Page 1085 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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discussion of the policies and issues relating to reconciliation; to consult on whether reconciliation would be advantaged by a formal document or documents; to report on progress towards reconciliation; and to develop strategic plans, including goals and objectives of reconciliation, and indicators and targets for measuring the council's performance in relation to the goals. I believe that this Act provides the appropriate framework for the promotion of reconciliation between the indigenous and wider Australian communities, and that the Assembly's support for the first part of this motion will be a positive symbol for reconciliation within the ACT community.
Madam Speaker, the second part of this motion calls on the Assembly to support the concept of constructive reconciliation between indigenous and wider Australian communities. This is the concept behind the Act. Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population have been treated as second-class citizens or worse for most of the last 200 years. At best, well-meaning administrators approached Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues in a patronising and paternalistic manner. A good example of this is the May 1957 declaration by the Northern Territory Administrator naming over 15,000 Aborigines as wards of the Government. In June 1960, Phillip Roberts, or Waipuldanya, and his family were, by a further declaration, explicitly removed from this list. When speaking to Douglas Lockwood for the book I, the Aboriginal, Phillip said of becoming a citizen:
What difference has citizenship made to my life? I am entitled to enter hotels and ask for a drink of beer without danger of being arrested ... a privilege which does not mean much to a teetotaller.
He went on to say:
My name and Hannah's name are on the Electoral Roll. We can be fined if we do not vote at Federal elections. That is something new. Otherwise, little has changed.
This attitude undoubtedly mirrors that of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community after the euphoria following the 1967 referendum - at which 92 per cent of Australian voters supported full citizenship rights for Aborigines - had died down. The fundamental issue of racism was still the key. As "Nugget" Coombs said in an article in the Australian Journal of Education in 1971:
After 170-odd years of decline the Aboriginal population is now rising rapidly and a failure to solve the educational and other problems of their place in our society could mean that the fond illusion many of us hold of Australia as homogeneous and free of "race" problems could be dissipated in violence and hatred.
To quote Kaye Bellear, who did much to turn the Redfern community housing project into reality:
I feel that things like massive medical aid, educational aid, legal aid and so on are only a bandage on the real problem facing this country - racism. I can't see the real problem as being anything else.
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