Dear Minister Macklin

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.