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Giving up on Reconciliation: Is Strategic Surprise Inevitable?

John Sanderson

This is an edited version of the 2007 Garran Oration delivered at the national conference of the Institute of Public Administration.

I want to suggest to you that the erosion of principle for convenience is a slippery path that has all the characteristics of a reverse J curve. Once you start the downward descent it picks up momentum in an exponential way until placing yourself in the hands of an unrepresentative executive starts to make a lot of sense.

Sir Robert Garran, our nation’s first Solicitor General and the founder of our federal public service, made the observation that: ‘Constitutional law is not pure logic, it is logic plus politics.’

There is a balance somewhere in the interpretation of this phrase that seems to reside squarely at the centre of our thinking as we question once again, in the age of globalisation, the Westphalian concept of state sovereignty (the principle that one sovereign state should not interfere in the domestic arrangements of another) – that has stood us in good stead for more than 400 years. And it has bearing also on liberal-democratic concepts of the working ingredients of the nation state – who is making public policy, how are the decisions being made and how is that policy being administered?

I have a particular interest in these questions in my present role as special adviser to the Western Australian government on Indigenous Affairs. And I find that the legislature has almost entirely abbrogated its responsibility for the complex social policy dimensions of the associated issues. It has left the field to what I would describe as a dangerous amalgam of the executive and the media.

From what I can see, the objects of these policies, Aboriginal Australians, have no representation whatever in the way these decisions are made and how the policy is being administered. In a sense, the victims are being blamed for the coercive actions against them. They have been selected for this approach on the basis of race and, with few exceptions, the legislature has acquiesed, or capitulated if you like, supposedly on the misguided assessment that the issues are not fundamental to the future of their parties or the nation.

After that rather dramatic opening note let me begin by explaining the title of this piece: “Giving up on Reconciliation - Is Strategic Surprise Inevitable?” The question I guess is a facetious one but it comes from the title of a thesis written by a CIA analyst who I worked with at one stage of my military career. Joe, I’ll call him, had developed a deep historical analysis of strategic disasters reaching way back into history to show that there had been plenty of warning of most of the causes of catastrophic failure in the affairs of nations, kingdoms and armies. It was simply that the related information had been heavily discounted by those loyal subjects committed to only telling or showing the glorious leader or leaders what they wanted to see or hear. An equally sinister revelation in Joe’s analysis was the fact that those who had achieved elevated positions by virtue of their contribution to the policies of the state often chose to intimidate and disempower those who offered contrary views.

There are of course, many examples of this syndrome going back through history, but, in all likelihood, we are seeing a very modern equivalent in the Middle East where the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ now strives to construct a face saving way to declare victory and leave the Iraqis to their fate. Once again, I suspect, the victims are going to take the blame for what should only be described as a strategic disaster based on fallacious and contrived information. “Mission” was never “accomplished” because it was never defined properly in the context of an accurate assessment of the facts.

I want to suggest to you that the erosion of principle for convenience is a slippery path that has all the characteristics of a reverse J curve. Once you start the downward descent it picks up momentum in an exponential way until placing yourself in the hands of an unrepresentative executive starts to make a lot of sense.

I would suggest that Robert Garran and his contemporaries understood the potential for this and would have seen the checks and balances entailed in the relationship between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, overseen by an unelected, non political constitutional monarch, as providing all the necessary safeguards. This form of government had evolved over the previous two and a half centuries to embrace the needs of the emerging middle class to share in the power of the state. Everyone must have known that where those aspirations had been stifled, you ended up with bloody revolution, instigated and led by that middle class. There were plenty of examples around by 1901 to suggest that these checks and balances were essential.

In the case of Australia, a federal constitution with a bicameral parliament, including a state’s house, would have been seen as reinforcing these checks and balances, with the commonwealth government being seen as an extra protection for Australian citizens from any tendencies towards venal practices by some interest groups at state level.

