I was reading one of the best, and the funniest, book on Australia I have ever read -- Bill Bryson's Down Under -- when I came across a passage which was a revelation, as one does when reading witty and perceptive observations by an outsider about the otherwise familiar. On page 125, Bryson writes "that was another very British thing I'd noticed about Australians -- they apologised for things that weren't their fault".
I read this and thought: now I understand all about National Sorry Day and the apology John Howard won't make.
John Howard's problem is that he takes his formal responsibilities as Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia very seriously. If he is to offer an official apology then it must be for something the Commonwealth of Australia did. Since, from 1901 to 1967, the Commonwealth had, very explicitly, no legislative responsibility for indigenous Australians, except in the Northern Territory and the ACT, and since, compared to what many of the States did, the administration of indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, certainly from 1949 on and arguably considerably earlier, was a model of enlightenment, then it follows that it is not appropriate for the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia to offer an apology for something that neither his Government, nor preceding Commonwealth Governments going back more than half Australia's life as a federated nation, did.
Moreover, if you offer an apology, and you are serious, then that implies a willingness to make restitution or compensation. As the person ultimately responsible for proper dispersal of taxpayer funds, offering apologies likely to be followed by substantial demands for cash for something the Commonwealth of Australia didn't do becomes doubly repugnant.
John Howard's problem is that, because he is Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia he is also Tribal Leader, and many people want our Tribal Leader do something felt to be Tribally Appropriate. And, as Bryson notes, it is very Australian to say sorry for things that aren't our fault.
People want, nay demand, an Aussie politeness apology, the sort of thing any Australian is likely to offer someone in distress. A gesture of sympathy and understanding.
Now, if John Howard were more of a showman politician, he would understand this, and offer some apology in a flash, with some suitable disarming rider to cut off any cash claims. A Clinton or a Blair would carry it off without hesitation, even with panache. But Honest John has the outlook and conscientiousness of the solicitor he used to be. Such duplicitous flair is just not in his nature. So, no apology.
He has offered a statement of sorrow and regret which, one would think, would satisfy the demands for a gesture of sympathy and understanding. This is not true for two reasons; one his fault, one not.
The reason which is his fault is that he, and his Government, have offered no explanatory context for his expression of regret. In a democratic polity, the role of leadership is to connect enduring sentiments to contemporary needs by rhetoric and action. There has been action, but nothing remotely resembling a coherent explanation of what is needed, and why what has been done reflects what is needed. In this, as in so much else, this is a rhetorically challenged Government.
So, the statement of sorrow and regret just hangs there, connected to nothing, and lacking resonance because it is a solitary statement, lacking any developed context.
Of course, to develop such a context involves investment in intellectual capital: something the Liberal Party is very bad at. John Howard, outside a few economic areas, shares this Liberal incapacity.
The other reason why the statement of sorrow and regret has not worked is because the contemporary public agenda of so-called indigenous issues is overwhelmingly driven by the moral vanity of the Australian intelligentsia.
That agenda is all about words and gestures -- saying "sorry", sorry books, a Treaty, statements of indigenous rights, policing public language, pontificating about (and greatly exaggerating the extent of) the "stolen generation". It is about generating and defending a set of approved opinions which function as moral assets (hence the enthusiasm with which that intelligentsia, particularly many journalists, fell for the Hindmarsh Island concoction). It is not about anything even vaguely resembling a serious agenda for advancing the long term interests of indigenous Australians.
The moral vanity game is all about being ahead of a designated set of moral inferiors, so it is about constantly upping the ante. "Sorrow and regret" is therefore not good enough -- it must be an apology. If an apology was offered it then would not be good enough -- too late, too begrudging, and not backed by compensation. The forcible removal of wanted children from functioning families -- which happened at some places at some times -- becomes genocide, and so on.
In all the settler societies, the indigenous peoples have major and endemic problems. The reasons are not particularly mysterious, but are acute in the case of Australia.
