The torment of powerlessness

This is an edited version of a talk by Danny Gilbert, Co-Chair Cape York Partnership at the Garma Festival 2019 on Constitutional reform for the inclusion of Aboriginal people. The full talk can be viewed at: https://tinyurl.com/y5xkaxcm [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

I start by acknowledging the Gumatj people of the Yolngu nation and I pay respects to their elders past and present.

It’s a great honour to be invited to speak here this evening. I’m going to talk about constitutional recognition and the enabling of a voice for Indigenous Australians. And about how this can relieve the ‘torment of powerlessness’, so poignantly expressed in The Uluru Statement from the Heart. I will explain why constitutional recognition is entirely in keeping with our Constitution as it is. And why it is so important to who we are as a nation.

For more than 30 years, I have been gifted with the friendship and trust of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These friendships began in the 1980s in Sydney’s Redfern. Redfern was a tough, confronting place. The problems seemed intractable, beyond remedy. It was emblematic of the tragic failures of the past and the inertia of the present. But Redfern was also a crucible of Indigenous activism. There was a voice there – if only Australia could hear it.

I was in my early 30s. The plight of inner-city Aboriginal people sparked my memories of growing up on Wiradjuri Country in the Western Riverina of New South Wales. I remembered very poor Aboriginal families. I remembered the shacks many of them called home. We looked away. They were outcasts, second class citizens, and seemed to be permanently so. When I was in my late teens my father casually mentioned, for the first and last time, that he had black cousins. One of them was Kevin Gilbert, the Aboriginal activist, artist and writer. I never met him or any of his siblings. They had no existence in my white non-Indigenous family. This was my own experience of what WE Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’.

Much has changed. Indigenous aspiration and achievement are today part of the national mosaic. Indigenous art, music, dance and drama step up whenever we want to tell the world who we are. Indigenous sports people, performers, writers and commentators are household names. Indigenous Australians occupy high places in academia, the media, politics and the professions. We rightly celebrate and recognise these remarkable Australians.

But this is not the only recognition needed. This is because Indigenous people occupy a very special place in our nation – a place unlike any other group. We need to be clear about the nature of the legal relationship, a relationship of disempowerment contained in the document at the heart of our nationhood – our Constitution.

The time has come to correct that relationship. We need an unequivocal statement of recognition levered into place as a cornerstone of our 21st century nationhood. Intrinsic in this recognition, Indigenous Australians must be able to speak to their fellow Australians – to have some say in their destiny. These two elements – recognition and being heard – cannot be separated. They are indivisible. Nothing in this would compromise our national purpose or historic achievements – our democratic institutions and traditions, our successful multicultural society, our place in the world. Nothing in this would compromise our Constitution. What does compromise us – and diminish us – is our relationship with our First Peoples.

I know that not all Australians share this view. Not all will be persuaded that the failed relationship is anything more than an irritating blemish, or that constitutional recognition will do anything to fix it. We cannot assume that what is so appealing and straightforward to us is appealing and straightforward to all Australians or to our politicians in Canberra. 

We must respect that what we are asking for will trouble some people. It will seem like a risk to the established order. It’s true that support is growing – and growing strongly. But our task is to persuade a majority of Australians in a majority of States that the time has come to make a substantive – but moderate – change to our constitution.

There are very big questions here. How do we unite Australians in this cause? How do we persuade Australians that this matters to them? That it will matter to their children? That it will go on mattering until we fix it? And that, until it is fixed, our claim to greatness is compromised? 

A great nation

The foundation of a great nation is a good society. In a good society people are free to be themselves, free to be fully alive. Every citizen is an equally valued part of the whole, regardless of cultural, ethnic and racial difference. Minorities have no reason to fear the majority, but flourish with them. This has never been true for Indigenous Australians, and it is not true today. Making up only 3% of our population, they have no institutional protection of their unique Indigenous rights and interests. 

My dear friend the late Ted Kennedy, Catholic Priest of Redfern, recognised this when speaking about Aboriginal Reconciliation more than 20 years ago. He said: Unacknowledged truth has a way of setting bands on the soul. The paralysis chokes. And unacknowledged truth has one of those perverse ways of imposing a sadness and guilt on the victim’s heart.

The grave injustices meted out to Australia’s First Peoples in the first two hundred years of European settlement will be remembered for the next two hundred – remembered for as long as there is an Australia. These things will not go away. They are written into the nation’s genesis, into its soul.

A great nation will address these wrongs and, most importantly, their ongoing legacies. The French philosopher, Ernest Renan, said: ‘Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more important value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort’. Now is the moment to recognise those duties and to make that common effort. For this is where the great compromise of our national beginning rests: when we excluded Indigenous people from Australian nationhood and told them in effect, that we would live together, but they must live apart, we left a void where there should have been a foundation stone.

Statement from The Heart

The Uluru Statement from The Heart should be seen as the synthesis and refinement of every request and demand ever made by Indigenous Australians since 1788. Its language is compelling – as compelling and as innately and profoundly Australian as any words uttered by the founders of the Commonwealth, or any of their successors. It is an invitation to join their ambitions and their talents with those of their fellow Australians; to embed their relationship to Country and their spiritual values in our identity and our national and community values. It is an invitation to share wisdom: to bring the First Australians into the conversation about Australia’s future – and the conversation about what is best for them.

