Joe Stella, Quadrant, 27 May 2024
Every year, Reconciliation Australia Limited (RAL) marks the period between the anniversaries of the 1967 referendum (May 217) and the Mabo judgment (June 3) as National Reconciliation Week. Last year, the theme was “Be a Voice for generations”, a reference to the looming referendum. This year’s theme, “Now more than ever”, reflects the organisation’s unprocessed shock and denial at the result. According to RAL, “as a nation we stumbled” but “the fight” must continue.
Really? RAL has now been operating for 23 years, more than twice as long as the statutory Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation that preceded it. As I have argued in a new paper for Close the Gap Research, “surely so emphatic a defeat of what advocates called ‘an act of reconciliation’ demands an objective assessment of the continued viability of that process.”
That assessment must begin with a difficult and still largely unexplored question: Is reconciliation what Aborigines actually want? In an address delivered during the last Reconciliation Week, ‘Yes’ campaigner Megan Davis cast serious doubt on this. During consultations in the lead-up to the 2017 Uluru Statement, she told a Townsville audience, “our old people kept saying, unsolicited and organically, that reconciliation was the wrong process, that reconciliation was the wrong word.”
We do not know how many of these “old people” there were, much less whether they represent a significant body of opinion among Aborigines. However, Davis’ comments are helpful because they at least acknowledge the diprotodon in the room. Reconciliation has always been promoted as a means to cement national unity. As such, it is inimical to a radical Aboriginal rights agenda centred on the indicia of a separate race-based nationhood: sovereignty, self-determination, international recognition, treaties, embassies and so on.
The Uluru Statement endorses the Aboriginal nationalist program first developed by the National Aboriginal Conference between 1979 and 1981. This includes Aboriginal sovereignty, a treaty (makarrata), reparations and recognition of customary law. The Voice to Parliament, the brainchild of non-Aboriginal academic Shireen Morris, was a novel addition. As later accounts of the convention that produced the Uluru Statement demonstrate, a treaty was the top priority for many delegates. They needed to be persuaded that the Voice was a necessary preliminary measure. This tension is reflected in the final text of the Statement, which characterises a treaty as “the culmination of our agenda”.