Reconciliation: a worthy and achievable cause or a political idea before its time?

Official policy suggests that reconciliation between Indigenous and other Australians needs to live in the hearts, minds and actions of all, for the nation to move forward.

National Reconciliation Week (NRW), which has just passed, each year runs from 27 May to 3 June. These dates commemorate the 1967 referendum and the High Court Mabo decision respectively, events which have been officially nominated as the two significant milestones in the reconciliation journey.

The desirability of reconciliation can hardly be disputed, given the many historic divisions, injustices and resentments between Indigenous and other Australians. At the same time it is also hard to avoid noticing that reconciliation seems to have lost momentum in this country, even though there is continuing goodwill concerning the concept.

Peak interest in reconciliation happened nearly a quarter of a century ago, when on 28 May 2000 about 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for the cause. Now, in 2022, NRW has passed with little notice. It has become a matter of annual routine and is now somewhat low key and stale. Maybe with all the other Indigenous celebrations (such as NAIDOC week, football's Indigenous Rounds, etc) there is an excess of Indigenous events.

Reconciliation Australia (RA) had been established in January 2001 to promote a continuing national focus for reconciliation. Its operational activities are primarily funded by the Commonwealth. Funding is also received from the BHP Foundation, corporate supporters, and private donors. For the year ended 30 June 2021, RA had revenue of $6.6 million.

Reconciliation has slipped from public prominence for a number of reasons. The main reason is that officialdom has ignored the deep-seated nature of disadvantages affecting our Indigenous population, creating the impression that "closing-the-gap" (a prerequisite for true reconciliation) could be achieved in less than a few decades. Policy realism has also been blinded by "quick-fix" ideological solutions that simply have not worked.

While in this country calls for reconciliation initially stemmed from the outcomes of key controversial inquiries, such as the "Stolen Generations" report and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, a key influence on Australia has been the experience of South Africa.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa was established by the new post-apartheid government in 1995. Its slogan was "healing our past", and its emphasis was on uncovering information about the apartheid era from both victims and perpetrators rather than on prosecuting individuals or on providing compensation.

After initially being regarded as largely successful, the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa ran out of momentum. This reflects the country's economic stagnation under the ANC government, and issues with corruption and governance. This has resulted in only the elites among the black population benefitting from ANC rule. The masses among the non-white population still feel aggrieved, while much of the white population has sought to emigrate. Long term reconciliation seems to be eluding South Africa.

Common features of both the South African and Australian reconciliation models are that they are largely government led ("top-down") processes, whose main shortcoming is that they "put the cart before the horse". In normal circumstances, tensions, that have arisen due to ethnic inequality and grievance, are solved over time by social mobility.

Such social mobility involving blacks in South Africa, and Indigenous people in Australia has been very slow. Consequently, we can expect reconciliation largely after we achieve much greater equality, and not before. This could even take a millennium to fully complete, when you bear in mind that in England people with Norman names are still measurably wealthier than others despite the Norman invasion being over a thousand years ago.

In my opinion, the reconciliation movement in Australia is headed in the same way as its equivalent in South Africa. It looks like it will continue to fade in profile, though progress will likely continue to be made in ways not currently acknowledged.

Let me explain by reference to Australia's past.

One can identify a number of ethnic groups, who in Australia's past were "outsiders" and were not fully accepted by the mainstream Australian community. Most prominent were the Chinese immigrants of the 19th century. Other groups subject to social frictions were the Irish (and Catholics in general) until maybe the 1960s, Southern European immigrants (so-called "wogs"), especially following WW2, Asian immigrants from the 1970s etc.

Reconciliation between these groups and the greater community was achieved informally through the economic success of the immigrant communities themselves, and through inter-marriage and assimilation with other Australians. (With apologies to Al Grassby) official policies played little part in this process.

While Australia's Indigenous population has been here the longest, reconciliation has been held back by a number of factors.

Firstly, by virtue of their physical isolation from the rest of the world for thousands of years, Australia's Indigenous population started from a very low technological base, had no formal educational learning culture, and no written language. These are great handicaps in achieving economic progress. In addition Indigenous Australians had little tolerance for alcohol (introduced by colonists), genetics adapted to bush diets rather than European foods, and were very susceptible to introduced and lifestyle diseases. Finally, disturbance of the traditional way of life, coupled with the introduction of ill-suited welfare, were very destructive.

A major negative has also been ideologically based "quick fixes", which were often misrepresented as cure-alls, but which in reality were often distractions from core problems that have never been properly addressed.

Prominent "quick fixes" have been the following.

