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Uluru Statement sets out a great goal
Volume 31 #51
May 31, 2017
Not Schapelle Corby news While it was a big week for Schapelle Corby-related news, there were other notable issues that may have been overlooked. Internationally, Germany’s leader Angela Merkel said her country can no longer rely on the US under the current president after his embarrassing appearance at the NATO summit. North Korea is pushing for a war through more missile tests, and 29 Coptic Christians were killed in Egypt. In the UK the Tories (rightwing) are becoming nervous because Labour’s Corbyn’s message that terrorism – in part – is a product of western foreign policy is gaining traction. In the US, Republican Montana candidate Greg Gianforte openly assaulted Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs in front of a shocked assembled media for asking him a question on Trump’s healthcare plan. It’s estimated Trump will boot 22 million vulnerable people off healthcare. And because it’s a backwards world, Gianforte won the election the next day. Any distraction is good when the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner makes a $110b arms deal with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest terrorist actors. Kushner is also now the subject of an FBI probe into Russian connections (who were sanctioned by the US after invading Crimea). Federally, senate estimate hearings in parliament sent the usual wintery chill through politicians and bureaucrats. The week was capped off by horrendous and idiotic performances from One Nation’s Pauline Hanson. Simultaneously her party is being investigated by the AEC over an aeroplane donation and she appears complicit with staffer James Ashby in (nearly) plotting to defraud her candidates and taxpayers. And then there’s the anniversary of the 1967 Indigenous referendum and subsequent Uluru summit (see Mungo). Right-leaning magazine Quadrant retracted a piece that suggested the ABC Sydney studios should have been bombed instead of the Manchester stadium in the UK, where 22 were killed. In The Monthly magazine, Robert Manne gave a cool account of author Roger Franklin’s other Quadrant stories, suggesting the piece was not out of character and that the idea of bombing the ABC delighted convicted racist and Murdoch minion Andrew Bolt. Bolt’s support of the piece was eventually deleted online, yet Bolt still claimed it was ‘satirical’. Locally? The Greens – with help from two other councillors – backflipped without a spine on a 20-year community battle calling on the state-run North Coast Holiday Parks Trust (NCHPT) to produce agreed boundaries on contested public lands in Brunswick Heads. Mayor Simon Richardson, Crs Jeannette Martin, Michael Lyon and Sarah Ndiaye were supported by left-leaning independent Basil Cameron and Nationals Party-aligned Alan Hunter in putting plans of management for two Bruns holiday parks to the minister, thus ending any battle for contested boundaries of Massey Greene and Ferry Reserve. Next comes negotiations for The Terrace Reserve. Requests to be fully informed with indepedent legal advice were knocked back with little effort to explain why. Even staff didn’t support the councillor’s view they would be sued by NCHPT. The local Greens and their backers chose to remain ignorant for unknown gains and instead trashed the values of transparency, honesty, process, inclusiveness and the community’s interests. Hans Lovejoy, editor News tips are welcome: editor@echo.net.au
thinking: patronising, insulting and demeaning, and it was hardly surprising the Uluru delegates rejected it in favour of a somewhat more robust formulation. It had two parts: one was based on Noel Pearson’s idea of an Indigenous voice in parliament, which on the face of it would seem unexceptional – there are already five articulate and voluble voices in the current two houses. But the catch is they were all chosen by their respective parties (Jacqui Lambie was originally from Palmer United); they were not elected primarily as Indigenous representatives. The Uluru statement wants to
Working towards a Makarrata – a form of treaty – while it may appear more difficult, actually has promise. by Mungo MacCallum by whom? The generations of whites doing the dividing? What they apparently meant was that they liked things just as they were – of course, they had lots of Aboriginal friends (well, a few acquaintances, anyway) and they weren’t getting uppity, so there was no reason for any change. Other Tories were a little more nuanced: there could perhaps be a few tweaks in the constitution, but they had to be bland to the point of being meaningless, because anything serious would never get past a referendum. At least it wouldn’t if they had anything to do with it, and given that they were obviously prepared for a campaign of fear and loathing, they were confident that their predictions would be self-fulfilling. In other words, they were the gatekeepers, the masters and commanders; what Indigenous Australians wanted was irrelevant, they would just have to take whatever crumbs White Australia was willing to dole out to them. This was real white man’s burden
