This is the year of Aboriginal Reconciliation, the culmination of a process the Hawke Labor Government began in 1991 in the hope of heading off the more radical push for a treaty between black and white Australians. In his New Year's message, and again on Australia Day last Wednesday, the Governor General called on the nation to make a renewed effort to bring about "true and lasting reconciliation".
Nice words, but what do they really mean? How will we know if reconciliation has been successful? Will the outcome be announced from on high, with a committee of righteous worthies telling us we have finally transcended our shameful past? Or will teams of public opinion pollsters tramp across the country to get a take on whether the nation actually feels "reconciled"?
Certainly, the vision promoted by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation seems reasonable -- "a united Australia which respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage; and provides justice and equity for all". But in fact it is so vague that, depending on your point of view, you could say it has been largely achieved already, or see it as an impossible goal which will always enable critics to complain that Australia has fallen far short of fulfilling its obligations.
In the hope of clarifying some of the woolly thinking surrounding the issue, I put out a paper called Reconciliation: What Does it Mean? towards the end of last year. I pointed out that there were contradictions between various parts of the program being promoted by CAR; for instance, between calls for "a united Australia" on the one hand, and promoting moves towards indigenous separatism on the other.
Among the issues we considered was whether it would really be possible to raise the social and economic indicators for Aborigines to an acceptable level without radical changes to the strategies of autonomy and cultural revival so favoured by the intelligentsia and prominent indigenous activists. Whether or not our answers have merit, the many questions and inconsistencies we raised are fundamental.
Nevertheless, in the national quest for reconciliation, most of the tough questions have been set aside. Although CAR released a Learning Circle kit last year "to promote discussion of the issues surrounding reconciliation in the Australian community", the package really seems designed to close down certain kinds of discussion by making participants aware that some matters are effectively out of bounds.
Only a smattering of alternative perspectives are offered, and even then, they are carefully placed in contexts that make it clear that such views are not at all helpful. The kit refers to a very large number of books, articles and websites for further information, but hardly anything that contains detailed arguments or embarrassing facts that might cause people to question the direction that CAR is taking. The people who espouse the "correct positions" get the best lines, the most sympathetic treatment, and the greatest prominence.
For example, a list of the underlying causes of indigenous disadvantage makes no mention of the many ways in which contemporary Aborigines are encouraged to see themselves as victims and to avoid taking personal responsibility for their own actions. True, the kit was prepared before Noel Pearson released his paper, "Our Right to Take Responsibility". But Pearson's observations about the destructiveness of victimhood were hardly new, as he readily acknowledged. Indeed, the Learning Circle kit makes its own distinctive contribution towards furthering the mentality of victimhood amongst Aborigines.
If there were a simple and obvious way to end Aboriginal disadvantage, perhaps attempts to keep the reconciliation discussion on a narrow track might be understandable. But if past dispossession and injustice is to blame for all of today's woes, as CAR and its supporters pretend, why are major social indicators for Aborigines such as life expectancy, suicide rates and violence getting worse rather than better in many areas? And why are some of the highest Aboriginal mortality rates to be found in regions which have suffered the least amount of dispossession and interference, such as East Arnhem Land?
As the American black critic Shelby Steele has pointed out, when people genuinely want to solve difficult social and economic problems, they take a flexible approach, encouraging anything that might work. In his recent book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, he contrasts the experimentalism of President Roosevelt's New Deal administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s with contemporary Americans' rigid "politically correct" approach towards racial issues.
Steele explains why liberal-minded white Americans now feel they must support ineffective or counter-productive policies which only benefit a black elite, while eroding the sense of individual responsibility amongst the very people they are supposedly trying to help. He thinks that many white liberals are not quite as keen to enhance black freedom and prosperity as they claim.
Rather, these whites are preoccupied with their own personal redemption; with demonstrating their moral virtue in the face of the shame they feel in being identified with America's unpleasant history of racial injustice. And they know that those who challenge the race-relations industry's favoured notions will find their goodness denied -- they will be called "racists". Although Steele confines his observations to the United States, they also seem highly relevant to the Australian situation.
Nevertheless, even those most committed to moral posturing on indigenous issues can occasionally offer a constructive way forward. Take Germaine Greer, who told a British audience last week that she was "an honorary Australian Aborigine". She didn't say who made her an Aborigine, but it is a wonderful idea. If only all the rest of us could be offered this status, there would be no need for reconciliation.
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