February 13, 2009
On the anniversary of Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations little has improved for remote Aborigines.
ON this first anniversary of Sorry Day, Kevin Rudd's official apology to the Stolen Generations, there is still a great deal to be sorry about. It was an apology that had to be offered. As The Australian's Paul Kelly put it, it was "an essential act of contrition and a uniquely confessional event for Australia's soul". But while the Prime Minister committed his Government to improving education and healthcare for the present generation of Aboriginal children, the overwhelming emphasis in the speech was on wrongs done many years ago. And in the way it elevated the politics of symbolism over the more mundane pursuit of policies to address issues that oppress Aborigines in the present, it might even have done some harm. Because the problems that afflict the most disadvantaged of indigenous Australians -- from low life expectancy and high rates of imprisonment, to too low levels of literacy and too high rates of addiction, to everything from alcohol to petrol and the national disgrace that is sexual violence in remote settlements -- cannot be solved by saying sorry. A year on, the emphasis on symbolism is still strong, following the appointment of Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson as Australian of the Year. Professor Dodson was an author of Bringing Them Home, the report that catalysed the Stolen Generations debate a decade back, and he is a passionate believer that past wrongs shape present politics. He was certainly true to form on Australia Day. Instead of accepting the honour, and undertaking to campaign to speak out on substantive issues of Aboriginal disadvantage, Professor Dodson quickly disposed of the courtesies to call for a community "conversation" on changing our national day from the date that marks the start of British colonisation.
This suggestion is as irrelevant as it is eccentric, serving no practical purpose. But practicalities are not always high on the agenda of the Aboriginal elite -- people such as Professor Dodson who have risen to senior positions in universities and the public service and have prospered in the society they are so keen to criticise for the way it treats Aborigines. It should be easy to view demands to move Australia Day as an academic argument advanced by people whose prosperity allows them the luxury of indulging in ideological issues that do nothing to improve the circumstances of ordinary Aborigines. But it's not. Many among the indigenous elite -- some the children of Stolen Generations women who were taken from their families and sent to school -- have dominated the debate over indigenous Australia for 40 years. Some of them began their careers in the Whitlam-Fraser years, when land rights alone were supposed to liberate all Aborigines by keeping them connected to their ancient cultures. But despite the failure of native title to create jobs in the bush, and its utter irrelevance to urban Aborigines, older activists have held firm to the idea that if you act on symbolic issues, the substantial ones will solve themselves. And so Professor Dodson suggests changing the date of Australia Day and proposes an Aboriginal legislature, an idea that was tried, and that failed, with the discredited ATSIC. Because they have prospered in the public's service, the issues many members of the Aboriginal elite emphasise are those they were trained to address -- abstract questions of rights and redress, rather than the mundane matters that exercise ordinary Aborigines such as access to schools and police, jobs and hospitals. But because they understand how government works, the public sector elite has set the agenda, demonstrated by the way so many people assumed the Sorry Day apology was a solution and by the appointment of Professor Dodson as Australian of the Year.
But while the advocates of symbolic issues have accomplished very little in the 20 years since the last Labor government committed to addressing health and housing, education and safety in remote settlements, policy-focused activists such as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine have adopted a different approach. Instead of arguing about ideals they confront reality, pointing to petrol sniffing, sexual violence and the misery that welfare dependency brings and demanding that Australia, including Aborigines, does something about them. Instead of relying on government, they work with communities and business to fund boarding-school scholarships for the next generation of indigenous leaders and support schemes such as iron-ore magnate Andrew Forrest's plan to create 50,000 jobs for Aborigines. In the immediate term, Ms Langton suggests indigenous-run infrastructure companies, freed up by the end of the mining boom, could quickly switch to projects in the Northern Territory. It is the sort of practical solution that these three, and the young leaders they speak for, specialise in.
But their practical approach will not get the overwhelming support it merits until the ideologues accept theirs is not the only answer. Since Sorry Day, the Rudd Government has not done much to transform the condition of indigenous Australians. Certainly, it has not ended the Howard government's intervention in the Northern Territory. The controversial policy of quarantining welfare payments to ensure they are spent on feeding families, rather than addictions, remains mainly in place. And Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin has not capitulated to the rights lobby. But otherwise it is business as usual. The bureaucrats talk, health workers in the field struggle against avoidable diseases caused by poor hygiene and bad diets, and another generation of indigenous children is growing up illiterate. There is no money specifically for remote Australia in Mr Rudd's national rescue package and nothing to show that, a year after his apology, anything has changed there. And as the NT goes, so go the states.
Last week, the House of Representatives was disrupted by protesters inthe public gallery chanting: "Human rights for all. Stop the intervention." It demonstrated the way Professor Dodson's agenda still shapes the way many Australians look at indigenous issues. Whatever the failures of the intervention, it is intended to protect fundamental human rights -- to a home, to health, to education and to personal safety. It is time to accept that changing the date of Australia Day does not matter a damn, that apologising for the Stolen Generations has not helped young Aborigines. This newspaper is often criticised for reporting the facts on indigenous dispossession. But without a paradigm shift away from symbols to the issues Mr Pearson and his colleagues are dealing with, The Australian will have to keep reporting the same disgraceful stories. And that is not something to apologise for.