What does it look like Kev?

When Kevin Rudd announced that the ALP would spend $260 million to improve the health and education of Indigenous children if it wins government, the first thing that passed my mind was “here we go again, another bidding war between political parties on our futures”.

While these promises are undoubtedly a good start, the political will to create change will require more than money and national symbolism.

I’m hoping to hear of a more holistic political approach that transcends political opportunism and commits to developing a sustainable, longitudinal approach to Indigenous affairs and wellbeing. For too long we have been a political football on a political football field upon which we never asked to be kicked around on in the first instance.

It is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, and it is often forgotten that this moment in our history gave impetus to a political movement, which in turn gave rise to the establishment of services run by Aboriginal people and which attacked discrimination in all its forms. It also gave rise to recognition of some land rights and it mobilised and raised the consciousness of Aboriginal people nationally to understand that racism was not the norm and that rights were worth fighting for.

It also gave birth to a much needed national political movement. The post 1967 referendum political agenda was firmly focused on improving the lives of Aboriginal people first and foremost in all social indicators.

It gave meaning to the existence of ordinary Aboriginal people at the grassroots. It provided a sense of unity that contributed to collaboration in addressing community issues. Remote people collaborated with urban people and rural people. With some freeing up of the missions and reserves family members were reunited, common causes were identified and coalitions for action emerged.

National leadership also blossomed, healthy debate ensued and it nurtured new understandings by white Australians about the history, culture and diversity of Aboriginal peoples.

What then will Labor deliver in terms of national leadership should it win government?

Moreover, where is the united Aboriginal voice leading up to this important federal election?

Twenty years ago the likes of Robert Riley, Colleen Shirley (Mum Shirl) Smith, Mick Miller, Charles Perkins and many others would not have stood for such an impotent national voice leading up to a federal election. Are our own leaders so politically divided that they cannot stand together and declare some common policy in relation to the aspirations of their own people?

The demise of ATSIC should alert leaders to the need to be more vigilant and inquisitive about Labor’s intentions before the next federal election and their promise of creating a new elected national Indigenous body. What will it look like? Who will it speak to? Who will be appointed to it? No one seems to know.

Important questions need to be asked of Kevin Rudd and Labor’s policy machine about their secret model for National Indigenous representation.

Some questions should include:

• will it be an elected body or just a Labor version of Howard’s toothless and token National Indigenous Council?
• how will this new entity interface with COAG and its Ministerial Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs? And
• what logic lies behind any possible model for national, regional and local representation to government and will it adequately deliver change for Aboriginal people?

While the model of democratic representation that ATSIC provided was, at best, loosely representative of an Aboriginal polity, at worst it was dependent on some of the most retarded policy development and implementation strategies.

One hopes that Labor will learn from ATSIC and recognise the need for Aboriginal communities to be charged with both policy development and delivering access to those goods and services that are so desperately required.

What Labor should address is, not who shall represent Aboriginal Australians in the trite theatrics of national politics, but how to develop policy at the ground level of community that delivers self determination with immediate and long term outcomes focus. A national policy for Indigenous children should be fundamental to any bundle of policies - they are after all, our future.

From this will emerge those grassroots leaders who know the problems and solutions required. Indeed these people already exist. The people know who they are and what they want to do and they need a national body to support them in their work.

In the year 2000 the eminent Aboriginal Professor Marcia Langton rightly proclaimed in her inaugural professorial lecture that “at the end of the 20th century, the public culture of Australia remains, as it has for the last two centuries, riven by disputes as to the status of Indigenous people in Australian society”.

Professor Langton went on to declare, “it remains the case that the Australia polity is devoid of a clear and just status for Indigenous people within its ambit. Further, this dispute is a loose hanging thread in the web of our civil society.”

Contrast this with Justice Brennan uttering in his deliberations over Mabo back in 1992 when he declared that any questioning of the laws that bestow Aboriginal citizenship and rights would not be tenable as it would "fracture the skeleton of principle which gives the body of our law its shape and internal consistency".

Brennan went on to say: "The peace and order of Australian society is built on the legal system. It can be modified to bring it into conformity with contemporary notions of justice and human rights, but it cannot be destroyed."

So somewhere between Langton’s loose hanging thread and Brennan’s skeleton resides nearly half a million Australians whose legal and political rights have never really been given the constitutional recognition that international law requires first world nations to address.

If this loose hanging thread can be modified to bring into conformity with contemporary notions of justice and human right without destroying its skeletal outline then this is exactly the challenge that the next federal government should acknowledge and act on immediately.

More recently the Queensland Speaker of the House, the Honourable Mike Reynolds, lamented to me that he did not know why Aboriginal people did not engage more with mainstream political parties. Langton’s loose hanging thread and Brennan’s skeleton in the national closet instantly came to mind. But alas, I did not respond with these illustrations, I simply said, “It’s because we are the nation’s first people”.

I don’t know for sure, but I think he actually “got it”.

If Kevin Rudd does have a model of Aboriginal leadership and representation he should be reminded that there are approximately half a million Indigenous Australians and supporters who would like to know exactly what it looks like. But Labor should also understand that we have a common understanding of that “loose hanging thread” and of being taunted by Brennan’s closet skeleton and no amount of gammon political tokenism will do. The stakes are now simply too high.