Our Indigenous Debt
In these two speeches, delivered on the same day in Canberra in 2014, Tony Abbott says Australia has failed to care for its Indigenous people, and that the laconic Australian character can be attributed to Indigenous humour and stoicism.
‘A Stain on Our Soul’
House of Representatives, Canberra, 12 February 2014. Reporting on progress in “closing the gap”, an objective set by the previous Government six years earlier, Prime Minister Abbott notes that indigenous rates of child mortality and education participation have improved but that life-expectancy, employment, literacy and numeracy are still inadequate.
When Prime Minister Keating made his famous Redfern speech in 1992, I was an opposition staffer. My job was to disagree with everything he said. While I could quibble with aspects of that speech, I couldn’t disagree with its central point: that our failures towards Australia’s first people were a stain on our soul. That was a watershed moment for me, as for others.
Many of us have been on a long journey. I can’t say that I have always been where I am now. The further this journey has gone, the more, for me, Aboriginal policy has become personal rather than just political. It has become a personal mission to help my fellow Australians to open their hearts, as much as to change their minds, on Aboriginal policy. We are a great country – I firmly believe the best on Earth. But we will never be all that we should be until we do better in this.
There is no country on Earth where people are made more welcome. There is no country on Earth whose people have more innate generosity to others. Yet for two centuries – with fragrant exceptions, of course – Australians had collectively failed to show to Aboriginal people the personal generosity and warmth of welcome that we have habitually extended to the stranger in our midst.
Even as things began to change, a generation or two back, our tendency was to work “for” Aboriginal people rather than “with” them. We objectified Aboriginal issues rather than personalised them. We saw problems to be solved rather than people to be engaged with. If that hardness of heart was ever really to melt, I thought, that change had to include me. Because you can’t expect of others what you won’t de- mand of yourself. So as a backbencher, I spent a few days every year in central Australia and always included a dinner with Charlie Perkins. As a minister, I tried to spend a few days every year in remote Aboriginal communities – especially in Cape York and later in the APY lands for which my portfolios had particular responsibilities. Yet after 14 years in the parliament, I found that I had visited dozens of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander places and not spent more than 12 hours in any one of them.
As shadow minister for Aboriginal Affairs, I asked Noel Pearson if he would help me to spend some serious time in individual communi- ties where I could be useful – rather than just another seagull, as Aboriginal people so often called officious visitors. So I spent three weeks in 2008 as a teacher’s aide in Coen; 10 days in 2009 as a truancy helper in Aurukun; four days in 2011 doing bush carpentry near Hopevale; and another four days in 2012 helping to renovate the Aurukun school library. Later this year, as Prime Minister, I will spend a week in East Arnhem Land along with enough officials to make it, if only for a few days, the focus of our national government. After 226 years of intermittent interest at most, why shouldn’t Aboriginal people finally have the Prime Minister’s undivided attention for seven days!
None of this makes me more worthy or less fallible than any of my predecessors – but it does demonstrate that this Government is serious about Aboriginal policy. No less serious than it is about stopping the boats, fixing the budget, and building the roads of the 21st century.
I pay tribute to former prime minister John Howard for first proposing to recognise indigenous people in the constitution. I pay tribute to former prime minister Kevin Rudd for the national apology. I commend former prime minister Julia Gillard for continuing these annual Closing the Gap statements to focus the parliament’s attention on prob- lems that might otherwise be neglected or glossed over. I thank Kirstie Parker and Mick Gooda and members of the Closing the Gap steer- ing committee. I welcome the presence today of Warren Mundine and other members of the Prime Minister’s advisory council. I welcome the presence of Andrew Forrest and others working on indigenous employment. I especially welcome Fred Chaney, a former minister for Aboriginal affairs and mentor to me, whom I have often described as a distinguished elder – and who is now officially recognised as Senior Australian of the Year. And I acknowledge the Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes, who has personally demonstrated, when bitter offence could have been taken, the “better angels of our natures”. I welcome the first indigenous Member of the House of Representatives, Ken Wy- att, and the first indigenous woman member of this parliament, Senator Nova Peris – and I look forward to the day when the parliamentary representation gap is finally closed. Most of all I welcome everyone the length and breadth of this great land who wants tomorrow to be better than today.
I can report that our country is on track to achieve some of the Clos- ing the Gap targets. The target to halve the gap in child mortality within a decade is on track to be met.
