Peter Garrett MP
Member for Kingsford Smith
Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the Traditional Owners of this place.

The title of this speech is: ‘In The Eye of the Storm - Prospects for Reconciliation’.

In March this year, Delmore Barton, elder in residence at Griffith University, and mother of leading didgeridoo player William Barton, collapsed on the footpath outside the University in Brisbane and lay in her own vomit for hours.

She was ignored by numerous passers by, who assumed she was drunk, until eventually some Japanese tourists took her to hospital.

There was a tiny flurry of comment and the incident was soon forgotten. Delmore was shocked at her stereotyping, I was too.

We didn’t have a big debate to try and explain this event, to reflect on why people acted in such a way and how we view and relate to Indigenous people.

I think we should have.

It is a simple and logical enough proposition that you can’t make sense of the present and plan for the future unless you know something of the past.

Yet this, it seems to me, is one of the greatest obstacles to Reconciliation.

There is no escaping the fact that the very real problems that exist in Indigenous communities today are largely a result of past experiences.

Notwithstanding current tumultuous debates about history, and regardless of the exhortations from some quarters to “move on” and quit what they call a “fixation” with the past, that past – the complete past - can’t easily be papered over.

And no matter how much it is reworked to attempted political or ideological advantage the truth will always out.

I think there is much in our recent past that indicates that non-Indigenous Australians want to walk together with Indigenous Australians.

Yet, under the conservative version of “practical reconciliation”, the Reconciliation process itself has stalled.

Yes the road to Reconciliation still exists, and the nation is still on it – but the Reconciliation process under this government is, I am afraid and disappointed to say, in reverse, going backwards down that road.

It is high time the conservatives relinquished their desire to rework the past to suit political ends, to deny the causal processes of history.

High time they stopped manipulating the present circumstances to push their own ideological agendas.

What better recent example of this behaviour than the Northern Territory town of Wadeye being turned into a law and order issue by the government, when it has suffered years of Federal and Territory neglect.

And it is long overdue for the Government to walk away from stereotyping Indigenous issues.

And long overdue the Prime Minister took some responsibility for the policy failures of the past.

In two days I’ll attend the 40th Anniversary of the Wave Hill 'walk-off'.

On August 16 1966, the Gurindji people led by Vincent Lingiari, walked off the Vestey Cattle Company lease, sick of being treated as third class citizens with third class conditions.

They then embarked on a campaign for wage justice and rights to land that grew into a nine year long struggle.

This was the day when, as Billy Bunter Jampijinpa one of the survivors of that time recently recalled, “We walked out of the darkness and into the light.”

It was a campaign that changed the face of Australia, ultimately, for the better.

Importantly the Wave Hill walk-off and the ensuing campaign culminated in the eventual passage of Lands Rights legislation for the Northern Territory.

This saw the return to Aboriginal ownership of large tracts of their country, and with this, the possibility of people building an independent economic base for themselves.

This is something that is slowly, but all too slowly, being realised today.

Voices are now being raised on the eve of the anniversary, questioning the wisdom of the events at Wave Hill.

Some say that the Wave Hill campaign contributed to the demise of the Aboriginal stockman.

That the claims for decent treatment and fair conditions and the championing of those claims in some way represents a failure of engagement with Indigenous history that continues through to this day.

This commentary is disingenuous. It greatly simplifies, for ideological purposes, the very complex circumstances of the past.

The fact is that the Indigenous people had no rights to be on the country they’d occupied for centuries and were booted off cattle leases if they were considered no longer economically useful.

To say that Wave Hill finished off the Aboriginal stockman is to ignore the many other profound changes underway at that time.

For example, the introduction of road trains, fences and helicopters, combined with a drought and a rural recession all played a part in driving down the need for labour.

And if Wave Hill did contribute, one can also ask: should it have? For to say that station owners had no choice but to cease using these virtual slave labourers is to ignore the fact that the station owners did have a choice.

They could have given them proper wages and work conditions, and stopped trying to buy them off with offers of beef, or a bit of sugar and tea.

It is hard to sustain an argument that in a country where people are equal under the law, they can be unequal in their working and living conditions.

That is unless you are willing to contemplate that rights to land and to fair working conditions are to be determined according to race.

This is something much of the cattle industry at the time practiced - it was resisted by Lingiari and many others and it is that history that is being marked at Wave Hill.

When I came into the Parliament I’d had a long term connection with areas like Aboriginal affairs, the environment and of course, the music industry.

I knew how critical the actions, statements and laws made by governments are.

When Kim Beazley appointed me Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts I was keen to add value to the debate in these portfolio areas.

And it is to those areas I wish to speak today.

