time and money, then vote them out. You have the power to do that, this isn't a dictatorship; you get the government you deserve. People need to be more engaged. This is the thing I always get frustrated by: when people aren't engaged in the political process but they want to have a massive cry about where we're at.
"When you're talking about the definition of reconciliation being one group of people understanding another group of people and coming to some sort of consensus around general ideas, what better way to initiate reconciliation than to understand this country's past?" The fact that the scare tactics work so well just shows how uninformed people are... I think that's the thing I get really upset about, when people are manipulated using fear. That really saddens me when things like that happen. I saw quite a bit of that when I was in Canberra. Because it's difficult to inspire people to be kind and open and compassionate when it comes to designing policy, and I'm not talking about one area in particular, it's really easy to motivate people to be scared and to close themselves off and to be independently motivated. I wish there were more inspiring characters. Are we going to see you in politics at any stage or is it a bit early to call? I don't think politics is for me. Having been down there and worked around politicians, I think it's really hard for people. People can be very idealistic
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and have a lot of personal goals and really strong values but it's difficult to maintain those when you are entering into a system. You've seen that with politicians before, you think, “Oh they're going to go in there and shake things up or change things,” and then they get in there and they're just sort of sitting on the bench not doing much. It's really, really hard when it's a party environment. Is it for me? I don't know. Will I ever do it? Probably not. What do you think is the best way forward for reconciliation? There's a whole bunch of stuff. One of the things that came out of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is around truth telling, and that's something that I keep coming back to. I feel a bit like a broken record but I think that, moving forward, the best way for people to reconcile with different views people have is to have a better understanding of the past, and that there's a really, really important process that we need to go through. We've seen in other countries, after Apartheid for instance, South Africa had their truth and healing commission. I think that those sorts of things, even though they are very structured and very formal, are very important exercises in the progress of a nation, and if we had something like that in Australia that would greatly benefit us. It's pretty common that I'll recount or tell a story about the brutality of colonisation and the effect it had on the population at the time, and people would be shocked to hear of it, and I think that's important for us to know about. If I've come across that many people who are hearing it for the first time, then there are a whole bunch more people who have never ever heard it and probably never ever will in their whole life. Something that I think is so important is the difference in outcomes that I was talking about before. When you attribute those only to race, it's
racism, so we need to know what the reasons are behind that, otherwise we're in a country where we think one group of people is better than another and I'm not okay with that. Do you think a lot of people just don't know? I didn't know anything until I read First Australians... It's very good, have you watched the TV series? I haven't, but should something like that be compulsory reading, part of the curriculum? I think it absolutely should be. When you're talking about the definition of reconciliation being one group of people understanding another group of people and coming to some sort of consensus around general ideas, what better way to initiate reconciliation than to understand this country's past? And for it not to be some sort of history wars thing where it's like, “Oh, we did this,” but, “Oh, but you did this and then this happened,” but just to understand plainly what happened in the first fifty years of this country's settlement is huge and I think it would change things dramatically. I think that would be a great idea. We're the only commonwealth country that doesn't have a treaty with our first nations; could something like that work in Australia? A treaty is when a country comes to another country and they say, “We're going to settle this country but we're going to look at you in terms of schooling, health and, you know, well make sure you're trained up to be farmers, or whatever.” So, that used to be how treaties were sorted out. The problem with a treaty now in Australia, and I'm by no means a legal expert, is that it's so complex and there are so many different nations. Who would the government or the Queen negotiate a treaty with at this stage? We don't have a representative body that