Dear Minister Macklin

Dear Minister Macklin,

With a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) Degree from the University of Melbourne, you’d be comfortable in analysing facts and figures. In fact you would have done a lot of number crunching as well as endured many sleepless nights before gaining pre-selection for and later winning, in 1996, the seat of Jagajaga. (The seat is aptly named after Aboriginal Elders who signed a land deal with John Batman in 1835, giving the white settlers 202,343 hectares of land at the North-West end of Port Phillip Bay.)

You would also have known the numbers within your party when you were elevated to Shadow Minister for Health and the Status of Women after the 1998 election, and Senior Vice-President of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from 2000-2004. In 2004 and 2006 your star continued to rise when you held the portfolio of Shadow Minister for Education, Training, Science and Research, and the portfolios of Shadow Minister for Families and Community, and Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Reconciliation respectively.

You didn’t just get those impressive portfolios gifted to you, Minister, because of some strange affirmative action notion acquiesced by your party members who thought of you as a brilliant, if not pugnacious, woman who deserved a fair go. No Minister, those lofty portfolios that you acquired - presumably as part of a steady strategic climb towards your political summit - were the result of calculated choices and an adherence to the democratic process.

And from a cursory glance at your mounting resume it would appear that you’ve won more contests than you’ve lost.

With a Commerce Degree you could easily have climbed the corporate ladder and be earning considerably more than what you are at present.

But I guess the call to public duty and the allied allure of power for you - and indeed all your parliamentary colleagues - is the aphrodisiac that is more seductive than any other real or imagined substance, including the appeal of a significantly larger annual pay packet.

To inhale the intoxicating power as you walk the marble corridors of parliament and to see tangible effects from the stroke of your authoritative pen are experiences that very few Australians will ever realise. But it is a goal nevertheless that is achievable through considerable effort on the part of candidates like yourself, in testing their competence to lead at the ballot box every three years.

Yes Minister I’m talking about the single most politically relatable word in our vocabulary: “democracy”. This is a word which shapes the volatility of our global community today. The evening news broadcasts of world events featuring high profile conflict centres like Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan and Russia - to name but a few - are in the headlines because of the desire of their populace to gain the right to vote, or rather in these cases, their inability to exercise that fundamental right.

Zimbabwe has a tyrant in Robert Mugabe who lost the election last year: but he chose not to step down but instead flexed his considerable military muscle to change the goal posts and retain power.

Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan were ruled by tyrants; Suddam Hussein, and the Taliban, whose views on morality and justice so incensed the West that a fabricated story of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)  became the necessary catalyst for an Allied offensive on their sovereign nations.

Russia, in October last year, on the other hand, rode rough shot over the sovereign nation of democratic Georgia to assert its might and to ensure its political and economic interests were not in dispute with their mineral rich and geographically strategic neighbour.

So why Minister, do you support the use of lethal force in Iraq and Afghanistan - and closer to home in East Timor and the Solomon Islands - to ensure those sovereign nations adhere to the democratic way, and yet feel so self righteous, in an imprecise media campaign, in excluding Indigenous Australians from that very process?

Indigenous people voted in large numbers for the Labor Party because they believed Kevin Rudd when he said he would create a national representative body before the last election.

Indigenous delegates attending the 2020 Summit held in Canberra last February were unambiguous with their recommendation to you to have an elected representative body as our national voice. And these weren’t expressed views of uninformed people, but rather a collection of the best and brightest Indigenous minds on offer at the time.

The same sentiments were clearly spelled out to you Minister from a review conducted by your team of senior public servants who travelled extensively around the nation in the middle of 2008 to consult with Indigenous people on their preferred model for a representative body.

And just when everyone was retiring for the Christmas recess after a frustrating year of witnessing failed social policies: most notably the vexed subject of the Northern Territory Intervention and its national implications, we read in the media that you appointed yet another review team to conduct further consultations in the New Year.

And if Tom Calma’s review team provide the same recommendations from his February summit as earlier review teams, will you seek another review Minister?

On December 20, 2008, you were reported in The Australian saying the “Rudd Government has no intention of creating another ATSIC”.

But Minister what exactly is “another ATSIC”?

And don’t furnish me with that well worn rhetoric of greed and corruption allegedly rife within the last ATSIC Board of Commissioners, which precipitated Howard and Latham joining forces to disband the organisation, as the excuse to not creating another ATSIC.

My earliest recollection of a national elected representative body; the 1973 National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) under Whitlam and its successor the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC) under Fraser’s administration in 1975, was one of national pride that empowered a nation of fractured traditional owner groups.

If there was a criticism of the NACC and the NAC, chaired by Lois O'Donoghue and Jim Hagan (my father) respectively, it certainly wasn’t one associated with corruption or greed but rather of a concern by politicians and their senior public servants of its political influence at the national and international level.

So Minister, please desist from feeding the media that nonsense about corruption with its linked inference that “black-fellows can’t be trusted with money and power” as it is just not plausible in these enlightened times.

John Howard sent our soldiers into battle on the basis of a fabricated story of WMDs and corruptly disseminated mistruths about the Children Overboard scandal and Tampa. Did we say that the democratic process was flawed and we ought to regress back to Imperial control from the mother country because Australian politicians are corrupt and greedy?

Furthermore, when Pauline Hanson and her One Nation political representatives at federal and state level started a movement based on xenophobia did the government of the day throw them out of office? Even when there were major concerns about their propriety as a legal entity, did the government close the door on them?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding No.

What happened in all these instances and what should now be afforded to Indigenous Australians in the light of the demise of ATSIC in 2004, is the opportunity for us to determine, through the democratic process, who should lead us in these uncertain times.

And if you think Indigenous people are not intelligent enough to make an informed decision about their national representatives then publicly come out and say so, and then at least we will know exactly where we all stand with you.

Please don’t keep instigating more national reviews, at considerable cost to the tax payers, just so you can come up with one that will finally give you a quasi mandate to eliminate an elected representative body from the national dialogue.

The Labor Party would like us all to think of them as “the” party for the blue collar worker; the supporter of the underdog; and an active proponent of the egalitarian adage of “giving everyone a fair go”. As such we ask for no special privilege but rather an equal say, as offered to mainstream Australians at election time, to vote for our elected representatives.

As Aristotle once said, “Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal”.

Minister Macklin, I’m sure you can find it in your heart to grant Indigenous people their democratic right to determine who should lead them at the national level; in much the same manner as your constituents in Jagajaga offer you that same privilege every three years.