The promise of an Australian homecoming

Comment by Megan Davis

there is an uncritical but flawed assumption that Aboriginal people are unquestionably Australian republicans. Professor Marcia Langton, responding to republican ridicule of the pomp and circumstance of the British royal family, pointed out that many Aboriginal people in fact have deep respect for the ceremony of the Crown, because our culture understands the power of ritual and symbolism. Such customary protocols speak to the conservatism of culture – it is slow to change − but provide continuity between the past and the present. Today in Australia, an ancient cultural practice relating to the regulation of strangers on country, born of recognition, relatedness and reciprocity, has become a welcoming convention for the nation.

Welcome to Country protocol is exercised at the openings of parliament, the legal year, conferences, sporting fixtures and graduation ceremonies. Those who have traced the contemporary iteration of Welcome to Country from the classical pre-contact period to today say its resurgence can be traced to the ’80s, the land-rights era. It is a cultural practice, but it is also a legal and political act. The odd politician raises questions about relevance or empty symbolism, apropos the disadvantage in many communities, but, by and large, it is accepted. Performative. Ritualistic. Respectful. It is a ubiquitous feature of the Australian cultural landscape.

Welcome to Country can be distinguished from an acknowledgement of country. The distinguishing feature is that the former is delivered by a traditional owner and the latter is not. Unlike Welcome to Country, the acknowledgement of country, when delivered by a non-indigenous person, has been known to animate discomfort among Aboriginal people. A few years

ago, Bundjalung woman and actor Rhoda Roberts lamented its perfunctory nature, observing that it often “lacks heart”. It can stir the simmering tension over the Australian polity’s proclivity only for empty symbolism as opposed to substantive rights. There has been a notable proliferation of its use by non-indigenous Australia in correlation to the diminution of Aboriginal rights, particularly property rights. Of course, many have persuaded themselves that because Aboriginal people do not “own” the land, then the apparent paradox is inconsequential – hence the exaggerated pause on the word “custodianship” in such acknowledgements. And ironically, during National Reconciliation Week this year, while many were pursuing the to-do list of activities aimed at reconciling the native and coloniser – such as adding native foods to stir-frys, and showcasing the practice of acknowledgement of country – we heard the news that Rio Tinto obliterated from the face of the earth some of the oldest Aboriginal heritage sites known to mankind, believed to connect the ancient polity of that area to 46,000 years ago. These examples highlight the tensions between acknowledgement protocols and the facts of the ground.

Of greater intrigue, though, is a puzzling incantation that was unilaterally added to the typical acknowledgement phrasing and has raised many eyebrows in the Aboriginal community. This is the recognition of “emerging leaders” or “emerging elders” alongside elders past and present, which is somewhat of a contrivance in a gerontocracy like ours. Perhaps more unnerving is that no one can pinpoint from where precisely the artifice emerged.

For an Aboriginal person, acknowledgements of country provoke a variety of reactions. When I was co-commissioner for the Queensland commission of inquiry into Queensland youth detention centres or chair of the New South Wales inquiry into Aboriginal out-ofhome care − bearing witness to the dehumanising and violent behaviour of corrections officers or the unlawful conduct of case workers − acknowledgements were intolerable. On other occasions I share the sentiment of the very clever young jarjums of Aboriginal Tiktok, who wittily convey the awkwardness of being the only Aboriginal person in the room when the acknowledgement of country is delivered. On bad days, an acknowledgement assumes an elegiac form, a sorrowful lament by the stranger who knows only too well that they have taken your land. On good days, I feel pride that Australians are learning the name of the First Nation of the soil upon which they were born or arrived, or live and work. For other Aboriginal people it incites feelings of resentment. I recall an incident involving a nonaboriginal colleague who was outraged when an Aboriginal woman, invited to deliver an acknowledgement – which sometimes Aboriginal people do when it is not their own country – refused to do so when she took to the lectern. She declared the acknowledgement protocol as meaningless and existing only to assuage the guilt of white Australians. My colleague was appalled because she saw herself as well-meaning and regarded the political stance of the Aboriginal woman impolite. Despite the likely antecedents of this anger being explained to her, she found it near impossible to view the world through this Aboriginal woman’s eyes. It reminded me of behavioural scientist Paul Bloom’s argument “against empathy”: empathy can be a blockage to law reform because it does not allow good intentions to transcend into meaningful change. These allies are the ones who think symbolic recognition is sufficient: anything is better than nothing, they chant.

