Here we go again.
It’s time for that perennial spotlight on national negligence in Indigenous affairs, the excruciating parliamentary groundhog day that highlights federal parliament’s failure to govern for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Yes. It’s Closing the Gap day.
On Monday, three of seven targets will be said to be “on track” – a modest but welcome improvement on last year. Our political leaders from the prime minister down will, meanwhile, wring hands and vow, “we must do better”, while seeking cover in whatever statistical aberration they might.
The Indigenous parliamentarians embody the profound difficulty of changing from the inside a political system that’s ignored – wilfully refused to hear – this continent’s Indigenes since long before federation. Still, they will rise and passionately articulate the terrible policy failures that leave their First People shamefully among the world’s most impoverished and socially disadvantaged.
What began as a bipartisan policy response to non-government agencies’ Close the Gap campaign a decade ago is now an annual charade. Ten years on, Closing the Gap is a failed act of parliamentary symbolism that does little but reiterate endemic problems. They are problems that can’t be fixed without real political courage and risk (examples of which are pitifully scarce) and a new commitment to bring Indigenous people onto the ground floor of policymaking and implementation.
A key political objective behind the Closing the Gap political process has been to offer reassurance to the world, not least to the United Nations, that the government is acutely watching its Indigenous disaster space, a catastrophe that warrants an international aid delivery-style response in some places. Genuine responsiveness is another thing all together.
So, where to start?
Uluru.
Last year’s Uluru statement from the heart, coming at the end of the referendum council consultation process, reflected the sentiment expressed at dozens of earlier Indigenous community meetings across Australia to roundly reject symbolic acknowledgement of First Nations in the commonwealth constitution.
It wanted something real, something practical – an Indigenous “voice to parliament”. It was not a call, as prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and deputy PM Barnaby Joyce each fatuously dismissed it as, some nebulous demand for a third parliamentary chamber.
It was an articulation of the genuine need, given the unique problems faced by Indigenous people, to have a more constructive advisory and consultative role in the parliamentary process regarding Indigenous policy such as Closing the Gap.
Before the ink was dry on the statement from the heart Joyce – with the absence of interest, subtlety or emotional intelligence that marks his engagement with Indigenous policy – damned it, saying, “... it’s not going to happen”. Turnbull waited the rest of the year, thoroughly disengaged from the cry from Uluru, before himself misrepresenting the “voice” and ruling it out in what will be remembered as one of the most profound moments of belligerence by an Australian prime minister to Indigenous people.
This from two leaders who are overseeing the implementation of $500m-plus of cuts to Indigenous programs from the 2014 federal budget, as if doing so has had no impact on the width of “the gap”.
Such a voice to parliament would say that Closing the Gap needs to be re-booted so that policy responses are firmly grounded in self-determination. Historically, Australia’s federal political responses to the failures of elements of self-determination – for example, the corruption within the long ago disbanded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission – has been to eliminate whole structures with the stroke of a pen.
Atsic remains the best example of this. Nobody will deny its problems, although comparisons with federal, state and local government corruption sit uneasily among white policymakers and legislators. Few in politics charged with finding answers to Indigenous problems today are willing, however, to acknowledge what the commission did well and learn from it. Still, Atsic was abolished with the type of bipartisan flourish and haste that has covered up generations of government failure in Indigenous policymaking (see, too, the mutual political protection surrounding the implementation and continuance of the 2007 “intervention”).
More Indigenous people need to be encouraged into the public service and their status elevated within the Indigenous policymaking orbit. Media companies need to appoint more specialists – Indigenous and other – who consider First Nations issues beyond the context of parliamentary politics, who are dedicated to understanding unique cultures and identifying the roots of Aboriginal disadvantage in colonial history.
Indigenous incarceration rates and deaths in custody, and child separation rates, meanwhile, have been excluded from the Closing the Gap targets – a decade-long absurdity given the insight those measures offer into the lot of Indigenous communities.
This Closing the Gap day it’s time for non-Indigenous politicians to stop talking. It’s time they listened to what so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are saying loud and clear about how to change things for the better.
- Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
