This is a collation of the talks given in Workshop 9: What rights for Indigenous Australians when might is again right?


[In this workshop, the conference organisers were criticised for choosing a room located away from other workshops, for placing the session on Sunday, and for the placing of the statement about indigenous people's rights towards the end of the conference declaration].


David Cooper, ANTaR

This question of what rights do indigenous people have when might is again right is very complex when you have a government around like John Howard's. His government has the support of broad groups in the society and has been influenced by the Pauline Hanson movement of intolerance for Aboriginal people, immigrants and refugees.

We do have to address that. It is not an easy or short term task. It is a long term task and I don't see any way around that. In the meantime we have to do the best we can to defend what rights have been gained up to now, and to reduce the damage that's being done, and to try to position ourselves to capitalise on the bigger moments of change. When Howard goes, that will be a moment when effort applied will reap significant rewards.

But at the present time, things are not looking optimistic. In fact there are many current processes that will affect us for many years ahead. One of them is the review of ATSIC. We don't have a reconciliation process any more, we don't have resources within the peoples' process to really mount any broad scale public education. We are still around the edges and there is a lot of work to do to penetrate mainstream Australia.

At present, Reconciliation Australia which took over from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, has a budget of $5.5 million, and some of that was quarantined for investment. It has been trying to do the work the Council did with a minuscule budget, and obviously there's a limit to what is possible.

From ANTaR's point of view, over the last two years, we recognise that we have to be here for the long haul. ANTaR has to be set up with the structures and resources to survive in the long term. We are not expecting immediate dividends or victories. So we have been trying to make our structure as strong as possible and to broaden our fundraising base. But there is a huge gap in resources for public education that we are facing.

The broader prejudices and lack of understanding of history in the general population is the biggest problem we face in the long term. Australia is almost back to the stage of blaming indigenous people for their problems. Most recently the focus has shifted - we should focus on some of the incredible problems facing indigenous communities, such as domestic violence - but the way the debate is going, these problems are seen as incremental evidence that indigenous communities are at fault and it is their responsibility to fix up the mess.

That is extraordinary when you see the position the government has taken. It is running on a 'practical reconciliation ' policy. It has identified those practical areas as the priorities for government, virtually the only areas that it sees itself having a legitimate role.
Yet after six years of 'practical reconciliation' we have health statistics and other indicators that have gone backward or there has been no progress.

Even on the government's own terms - of Howard's suggestion that these priorities should be tackled - it's been a spectacular failure. Things have become worse. The government's immovability on these issues, this digging in, is really what has consumed a lot of our time and effort. We've had to defend issues such as the apology, when you would have expected that to be the easiest thing to get out of the way with some real symbolic meaning, and then start building on. Instead we had to spend a year to 18 months just trying to get the government even move a centimetre on that one.

We are now in the position where Howard and the new conservative agenda is exceedingly strong. We really need to position ourselves for a long term war of attrition to try to turn some of those issues around, and to preserve as much as we can from the processes now underway.

ANTaR has recently reviewed its strategic plan. We are about to embark on a new national process of campaigning. We need to refocus what we are doing and get some solid resistance to the government's agenda. This agenda is being pushed forward in the absence of any coherent opposition, and this is pushing back the bottom line, week by week, month by month, year by year.

One example of a good campaign is the stolen wages campaign in Queensland. Dr Ros Pivott was able to extensively research government archives and records and produced a report and some books on this issue. Indigenous people in Queensland, under the control of the government, worked for wages, but were only given a small part of their wages, while the rest was put into a trust fund managed by the government. Over many years, up into the 1970s, those monies were appropriated for other purposes, such as building hospitals or general revenue, but didn't go to the workers and their families. On the basis of the research, the Queensland government took on this issue - at least they should be congratulated for that - and eventually offered a settlement of $55 million, and they've dug their heels in on that. In terms of the actual wages withheld, the $55 million is only about 10 per cent of what is due. There are two categories of offer - $2,000 and $4,000. Workers who take the offer have to sign an indemnity that they will take no further action, and that they will have no access to their records. Workers whose records have been destroyed are told 'tough luck'.

The former workers and their supporters have been in a process to the Beattie government to come back to the negotiating table on the offer. The unions have come on board in the campaign - the ACTU, the Queensland Council of Unions and many individual unions.