It is one thing to have an “acknowledgement” that property rights were taken away; it is another for the rights-depriver to add things, unsolicited and unilaterally, to the acknowledgement formula, further weakening our culture and strengthening their own. A few unscientific enquiries by Indigenous Twitter once traced the origins of the “emerging leaders” to the Queensland bureaucracy. This is probably an urban myth. However, it would come as no surprise that it originated in a bureaucracy, given the role bureaucracies have played in assimilation, and continue to play. From the time anthropologists ran Indigenous affairs to the current Hunger Games-esque National Indigenous Australians Agency, the state has sought overt and covert ways to control and assimilate Indigenous peoples. Consequently, many view the “emerging leader” coda as an unwelcome addition. How to circumvent the sage advice of elders and battle-weary leaders? “Emerging leaders.” Who gets to define what an “emerging leader” is? Not the collective. When the Referendum Council engaged the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) to organise the constitutional dialogues, it was never debated, let alone disputed, that traditional owners and other elders were our cultural authority and would underpin the decision-making of dialogues.

The discomfort with the term “emerging leaders” is far from a repudiation of youth. Our gundoos, our jarjums, our young people, constitute the majority population in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Our young people drive much of what we devote our lives to. The Uluru Statement from the Heart singles out our young people in detention: “Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.”

The uneasiness many feel with the “emerging leader” trope is a lament for the relentless and pernicious chipping away at culture. The Howard years saw the dichotomising of reconciliation, into “practical” and “symbolic” reconciliation. Practical reconciliation

Unlike Welcome to Country, the acknowledgement of country has been known to animate discomfort among Aboriginal people.

meant ostensibly hard-headed policies aimed at socioeconomic disadvantage, health, education, employment and housing. We know now that this approach has incontrovertibly failed to address disadvantage. The matters that Howard regarded as “symbolic” were advocacy for the right to self-determination, an apology, reparations, treaty and land rights. This bifurcation of reconciliation means Australia, for two decades, has delayed grappling with the pillars of reconciliation, truth and justice. And if Howard decoupled the rights agenda from reconciliation, the reconciliation movement aligned with Howard.

Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPS), a very Australian innovation dating back to 2006, became the centrepiece of practical reconciliation. They set targets for Indigenous procurement and Indigenous employment. Over the years, this approach deeply troubled many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people because they felt that reconciliation in Australia had been separated from the truth-telling and the pursuit of justice: what is the truth and what does repair look like?

Harvard sociologist Charlotte Lloyd studied Australia’s reconciliation process because she found it was unique in the world. While almost all reconciliation processes derive necessarily from the foundations of truth and justice, Australia’s did not. It cannot be viewed as sitting within a continuum of truth-telling from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody or the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, because of the countervailing policy considerations that sit behind the genesis of the legislated reconciliation process. Lloyd studied the RAP program involving nearly 1000 governments, corporates and community organisations and covering 25 per cent of the Australian workforce. She describes this approach as “creative reconciliation”, as it provides practical actions for citizen engagement and corporate citizenship, so that reconciliation is not left entirely to the government. Lloyd’s conclusion, though, was that RAPS do not “invite the deep consideration of violent and racist policies of the Australian state that led to current inequalities”. Lloyd argues that RAPS do not associate reconciliation “with structural political change such as land rights, indigenous sovereignty, or treaty”. More importantly, she argues that:

… ultimately RAPS promote understandings of indigenous difference that leave organizations and their members ill equipped to understand persistent sources of conflict in indigenous and non-indigenous relations, particularly those stemming from indigenous aspirations for social change, that would have to be driven by structural political reform, rather than by voluntary gestures from private individuals.