The 1967 Referendum, while a step in the right direction, has been widely misrepresented in the popular belief. Legally, it only directly applied to a small proportion of the population now regarded as Indigenous, though arguably its symbolic effect was huge.

By way of example, many people actually believe that, prior to 1967, Indigenous Australians were not counted in our Population Census. In reality, statistics on Indigenous people have been collected since the Empire Census of 1861. They have also been enumerated in all Population Censuses since the establishment of the Commonwealth. The 1966 Census separately counted 80,207 full-blood and half-blood Aborigines, with those of lesser descent enumerated in the general count because they were not then regarded as Indigenous. Contrary to popular belief, the Referendum also didn't confer Australian citizenship on Indigenous people or give them the right to vote. Indigenous people (even under the old definition) mostly already had the vote, though rules varied by state.

The Mabo decision, the other officially regarded landmark on the reconciliation journey, granted native title rights, mainly to Indigenous people in remote areas. While it was hugely important as a legal triumph for Indigenous people, I am not sure that it did much to help reconciliation. In terms of reconciliation, Mabo arguably was the most divisive decision ever brought down by the High Court. Besides creating uncertainty in land law, that created fear concerning property rights and required subsequent clarification in legislation, it arguably enriched the legal fraternity more than it benefitted a typical person of Indigenous descent.

The broader granting (from the 1970s) of land rights, while widely welcomed, has not been the cure-all that many had hoped for. Most remote communities, while they value their title to lands, have derived little economic benefit from land ownership, even though in some respects they receive preferential treatment to other landowners. Collective ownership is often considered a barrier to economic development and individual home ownership. Preferential treatment to other landowners (e.g. rights to negotiate with miners) has also become a cause of resentment.

Native title benefits are now non-assessable non-exempt income and are therefore not subject to income tax. Similarly, any capital gains or losses made from surrendering or cancelling native title rights are disregarded for tax purposes. Aboriginal lands are also commonly exempt from rates. For example, under the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983, if land owned by an Aboriginal Land Council falls within a certain category, it is automatically exempt from rates and other charges.

The National Apology to the Stolen Generations and associated reparation payments is often considered an important step in reconciliation. There is no doubt that the vast majority of Australians feel sorry for the experiences of those affected by removals. On the other hand, the narrative concerning whether those who were removed were genuinely "stolen", is strongly disputed by many researchers, and has become central to the so-called "history wars". Some historians strongly believe that nearly all were either given-up or removed because they were "in danger", so that reparations for being "stolen" are inappropriate. Thus, in reality, the role of the Apology and its aftermath in promoting reconciliation has been double edged.

The latest "fix" is the proposed "Voice". The Indigenous Voice to Parliament is the proposed advisory body of elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to be enshrined in the Australian Constitution. There are now ten Indigenous representatives in the new Parliament so that, if anything, Indigenous Australians are now slightly over-represented. The proposed "voice" therefore appears unnecessary, and the proposed referendum is likely to be divisive and not conducive to reconciliation.

There are also two major "elephants-in-the-room" concerning both Indigenous economic development and reconciliation.

The first is the issue of poor parenting, which has become a generational and self-perpetuating issue holding back affected communities. Neglect on the part of (some) Indigenous parents, especially in regional and remote areas, is a key contributor to issues such as poor school attendance, youth crime, substance abuse, and domestic violence. Such behaviours negatively impact perceptions of Indigenous people by the general community.

Poor parenting is an issue that has been largely ignored, and many Indigenous leaders find it difficult to deal with. A side effect of the Apology is that removal of abused and neglected Indigenous children has become much more difficult, thus perpetuating the problem.

The second largely undiscussed issue is Indigenous out-marriage .

For many decades, especially in non-remote areas, a majority of Indigenous people have chosen a non-Indigenous marriage partner, with about 90 per cent of the children of such mixed-race families being identified as Indigenous. In other words, in non-remote areas the Indigenous population is rapidly integrating into our multi-cultural population and is growing in measured size. This has been associated with the "Gap" closing more quickly in non-remote areas.

Over time people defined as "Indigenous", especially in non-remote areas, are likely to become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the general population, and issues of disadvantage will become even more concentrated in remote areas and some regional centres. The proposal for a Treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians seems to have been overtaken by time, given the extent of out-marriage. Such a Treaty, in the case of families with Indigenous members, would in the majority of cases place husbands and wives on opposite sides of the Treaty.

Overall, full reconciliation is unlikely to be achieved for some very considerable time because of deep seated problems, especially in regional and remote areas. Also, as far as public protests are concerned, nobody really expects the radicals within the broader Indigenous community to become appeased anytime soon.