In fact, the British government had gone to some lengths to insist on this function for the central government. With all the states having robbed the Aboriginal people of their rights up to that point in time there was a studied determination to exclude them from the benefits of citizenship and place them in the status of protectees under the Flora and Fauna Act – just like kangaroos and emus. There probably would not have been a Federation if it had not been for acceptance of this exclusion – hence the fact that we have no individual rights to speak of delineated in our Australian Constitution.

We seemed quite happy as a people with this racist anomaly up to the period following the Second World War. What emerged from that conflict however was a new form of egalitarianism that required the nation to place itself on the high moral ground of the international human rights movement. Australia had played a major part in the inclusion of an individual rights clause in the charter of the United Nations – against considerable resistance I might add, at home and abroad. Despite our leadership in this regard, it took us until 1967 to give partial expression to this new enlightenment, and almost a further five years to attempt to empower Aboriginal people to forms of self determination and representation. Belated attempts to recognise their entitlement to land rights have been resisted all the way by the same sort of interest groups that prevailed in the states at the time of federation.

Native Title is a weak form of title anyway for a people whose entire existence is locked up in a deep cultural, economic and spiritual connection to the land and landscape. Even this has been eroded by the amendments to the Wik judgement that had consolidated the Mabo decision of the High Court. As a nation, Australia was always a long way behind the other former British colonial states in this regard and is now even further behind the rest of the world. Recent policies that are designed to mainstream Indigenous people into individual engagement with the market and away from any form of communal governance that might empower them to determine their own destiny have made this gap even wider.

It is this form of cultural disempowerment and neglect that lies at the heart of Aboriginal despair and dysfunction. Like most victims, they are blamed for their own dysfunction and also for the necessity for the coercive laws that follow. In this regard it is not significantly different to the Khmer Rouge Year Zero philosophy in Cambodia – to break society down into its individual components and recreate it in the image of the leaders. This philosophy was always doomed to fail because it did not take account of Cambodian culture nor the central place of the family in the way the people established their identity. Its ultimate catastrophic failure was the main cause of all those one million plus deaths that we now think of as a genocide.

Some of you might think this comparison is extreme, but the nature of the outcome is not vastly different. If you have forty-two percent of your prison population coming from less than three percent of your people, as is the case with Aboriginal representation in the corrective system in Western Australia, then you can safely say that you have social alienation that is close to civil war. This figure incidentally, is closer to ninety percent above the Tropic of Capricorn.

Now in keeping with my title, let me suggest to you how this trend in our relationship with Indigenous people could cause us to be surprised strategically in the years ahead.

Globalisation has several dimensions to it, but the most powerful at the present time is the globalisation of the market. In fact, the successful conclusion of the Cold War is seen in most quarters as a triumph of free market forces. Since 1989 and the coming down of the Berlin Wall, the global market has grown at a phenomenal rate, embracing Russia, India, China, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, Africa, South East Asia and adding them to the post Second World War powerhouses of America, Europe, Japan and the Middle East. If you add the economic rise of women to this you can see that the number engaged in the global economy has grown four or five hundred percent in that time. We are now all bound together in a frenzy of economic growth.

Freeing up the flow of capital has weakened resistance to the free movement of labour and free trade, and begun a radical change from the status quo in all nations – rich and poor. At the same time, it has threatened the cultural balance in many nations and radicalised the urban and rural poor who are willing to see it as the work of the devil. Such people provide the foot soldiers for those who want to confront western ascendency in these processes of change. Terrorism is the tactic of choice in this war which is fought on many fronts.

Australia has a particular dilemma in this equation. It is without doubt, one of the principal beneficiaries of the growth in the global economy. The demand for its vast reserves of minerals continues, seemingly unabated, and the strengths of its education systems and financial services have given it a strong part in global service delivery. This makes up in part for the slow demise of its manufacturing sector. The economy looks strong but is becoming severely distorted by this dependence on resource extraction and export. My figures are not exact, but it seems that nearly seventy percent of our export income will come from this source by the end of the decade.