With the recent release of Labor’s discussion paper on arts policy, we are offering up new, and I hope constructive ideas including how government can be involved in, and support the Arts in general.

The approach goes like this.

We all possess the desire and capacity to create. I’ve experienced it in my life, parents witness it when they enrol their kids at kindy.

If this inherent creativity is nurtured and developed in our early years, it enhances our social and intellectual wellbeing.

Critically, the creative work we produce and consume - paintings, songs, film and TV drama, books, theatre, documentaries - all these enrich our experience.

And in the case of great artistic accomplishment, enrich the life of the nation.

A great majority of people like some form of the Arts – I reckon as many as like sport – (and most of us like both).

And an increasing tempo of involvement in creative activities has become a pronounced feature of many modern societies, from garage bands, to blogs to amateur theatre.

Australians know well that in Indigenous culture, creative expression is also fundamental.

Painting, music and dance especially are central - they connect people and place.

And Indigenous art continues to grow, astonishing audiences worldwide with its vitality and pungent impact.

Governments do have a vital role to play in supporting and encouraging the Arts and in ensuring all Australians have an opportunity to learn and enjoy the Arts.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Labor wants to unfetter our arts entrepreneurs to take risks and create value in both traditional and new media.

And we want to enable private sector cultural industries and independent artists to realise the potential of telling our stories.

We envisage a creative country where innovation and adoption of new ideas, aesthetic approaches and technologies is both second nature and also profitable.

And importantly, is one way we can compete with the accelerating economies of Asia through value added cultural industries, from children’s TV to the internet to Aboriginal art to movies.

So what about Reconciliation?

I’ve been around long enough to know that in politics there is a long list of people who spoke first, mostly prematurely, and then failed to deliver on their rhetoric.

Where possible, I wanted to take time to properly hear from Indigenous leaders, communities and organisations about what they saw as important and how best Labor could respond to their concerns.

This is particularly critical in the highly charged atmosphere of the so-called culture and history wars being fought out at the moment.

My colleague Senator Chris Evans has argued for an approach to Indigenous Affairs where policy-making is based on the evidence of what works and what doesn't.

He argues we need a long-term strategy to address Indigenous disadvantage—such as the 20 and 25 year plans NT Chief Minister Clare Martin and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma have put forward.

Plans with targets, benchmarks, and clearly defined, transparent mechanisms for monitoring progress.

And he’s right.

Labor leader Kim Beazley has recently announced his determination to make progress on Indigenous health a threshold issue should he assume the Prime Ministership.

But the government’s current approach, where we’ve had four Indigenous Affairs Ministers in six years, with its chronic short termism and ad hocery, makes ATSIC look streamlined and strategic.

And combined with a remorseless attack on Indigenous rights the current approach works against the possibility of finding political common ground.

We urgently need to find that common ground, where policies can bed in over the longer term.

That’s the only way to have any chance of success.

Now, there are some encouraging signs on the landscape that there would be support for such an approach.

More Australians than ever - some sixty nine per cent, consider Aboriginal culture is an essential part of Australian society .

And that number has grown from sixty four per cent since 2000.

This provides a good base to garner support for fundamentally addressing the issues of Indigenous disadvantage in health, education, in the operation of the criminal justice system, and as importantly, in the way in which we relate to Indigenous Australians.

I’d hope there is a majority who would recognise this task as a great call that is upon us as a nation.

John Hartigan Chairman and CEO of News Corporation said earlier this year, “No tragedy I’ve witnessed is bigger than Australia’s inability to confront the problems facing Indigenous people.”

He went on to call for a national Indigenous body with real power and responsibility.

A gathering of young emerging leaders at the Australian Future Directions Forum, of which the Prime Minister is Patron, agreed that ending Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage was the nation’s first priority.

They eloquently stated, “We will do this because it is right, (and that) we need to establish an agreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous as a foundation document for progress”.

This is Reconciliation.

I would argue that there are moments in a nation’s history when there is a moment of moral challenge when the community and its leaders are called on to act.

To pick two examples we in Australia know well.

America forged its moral character in part from the abolition of slavery followed by the long hard struggle for civil rights championed by Martin Luther King.

In South Africa the climb out of apartheid and the eventual election of Nelson Mandela as President, and the establishment of the Truth & Reconciliation commissions with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, led to a Republic where the colour of your skin was irrelevant and where a genuine attempt was made to square up to the past.

In Australia, there was a strong moral component in the decision by Lingiari and others to strike for their rights.

Without malice he said, “…we want to live in a better way, together, Aboriginals and white men, let us not fight over anything, let us be mates...”.

