Reconciliation spirit is vital

Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough's admirable commitment to improving the lot of Aboriginal Australians puts him on the side of the angels, but he doesn't need to reinvent the wheel to find solutions.

The Sydney funeral last week of Rick Farley could provide Brough with some inspiration.

Farley's death reminds us of a period 15 years ago when governments across Australia committed to a new deal for Aboriginal Australians that might, if it had been allowed to continue, have saved Brough a lot of headaches today.

What emerged in 1991, after the four-year Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, was an acknowledgement by governments and politicians from across the spectrum that improving the well-being of Aboriginal Australians required symbolic redress, as well as practical measures.

At the beginning of 1991 the 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody provided a comprehensive blueprint for social and economic change to lift Aboriginal Australians out of poverty, ill health and community degradation.

And, although it seemed at times like herding cats, there was almost universal adoption of the commission's recommendations by state and territory governments.

Led by Sandy Hollway, who went on to head the 2000 Sydney Olympics organising team, and Peter Shergold, who is now head of the prime minister's department, but then head of ATSIC, and backed up by key ministerial staff, the Federal Government formulated a whole of government response and bureaucracies and governments around the nation - conservative and ALP - eventually fell into line.

Then Aboriginal Affairs minister Robert Tickner also established in 1991 the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, which brought together Indigenous community leaders like Pat Dodson and Lowitja O'Donoghue, non-Indigenous community leaders like Farley, unionist and now federal MP Jenni George, former High Court judge Sir Ronald Wilson, mining magnate Robert De Crespigny and employers advocate Ian Spicer.

The federal Labor Government failed to leap over one major hurdle: it refused to make state and territory government future funding dependent on keeping their commitments to implement the recommendations. It did, however, set up an accountability regime, with ongoing whole of government reports and with the establishment of a watchdog, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.

It led by example, committing $300 million in new funds over five years, and pushed the states and territories to do the same.

Apart from the practical measures in the royal commission's report dealing with health, education and strengthening communities, the final recommendation - No 339 - dealt with the need for a symbolic acknowledgement of past wrongs that European Australia committed towards Aboriginal people.

The reconciliation process, launched by the Keating Government with the support of the then Liberal-National Opposition, would have provided that symbolic recognition allowing Aboriginal people to move on, or denying them a continuing excuse whatever way you want to look at it.

That a formal apology for wrongs committed is directly relevant to the matters with which Brough is concerned today, in particular allegations of child abuse in Aboriginal communities, ought to be self evident.

There is, in Aboriginal Australia, a continuing deep distrust of the European culture.

It is a distrust that is exacerbated by the refusal of European Australia, through the Federal Government, to say sorry for crimes committed in years gone by.

Ministers like Brough are outraged at crimes committed by Aboriginal people against each other, and demand this behaviour end immediately and that those who commit the crimes show remorse.

Yet, Brough belongs to a government that stubbornly refuses to apologise for equally horrific crimes committed by white Australians on their Aboriginal compatriots over two centuries, instead wanting to sweep the issue under the carpet.

At Farley's funeral the congregation was reminded of the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, where Rick met his future wife, Linda Burney, then an outstanding advocate for Aboriginal education, now a NSW MP. It was at this event that Prime Minister John Howard deliberately broke that political and policy consensus.

If Brough were to persuade his prime minister that if he were to return to the bipartisan spirit of the early 1990s and acknowledge that only through a genuine spirit of reconciliation will substantial progress in Aboriginal Australia be achieved, then he will have achieved as much as Farley did for the advancement of race relations in his country.