These concerns for the shortcomings of reconciliation align with the sentiment expressed in the constitutional dialogues that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. They also align with the deep discomfort at the “emerging leaders” trope.

Uluru was a gamechanger. If treaty was the British Crown’s solution to dispossession elsewhere, the Uluru statement is the Australian solution to a very Australian problem. The dialogues sought to inject the one thing that had been decoupled from the recognition process: truth-telling about Australian history. Uluru reoriented Australian reconciliation to where it should be: what is the truth and what does repair look like? The reform agenda spoke to Voice, Makarrata and Truth:

Solidarity with Black Lives Matter in the United States galvanised a growing sentiment in Australia that the time for change is upon us.

The invasion of our land was met by resistance. But colonisation and dispossession cut deeply into our societies, and we have mourned the ancestors who died in the resistance, and the loss of land, language and culture. Through the activism of our leaders we have achieved some hard-won gains and recovered control over some of our lands. After the Mabo case, the Australian legal system can no longer hide behind the legal fiction of terra nullius. But there is Unfinished Business to resolve.

Following the work of the Referendum Council, it is no secret that the politicians took a long time to understand this reorienting of the reconciliation movement. To this day, Malcolm Turnbull still does not. But some of the RAP sector – those who took seriously the work of talking to their Indigenous workforce as core business and not tick-a-box corporate social responsibility – intuitively understood the Uluru statement. While RAPS represent a “practical reconciliation” approach, the emphasis on “having a say” in practical matters helped the sector’s comprehension of the voice to parliament. This was an unexpected consequence of Australia’s unconventional approach to reconciliation. Now, these supporters of Uluru no longer need RAPS. RAPS are to the Indigenous workforce what acknowledgements of country are to the Australian parliament. A protected voice in the Constitution would mean First Nations matters are core business to the nation, not an add-on.

In National Reconciliation Week, we saw Reconciliation Australia kick Rio Tinto out of its RAP program for destroying ancient Aboriginal sites. Who saw that coming? Reconciliation with teeth! Since Uluru, we have seen a lot of shifting sand. Solidarity with Black Lives Matter in the United States galvanised a growing sentiment in Australia that the time for change is upon us. Aboriginal lawyer and Barkindji woman Gemma Mckinnon, whom I mentored through the Uluru process, put it this way:

Australian governments have become comfortable with the idea of symbolic forms of Reconciliation. We have endured years of lemon myrtle-dusted morning teas, flag raisings, and screenings of Rabbit Proof Fence, yet institutionalised racism prevails everywhere I look. The idea that First Nations people deserve a constitutionally enshrined role in our political system is deemed repugnant by the political elite like Turnbull and Wyatt. Symbolism has got us nowhere.

I would call Gemma an “emerging leader”, but she knows, as I do, that only our elders can bestow such a title. The world is changing beneath our feet. An invitation was issued to the Australian people three years ago at Uluru and support is growing. If not now, when? When our voice is protected in the Constitution from the vagaries of ideology and party politics, we will be heard, and we can have a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia. It is only then that the acknowledgement of country will become less ritualistic and performative. It will no longer be an Australian welcoming; it will be an Australian homecoming.

M

So what winners should we pick? The gas industry wants public money to build it a transcontinental pipeline and the coal industry wants us to build it a so-called high-efficiency low-emission coal-fired power station. But what if we built things that benefited our citizens rather than our corporations?

What new businesses should we build? And how should we choose between all of the options we face? Let’s start small. What could Australia do for the cost of one more Snowy 2.0?