This moral component was also present in the long campaigns for political inclusion and equality by Faith Bandler and many others, which culminated in the referendum of 1967.

The tireless efforts of campaigners that resulted in the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, and the Northern Territory Land Rights Act of 1976 likewise appealed to Australian’s sense of right and wrong.

And the current situation, whilst not as clear cut for some, does, I would argue, need to be connected to that earlier historical movement.

Even if Reconciliation seems to have stalled since the bridge walks and Sorry Books of 2000, it remains the case for many of us, that there is no greater priority than to fully reconcile the past to the satisfaction of Indigenous people and then move forward so Indigenous Australians can participate fully and fairly in the life of the nation.

The Prime Minister has on a number of occasions promised to make Indigenous policy a priority.

He’s even talked, amid much fanfare, about his new-found recognition that truths and symbols, and practical measures, were both necessary.

But he has not delivered on any of it.

And there’s a Minister for Indigenous Affairs who has quickly lost the trust and confidence of many Indigenous Australians and their leaders.

If we ask ourselves the question: are existing government policies sufficient to address and redress the depth of Indigenous disadvantage where for instance the life expectancy gap between Indigenous Australians and the rest of the country is still growing?, the answer on present indications is no.

Whatever merit the whole of government approach may have, without any accountability mechanisms the exercise is fractured and flawed.

The COAG trial at Wadeye is a clear case in point, with approximately ninety one different funding streams going to the community!

The COAG trial is being sponsored by the Minister’s department, yet residents still lack anything like enough adequate housing.

The World Health Organisation and other organisations have consistently pointed out how overcrowding significantly contributes to psychological and emotional distress.

In Senate Estimates in May the department claimed it wasn’t their responsibility to provide emergency housing, despite there being several hundred people estimated to be homeless after the riots.

And although the majority of the town's residents are Centrelink 'customers', Centrelink has no physical presence, there is only a phone.

And then there’s Reconciliation. Does it have any future under the current government?

The answer here is, not as far as I can see.

In point of fact I have never known a time when dissatisfaction, disappointment, and even anger, amongst Indigenous people with the approach of governments has been as high as it is at the present.

For the Traditional Owners of Kunwinjku country in Arnhem Land this disappointment is made clear in an open letter to the Prime Minister published in The Age recently which called on the government to accord them the respect of actually meeting and discussing the government’s Indigenous agenda.

“We have our law”, they said. “We know how to look after our country . . . it is the Kunwinjku people not the Federal Government who hold the solutions for our future.”

That is not to say the old approaches were always right and the new are always wrong.

It is clear that there has been a long term failure to address institutional dysfunction and the spectre of passive welfare that has so debilitated some communities and that responsibility must be shared.

But the so called ‘new arrangements’ instituted by the Howard Government continue a flawed dynamic.

They are wedded to an accompanying ideological crusade against the distinctive character of Indigenous society.

And they are combined with a denial of political rights.

Proceeding from the colonial mindset, and still with us today, they will bear rotten fruit.

From the time the Prime Minister took his version of the “practical reconciliation” route, he effectively robbed the word Reconciliation of much of its meaning.

In the absence of a federal Minister with responsibility for Reconciliation it is from the Prime Minister that we glean the government’s approach.

And the plain historical fact is that all along, John Howard has been an implacable ideological warrior.

He’s a man of the old verities, unwilling to accord Indigenous Australians unqualified respect for their claim to be accorded a distinct status or with rights that attach as a consequence of their being the first Australians.

After initially asserting that the pendulum had swung too far, the Prime Minister has since claimed that his government will meet Indigenous people more than half way.

He’s done this while arguing that the time for lofty statements is over.

At the beginning of his second term he claimed his government would be judged by its record on this issue.

Yet he has never truly been held to account for these words.

This is the John Howard who claimed in 1989 that the creation of ATSIC would result in a black nation within a nation.

He knows better than most that there remains a segment of the population who are suspicious of any policy that has the appearance of favouring Indigenous people.

And he is the only figure, in the present circumstances, with sufficient authority to remedy the situation.

Yet it was John Howard who recently appointed one of his favourite historians Keith Windschuttle to the Board of the ABC, a man correctly described by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson as a denier.

The agenda that emerges from Windschuttle and others is clear:

No land rights; as now evidenced by the Government’s approach on reform of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act where no-one other than government – not land councils, the Minerals Council, traditional owners, local communities or NGOs – none favours all the proposed changes.

And with regret I note the legislation has passed.

No apology; that’s the PM’s special, despite all state governments, churches, local councils and numerous individual citizens fronting up.

