says the former prime minister's Redfern Park address has "fixed nothing'' for Aborigines.

PAUL Keating speechwriter Don Watson says the former prime minister's Redfern Park address on reconciliation has "fixed nothing of a practical kind" for Aborigines.

Speaking ahead of the 20th anniversary of the speech on Monday, Watson said governments had lacked the courage to effectively tackle Aboriginal disadvantage and bureaucracies had been "incompetent and corrupt".

The speech, which launched the Year of the World's Indigenous People, was described at the time by Aboriginal leaders as a seminal moment in reconciliation and has reverberated for two decades because of the power and poetry of its words.

At Redfern Park on December 10, 1992, Keating urged whites to acknowledge past injustices as it was necessary to forge "a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians".

"It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life . . . With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask -- how would I feel if this were done to me?"

The speech fired debate about notions of "guilt" for the actions of past generations. However, Keating said "guilt is not a very constructive emotion" and urged a focus on "practical things" such as improving living standards.

Delivered months after the High Court's Mabo judgment, which recognised native title in common law, Keating pledged to deliver a legislative response to Mabo, which he did a year later.

The speech is also controversial because of a feud between Watson, who drafted it, and Keating, who delivered it without changing a word.

"It appals me to read in the media that authorship of the speech is 'a matter of dispute' between Paul and me," he told The Weekend Australian.

"Of course I wrote the thing. When asked, am I meant to say I was his flower arranger?

"In truth, I sometimes think Aboriginal Australia should lay claim to it: it made their case, or tries to. God knows what they must think of the 'dispute'."

Keating has rebuked Watson for claiming authorship.

"Watson was not the author of the speech," Keating said in 2010. "The sentiments of the speech, that is, the core of its authority and authorship, were mine."

"Anyway, it's just a speech." Watson told The Weekend Australian.

"Redfern fixed nothing of a practical kind then and it hasn't fixed anything since, and if governments are as mealy-mouthed and bureaucracies as incompetent and corrupt in the next 20 years as they've been in the last 20, maybe no one will want to own it."