For the reader's consideration......
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The
Saturday Paper,
7 October 2023:
John
Hewson
The
enduring stain of the White Australia policy
The
White Australia policy stands out as probably the most significant
blemish on this country’s national character and unity, as well as
its global reputation, with continuing consequences today.
It
has been said that latent racism, carrying echoes of White Australia,
persists across the country and all walks of life. We have seen it
emerge at football games and other events. Politicians have been
known “to play the race card” when they believe that appealing to
prejudice will afford them some political advantage.
In
light of Australia’s colonial history, it should come as no
surprise that race would become a dominant undercurrent in the public
discourse about the upcoming referendum, with the “No” case
appealing to those who believe the White Australia-era Constitution
should not be amended. How else can we make sense of many of the
misrepresentations and claims of opponents of the Voice to
Parliament? How are we to understand John Howard’s call for people
“to maintain the rage”, if not for its racial connotation?
Our
Constitution was drafted by protagonists of White Australia, strongly
supported by zealots such as Alfred Deakin, who became our second
prime minister.
First
Australians were not recognised as it was assumed they were a “dying
race”. Among the first pieces of legislation passed after
Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was
initiated just nine sitting days after the Duke of York officially
opened the Australian parliament. The law’s aim was essentially to
ensure a predominantly British population, by restricting non-white,
and particularly Asian, immigration and enabling the deportation of
undesirable migrants. It is difficult to understand by what standards
their desirability would have been judged, given the British
settlements were primarily penal colonies.
I
would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of
others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in
the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.
Aboriginal
Australians were also targeted. A range of policies was directed at
so-called protection and assimilation of Aboriginal people into white
society, one of which was the removal of Aboriginal children from
their families and culture. By 1912, the government was working to
remove all people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent from
reservations across Australia, with the goal of forced assimilation
into the white community. It is not too much of a stretch to claim
that these policies were designed collectively to destroy Aboriginal
society.
As
Barry Jones has pointed out in this publication, at the time of the
arrival of the First Fleet, Australia’s Indigenous communities had
well-established traditions and practices, art and mythology, spoke
roughly 500 languages and dialects, and made and traded tools,
weapons and goods. So much of this was lost in the ensuing violence
and generations of repression and neglect that followed.
Non-Indigenous Australians still have so much to learn from First
Australians about land and river and water management, among other
things.
The
initial focus of immigration on Britain was subsequently widened to
southern and eastern Europe, to the Middle East and just a few Asian
countries. After World War II there was an attempt to re-emphasise
the “favoured” British immigrants, with the Assisted Passage
Migration, or “ten-pound Pom”, scheme. This program invited
Britons to come to work in Australia to help meet the country’s
postwar industrial development and infrastructure needs.
The
White Australia policy was unwound in a number of steps, starting
with the Holt government’s migration review in 1966, which shifted
the focus of the program to migrant skills and their capacity to
contribute to the country’s priorities. In 1973, the Whitlam
government formally renounced the policy and shifted the focus to
multiculturalism.
However,
a racial dimension to immigration policy was raised again by then
opposition leader John Howard in the 1980s, when he called for a
slowdown in Asian immigration, and again with the arrival of Pauline
Hanson on the political scene, in her maiden speech to parliament in
1996 and subsequent statements about Muslims.
These
attitudes are at odds with the fact Australia has become probably the
most successful and tolerant multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious
society in the world – the envy of many. It is a tragedy that our
nation hasn’t come to terms with its history and built on a
recognition of the world’s longest continuous civilisation, with
65,000 years of history. We cannot conceive of the vastness of the
opportunity that is being lost through this myopic, frightened
governance. If the referendum fails, the world will see we have
missed this opportunity.
For
many years I have travelled widely for both business and academia,
and it has always troubled me greatly that I am so often questioned
about whether this country still upholds the White Australia policy.
This is still a common perception, and its persistence should bother
us as a nation.
In
1967, when I was a student at Sydney University, there was no
significant presence of Aboriginal people. Having been taught nothing
about Indigenous history in high school, my only awareness of
Aboriginal issues was some knowledge of the 1965 Freedom Ride that
was designed to bring to the attention of the public the extent of
racial discrimination in Australia. This publicity provided something
of a basis for the 1967 referendum that finally led to the counting
of Aboriginal people in the census.
I
would like to imagine that in 2023 our university campuses are more
engaged, and that the obvious need for First Australians to be
properly recognised and heard is readily embraced and understood,
without being swayed by the fear and hatred propagated by many in the
“No” camp.