There is a postcard campaign to Beattie as part of this effort.
This campaign highlights something that is not a welfare issue. It is a clear workers' issue. It highlights the lack of understanding of the real history of Australia, of how it was developed often with forced labour, and virtual slave labour of indigenous people. We will circulate these postcards from ANTaR in the next few weeks.

Kevin Tory, Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights

Many people don't know what happened under the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act. If labour was wanted from a local community, police would go and sign them up and send five to ten people to work for someone. After working there a while, they would go and ask the boss for some money. Many of the indigenous people were illiterate. They might sign for twenty pounds, give the worker one pound, and put the rest in their pocket.

Many people don't know that the Queensland laws were used as a model in South Africa when they created the apartheid laws in the 1940s and 1950s.

You can say that happened in the past, but people today are the beneficiaries of what happened then. I've always had a problem with the fact that people from a country as small as Britain now control a country almost one-third the size of Africa. I've never believed in the concept of land rights, always said it was a cop out. I always thought we were entitled to independence, like the Indonesians, the Indians and the Fijians. But I've always gone along with the majority, and put those views forward in forums over the years.

We are living in one of the richest countries in the world, but if I pull out a postage stamp and put it on the table, you could write on that what your ancestors bought to this country. You basically stole the lot. Not only our forests, our arable land but huge energy resources, rivers, lakes. Our people looked after this country for hundreds of thousands of years, and now see it almost totally destroyed in just 200 years.

In the wake of what has happened to ATSIC, there is going to be a strong push to set up a national organisation outside of ATSIC.

That's the only way we can put pressure on the federal government. In the early days of the land rights struggle we had the Federation of Land Councils. Then we had the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations. It is sad that Whitlam was dismissed, because we would have had a national land rights policy. Then when they brought in the national land rights act, it was only for the Northern Territory. That was done in a cunning way to divide us. We were fighting for land rights for everybody, and they only gave it to one group of people. It was their interpretation that they were the only true blackfellas.

Once any national organisation starts to become too vocal or too militant, they just cut off the funds. While ATSIC hasn't been militant, the Howard government has focused on it. They attacked Geoff Clark over $31,000, while politicians have spent millions on travel. We say that's taxpayers' money, but I say no, that's our money, off our stolen resources.

We will have some meetings and elect our spokespersons for a new national organisation.

ATSIC was set up out of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to be a service provider. The Councillors should have resigned and walked away when they gutted it in 1996, and tried to get some focus, some fire in people's belly around the country. There weren't too many people protesting when Clark was suspended.

David Cooper: The Howard government has played the wedge so well on ATSIC. It was all about Clark and Robinson - they are the problem, they have cause it all. That's bunkum. They are not perfect individuals, but ATSIC is a flawed organisation from the start. The Act which set it up was the most amended piece of legislation ever. It was resisted and opposed from the start. The Howard government is anti-self-determination. It has been steadily working against any national policy and agenda for indigenous people, and doing that on an international level too. They have captured and orchestrated issues in ATSIC to attack ATSIC. They have used community unease at the personal circumstances of the leaders to gut the organisation.

While that has been playing out, Minister Ruddock moved in and took the funding authority away from ATSIC's elected leaders, and putting it back into the Department. That's going the opposite way to what ATSIC was meant to represent - self-management and self-determination.

The only alternative to an ATSIC that manages spending on services to indigenous communities is a totally independent one, without any funding. That is a hard choice.

Kevin Tory: I don't think it is too hard. It has to go though some political change. In 1967 the Federal Government got the power to legislate on behalf of the indigenous population, yet never used those powers once, even with Labor governments since then. Minister Tickner did use some powers, and later Howard's 10 point plan took some rights away from indigenous communities, making the Native Title process harder to use.
When the National Indigenous Working Group, which handled the Native Title negotiations, saw that they were getting nowhere with the Howard government, they just went back to work in their communities. Peter Yu went back to the Kimberleys. The Dodsons were sidelined. Michael Mansell is pretty quiet down there in Tasmania.
There is a push for something new now that ATSIC has been gutted.
Some of the younger people get degrees, and some are absorbed in the political parties, some into the legal profession. It is hard for some of them to go back and face how their community is suffering.

Adam Kerslake, NSW Labor Council

In the union movement, I am working to attempt to establish a power base to create an independent voice. It is hard not to be incorporated into a system.