We are already close to meeting the target to have 95 per cent of remote children enrolled for pre-school – and should soon know what percentage are actually attending as well as just enrolled. And the target to halve the gap in Year 12 attainment by 2020 is also on track to be met. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there’s almost no progress in closing the life ex- pectancy gap between Aboriginal and other Australians – which is still about a decade. There’s been very little improvement towards halving the gap in reading, writing and numeracy. And indigenous employment has, if anything, slipped backwards over the past few years. We are not on track to achieve the more important and meaningful targets. Because it’s hard to be literate and numerate without attending school; it’s hard to find work without a basic education; and it’s hard to live well without a job.
We are all passionate to Close the Gap. We may be doomed to fail – I fear – until we achieve the most basic target of all: the expectation that every child will attend school every day. Generally speaking, the more remote the school, the more excuses are made for poor attendance. Last year, in metropolitan areas, only 81 per cent of indigenous Year 9 students met the National Minimum Standards for reading. In very remote areas, just 31 per cent of indigenous students reached the same minimum standard. Yet it’s being demonstrated in places like Aurukun that a strong education in traditional culture is actually helped by a good education in English.
Right around our country, it should be possible to be proudly Aboriginal and a full participant in modern Australia. That doesn’t just mean access to a good education in cities, towns and remote settlements – it means actually going to school.
So I propose to add a new target to our existing Closing the Gap targets: namely to end the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous school attendance within five years. I hope I am here long enough to be judged on its achievement.
We will know that this gap has been all-but-closed when schools achieve 90 per cent plus attendance regardless of their percentage of Aboriginal students. This was the strong consensus of my indigenous advisory council’s first meeting: that no one ever received a good edu- cation by not going to school. Every day, in every school, the roll is taken. Every school knows its attendance rates. Every education depart- ment knows the attendance rate for every school. The lower the attendance rate, the more likely it is that a school has problems. The lower the attendance rate, the more likely it is that a school is failing its students. It’s the duty of every teacher and every education department to try to ensure that every child attends school unless there’s a very good reason.
One of the worst forms of neglect is failing to give children the education they need for a decent life. That’s why every state and territory has anti-truancy laws. That’s why the former government, to its credit, tried to quarantine welfare payments for families whose children weren’t at school. That’s why, at my first COAG meeting, every state and territory agreed with the Commonwealth on the need to publish at- tendance data from every school. And that’s why, at 40 remote schools, the Commonwealth is already funding new anti-truancy measures that, on day one of the 2014 school year, in some communities, seem to have boosted attendance from under 60 per cent to over 90 per cent.
Our job is to break the tyranny of low expectations. That’s why in- digenous school attendance data will be part of the next Closing the Gap report and all subsequent reports under this Government. The parliament will be brought up-to-date on the relative success or failure of Aboriginal education because a good education is fundamental to a good start in life.
Future Closing the Gap reports should also include data on work programme participation and data on communities without a police presence. These reports, after all, should be less about what government is doing and more about how people are living. We will know that Aboriginal people are living better when children go to school, adults go to work and the ordinary law of the land is respected and enforced.
The first Aboriginal member of this parliament, Senator Neville Bonner, once warned his colleagues that history would judge us all. We shouldn’t have to wait for the judgment of history and, thanks to these Closing the Gap statements, we don’t have to.
A fair go for Aboriginal people is far too important to be put off to the judgment of history. We have to provide it now – or as soon as we reasonably can. I am confident of this: amidst all the mistakes, disappointment and uncertain starts, the one failure that has mostly been avoided is lack of goodwill. Australians are now as proud of our indig- enous heritage as we are of all our other traditions. The challenge is to turn good intentions into better outcomes.
I am confident that, these days at least, for every one step backwards we are also taking two steps forward. To give just one example: on every ministerial visit to the APY lands, I used to complain that there were just eight police for 3000 people spread over an area the size of Scotland – and that none of them lived in any of the places where they were needed. Six years later, these are hardly model communities, but every substantial settlement has a permanent police presence – thanks to the good work of the South Australian Labor government – because this was an objective beyond politics.
As Fred Chaney has just said, reflecting on a lifetime of work with Aboriginal people: there is so much left to do but – in this area – these really are the very best of times.
There is probably no aspect of public policy on which there is more unity of purpose and readiness to give others the benefit of the doubt. On this subject, at least, our parliament is at its best. Our duty is to make the most of this precious moment.
Our Indigenous Character
Old Parliament House, Canberra, 12 February 2014. Prime Minister Abbott tells the annual Reconciliation Australia dinner, sponsored by Rio Tinto, the largest private employer of indigenous Australians, that formal recognition in the Constitution would be his “crowning achievement”.
