On the way to government, Tony Abbott vowed he would be a special prime minister for Indigenous Australians. He said: “It is my hope that I could be, not just a prime minister, but a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs.” The first such thing, I imagine, that we have ever had. So glacially has the gap been closing between Indigenous and other Australians on the important indicators — life expectancy, health outcomes, income, employment, imprisonment rates, child mortality, education — that even the sceptics on the Left were willing to suspend judgement.
Abbott has repeatedly talked about his “journey” towards understanding. He has made many evocative speeches in federal parliament, lauding the commitment of other political leaders — including Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and former prime minister Paul Keating — to building better Indigenous lives. Twice in recent years, Abbott has evoked in parliament Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech, which remains the high-water mark in Australia’s political acknowledgment of past crimes against Indigenous people. Abbott said this to parliament in February 2013: “Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing — we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that prime minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788, this land was as Aboriginal as it is Australian now and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.” It is worth recalling some of what Keating had said at Redfern in 2012: “... surely we can find just solutions to the problems that beset the first Australians — the people to whom the most injustice has been done. And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with that act of recognition ... that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.”
The gravity of Keating’s speech lies in its unambiguous acknowledgment that past crimes are inextricably — practically, emotionally, symbolically — linked to present Indigenous disadvantage. Abbott’s repeated endorsement of Keating’s words (to the profound disquiet of some of his most ardent supporters on the ideological Right) seemed to make it plain that he, too, understood that critical intersection. But what has happened to Abbott’s journey, which has included his demonstrated commitment to working each year in a remote Indigenous community? His trip to Arnhem Land this year bore more hallmarks of an election-style PR exercise, but in fairness, that may be because of the unwieldy prime ministerial apparatus, including the media, that now shadows his every move.
For a start, in Indigenous Australia — whose disparate views are reflected broadly outside, if not within, the mainstream, media — Abbott is regarded as having selected an inordinately narrow source of advice, his notable seers being Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine. Pearson is undoubtedly the outstanding, and now most lauded, orator of his generation of public intellectuals (witness his Whitlam eulogy and the rather bizarre rendition of it on last Monday’s Q&A). His commitment to furthering Indigenous well-being is hard to question. But a great many Indigenous people disagree with him and believe his close alignment with Abbott is a dramatic, personally risky, strategic error.
Should Abbott lose the next election, Pearson may no longer be the most influential Indigenous Australian. And then what will he have achieved? But on Q&A, Pearson made plain his oracle-like belief “there will not be a change” of government. At which point, I wonder, did Abbott consider getting Pearson to assure the nervous doubters in the joint party room that the other “gap” — the 10 per cent between Labour and the Coalition — can yet be closed by 2016? Some of Pearson’s views, not least his search for a “radical centre” on Indigenous policy-making, do not reflect those of many emerging or, indeed, older, black leaders and activists, let alone those in struggling Indigenous communities. Indeed, witness the protest during Pearson’s speech by some, including elders, in Brisbane recently, where the Cape York Group chairman was told he certainly did not speak for Indigenous people.
Gary Foley, whose life-long ongoing struggle for equality is revered in Indigenous Australia, has described Pearson as a “latter-day black Gordon Gecko preaching ‘greed is good’”, while he views Mundine, to whom he is related, as “the white sheep of our family”.
Only the bigoted would demand Indigenous politics to be homogenous, of course, when there are so many divergent black views and approaches. And that is the point here: Abbott takes his advice from such a narrow quarter that attention — public service, think-tank, media and national — is also, inevitably, tightly focused upon the same space. Out there was white-hot anger that $500 million (Dh1,839 million) had been cut from funding to Indigenous programmes in Abbott’s first budget, without broad consultation. Those voices of protest didn’t get a hearing. And now to Abbott’s recent string of absurd pronouncements on continental Australian, Indigenous and colonial history, beginning, in July, with this: “Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment. I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled, or scarcely settled, Great South Land. Notwithstanding that Australia had been settled for 60,000 years, it’s quite a feat of dissembling to substitute occupation with investment.” Mundine described Abbott’s comments as “silly” and “bizarre”, although deliberately provocative, culturally condescending, retrograde and insulting might have been more apt.
Perhaps those who had previously taken Abbott at his word hoped he had misspoken, but no. The very next month, even with at least 60,000 years’ of continental history to choose from, the PM nominated the first fleet arrival in 1788 as Australia’s defining moment.
And in just this past fortnight, while hosting British Prime Minister David Cameron, Abbott, perhaps invoking the now nostalgic colonial concept of terra nullius (land belonging to no one), declared Sydney was “nothing but bush” when the Brits arrived. They hardly seem like the words of a leader about to gravitate towards a radical centre. These pronouncements — not quite return day trips from enlightenment into the colonial retrograde — coincide with his waning political will to amend the constitution during this parliamentary term so it meaningfully recognises Indigenous Australians.
Or perhaps that is no coincidence at all. Could this be his way of signalling to the ideological Right that proposed constitutional change, should it come, will be moderate, largely symbolic and absent of guarantees against future racial discrimination? Who knows what he is thinking? If he is telling Pearson and Mundine, then they are certainly not telling us. So much for that “stain on our soul”.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Paul Daley is a Canberra-based author and award-winning journalist who writes about Australian history, culture and identity.