No government support for remote communities; according to Minister Vanstone when she occupied the portfolio, they are “cultural museums” and the only solution to these so called “Hobbesian hellholes” is absorption of Indigenous people into suburban Australia.

The accumulation of these positions represents nothing more than the assimilation agenda reignited, and worse, a failure of moral imagination.

Again it was the Prime Minister leading the chorus line last month that there should be one law for all Australians. Did anyone say there shouldn’t?

In response to some poor decisions on sentencing and some terrible instances of assaults against children the Attorney-General said, “We are not a nation of tribes”.

“We are one people under one law”, the Prime Minister chimed in, where the use of customary law is “abhorrent”.

But the issue of violence in Indigenous communities, prominent in the news lately, had been around for quite some time.

When visiting Cape York communities in 2003, a concerned doctor handed the Prime Minister a dossier of sexual abuse cases.

A Prime Minister’s summit on Indigenous family violence was held in 2003, described at the time as “a highly significant act of reconciliation on the part of the Prime Minister.”

Yet in response to recent reports of violence in communities, the Indigenous Affairs Minister’s summit on violence of last month did not include a single Indigenous health or community organisation.

What a farce. The only reason there was any Indigenous participation is that the relevant Northern Territory Minister is an Aboriginal woman. Tom Calma, Social Justice Commissioner, was invited late as an observer.

Three years ago in this very place Professor Mick Dodson called on the Australian government, “To work with us in partnership, to acknowledge the centrality of violence-induced trauma and its debilitating effects and to combat family violence as a national priority”.

Only last month the Prime Minister spoke at an important Reconciliation Australia event.

Having received an advance copy, he listened to Mick Dodson’s speech generously acknowledge a role the Prime Minister could play in finding common ground and reenergizing Reconciliation.

After all this time Mr Howard returned nothing other than pieties and platitudes hinged around the need to focus on education - he turned away.

There are no magic bullets with Reconciliation, it’s been described as a difficult, relentless and unceasing negotiation.

But, you either think it is important and worth pursuing, or you don’t.

The pathway to Reconciliation is clear.

It was laid out by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation on numerous occasions both here in the national capital and around Australia.

It includes reaching an agreement between Indigenous Australians and settler Australia, and the reflection of that coming together to be recognised in the Constitution.

The Council made a number of recommendations to government. Mr Howard ignored all but one.

I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise seeing as when the idea of constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians was addressed during the Constitutional Convention debate on the Republic, the best on offer, as one Indigenous leader put it was, “ two lines in a preamble… negotiated by a Prime Minister, a poet and a minor party”.

Still Reconciliation is more than one person’s responsibility.

Just because John Howard hasn’t the will, doesn’t mean we won’t.

For our part Labor would kick start Reconciliation.

We would implement the recommendations of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and give effect to the many ways that have been identified by which Reconciliation could be advanced.

We would explore new ways of engaging the community, for instance supporting street naming ceremonies where in consultation with local Indigenous communities new suburbs proudly take on Indigenous place names.

Initiatives like this already take place around Australia: Labor would encourage more.

Critically it is long overdue for Indigenous people to have a proper voice, a national representative body which can enter into dialogue with government and reflect the views of diverse Indigenous communities.

I call on John Howard to do just this, but if he refuses, on assuming office Labor will take that step following full consultation with Indigenous leaders and communities.

The only consolation, friends, for the present is that in much of Australia Reconciliation is already underway.

It may be virtually absent from the Howard government’s agenda but it is very much present around Australia in schools, local councils, in sport and increasingly in the business community.

One positive to come out of last months Reconciliation Australia event, was the commitment to Action Plans for Reconciliation by leading Australian corporates - a positive and necessary step.

Critics of the left-right dichotomy that is a feature of our two party system argue that one side of politics places too much reliance on government and excuses personal responsibility and initiative, and the other places too much reliance on personal responsibility and ignores structural injustice.

There is something in this, because both approaches, if conducted in an exclusive, dogmatic way, have fatal consequences for Indigenous affairs.

What is missing is an approach that is rooted in a moral compassion, which recognises that hard held ideologies can bind too tightly, can reduce the scope for effective responses and ignore the need for rights and symbolic gestures, which partner the practical.

What is needed is a national commitment to stop walking around the past and to start walking and talking with all Australians, recognising the unique circumstances of the first Australians, with a commitment to make genuine recognition with them happen in our time, with, necessarily, rights and resources.

We will make that commitment. Labor will kick start Reconciliation so the ghosts of our collective past can be put to bed at last.

That will have good, positive, practical effects on our society, and on the level of well-being and life choices of Indigenous Australians.

Surely that is not too much to ask for.