Pat Dodson's Address To ACTU Congress 2003
21 August 2003
I acknowledge the traditional owners of this part of the country, and I come in peace. We also want to recognise the role of the ACTU Congress historically in the struggle for justice for the poor and the dependent and the marginalised in Australian society.
Aboriginal people have been marginalised and unemployed in the course of the last century, and it looks like the new century is going to promise much of the same. So what do we have to look forward to when we wake up? In the morning, what do I see? What do Aboriginal people see in the world? We see the CDP program, Work For The Dole program, which has debilitated many of our communities and is in serious need of a rethink. We see the high incarceration rates that are continuing to remove the young men from our communities and our societies. I want to say something about that a bit later. We also see the public sector control programs that keep Aboriginal people dependent. Attached to those programs is the practical reconciliation approach that's located in the COAG policy arrangements which means it's not just the Commonwealth Government, but it's also the States that are required to engage in trying to shift the paradigm at the social levels of Aboriginal societies.
But what we see in reality is the domination of the agencies over the lives of the blacks. We see public service control over the lives of Aboriginal people. They are meant to be in partnership with the local Aboriginal people and the communities and it's supposed to be about capacity building and governance in these communities. But what they are about, really, is about conformity and compliance with the mainstream objectives, allowing little innovation to accommodate the underpinning cultural and social values of the Aboriginal communities. That means those values are subordinated to the ongoing thrust of assimilation in this country, that continuously tries to make us into something that we aren't.
There are some interesting reflections that I can't share with you today but that I do have about this Australian approach to the Solomon Islands. After 85 years of UK rule there, Australia now turns up bringing in ex-patriates to assist people to learn about governance and administration and to try and develop an economy. There are parallels in relation to the indigenous societies in this country, because the fundamental challenges are the same: the challenges like governance, the challenges about skills, the challenges about administration, about transparency, and fundamentally the identity and rights of the people.
The problems that exist in Aboriginal communities are not simply of the Aboriginal people's making. They are contributed to by the ineptitude of programs and those who deliver them. The resultant accountability is not to the Aboriginal people, but to their political masters. Even when the agencies talk about frameworks agreements, they're often posed as a carrot to the practical reconciliation approach. The problem of this approach is that it moves away from a genuine dialogue between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and turns to an introspective focus on supervising indigenous people's behaviour.
This new brand of assimilation is like SARS is to the flu. Every citizen is entitled to equal access to health, education and welfare as a basic right in this country. Trading this fundamental right off as a practical reconciliation means a genuine reconciliation in Australia is not achievable because there's no dialogue.
Aboriginal affairs has to be about rebuilding the Aboriginal nations. It is not just about the populist campaigns, worthy as they might be, to deal with the social ills in our community. Ills like violence and abuse and drugs and exploitation, excessive alcohol, which lead in any society - not just in ours, but in any society - lead to a loss of quality of life. It leads to suffering, sadness and poverty - poverty in fact and poverty in spirit. That results in hopelessness and despair.
There's no human being in the word that is willing or that would willingly desire that form of life, and we Aboriginal people certainly do not. These are things that all happen in a context. They don't just happen by chance, and there is a cause for them, for them being in the centrality of people's lives. What makes Aboriginal affairs complex is that not only do you have to deal with what is real and in your face, but you also have to deal with the rights of the indigenous people which have never been acknowledged and agreed. So you try to deal with those two dilemmas, whilst in the process of trying to rebuild and restore the lives of people in your community. Dressing up ordinary citizen rights and calling it practical reconciliation does not address this complexity. Rather, it pulls the wool over middle Australia's eyes that the government is actually doing something.
At present, the Commonwealth Government has shifted the agenda from responsibilities a national government ought to have taken under the 67 Referendum. It shifted it back to the states and further down to the regions. It is a case of out of sight and out of mind for most Australians, except for the occasional sensational headline about what is wrong in indigenous societies or what is wrong with indigenous people. It's that mantra that we hear too much of, that it's really up to the blacks and it's their fault and they'll have to fix it. That mantra is the most debilitating matter for many in the indigenous community who struggle on a daily basis to change and transform their situations against huge odds.
What we need in Australia are agreements about some standard things: things like service delivery, native title rights and interest and how they are to be exercised and enjoyed, the creation of job opportunities and economic development, cultural heritage. For these things to occur, fundamentally there needs to be Constitutional change in this country, and there needs to be a treaty.
This needs to be underpinned by what is referred to as the cultural match: that is, the matching-up of indigenous people's essential cultural and social value systems and where they interface with those of the broader society or the mainstream society and where the broader society is in fact prepared to adapt and change its ways to allow for the indigenous ways to have prominence of place in the formalities of citizenship rights and in the shared life of this country.
These things are not a threat to middle Australia. They would allow Aboriginal people to fully take up their responsibilities in a way that is consistent with their social, their cultural, spiritual values and obligations in order to ensure our political voice beyond the three year electoral cycle. This would enable us to take our rightful place as Australians in an Australia that prides itself upon its own democracy.
What we still have to deal with as a nation is a continuing fear manifested in the current Federal Government that we might come up with something that will enable indigenous people to get some decent outcomes. Being marginalised from employment is a manifestation of the fundamental marginalisation of indigenous people from the sources of wealth, from the political forums of the land, and moreover from the life of the nation. What we are talking about here is the survival and sustainability of the world's oldest living continuous culture. It requires more than indigenous people being assimilated into the middle classes. It takes political will and honest dialogue. In this task we value and need the support of non-Aboriginal people, especially those like the union movement who are dedicated to a just Australia.
Thank you.
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Stephen Webb Media Officer Communications Unit NSW Synod, Uniting Church in Australia Box A2178, Sydney South, NSW 1235, Australia email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +61 2 82674308; Fax: 92674716; Web: nsw.uca.org.au/cu/ & insights.uca.org.au/ ------------------ The Communications Unit publishes the monthly magazine Insights, conducts public relations for the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church, and provides a variety of communications services. These include writing, editing, web consultation and development, desktop publishing and graphic design, public relations and advertising. For a consultation or free estimate on your project call the Communications Unit at (02) 8267 4307.
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