Power without responsibility

Today, Australians are safer, wealthier and live longer than ever before. In the last hundred years, homicide rates have fallen from 2.6 to 1.0 per 100,000 per annum, GDP per capita has risen from $21 to $136 per day, and life expectancy has risen from 61.0 to 83.4 years. Meanwhile the population has increased from 5.4 to 26 million. Most Aboriginal Australians have benefitted from this. However there is a significant proportion of indigenous citizens whose lifestyles have never improved to this level.

If, as seems likely, Australians reject the voice referendum, then the problem of indigenous disadvantage still needs to be addressed.

As Anthony Albanese said, "Every Australian wants to know that an Aboriginal or Torres Strait islander baby born today will enjoy an equal right to grow up healthy and safe, to get a great education, find a good job, to live a long and happy life."

Decades of welfare spending and the delivery of services by a rent-seeking aboriginal industry have not worked; in fact they have made the problem worse.

It will be opportune to recognise that it is not possible for citizens to share the benefits of a 21st century society without participating in it.

Most Australians with Aboriginal ancestry are already doing so. That includes leaders active in the voice campaign such as Marcia Langton, Megan Davis, Thomas Mayo, Linda Burney, Lidia Thorpe, Stan Grant, Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

On one major point Abbott and Pearson agree: it is no good giving power without responsibility; that is no way to close the gap.

The solution will be to eschew welfare dependency and devise ways in which to empower disadvantaged indigenous citizens to make the transition and to be responsible for their families and themselves. Just as Noel Pearson envisaged eight years ago.