Australians with an ironic appreciation of the folly that pervades much of our contemporary politics must be savouring the fact that reconciliation has become such a source of strife.
After considerable argument last weekend, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation approved a document called the Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation, which will be launched in three weeks time at Corroborree 2000 in the Sydney Opera House. This corroborree was supposed to be a high point of the reconciliation process, but already it has caused a great deal of anger.
Prominent Aborigines such as Charles Perkins and Galarrwuy Yunipingu have said they will join former CAR chairman Pat Dodson in boycotting the event to protest against the Howard Government's approach to dealing with reconciliation and Aboriginal issues. In response, Senator Aden Ridgeway has accused Dodson of a "blatant and bitter act", and of attempting to undermine the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation for his own ends.
On the other hand, if media reports about its contents are correct, the Declaration will only increase the disquiet and irritation that many Australians feel about the thrust of demands for atonement for past wrongs against Aborigines. Instead of adopting something that could gain the support of the Howard Government as well as ordinary Australians, CAR extended the very aspects of its previous drafts that caused the greatest concern.
The Declaration reportedly strengthens the demand for a national apology to Aborigines and bemoans the fact that there was never a treaty between Aborigines and white authorities. It also calls for "self-determination" which, as interpreted by many activists -- including CAR member and ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark -- means a much greater push for Aboriginal separatism.
All this suggests what many of us have long suspected. Some of the most vocal advocates of "Reconciliation" have no interest in a healing process which would create a unitary and harmonious nation and produce constructive solutions to Aboriginal disadvantage and resentment. Rather, they seek new issues that will help them to "maintain the rage" amongst their constituency, and further ways of making claims on non-Aboriginal Australia.
Many Aboriginal individuals and communities still suffer serious social and economic hardship. But one of their greatest misfortunes is that their misery is the plaything of middle class whites keen to engage in displays of conspicuous compassion, as well as being a resource for the cynical beneficiaries of the "Aboriginal industry", both black and white.
Until this ends Australia will never make genuine progress in solving Aboriginal problems. Any attempts to identify the real causes of these problems or to propose solutions which do not meet the psychological requirements of the breast-beaters, or which threaten the interests of the "Aboriginal industry", occasion a storm of righteous abuse.
An example of the harmful consequences of this situation was presented earlier this week by Bernard Lane, The Australian's legal correspondent. Lane wrote about Joan Kimm, a Monash University academic whose research forced her to conclude, against all her previous "politically correct" convictions, that "Aboriginal customary law had to carry much of the blame for the horrific violence suffered by Aboriginal women".
Unfortunately for Ms Kimm, the recognition of customary law has become a supposed pre-requisite for reconciliation -- although any effectiveness such law may once have had depended on punishments, including execution, that would cause even the most florid rednecks to blanch. So while she is now publicly discussing her work, Ms Kimm was initially so distressed by her findings and the reaction they might cause that she abandoned her research for 18 months, fearful of giving ammunition to "Pauline Hansonites".
Both John Howard and Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron seem to recognise the need to break the logjam that bedevils their attempts to chart a more constructive approach. Their strong focus on practical outcomes for Aborigines is admirable, but they continue to stumble on the important symbolic issues, allowing their political opponents to portray them as heartless at best, and racist at worst.
Even were the Prime Minister to offer an apology so grovelling as to embarrass the most sanctimonious member of the Australian Democrats, it would not be enough. New grounds for berating him and his government would quickly be invented, designed to ensure that the Coalition will forever be denied the moral high ground.
So Mr Howard should forget about ever winning over the cultural elites. But this does not mean that he should ignore the need to undermine their posturing by offering a worthy and morally justifiable alternative vision that could appeal to the majority of Australians, whether white or Aboriginal.
Perhaps he could begin by offering an appropriate apology to Aborigines. Not the destructive kind of apology he is currently being told he must make, which would enshrine Aboriginal victimhood; but one which would encourage Australians to reflect on what has really been wrong in our treatment of Aborigines.
The root cause of all the problems has been the belief that Aborigines are a different sort of human being from other Australians, with different kinds of rights and civil obligations. For over 200 years Aborigines have been treated as inferior and requiring protection -- either explicitly, as was the case in the past, or implicitly, as is the case with today's nostrums which seek to cosset Aborigines from facing the realities of individual responsibility and freedom.
As Peter Howson pointed out in the Courier-Mail a couple of weeks ago, all sides of politics have been guilty of this kind of thinking, of expecting Aborigines to conform to a different set of rules to those which apply to the rest of us. Mr Howard knows this is wrong, but because he has been generally ineffective in conveying this understanding to the Australian people, his government has not had the courage and the will to urge the radical rethink that is necessary. And for this, he should apologise.
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