Nielsen poll doesn't quite support a Treaty for Indigenous Australians

(3) 20 per cent support reconciliation in the abstract, but tend to oppose specific measures that would involve costs;

(4) 20 per cent want to express goodwill in some sense, but are confused.

I would put Howard in category (3), but his policy has been to court group (2). People in group (4) may not know what they want on this issue, but they are, in my view, coming to recognise that whatever it is, it's not what Howard is offering.

John Quiggin

Australian Research Council Senior Fellow
Department of Economics Faculty of Economics and Commerce Australian National University ACT 0200

Dear John,

I haven't actually thought through what the real support for a treaty is, or reconciliation for that matter. The point of the article was to say that the report overstated it, and that without particulars as to what a treaty consists of, any polling is relatively meaningless.

I think the apology figure is much harder than the figure on a treaty as there has been a lot of debate on the issue. As a result I do not think it is a mistake to say that the Treaty figure is flakier. However, if the Treaty figure stays up where it is for the next twelve months after the issues involved in a Treaty have been adequately ventilated, then I would probably have to change my mind. That doesn't mean that the apology figure is not soft for or against either.To gauge how accurate it is you would need access to figures as to how strong the opposition is and how persuadable people are.

Ultimately I don't think the apology issue is that important in the sense that once Howard is gone as Prime Minister, one way or the other, you are likely to have a Prime Minister who won't have a problem with making a fuller apology than has already been made. I don't think that the same can necessarily be said about a Treaty. An apology is just one element in the mix of Reconciliation, while a Treaty is a cluster of elements. One indicator of the relationship between the apology figure and the Treaty figure is my attitude to a Treaty.

If I had been interviewed for the result I would have ticked the box as being in favour of both Reconciliation and an apology, as well as a Treaty. However, I wouldn't support a Treaty that included all of the elements that I mentioned in the article. On the basis of that insufficient sample I think the support for a Treaty is likely to be below that for an apology, but I would be happy to be contradicted by the facts if someone would design a poll to test them. I'd also love to get some debate going on the forum and see what other thoughts might be out there on this issue.

Graham

"Families adversely affected by the Wik decision are very fearful about the effects of a treaty on their ability to live on, work on and love the land they purchased in good faith. There is no legal clarity about what the Wik decision means, four long years after it was handed down. Confidence in leasehold land tenure seems to now be at an all-time low, affecting the equity of leaseholders. This in turn affects their ability to borrow, improve their land and viability, or plan their futures. It is often suggested that it will take probably twenty years to sort out the resulting land tenure mess. Too long for many, who will be unable to sustain a business plan in the face of such uncertainty."

Lindsay MacDonald. Read the full letter here.

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