You could install a lot of solar panels with battery storage for $5 billion. At a conservative $10,000 per system you could slash the electricity bills of half a million Australian families or community organisations. Rolling out such a program over three years would provide training pathways for tens of thousands of workers. And the end result would be to boost electricity supply, drive down power bills and lower Australian emissions.

But a small-scale project like that would be a missed opportunity. Putting solar panels on individual roofs is one of the most expensive ways to install renewables. It would be far cheaper for a newly created governmentowned enterprise – let’s call it Solar 1.0 – to build a vast network of large solar farms around the country in places where land is cheap, there’s lots of sunshine, and where the distances to workers and customers isn’t too great. For the cost of two Snowy 2.0s we could be the owners of a $10 billion renewable and storage company as big as AGL, and we would still have spent only 5 per cent of the recent stimulus announcements.

But why stop at where our houses get their electricity? For $5 billion, we could build around 20,000 four-bedroom houses on Commonwealth or state government land. For the next 50 years the government could rent them out to women fleeing domestic violence, or to the unemployed, age pensioners, key workers or lifelong members of the Liberal Party. No matter who was deemed “worthy” enough to live in them, the houses would immediately create jobs where they are needed, and lower the general cost of housing for decades.

If that sounds radical, bear in mind that the government is already funding a similar scheme. According to the (not top secret) website of the publicly owned Defence Housing Australia: “We provide quality housing and related services to Defence members and families. In doing this, we support the operational, recruitment and retention goals of the Department of Defence. To meet our Defence housing obligations, we are active in Australian residential housing markets, acquiring and developing land, and constructing and purchasing houses.”

As of June 2019, Defence Housing Australia had 17,948 properties under management, worth a combined $11.2 billion. The organisation not only provided subsidised housing services to tens of thousands of Defence personnel and their families, it generated a profit of $40 million for its owners (that’s us).

Needless to say, Defence personnel are worthy recipients of publicly owned housing, but are they really the only worthy recipients? When did we have that debate? Soldiers, prime ministers and vice-chancellors get public housing, so why can’t nurses, teachers and the unemployed?

It’s not ideology or economics that stops the federal government investing in the things the public wants more of. It’s that we misunderstand what governments already do, and we’re reluctant to look into the simple truth hidden in plain sight: our governments have always been willing to spend a fortune helping some groups while pretending we “can’t afford” to support other groups.

Despite the enormous human and economic costs of COVID-19, Australia is still one of the richest countries in the world. While the federal government’s debt has grown to $441 billion, luckily our national income of $2009 billion means that our debt accounts for only 22 per cent of GDP, which is far lower than it was at the end of World War Two, and far lower than the advanced country average of 83 per cent.

The economic problem isn’t that we have taken on debt in the past few months. The economic problem is that we have never had a debate about what we want more of, so there is no chance all that debt can solve all of our problems. (Imagine if we didn’t let our kids decide what degree they did but made them pay HECS for it anyway.)

So how should we decide what to spend it on? If jobs are the priority, as is so often said, the first thing to realise is that in a recession any additional public-sector spending will create public-sector jobs. There is nothing economically magical about building roads or bridges. Spending billions on infrastructure will create some jobs, and spending billions on health and education will create even more.

The second thing to realise is that not all public spending creates the same number of jobs. Every million dollars spent on labour-intensive activities such as aged care and childcare creates, literally, 10 times as many jobs as a million dollars spent on construction or mining projects. And when it comes to creating jobs for women, government spending on education and health is much more effective than spending on construction or mining.

And, finally, if Australia builds things that the public wants more of, and will need in the future, there’s little chance that at the end of this crisis we will be stuck with things we don’t want or need. Economists have no unique skill in identifying which projects Australia should build, but luckily democracy does. If only we would put relevant questions to the public and listen to their answers. Now you see why the Coalition works so hard to pretend it’s opposed to public spending.

Every million dollars spent on aged care and childcare creates, literally, 10 times as many jobs as a million dollars spent on construction or mining projects.

M