Mind the Gap

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a radical manifesto by inner-city protesters that will enfeeble Parliament and not solve indigenous disadvantage, says Nick Cater.

Before getting too excited about the next symbolic act of reconciliation, let’s take stock of the last.

The annual Closing the Gap report is one of the few useful bureaucratic exercises initiated by Kevin Rudd. It runs an empirical measure of progress since of his 2008 apology. The news is bad. Aboriginal children are more likely to die before they reach five than children in Lebanon. Infant mortality is 2.4 times higher than those of other Australians. Life expectancy for an indigenous male is on a par with that of men in Nicaragua but is 8½ years shorter than that of other Australian males.

Reluctantly we must conclude that, while Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was cathartic for some, the gap between fine words and practical deeds is no narrower. If changing the Constitution could be linked to practical improvement, a referendum might actually get up. In today’s nebulous, ambiguous and inelegant form, it’s a non-starter.

Stripped of its pretty rhetoric, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a radical manifesto for constitutional change that will enfeeble parliament and weaken democracy. It is explicitly designed as a first step towards more ambitious reforms, including a treaty and the granting of some form of sovereign separation.

The very idea of a Voice to parliament, a single voice with a capital V as opposed to the plurality of voices that speak to it now, is troubling in itself. To see pre-settlement Australia as a single entity is to see it through Western eyes rather than through the eyes of Aborigines, who coexisted in hundreds of mini-republics speaking different languages and who treated one another as foreigners, as Geoffrey Blainey writes in Triumph of the Nomads.

Yet we are asked to pretend that some 10 generations later the descendants of these first nations speak with a single voice decided by a subprime democratic mechanism run by an untouchable bureaucracy. We are being asked to believe that, unlike any other bureaucracy that came before it, this one will be resistant to capture and mission creep.

Daniel Andrews’s government in Victoria, a first adopter of muddle-headed ideas, offers a clue as to how it would work in practice.

In January last year, the government appointed a Treaty Advancement Commissioner to set up the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. Its first task was to establish a First Peoples’ electorate of traditional owners. Anyone prepared to sign a declaration that they identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and that they are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent is accepted as such by the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community and can enrol.

It’s not known how many have signed up to vote, but one suspects business is slow given the inducements the commission is offering.

“Be one of the first to enrol for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria elections and your child could run out with the team, as the Richmond FC Junior Mascot or be a part of the Guard of Honour on the field,” the commission announced in May. The prize included the opportunity to visit Richmond Football Club change rooms, the Richmond Football Club Dreamtime footy kit and two tickets for the game.

“Nobody underestimates the complexities of designing a body that fairly represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” Murray Gleeson said in a considered speech earlier this month. “But I am not sure anybody suggests it is not worth trying.”

Gleeson, with respect, should consult more widely. There are many conservatives of goodwill who regard the continuation of the treaty process as divisive and wish it could be taken off the table while calm discussions continue about the best way forward.

Those who claim the momentum is “unstoppable” live almost exclusively in the intellectual enclaves of the southeastern metropolises. The closer you get to the epicentre of Aboriginal misery, the less pressing the need becomes to mess with the Constitution at all.

“The majority of Territorians don’t really care,” senator Sam McMahon told Sky News’ Peta Credlin last week. “They want to see real change, they want to see real improvement, housing, they want jobs, they want healthcare.

“They want all the basic things that anybody wants. They don’t even care what’s in the Constitution or not because that’s not going to deliver all those things.”

McMahon does not claim indigenous heritage, but she can rightly claim to be a voice for indigenous people in the parliament, since they make up 25 per cent of her electorate. Some 78 per cent of them live in remote communities where poverty and welfare dependency is most obscene.

In Andrews’s Victoria, by contrast, 99.9 per cent of those identifying as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people lived in non-remote areas on the night of the 2016 census.

The industry servicing Aboriginal misery is the backbone of the Territory’s economy. The bureaucrats who clip the welfare ticket keep Darwin on its feet.

McMahon’s view that the constitutional process is distracting is widely held by indigenous and non-indigenous Territorians who see the worst of indigenous disadvantage first hand.

The divide between those for whom practical reconciliation is a priority and those who seek salvation through symbolism follows a familiar pattern. It is a dispute between the city-based indigenous elite and their largely well-meaning white supporters and the forgotten indigenous people farther north who have had to suffer the effects of a socialist economy (there’s no other name for it) imposed by wide-eyed reformers from the Whitlam period onwards.

There can be no doubt on which side Scott Morrison’s government stands. Its view on constitutional reform has not changed since Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, declared it neither “desirable or capable of winning acceptance at a referendum”.

But neither has the magnitude of the task it faces by following the path of practical reconciliation and genuine empowerment.

Morrison’s mandate to improve the lives of the quiet Australians starts here.