It is vital to see and to understand that the Uluru Statement’s call for constitutional recognition is simply a further development – natural, appropriate and measured – in the maturing of our country and its legal infrastructure. 

I’ve heard Noel Pearson say ‘non-Indigenous Australians don’t know what to do with us, they don’t know where we fit in’. Constitutional recognition will help Australians answer that question. It will expand our understanding of what Australia is and can be. It will acknowledge the world’s oldest living cultures as the bedrock of our Australian identity. It will close the gap in our collective sense of nationhood.

Constitutional recognition in and of itself is but one element of what needs to be achieved. The other element is the empowerment of Indigenous Australians to have an assured say in their future. These two elements – recognition and empowerment – are essential and indivisible. Any separation of them would be a stab to the very heart of the Uluru Statement.

And why is this empowerment so necessary? Well, we need look no further than the 11 Prime Minister’s Closing the Gap Reports. In his speech in the Parliament in February this year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, when referring to those 11 Closing the Gap statements, ‘The process that began in 2008 was born of good heart.’ But he went on to say, ‘It did not truly seek to partner with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.’ Very importantly he added this: ‘It was set up to fail. And has, on its own tests. And today I am calling that out’.

The Prime Minister’s words confirm his commitment to addressing what the Uluru Statement calls the ‘torment of powerlessness’. The position in remote Australia is particularly dire. Too many communities are struggling against the odds. Right here in North East Arnhem Land Aboriginal children live with unacceptably high levels of infectious diseases, anaemia, skin diseases and very poor dental care. 

The Menzies School of Health reports some of the highest rates of rheumatic heart disease in the world. The inter-play between poor child health and chronic adult health problems is profound. Other problems of violence, poor education, shameful levels of incarceration and lack of economic opportunity are so well known we hardly need reminding. At the same time, communities are confronted with their disappearing languages and the everyday struggle of their elders to pass on their knowledge. 

A way forward together beyond differences

I want to say a few things to the people who do not support this change. I know you are not indifferent to the plight of Indigenous Australians. And I do not suggest that this change will be a panacea for all ills; that it will miraculously cure long-standing policy failures and entrenched inter-generational disadvantage. 

But, properly designed to ensure essential bottom-up community input from on-the-ground grassroots people, we will have community owned, workable solutions across the country. And that, surely, is what every Australian wants. We would all agree with the basic idea that solutions are more likely to be found if the people most affected are consulted and given the opportunity for input. It’s an idea that goes with freedom and democracy. It’s an idea that goes with respect and dignity.

I don’t think it can be fairly said that constitutional recognition would privilege one group of Australians over others. I also think it is mistaken to say this will divide the country on race. On the issue of equality, the fact is that Indigenous Australians have never had it. This is the opportunity to change that. Substantive constitutional change will invigorate the prospects for their more complete participation in our nation. 

As for the fear of a racial divide, that divide is the existing reality: the result of our treatment of Indigenous people over the past 230 years. Their separate collective identity was, of course, imposed from the very beginning in 1788. It was reaffirmed in the Constitution in 1901 and again in 1967. The Uluru Statement offers a pathway towards lessening, not deepening, that divide. Some people say the Constitution should not give preference based on race. But the Constitution already gives the Parliament power to make special laws based on race. It is commonly known as the “races power” – the power used by the Parliament to make laws about Australia’s First Peoples.

I see the Uluru Statement as fundamentally an invitation to listen, now and into the future. Let’s move forward and participate openly and honestly in a dialogue about how the Constitution can ensure that Parliament and the Government listen to and hear Indigenous voices. Let’s not allow a rejection of the Uluru Statement to be added to that long list of rejections borne so heavily by Indigenous Australians for 230 years. And let’s not breach the trust the Uluru Statement places in us.

The challenge for those of us who support constitutional recognition is to understand that not all fair-minded people will agree with what I am saying. That said, I strongly believe that the widest range of reasonable concerns can be properly and safely addressed. In this, we must mount our arguments with clarity, care, generosity and respect. In return, I ask sceptics to stand in the shoes of people whose 65,000 year-old civilization was so purposefully, negligently or carelessly devalued and disrespected. And who were then made outcasts in the nation created by that conquest.

To those who think it’s fanciful, remember there were plenty who thought Federation was fanciful. And that the Native Title Act was fanciful – and even dangerous. On both occasions many sensible people of goodwill doubted that such divergent interests could ever find common ground. But common ground was found, and on each occasion the nation took a step forward. 

I’d urge sceptics to consider this about those two great national steps forward: out of the 1890s Federation movement came a generation of leaders of outstanding competence and patriotic vision. The genius of the nation was framed in those constitutional debates. Similarly, with Mabo and the Native Title Act: from those complex 1990s negotiations a brilliant generation of Indigenous advocates was born.

Consider how much we stand to gain when Indigenous people are given a constitutional guarantee that their voices will be heard in the nation’s deliberations. Not only will it go some way to correcting historic failures, it will add another dimension to the national debate. It will be a lesson in the virtue and rewards of boldness. When we face the truth squarely and challenge ourselves to find answers, we gain in ways we never contemplated. When we shy away, fearing that the debate might get awkward, or raise difficult matters, or come to nothing, we lose – and in more ways than can be counted.

And if we don’t, as a nation, seize this opportunity, what will that say to future generations of Indigenous Australians? [/s2If]