Australians All

What Chance for Reconciliation, After the Decade of Disappointment

Jon Altman

Four months after the declaration of the ‘national emergency’ intervention there is little evidence that despite military assistance and allocation of significant additional funding much has changed at prescribed communities.

It is difficult to know how to interpret John Howard’s campaign eve confession on 11 October 2007 that he may have gotten it all wrong on reconciliation—that the symbolic as well as the practical will be essential if some meaningful accommodation between Indigenous and non-indigenous people is ever to eventuate in Australia.

I have argued previously that a very positive feature of Indigenous affairs in the modern policy era since the 1967 referendum has been political bipartisanship that probably reached its zenith when Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation legislation was passed unanimously and without any rancor by the Australian Parliament in 1991. That bipartisanship was slowly strangled by successive Howard governments from 1996 with a long string of antis: anti native title, anti land rights, anti ATSIC, anti Indigenous specific programs, anti saying sorry for the stolen generations, anti the many institutions of Indigenous Australia.

In his election victory speech in October 1998, John Howard articulated an early mea culpa, making a personal commitment to vigorously pursue the goal of reconciliation. This followed his oppositional and angry performance at the Reconciliation Conference in May 1997; and the passage of contentious legislation diluting the Native Title Act in 1998. Subsequently it became clear that this pursuit was to be a particular brand of reconciliation – ‘practical reconciliation’– with which the Prime Minister was comfortable. Such a goal, which sought to reduce Indigenous material disadvantage in the areas of health, housing, education and employment, was and remains incontestably needed. This was hardly a new approach though as it has been the central plank of Indigenous policy of all Australian governments since the early 1970s, and especially of the Hawke government in the late 1980s.

What differentiated Howard’s ‘practical reconciliation’ from his predecessors was an antipathy to the Indigenous rights approach and a vehemently held belief that the balance between practical and symbolic reconciliation had both swung too strongly in favour of the latter during the Labor years and was jeopardizing practical outcomes. It was John Howard who invented the binary opposition between the ‘practical’ and the ‘symbolic’ that is a false dichotomy influenced in large measure by his particular reading of history and his view that Indigenous cultural difference and diversity of aspirations are second order issues.

Statistical evidence that became available in 2003 indicated that prime ministerial goal of practical reconciliation was failing to ‘close the gaps’. The immediate consequence of this was to blame the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) for lack of progress. This was unfair because ATSIC administered less that 50% of Commonwealth Indigenous specific programs, none in education and health and only some in housing and employment. Subsequently ATSIC was abolished and the new mainstreaming was introduced as the new overarching policy. From 2004, without ATSIC as an excuse and with rare control of both Houses of Parliament, the Howard government could pursue its goal of practical reconciliation unfettered. And it did so under a new series of experiments, whole-of-government COAG trials, Shared Responsibility Agreements, new bilateral agreements with some States and Territories, and the administration of Indigenous-specific programs by mainstream government departments and Indigenous Coordination Centres.

The Northern Territory National Emergency Intervention in June 2007, some three years after the demise of ATSIC and only two years after a bilateral agreement was signed between the Commonwealth and the NT government in April 2005, could perhaps be interpreted as a stark admission by the Howard government that its new mainstreaming has failed. This is despite the standard intergovernmental bickering and the attempt by the Commonwealth to variably blame Claire Martin’s government and local Indigenous governance for the dire socioeconomic predicament of remote Indigenous communities. The heavy-handed intervention, however, was not based on any rigorous assessment of policy performance or statistical evidence but on a report Little Children Are Sacred that vividly documented child sex abuse problems in numerous remote Indigenous communities in the NT.

Using the rhetoric of policy failure and ‘national emergency’ and the emotive specter of child abuse, the Howard government was able to urgently ramrod a range of measures through the Australian Parliament in August 2007 that paradoxically saw a renewed bipartisanship between the Coalition and the ALP. It is noteworthy that both the Australian Greens and the Australian Democrats vigorously opposed these new measures now enshrined in law for many reasons, but primarily because they were race based and required suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. Four months after the declaration of the ‘national emergency’ intervention there is little evidence that despite military assistance and allocation of significant additional funding much has changed at prescribed communities: some health checks have occurred, some changes to alcohol availability have been introduced, communities have been assessed for extent of disadvantage, income quarantining is being introduced, the CDEP scheme is being abolished, the permits system is being diluted, and government-appointed business managers are in the process of taking over prescribed communities.

But despite much talk of ‘stabilization and normalization’ to bring these communities into the so-called real economy, little has been done to fundamentally address their underdevelopment and structural dependency. This is partly because the Howard government is ideologically committed to a top down mainstreaming approach that has lacked adequate consultation or empowerment of local community organizations for sustainable futures.

How does the NT intervention sit with the broader national goal of practical reconciliation, bearing in mind that less than 15% of Australia’s Indigenous population estimated at 517,000 live in the NT. Ironically, the jury is still out on this issue as 2006 Census data are not yet fully available and analysed and there is a possibility that the statistical ‘practical’ gap between Indigenous and other Australians may have closed during the boom times of the last five years. Such information will be available later this month and my sense is that in absolute terms Indigenous socio-economic status will have improved at a national level between 2001 and 2006; but that the gap between Indigenous and other Australians will remain stubbornly wide. This is hardly surprising because as argued earlier despite massive budget surpluses the Howard government has consistently under-invested in addressing Indigenous disadvantage, most recently in the 2007–08 Budget (see a previous article of mine in Australians All).

What hope now for reconciliation? Can an election eve statement of intent undo the divisiveness between Indigenous and other Australians that has grown despite the mantras of ‘governing for all Australians’ and mainstreaming? In my view the Prime Minister’s statement with its continued adherence to the false practical/symbolic binary and its inability to recognize the legitimacy of the rights agenda based on social justice criteria augurs poorly for the immediate future. For a start, any notion of reconciliation cannot itself be reconciled with the race-based NT intervention or with the unwillingness of the Howard government to ratify the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Nor can any meaningful notion of reconciliation be unilaterally corralled by the Prime Minister to exclude an apology on behalf of the nation for the stolen generations and to be limited to the acceptable symbolism of a changed preamble to the Australian Constitution.

Reviving the reconciliation process after a decade of disappointment without a national Indigenous representative organization will be extraordinarily difficult: it is not just a matter of doing it the Prime Minister’s way or having his way merely endorsed by his hand-picked advisory body. There are some fundamentals that were received wisdom in 1996 that will need to be revived. The reconciliation process will need to be negotiated between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Fundamental to this process will be the need to both recognize and embrace the diverse values and aspirations of Indigenous people. This is a first principle that the current Prime Minister does not fathom: true reconciliation might mean accommodating Indigenous aspirations even if they diverge from his cherished Australian mainstream that, without doubt, has been too heavily privileged in the last decade.