|
NIT FORUMS: 2020: No room to think big
Issue 153 - 15 May 2008
ISSUE 153, May 15, 2008: The 2020 summit was supposed to be about big ideas, writes MEGAN DAVIS*
The 2020 Summit was an interesting political experience. I had no real expectations. It was a privilege to spend two days with a group of committed Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.
Aunty Jackie was the head of the Indigenous stream and she did a terrific job in moderating the sessions.
Afterwards I felt strongly that the very interesting and nuanced discussions that had taken place were not appropriately presented to the plenary on Sunday afternoon and so I wrote a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald (April 24, 2008) explaining my disappointment along with Dr Sarah Maddison, a political scientist from UNSW.
In that opinion piece we said that we felt discussions around the importance of a dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians regarding unfinished business had not been captured by the report.
Media coverage crudely reduced informed discussions on dialogue and the importance of bipartisan support to: “Kids trampled in race for Treaty”.
In response to our opinion piece Noel Pearson (The Australian, April 26, 2008) suggested that there is much that can be done in the meantime to deal with Indigenous disadvantage. This is true.
Yet it is important to make the point that advocating for constitutional reform at 2020 wasn’t intended to eschew the need to address disadvantage immediately.
I know for myself, as a Summit invitee, I teach public law and the Constitution and institutional reform are primarily my professional interests.
Throughout the Indigenous stream there were community workers, health workers, judges, lawyers, business people who all brought their own expertise.
As the facilitation progressed, people broke into groups that reflected their singular interest in addressing disadvantage: tax incentives for business people; children’s education funds; services in remote communities; healing and families; a national cultural authority; closing the gap; boarding schools; institutional reform; the role of Aboriginal law.
We were all drawn to those areas we felt we had most to contribute. From constitutional lawyers to community health workers, addressing Indigenous disadvantage seemed to be everyone’s main priority.
Some initiatives were immediate and urgent and others were long term goals.
Pearson also noted that there isn’t a great deal of specificity about what Indigenous peoples want in a Treaty.
He said there is conflation of constitutional reform with Treaty. The conflation is true - unless people mean small “c” constitutional reform, and in that case they are accurate.
The lack of specificity is perhaps something that will be dealt with in a formal national dialogue and certainly will be addressed by any national representative body that can consult communities.
In my small group that included political scientists, politicians, land councils and community workers from Aboriginal organisations, we discussed the importance of bringing other groups, in particular conservatives, along in any dialogue for institutional recognition.
We also discussed the importance of nomenclature.
Specificity is important in amending the Australian Constitution. It is not a revelation that we need bipartisan support to alter the Constitution as section 128 renders it a rigid instrument.
Any alteration requires a majority of states and a majority of the people. Only eight out of 44 referendums have succeeded and those eight successful amendments had the support of both parties.
But the bottom line numerically is: majority of states + majority of people.
This is why a formal national conversation is required to discuss and debate why changing the Constitution is important and how it would impact upon Indigenous disadvantage.
How long would it take for such constitutional changes to have an impact on the day-to-day lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples? What changes need to be made to the text?
It is important that section 51 (xxvi) is deleted. A races power is inappropriate in a modern liberal democratic state. No federal government should be permitted to make laws to the detriment of a people on the basis of race.
Further, there is already bipartisan agreement that section 25 needs to be deleted because despite it being inoperative, it shouldn’t remain in the Constitution of a democracy that is ostensibly committed to the rule of law and human rights.
As to what constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights looks like, that will be decided by a national process. Given the difficulty of Constitutional reform, I would be happy with a non-discrimination clause and an equality clause on the basis of race, religion and gender. I believe these are values that no Australian would object to entrenching in the Constitution.
In hindsight the summit had people in the Indigenous stream labouring under the false assumption that it was about vision and big ideas. That’s what the 2020 propaganda implied.
I thought there were many issues raised that one could lobby government about any day of the week and assumed these issues would be dispensed in favour of big ideas. My thinking was clearly wrong.
For 2% of the population it is hard to get the ear of government in a majoritarian democracy like ours. Why wouldn’t one push one’s own agenda in those two days rather than articulate a ‘big picture’ vision?
Regardless, post-2020 comments clearly show that unlike other streams we weren’t entitled to think big - blackfellas should only focus on grog and children.
Any focus on rule of law issues for Indigenous people in Australia was painted as elitist or prolonging the suffering of children - as if the rule of law in a democracy is “elitist”.
On a final note Robert Manne, writing in The Monthly, singled out the Indigenous stream for not raising alcohol and child sexual abuse in the final report.
Ironically Manne’s piece was about the problem of “over-facilitation” in the Governance stream that, in his view, over simplified ideas and omitted some ideas altogether.
Manne wasn’t in our stream but of course these issues were raised and discussed.
The Indigenous stream work groups focused on ideas that people felt would change the way Indigenous peoples lived their lives, run their communities and change the way they feel about themselves.
Ideas discussed included improving basic services and policing in rural and remote communities, education in communities, healing centres, Aboriginal law, alternative justice mechanisms, improving children’s well being and economic development in communities.
We can see the correlation between many of these measures with combating alcoholism and improving the well being and bodily integrity of children - even if some white intellectuals can’t.
Of course we were all damned if we did and damned if we didn’t.
For Indigenous participants we weren’t just “summiteers” - we are also accountable to the communities and organisations that we come from.
If we eschewed constitutional reform for a two day, over-facilitated discussion on sexual assault and alcohol alone we would have missed an important opportunity.
Given that the crisis in some Aboriginal communities is a national issue - not just an “Indigenous” issue - you would think that more would have come out of Manne’s own governance report than mere recognition in a preamble.
Rather than being puzzled at the omissions in the Indigenous stream report, Manne should ask why the Republic was the big ticket item for his group when there are so many more serious and pressing manifestations of poor democratic governance in Australia. Indigenous affairs being one of them.
I thought it was telling that many of the issues raised highlight a failure on the part of federal and state governments to deliver on basic citizenship rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: basic infrastructure; education; health provision.
My big concern out of 2020 is that we will be put in our preambular place. A lot of words signifying nothing.
And while I support a Charter of Rights, I am under no illusions that an Australian parliament would override this statute to diminish Indigenous rights if they needed to.
Finally, while I am a Republican, I now realise that people don’t understand how insulting it would be to remove the casing of the Constitution from a British Act, delete references to the Queen and recognise the popular sovereignty of the Australian people while reducing Indigenous sovereignty (if that) to a passing reference in the preamble.
But maybe in Australia that’s as good as we will ever get.
* Megan Davis is Director, Indigenous Law Centre and Senior Lecturer Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales. She attended the 2020 Summit in the Indigenous stream.
|