We went to the ACTU Congress this year with a new policy, wanting the union movement to back us and give us a new relationship. It is going to be a struggle for resources within the union movement, but it is one of the few institutions which is separate from the state and from business. We can organise people in the bush that have got jobs, that haven't got jobs. We can take up issues with the state governments. For example, the NSW government has a two per cent employment target for Aboriginal people. Are they met? If not, why not?

We can start taking up some of the policies of the Howard government. We had Reith shaking hands with Woolworths a while back, because they had a two percent employment target. But if you go to Dubbo, you don't see any black faces. We want to take up that challenge hard about jobs and employment.

We want to do something about incarceration rates. It is a crime to be an Aborigine in this country. People have to say that independent of ties to government strings.

We are in an organising phase. My expertise is in the union movement. I have had a break from my family and community - it just happened that way. We need to form alliances with ANTaR. Labor Councils in each state need to be funded by state governments. We've been to see Minister Refshauge in NSW to ask for $150,000 so that we can employ someone, so that we can teach union officials cultural awareness training, how to organise indigenous workers, how to have more black faces in unions.

At Labor Council meetings at the moment we don't see any black faces, just me and Kev, that's it. We just don't have a presence in those organisations that would give us a power base. That is a big struggle to get organised.

Some of the best people in the world work in the union movement, but it is like people don't know what to do with indigenous issues. Look at the stolen wages. Unions were complicit in that. Unions excluded Aboriginal people from membership to keep white people in comfortable paid positions. How do you overturn those years of discrimination that allows people to confront it? We don't have a Truth and Reconciliation process in the union movement. We have to create the basis for that to happen, so that people can say, 'Yes, I know things were pretty fucked in the past, but that's not the way it's going to be in the future'.

We are going to have to intervene in the process and make a difference. We asked the union movement to be a partner in this at the ACTU Congress, and they bought into the policy. Kevin and I are on the National Indigenous Committee and we will be taking it up hard and challenging the union movement to come to terms with it.

It is about education, support and resources. I don't know that national union leaders know how to tackle this. We have to work with them to create the basis for doing it.

For me, it starts with simple things about resources. If you are a union in Australia, you should have an indigenous person working with on this issue. If you are a progressive union and you haven't got it, you are not making the grade. We have to make that the context for the struggle around resources.

There are many union leaders who have posters of blackfellas all over their walls, Aboriginal flags flying all over their place, but where is the money? We need money. We can't organise without money. Otherwise it is just flag waving, all these signs saying 'always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land', and there's a white person sitting in the office. Where's the black person to actually do this work? That's the struggle.

If we go to those people who are our supporters, we are going to find it easier than to challenge those that are less supportive. The more people we can get into positions of power and influence, who can be passionate about this, the better.

If you took Wilcannia or the Cape, and you put it on an island off Australia, union leaders would be flying over there to see how these people are oppressed by a horrible government, years or racial discrimination, and we'd be making a big stand in the progressive trade union movement. If you leave it in Wilcannia or the Cape, people are not making the same noises, not making the same fuss as over East Timor or South Africa. Yet the conditions are the same. How come?

These are the hard conversations we need to have with people, in a way that allows people to move without feeling the guilt of the past, or something like that which is a blockage.

Local governments are a great area to organise, not only through the union movement. The trouble is that there is no network set up form the good work done there, and so there is no power because there is no voice. People are broken up into individual groups. We have to build up the power by creating the collective components to have a voice.

We have fantastic people coming through the union movement. Some of the people on our indigenous committee, like Darcelle Moore, she could be the Prime Minister. How do we do it? Let's have the Secretary of the ACTU who is an Aborigine.

The Labor Party, without the union movement being a viable, powerful voice for social change, would be coopted by business and go further down the track of economic rationalism, an apologist for business. When that happens, we are stuffed. As Aboriginal people and trade unionists, we have to organise workers to have a powerful force in the union movement. Without that, the Labor Party will be no use to us. So focusing in on the Labor Party is a waste of time. Now it is a corrupt institution for representing working people, and certainly corrupt when it comes to representing the interests of Aboriginal people.

But we can't influence the Labor Party, the Greens, the Democrats or any party, if we are not organised. Disorganisation is the nature of the political attack on us, and we have to build our power bases so that we can challenge the Labor Party. The Labor Party has an Aboriginal woman elected into the NSW parliament, they have an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee, but it is piss poor because it isn't delivering anything.