The other growth sector has been the building of houses in the south-east and south-west corners of the continent. The continent is in fact, emptying out as agricultural economic units become larger of necessity and mineral resources are harvested on an expeditionary basis by a ‘fly in - fly out’ mercenary workforce that has to pay for its large mortgages back where it came from. Nothing stays in the regions except the scars and the Indigenous people.

Here’s the strategic surprise. Despite their problems with substance abuse and poor health, the Aboriginal population is growing at a far greater rate than the non Indigenous population. Some forty percent are under the age of fourteen. The demographic bulge is just entering the high fertility bracket. Already, many inland regional centres have a majority Aboriginal population. Broken Hill is one of these, and there will be many more before too long, particularly if the attempt to close small communities is successful and people are forced towards these regional centres.

Now I have no particular concern about this from the perspective of race, but I think it will have a serious impact on our nation if we create in all our northern and inland regional centres a majority dysfunctional population. Already, non-Indigenous people are reluctant to make a future for their families in these regions. It seems to me that there is some urgency in developing a partnership with the Aboriginal people that sees them reconnecting with the land and nurturing the natural environment in a way that empowers them and the nation.

Another dimension of this strategic surprise is the fact that the north of the continent is becoming emptier than it has ever been. Our market forces approach to development is increasing the momentum in this process. We are approaching a true “terra vacua” in a way that was never the case before the Europeans arrived. In fact, when the Europeans arrived in the late Eighteenth Century the entire continent was occupied by hundreds of different cultures with hundreds of different languages. I am suggesting to you that this trend is creating a strategic vulnerability that is not immediately obvious to a population of aspirational consumers whose sense of owning the future for their children is dulled by a commitment to owning things.

A third dimension of this strategic surprise is that the unique ecology of this continent has, in large part, been destroyed by imported vermin that breeds unhindered in the interior. Cats, dogs, foxes, rabbits, camels, donkeys, pigs, starlings, weeds, cane toads, you name it and it is all out there replacing the unique ecology of Australia. Any expression of nurturing coming from the remote southern centres of population is weak and transitory. It takes some doing to destroy the entire ecology of a continent in two and a half centuries, but somehow we are well on the way to achieving this staggering feat. That the environment and climate change have entered the national consciousness with some force in recent times, is primarily because of the shortages of water in our large cities.

Aboriginal people have been through all this before. The cultures have evolved on this continent over at least 60,000 years – at least two ice ages and more climate change than most of us can imagine. Apart from being recorded in the genetic memory of Aboriginal lore and culture there are places in Australia where it is recorded in acheological sites.

We are the only people in history who have united an entire continent under one system of government – and without the pain and deep wounds of civil conflict that normally go with this sort of achievement. But there is a canker in our midst. We are yet to come to terms with the fact that we are of this part of the world, rather than an outpost of the northern hemisphere – a forward base for asset stripping on an expeditionary basis in the interior of the continent.

Is this what economic globalisation is all about? What is the role of the public service in this? Is it simply to facilitate the decisions of the executive as directed, loyally identifying with the political agenda of the party in power? Are the political staffers and their media relationships eroding the capacity of the public service to do otherwise, promoting the interests of those public servants who most closely align with the ideology of their political masters? If this is what is happening, what about the people and their legislatures? Do we have enough checks and balances in our system of government to protect them from the powerful trends in the global economy?

Of course, we all have to make a living in a world of aspirational consumers. We are hooked, whether we like it or not, into a syndrome of constant economic growth – a headlong rush into the future with little concern for its sustainability. But, the truth is, it seems to me, that if you are going to truly inherit a continental mass of the type that Australia is then you have to behave as though you deserve it – nurturing its ecology and its people, reaching out to others around it in a responsible and sustained strategic manner, resisting expediency and building trust, encouraging the growth of a culture that is truly connected to the land and sea, and educating your children to be better custodians than you yourselves have been. Otherwise, strategic surprise is inevitable.