Today, in the parliament, I spoke about the specific things that we could do to close the gap; in health, in education, in employment and in life expectancy. It was about concrete actions to produce concrete change. What I would like to speak about briefly this evening is about the symbolic change that our country needs too.
I am too young to have served in this building. There are very few members in the current parliament who actually served in this building when it was operating as a parliament, but I did come here back in 1999 for the constitutional convention which some of you would remember.
One of the most powerful speeches at that constitutional convention was the speech given by a friend, former senator Neville Bonner, who I had come to know as a member of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy on whose foundation council he served. He gave an extraordinary speech about how his people had suffered the indignity of dispossession, and had endured the life that had been given to them by more powerful newcomers. Part of that was the Crown. He said they came to accept it – perhaps reluctantly – but nevertheless they had come to accept it, and now another generation of white fellas were saying, “Well, we got it wrong we want to rip it off you” and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy.
It was a very, very powerful speech. In it he quoted an Indigenous poet, a Korean War veteran, Cec Fisher. It was a pretty black poem that Neville Bonner quoted. Talking about “for all the talk of reconciliation, time will not diminish the black deeds of history. We will carry forever the memories of the pain.” That was what Cec Fisher said and that is what Neville Bonner quoted.
Interestingly, some years later Cec Fisher wrote another poem which he called Reconciliation – a very different poem. He said, “We sit here to unite, we sit here black and white, we sit here in celebration, we sit here in education, we sit here no more hate and sorrow, we sit here planning our tomorrow, reconciliation is what it is all about, reconciliation we’re talking about it.”
Now, maybe it’s not the greatest poem. Maybe this is not Kenneth Slessor, it’s not Shakespeare or anything like that. But this is a decent, honest, Aboriginal Australian talking about the journey that he has been on and the patience, the decency and the forgiveness which is evident in that poem characterises the indigenous people who it has been my privilege and honour to meet over the last 20 years or so of my public life.
There is a great spirit in Indigenous people. I often think that we Australians underestimate the contribution that Indigenous people have made to our national ethos; the stoicism, the laconic humour, and the endurance that has come to characterise us as a nation. I doubt it came ashore in 1788 because, frankly, it doesn’t characterise the English, the Irish or the Scots but it came to characterise Australians. I suspect that the interaction on our frontier between the white fella and the black fella has produced in the Australian character that stoicism and that humour which is now very much a part of our ethos, indeed a part of our soul.
Now, when we came together as a nation, as a Commonwealth in 1901 we had a British heritage which was embodied in our constitution. We also had indigenous heritage which was very much part of us, but which was not in any way recognised or acknowledged in that constitution and it is high time that we rectify this defect.
I have nothing but admiration for our constitutional founders. I have nothing but pride in the history of Australia. That doesn’t mean that everything was perfect. That doesn’t mean that everything they did was right in every respect. It is overdue to do what we can to complete our constitution by finally acknowledging the indigenous people in it - significantly acknowledging indigenous people in that constitution.
But I don’t think anyone should underestimate the difficulty of that task. There is an abundance of goodwill. As Fred Chaney has said and as I have quoted a couple of times today these aren’t necessarily perfect times, they are not even necessarily great times but they are the best of times and there is no better time than now to push along with this.
As those of you who have followed the constitutional debates earlier in our history would know, it is easy to say no. Back in 1977 both major parties ordered a referendum supposedly to recognise local government in our constitution. As I recall, it was defeated basically because of a couple obscure Queensland Senators – habitual naysayers – ran a campaign which ultimately succeeded in obtaining a majority.
So, if we are going to succeed in this vital task, it is so important that all of us approach it in the spirit of that poet Cec Fisher, in his poem Reconciliation. To sit down in education, celebration, and in planning. It might take quite a long time. I know some of us are thinking let’s try to get it done in six months or 12 months or 18 months. If we could do it that quickly that would be magnificent but let us not underestimate how easy it is for people to become nervous and anxious about these things. We can’t be too ambitious and we can’t be too hasty because the worst thing that could happen for our country and for reconciliation would be for something to be put up that failed.
As far as I am concerned, if we can get this through in my time as prime minister I would regard it as a crowning achievement. But I have to say to you nothing worthwhile is easy. This is extremely worthwhile but we do have a big task ahead of us.
As far as I am concerned it is as worthwhile a task as anything we undertake but we have to be careful not to force people to take sides, because, if we do, some will take sides and it won’t be the right one. What we have to do is invite people to see things from the best perspective. We have to invite people to be their very best selves. In the same way that Cec Fisher was transformed; we have to invite all Australians to be transformed.
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