We must remain outside the system, not be incorporated, and take it up really hard, be challenging. It is a crime to be an Aborigine in NSW! And we have a Labor government! Why are 40 per cent of people in juvenile justice Aboriginal? How come? Nobody is asking that question. Something has to be done, it is not okay. That has to be said to Minister Refshauge. Look at the distribution of wealth, every social indicator that Aboriginal people miss out on. You are not delivering.
Unless we are organised, we will not be able to put that challenge to him. We will just be marginalised as Trots, angry black people.

Kevin Tory: Look at the political reality. If you are about two or three peer cent of the population, and you want to get any legislation up, you have to sell your argument to the wider community. We live in a country where there are a lot of really good people. Yes, there are a lot of crooks, thieves and burglars, ex-colonials. But through churches, unions, organisations like ANTaR, we hope that you don't end up believing all the bullshit they publish in the media.

The media here have never basically supported workers rights for better wages and conditions. When blacks started cranking up the campaign to get back some of the land stolen from them, the media didn't support them. That's whey we have to link up and support each other. In the end, what people are fighting for is to make Australia a fairer place for everyone to live. We hope for our rights to be enshrined in the Constitution. Nothing came from this government at the Centenary of Federation. Then there was the vote about a republic where we retained our links to the British Monarchy as the Head of State.

Adam Kerslake: When Cathy Freeman ran at the 2000 Olympics it was a real statement about black and white Australia. It really touched people deeply. When we had the march across the bridge, mobilising large numbers of supporters of Aboriginal people, when Archie Roach sings about what it is like for the Stolen Generations, it says we need campaigns where black and white Australians come together to support indigenous issues. That's the point when the Aden Ridgeways and Cathy Freemans have their impact. Not us, we are joe blows.
We have politicians, sporting people, people in the arts - I'm suggesting we need people in the union movement where we can have an independent voice, organise and link with groups like ANTaR.

Look at the photos of Pauline Hanson crying in jail, look at those people in Canberra saying Howard's sold out Hanson. Black people are really up against it, it is going backwards for us. There is a real surge around Hansonism and Howard adopting her agenda. There is this real discomfort, about the place being built on a lie, on a theft. People don't feel great about it. There is something not complete about our past. We have to mobilise to draw it together.

Some Aboriginal people in key positions don't do a lot. I'm not sure they know what to do, but they don't. We need to provide leadership so that people can rally around something. It is not just a symbolic march across the bridge, we have to march around something, I don't know what the issue is.

Kevin Tory: ATSIC was a flow on from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The government said they wanted a black political voice, but not an independent voice. Look who the people were leading ATSIC - Lowitja O'Donahue, Gatjil Djerkurra, who were fairly conservative, were both appointed. They had not been involved in what we regard as the struggle. Geoff Clark, a bloke from the back streets, eventually got to be the leader by being elected.

The majority of people never accepted ATSIC as being the political voice. But the reason they went along with it is the access that ATSIC had to resources, where the other organisations didn't.

When you talk about sovereignty, there is only one way you get your sovereignty - like they did in Viet Nam, like the Palestinians are doing, like the Tamils are doing, like the people in all oppressed colonies who take the struggle up to those who are oppressing them.

Look at the terrible price the East Timorese paid for their independence - but they eventually got it, and it is something they fought for. The Australian government, under Labor, basically rubber-stamped the Indonesian invasion in 1975.

Gary Foley and I had a terrible argument with Gough Whitlam at the time and he said that he would do nothing to threaten the sovereignty of this country.

David Cooper: I think we have to recognise that the elected ATSIC Commissioners have been under incredible pressure from the government. The government has determined which way it wants to go and is not accepting any deviation. Elected people lose either way - go along with the government and get some scraps from the process, or take a stand and become further marginalised and disempowered through the $400 million cut, and the loss of spending powers. The government has played the wedge politics so well and made ATSIC and its elected people the villains of the piece, and completely escaped any responsibility for their role.

So I caution that any Aboriginal person in a leadership position is facing a hard ask.

Kevin Tory: Just forget about ATSIC. Look at all the social indicators, on health, education, housing, the whole lot. What do we have to do to convince you that that is the truth? What do you want to do to redress that as part of the over 90 per cent of the population that's white?

Adam Kerslake: Unless this issue is addressed, we can't be a progressive movement. Just as we embraced the struggles in East Timor and South Africa, we must embrace the struggle for justice for indigenous Australians. Whether you follow a marxist analysis or whatever your persuasion is, it goes back to this - every single social indicator is the worst for Aboriginal people, starting with life expectancy.
When we try to get funds for the Trade Union Committee on Aboriginal Rights, we have to compete with other demands, including the movement against Bush's war. But this is not any other trade union issue, it is our issue. No other trade union movement in the world can fix the relationship between the Australian union movement and indigenous people. The same thing applies to all progressive people.