The scattered and diverse indigenous societies of mainland Australia had not experienced the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic Age. They did not create settled, urban communities. They did not create any political structures which extended beyond people personally known to each other. Their cultures were rich in many ways -- the richness of indigenous Australian art is even now exciting the art world -- and their ancestors engaged in ocean-going voyages long before any other human society.
But all the things indigenous Australian cultures had not done made them spectacularly ill-equipped to deal ineffectively with the immeasurably more capable invading British one. Ill-equipped to resist, ill-equipped to participate. These problems linger. For example, cultures which have no concept of formal obligations beyond kin-groups have enormous difficulty running large organisations. In these, nepotism and cronyism are sins of breaching formal obligations but in a system of kin-based obligations, they represent virtue. Nor can, as my colleague Ron Brunton points out, one achieve industrial-age life expectancies with hunter-gatherer notions of good health practice, and success in improving indigenous health has to deal with real barriers, however ideologically awkward they may be.
Dispossession is often cited as the European Original Sin which is the root of the problems of indigenous Australia. The problem with that hypothesis that Aboriginal communities which have experienced the least dispossession often have the worst health and other profiles of social pathology.
As Lawrence Harrison explains in the latest issue of The National Interest, scholars are increasingly looking to culture to explain differing social outcomes.
The essential problem for indigenous Australia is surely cultural distance and cultural collapse. The result of that cultural distance has been an endemic and continuing disconnection between indigenous and other Australians. The vileness of the White Australia policy was not in its exclusion of non-European migrants -- even at its height, White Australia was less ethnically exclusory than is contemporary Japanese citizenship policy. The vileness of White Australia was something quite different. Talking of preserving a White Australia literally whited-out indigenous Australia.
The solution to cultural distance and collapse is cultural adaptation and renewal. Now, run through in your mind the items in the contemporary public agenda of "indigenous issues". What is likely to make a serious contribution to indigenous cultural renewal and cultural adaptation? Saying "sorry"? Exaggerating the "stolen generation"? Statements of indigenous rights? Demands for a treaty that no government could accede to?
In fact, much of that agenda is harmful. The vicious policing of public debate on indigenous issues in order to preserve the intelligentsia's moral assets makes even discussing problems and difficulties within indigenous cultures either extremely difficult or simply forbidden. Debate is made difficult even for people with impeccable Aboriginal credentials. Noel Pearson was promptly abused for pointing out that welfarism -- the manna from heaven approach to income -- massively undermines development of functional roles in a modern economy and the incentive to renew and adapt.
It makes it difficult for welfare agencies to carry out their proper roles. In his article in the April 15 Spectator, Michael Duffy tells the sad tale of a 22-month Aboriginal baby girl found stabbed and covered with bruises and bite-marks in her inner city Sydney home; social workers having not dared to intervene, lest they perpetuate the "stolen generation". Extreme examples maybe, but of a type that is all too common.
Even native title is a deeply flawed process since the form of property rights given, by statute and by High Court decision, is spectacularly and needlessly ill-designed for effective participation in a modern commercial economy. It is, however, very well designed to maximise angst and economic disruption for minimum gain -- the current slide in mineral exploration in Australia is, in part, due to the screwing up of rural property rights, a consequence not merely predictable, but predicted (see my 1997 Past Wrongs, Future Rights, pages 116-117).
That indigenous policy has been denied honest analysis of the needs of indigenous Australians is surely one reason that it has been such an unhappy failure, with many indicators of indigenous well-being remaining static or even regressing over the past 30 years.
To contemplate the current politics of indigenous issues is to understand what self-indulgent, self-righteous shits the progressivist Australian intelligentsia really are. Michael Duffy writes "in 50 years' time, people will look back in horror and wonder how intelligent and powerful white people could have let such things happen while professing so strenuously their concern for black welfare and their superiority to previous generations". He is right, and at least part of the explanation of failure is to be found in those pretensions to superiority.
John Howard should lift his game, but it is not he who should be saying "sorry".
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