The column observed that local action on these matters could circumvent the failure of our national government to take up the Statement’s proposals for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations advisory Voice to parliament, a Truth-telling process, and a Treaty.
To my knowledge, nothing much is happening with any such matters at the local level in Newcastle, and Reconciliation Week and the recent first anniversary of the signing of the historic Uluru Statement from the Heart passed by with little local activity or acknowledgement.
However, state and territory governments elsewhere have recently stepped in where others have feared - or not sufficiently cared - to tread, introducing legislation that takes up some of the Uluru Statement’s proposals.
At the time of writing, the Victorian parliament is considering legislation to establish a First Nations body to advise it on matters affecting that state’s First Nations people, and to start the process of negotiating a Treaty between the state government and Victoria’s Indigenous people.
The Northern Territory government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Territory’s First Nations people, at the ironically symbolic site of Barunga, where the then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, promised a Treaty 30 years ago.
The Barunga Statement that triggered that unfulfilled promise now gathers dust in Parliament House in Canberra.
The current MOU is part of an ongoing process designed to culminate in a Treaty between the Territory government and the Territory’s First Nations people.
In the only Commonwealth country without such a Treaty, these are significant historic moments in our national journey toward Reconciliation.
The 1960 Referendum vote removing discriminatory provisions from the Australian Constitution, the 1992 High Court finding of Native Title, and Kevin Rudd’s justly famous 2008 Apology for the Stolen Generation – the last two of which were marked by conservative panic about the end of Australian society as we know it - marked other significant steps along the way.
Key future destinations on the journey must be a national Treaty, informed by a national truth-telling process, and incorporating a genuine voice for First Nations people in national legislation (what the Uluru Statement, and other previous Statements, have referred to as “Makarrata”).
The journey will not be a smooth one.
Some of the opposition to the recent Victorian and Northern Territory initiatives show that some Australians would rather tighten their blindfolds than acknowledge the increasingly obvious truth about Australia’s colonial past.
The full extent of the injustices of that past are still being uncovered, largely through the efforts of historians and writers such as Henry Reynolds, Paul Irish and Bob Pascoe, whose carefully researched work has definitively debunked old colonial fictions that established and sustained the doctrine of terra nullius, and exposed the falsehood of frontier settler narratives about the passivity of Indigenous people and their ostensibly primitive cultural practices.
The wealth of modern Australia is substantially built on the foundation of this dark colonial past, mired in unresolved, and often unacknowledged and suppressed, injustices toward Indigenous people.
The recent moves toward Treaties represent a significant shift in government approaches.
Until this, contemporary policy approaches to Indigenous disadvantage have focussed on so-called “practical Reconciliation”, a term coined in the Howard years to generally describe service-delivery models aimed at improving Indigenous health, housing and education.
However, the Federal government’s controversial Intervention and Closing the Gap policies (both examples of “practical Reconciliation” and supported by Coalition and Labor) have largely failed Indigenous communities.
Last year’s Uluru Statement from the Heart was a cry from Indigenous communities for something beyond previous campaigns for symbolic constitutional recognition and the failure of so-called “practical Reconciliation”, and toward structural change.
The pursuit of justice for Australia’s First Nations people is as much – if not more - a matter for non-Indigenous Australians as for First Nations people themselves, as Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Statement acknowledged.
The final words of the Uluru Statement are directly addressed to non-Indigenous Australians:
“We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.”
After its rejection by the Turnbull government, the Uluru Statement is currently being taken around Australia, seeking signatures from ordinary Australians as part of a grassroots campaign for change (it hasn’t yet visited Newcastle).
In their own ways, the Victorian and Northern Territory governments have taken up the Statement’s invitation. What NSW and our local community will do remains to be seen.