Kevin Tory: A lot of the domestic violence problems come from frustration and poverty. They deliberately destroyed the man's social role by stealing the land. Women tried to keep the families together. A lot of our sacred objects were stolen. It is a colonial imposition. Who were the beneficiaries? The wider society.

Education is part of the process. I am one of 13 children. My dad never knocked us about. He told me to get out there and try to get a descent living, and a lot of things will flow from that. There is some terrible violence among some of my relatives, and that comes from the economic position they've been put in. Have a look at the violence you see in the refugee camps. Well, a lot of communities are like concentration camps, even today.

David Cooper: An underlying issue, including with domestic violence, is what process do we need to address these problems. And the process is one of sitting down and negotiating this out. And that should be the government's starting point on a range of issues. But instead it is playing divide and rule, marginalising people, and hand picking the voices it want to use or the people it wants to coopt. It is a corruption of process, and that's the problem.

Kevin Tory: It is like the NSW Land rights Act in the 1980s. It sounds simple. The Land Rights Act was initiated to address the people's concerns at the lack of land. They worked out a structure for buying back the land.

But today, the Land Council has a comment on everything, it si the doctor, the philosopher, but it was only set up to address the issues of land. ATSIC is a service delivery organisation but they made it the national political voice. They did that to lead to its eventual failure.

Adam Kerslake: The situation in most communities with domestic violence is very disturbing and confronting. We have to be able to talk about it and find a way through it, without playing into the hands of the Hansons and the Howards, and getting bashed for it.

You have to deal with it as much as possible internally. You get 'it's a socio-politcial-economic context which explains this', but that's not enough. We have to find ways through it.

Education is a key. You have to find ways to keep children in school, which means we have to have black teachers, and more cultural awareness of what is needed.

It's like a cycle. When you go down that black hole, it is a community in decay. When you acknowledge that and say why is there decay, you get back to the fact that it is a deliberately driven strategy. Just why ATSIC was set up, why independent indigenous voices were incorporated into the system.

That's why I think we have to go back to the basics and create places where we can have black voices independent of government, independent of business, independent of the bureaucracy.

Another dimension is that Aboriginal communities are disunited. I don't know how many times you go into a place and get attacked. Linda Burney said that when people told her it was going to be hard in politics, she said, 'you don't know black politics'.

You get carved up. You are young with a big mouth and people start to say all sorts of stuff. When you don't have a united group, and you have incredible social decay, we have to not hide from this but we have to say it is there for a reason, not dissimilar to poisoned water holes, it is about keeping black people disempowered.

That way the land issue never comes up.

If they don't want us organised, let's try to find ways that we can be organised.

I really want to campaign around juvenile justice in a way that brings us together, but I haven't quite worked it out yet.

Kevin Tory: People migrated to Australia from countries that could no longer sustain them. This country allowed you to develop to your full capacity as human beings. Remember that. Without our ancestors nurturing this land, it would have been like the Sahara Desert, you wouldn't have been here. So we go with the birds, the trees, the rivers, the lakes. It is a giant cobweb and we are intertwined in it. You have responsibilities just like our ancestors did. Just because you have buildings, flash roads and jets, don't think you don't have responsibilities. Land rights is not just about us having a bit of land. Land rights is a living thing. It means that the land has rights too.

David Cooper: People have argued about the reconciliation process we had under the Council. Was it a good or a bad thing? Was it strong enough, or too wishy-washy? But the reason that it occurred at all and had some degree of success is that it had bipartisan support. We shouldn't lose sight of that. Howard has removed bipartisanship as a fundamental principle of moving forward on these issues. He's alienated all small-l liberals in the Coalition. There is a real need for us to make bipartisanship an important thing to reestablish. It is not going to deliver big outcomes in once sense, but experience shows that unless there is that fundamental basis, then major change doesn't happen in Australia. The 1967 referendum result would not have happened without strong broad support.

Dr David Cooper is the National Co-ordinator of Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation

Kevin Tory is a longtime activist and the worker of the Trade Union Commitee for Aboriginal Rights

Adam Kerslake is the convenor of the Labor Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee and is the Labor Counil Campaign Unit Coordinator

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