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see a presence embedded in the constitution. It is not clear how this can be managed, but it would, by definition, involve a referendum, and at least some of the conservatives could be guaranteed to campaign against it, leaving the result at best problematic. But the other bit, working towards a Makarrata – a form of treaty – while it may appear more difficult, actually has promise. This is because no referendum would be needed; the treaty power is already given to the Commonwealth in the constitution, so if the major parties can come together on it, end of story – and perhaps the real start of reconciliation. The Tories, of course, would go apeshit: they would scream about two separate nations, apartheid, and all sorts of nonsensical hyperbole, ignoring the fact that such countries as the United States, Canada and New Zealand have long since signed treaties with their original inhabitants without splitting their
sovereignty apart. And although negotiations with multiple Indigenous nations would be difficult, it must surely be encouraging that so many of their representatives at Uluru resolved, unanimously, to give it a try. So the Uluru Statement is offering a deal – not the one that Malcolm Turnbull, who is still talking vaguely about recognition, wanted, but a concrete proposal he will have to confront once the ideas have been workshopped and refined, possibly as early in August at the Garma festival at Yirrkala. The prime minister is, as always, cautious and lawyerly, but not dismissive and Bill Shorten is more optimistic. So it may not be an impossible dream. And this might bring us to yet another anniversary: 1972, the It’s Time election, where Gough Whitlam announced: ‘We will legislate to give Aborigines land rights, not just because their case is beyond argument but because all of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.’ The simple goodness and rightness of these words still resonates through the years that have followed. There have been many attempts to move forward since, some successes, all too many failures. But we can report progress, both materially and socially. There is probably less goodwill, less generosity of spirit now than there was in 1972, not to mention 1967; the struggle for reconciliation is now seen as less urgent than other concerns, and the politics of inclusion, even within our own country, less forgiving. But the men and women from Uluru have given us a guide to the great goal of uniting all Australians, old and new, in facing the past with honesty and the future with hope. The next step could be the big one.
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10 May 31, 2017 The Byron Shire Echo
existence of Aboriginal Australians should be mentioned in the preamble to the constitution – a syrupy placebo that was rightly rejected by the populace. But at least that opened the way for some form of constitutional recognition, and that was enough to terrify the ageing white conservatives who dominated the Liberal and National parties’ and their supporters in the media. Some of the extremists – Andrew Bolt and Greg Sheridan, to name but two of the noisiest – rejected any acknowledgement of Aboriginals in the constitution at all: it could be seen as divisive, they spluttered. Hang on,
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t is fitting that the Uluru Statement from the Heart celebrated the triumphant referendum of 1967: ‘In 1967 we were counted; in 2017 we seek to be heard,’ the statement declared. And others noted later anniversaries: the Mabo judgment of 1992, the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations in 1997. But there is an older and equally relevant anniversary, one in which the conservatives have been wallowing nostalgically for the past week. The 1942 Forgotten People speech from Robert Menzies is now extolled as the foundation manifesto of the modern Liberal Party. Menzies’s forgotten people were the middle classes, and they were a receptive audience – they voted for him in 1949 and proceeded to do so for the next 23 years. But the ones Menzies really forgot – and ignored – were the first Australians, and he had consistently refused pleas led by one of his backbenchers, William Charles Wentworth, to bring about the referendum, which was eventually implemented by Harold Holt. Such was, and still is, the inertia of conservative politics. The conservative approach was, perhaps, typified by John Howard – the man who abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, who did his best to undermine the Mabo judgment with his insistence that he had a covenant with Australia’s farmers (but not, apparently any empathy with Australia’s Aboriginals), who berated Indigenous audiences until many of them turned their backs on him, who twice suspended the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, who instituted the unilateral intervention into settlements in the Northern Territory and who refused to countenance an apology for the stolen children. And he then attempted conciliation with an anodyne suggestion that the pre-federation
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