Doubts raised over reconciliation process
By Liam Mitchell
ADELAIDE - A seminar here on September 8 raised a number of doubts and
reservations in the Aboriginal community about the government-sponsored
reconciliation process. The 50 participants were told that there are
concerns that the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was a
government tool and lacked any focus on land rights.
The seminar was organised by the University of South Australia's Faculty of
Aboriginal and Islander Studies and the WEA Adult Education Centre.
Faculty dean Professor Colin Bourke outlined relations between Aborigines
and white society and governments - an alternative history to the glossy
publication put out by CAR and the Prime Minister's Department.
Bourke said that white invasion had raised issues of land ownership,
culture, development, progress, human rights and law, none of which have yet
been resolved. It was a little-known fact that fierce resistance had been
put up by Aborigines to invasion for 150 years, a conspiracy of silence that
was only just being broken.
He mentioned events such as the 19th century march on the Victorian
Parliament House that was not admitted because many of the marchers were
women and women were not permitted inside parliament.
In 1837, John Macarthur and the NSW attorney general called for a treaty to
counter injustices to the Aboriginal people.
In 1975, parliament passed a resolution by Aboriginal Senator Neville Bonner
recognising prior ownership and the duty for compensation. In 1983, ALP
policy was to continue developing recognition of the need for a treaty.
By 1988, the government had committed itself to a treaty. However, this was
dropped by Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
Lawyer Ribnga Green, head of department at the faculty, went through the
Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and detailed some of the criticisms of
the process. He said that while Aboriginal Affairs minister Robert Tickner
talked about social justice and reform, in reality the council was set up
following the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody with no mandate
from the Aboriginal community and the power only to make recommendations to
government.
Green said that there were criticisms of the process and the approach of
going through the courts to achieve sovereignty from sectors of the
leadership of the Aboriginal rights movement. He said that Aboriginal
experience was diverse between various communities and that tribal
Aborigines are becoming victims of political wheeling and dealing by white
and black politicians and are being left out of the debate, which is
conducted in legalistic terms.
The director of the Aboriginal Research Institute of the USA, Eleanor
Bourke, detailed the make-up of the reconciliation council and outlined her
problems with it.
She emphasised that this was a process of community education - specifically
the white community - and that none of the council's members are from the
education sector.
CAR, she said, was a non-Aboriginal recommendation to the government. She
questioned whether the subcommittees set up by the council - mining, rural,
industry and consultative - were Aboriginal priorities.
The council is composed of up to 25 members chosen for three-year terms.
Twelve of these must be Aboriginal and two Torres Strait Islanders.
The members include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
chairperson and deputy chairperson, and one person each nominated by the
opposition and other non-opposition or government parties of at least five
members. The minister appoints the rest.
Eleanor Bourke said that this fitted very much into the role of the
bureaucracy in the process. Along with the media, the legal industry and the
top level public servants, the bureaucracy is very much controlling the
agenda.
She stressed that any form of sovereignty would necessarily entail education
of Aboriginal people in their own languages and culture and would raise the
question of who represented the Aboriginal people.
She also said that the question of sovereignty cannot stop with land rights,
but must also take up what economic means the people will have after they
have regained access to their land.