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The Scale Politics of Reconciliation: from the Political and the Personal to Geographical Scale

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The Scale Politics of Reconciliation: from the Political and the Personal to Geographical Scale 1) INTRODUCTION 1.1: Preamble Indigenous affairs policies in Australia’s colonial and “post-colonial” phases have been concentrated mainly around the twin issues of constructing an Australian national identity and maintaining capitalist systems of resource exploitation, rather than addressing issues of Indigenous rights or political equality between Indigenous peoples and Australian governments. For example, commitments made by federal governments to Aboriginal rights in land from the 1960s to the 1980s have been defeated or seriously diminished by political influence from the pastoral and minerals and energy sectors1. Throughout, conservative interests have been served by representations of land rights and Indigenous political associations as being a threat to Australian national unity and identity2. When the idea of reconciliation became a foundation for Indigenous affairs policy in 1990 it represented an effort to broaden previous policy parameters. One of the major three objectives of the policy, as formulated by its architect Robert Tickner (the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Hawke Labor Government from 1990 to 1996) was to establish whether “any document of reconciliation would benefit the Australian community as a whole” and if so, “to make recommendations to the Minister on its nature and content” (Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, 1993:12). This was an attempt to move from a narrow legislative framework to a more open- ended process of negotiating frameworks of reference between Indigenous leadership, politicians and other sectors. Another objective—a public education program on Australia’s history and social justice issues—was aimed in part, at generating popular inquiry concerning the need for these new processes. Third was the objective to advance Indigenous civil rights and social justice. As Chapter 5 shows, policy agents (including Tickner, 2001:30) widely interpreted these objectives as having potential to produce an agreement or treaty. 1 Goodall (1996); Hawke & Gallagher (1989); McCleod (1984); Rowley (1970); Rowse (2000). 2 Attwood (1996a, 2005); Markus (1996); Nicoll (1998). 1 This formulation of policy objectives, however, still evaded the question of Indigenous self-determination and self-governance. And the process of discussion, consultation and response anticipated by the legislation enacted by the Australian Parliament in 1991 avoided any proposition involving a fundamental restructuring of the framework for political relations between Indigenous communities and Australian federal governments. Further, there was nothing in the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) legislation that would deliver authority to Indigenous communities. Rather, the CAR was a peak body whose members were government appointed rather than Indigenous community authorised, and its discourse was firmly referenced to the policy agenda of state and federal levels of government. With the election of the Howard Liberal-National Party coalition government (1996-2007), there was a shift away from recognition of Indigenous rights, and toward a rejection of conceptions of self-determination as a basic human right of colonised peoples. Reconciliation was redefined narrowly as “practical” reconciliation, which was no more than a recognition of Indigenous disadvantage in the civil rights long enjoyed by other Australians (Huggins, 2001). As Fraser notes, current neo-liberal ideologies draw a radical either/ or dichotomy between recognition of minority groups and redistribution. Indigenous people are given a choice between cultural/political recognition and the attainment of civil rights, which are rendered as mutually exclusive (Fraser, 1997:3). And public discourse was structured by the federal government around what became known as the “new paternalism”, or according to some commentators, a return to early C20th assimilation policies (Burney, 2006; Dodson, P, 2004)3. Among other casualties of this approach have been: justice for members of the Stolen Generations; the integrity of the Northern Territory land rights legislation; and the hope of Indigenous communities to bring federal and state government into a partnership for reversing the ever-increasing incarceration rates and ever-worsening mortality and morbidity indicators (Burney, 2006; Dodson, P, 2000). Following the submission of the National Reconciliation Documents4 by the CAR to the federal Parliament in December 2000, its 3 However, Rowse (2006a) proposes a marked difference in ideology between the assimilation era and the Howard era. He argues that the premise of assimilation ideology was that Indigenous people had the capacity to participate in mainstream life, while in the Howard Government’s redrawing of its relationship with Indigenous people as one of “mutual responsibility”, it constructed Indigenous agency as being corrupted, thereby laying the moral basis for absenting itself from the responsibility to provide civil rights. 4 These consisted of the general statement, known as the “Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation” and the four “Roadmap for Reconciliation” documents – See Appendix 1. 2 recommendations—particularly those concerning the support of Indigenous aspirations through the recognition of difference in culture, land relations and economic models5—were immediately discarded by the Howard Government (Burney, 2006). There is no doubting the role of the Howard Government in setting back the agenda of social justice and self-determination for Indigenous peoples6. Conversely, the substantial social justice advances of the reconciliation era were Labor Government initiatives. These were the 1997 Bringing Them Home report (Wilson, 1997) and the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Dodson, P, 1997a), which set new standards for historical evidence collection, policy benchmarking and popular acknowledgement for two of the most pressing (yet largely still unaddressed) injustices in Australian history. And the Labor Prime Minister Keating gave the landmark 1992 Redfern Address (Keating, 1992, Appendix 13), which still remains the clearest public statement by a politician on political and racial relations between black and white Australia. With the election of a new Rudd Labor Government at the end of 2007, there have been some indications of a more conciliatory approach in recognising Indigenous rights. For example on 13th February 2008, the first sitting day of parliament, the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd delivered an insightful and well-received apology to the Stolen Generations7. Yet beyond questions of how Labor and Liberal Coalition governments differ or cohere in their Indigenous affairs policies is the above-mentioned, more fundamental issue of the structure of political relations between Indigenous communities and Australian federal governments. Questions about the successes and failures of the reconciliation policy in terms of its objectives established under a Labor government, and in the context of the major changes after 1996 are important and have been dealt with in the scholarly literature8. These are not the subject of this study. The wider reference point for this study is the structure of political relations and the terms of engagement between Indigenous communities and Australian federal 5 “Roadmap” documents 2 & 4: “The National Strategy to Promote Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Rights”; and “The National Strategy for Economic Independence” – See Appendix 1. 6 Behrendt (2002); Gunstone (2007); Manne (2003). 7 However, the Rudd Government has continued some of the most authoritarian aspects of the Northern Territory Intervention established by the Howard Government. For example, it continues to roll out the quarantining of welfare payments (Behrendt, 2008). 8 For example, Grattan (2000); Gunstone (2007); Pratt (2005); Prentice et al (2003). 3 governments. This study treats reconciliation as a case study of these dynamics. And the conceptualisations so produced are utilised in Chapter 5 (on policy history), to highlight the structure of political relations in federal government policy since the late 1960s. While each policy employed different structures, processes and methodologies, these policies, which were part of the ‘self-determination’ era, were generated from the same overall structure of political relations. In particular, the study examines how reconciliation policy structures and methodologies addressed the issues of Indigenous community diversity (both within and between urban, rural/regional and remote contexts) and specificity. As this thesis will show, these issues are constitutive of Indigenous community authority and governance and so are crucial to the building of a genuine self-determination that is Indigenous community authored and not determined by changing government agendas. Further, this thesis examines how, under present frameworks of political relations, the reconciliation policy process addressed the dissent that arises when the issues of diversity and specificity are not addressed as matters of Indigenous community authority. The underlying question addressed in these inquiries is whether, within present frameworks of political relations, it is possible to build a structure or process of genuine self-determination. Reconciliation policy is a useful example to explore all these questions for two reasons: 1) it is recent and allowed participants ready access to their experiences of the policy, which is significant for an empirical study based on interview
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