The
most disturbing point in this campaign for me has been the
vilification of people such as distinguished academic Marcia Langton,
who had the courage and good sense to draw attention to the racial
undercurrents of the “No” campaign. It was not racist of her to
point this out. She was stating facts. Yet many who criticised her
had been running a fear campaign claiming that the Voice would
racially divide our nation. The treatment of her was abhorrent and
emphasises why the country so badly needs to come to grips with its
history and acknowledge the need for proper recognition.
The
recent speech of leading “Yes” campaigner Noel Pearson to the
National Press Club hit the mark. He spoke eloquently about his
vision for the future, a better future. He laid out what sort of
country we should aspire to be.
He
rejected the argument from the opposing camp that the Voice could
divide Australia by race: “We’re not a separate race – we’re
humans,” he said. “It’s just that we are Indigenous. And you go
to some parts of the world and indigenous people are blond and
blue-eyed. This is not about race. This is about us being the
original peoples in the country.”
His
comments contrasted sharply with those of Nyunggai Warren Mundine in
the same forum the previous day, in which the “No” campaign
leader described the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a “declaration
of war”.
“Only
love can move us now,” Pearson said. “It’s the love of home.
Our Australian home is the source of this love.”
I
would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of
others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in
the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.
In
an important sense, the referendum provides an opportunity to clearly
move beyond our White Australia past by responding positively to the
wishes of First Australians – that is, their request as to how best
to be recognised, as expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Giving them an advisory Voice can also help our leadership do better
than the failed attempts of the past to develop effective policies to
deal with Indigenous disadvantage.
This
is not about guilt but a positive expression of love and unity for
our national future.
This
article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday
Paper on October 7, 2023 as "The stain of White Australia".
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ABC
News,
7 October 2023:
Laura
Tingle
The
bitter politics and hypocrisy of the Voice debate will mark it as yet
another ugly chapter in Australia's history
A
usual plaudit for a book is that a reader "couldn't put it
down". But a plaudit for David Marr's new book, Killing for
Country, which documents his family's history as professional killers
of Aborigines in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s, is that it is
one you have to keep putting down.
It's
not just the brutality of the large-scale killings Marr documents
that requires regular pauses, but the voices of white people
discussing it — either in the most cold-blooded pragmatic terms, or
in terms of horror.
The
chilling fact is that, no matter what was actually known or protested
about at the time, the killings didn't stop.
Marr's
history documents events which were not just cases of rounding up
Aboriginal people accused of crimes, or events that just happened in
the early years of white settlement, but the systemic shooting and
poisoning of people living on land they had been living on for
thousands of years, or who may have adapted to living peaceably on
stations, or even in working in towns.
It
continued at least into the 1890s.
The
immediate horror of the story clashes horrendously with our image of
ourselves, and with the lofty ambitions of those who oversaw
federation, and the writing of our Constitution, as the former chief
justice of the High Court, Robert French, observed in a speech to the
National Press Club this week.
Noting
resonances with the current referendum debate, French quoted some of
the opposition to federation and the constitution at the time, with
one contributor observing that "the people aren't ready to
federate; they don't know what it means; [and] their leaders and
their newspapers are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to
teach them what it means".
He
quoted the then premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, observing
that "there is no doubt that here, as everywhere, there will be
timid men who are afraid of launching into something new; but when
was ever a great thing achieved without risking something".
French
observed: "The Australian spirit evoked by the 'don't know, vote
no' slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our
Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity."
Linking
the past with the future
The
headlines from the former chief justice's speech focused on his
affirmation that, in his view, the Voice posed no constitutional or
legal risks.
But
his speech also manages to link up, in a way which has often not
successfully occurred, the past and the future embedded in the Voice
debate.
"It
does not require a black armband view of history to conclude that
colonisation did not bring unalloyed benefits to our First Peoples,"
he said. "Nor does it require rocket science logic to conclude
that we live today with the cross-generational effects of that
collision."
Whatever
your views on the idea of the Voice, it is not just the ugly racism
exposed by the debate about it — which has seen Indigenous people
on both sides of the debate subjected to abuse and death threats —
it is the spectacular failure, hypocrisy and opportunism that has
been on display on occasions among our politicians that has already
marked it as another ugly chapter in our history.
The
willingness of some sections of the media to perpetuate
misinformation, and of other sections of the media to get lost in
attempts at false balance, has made nigh on impossible a reasonably
rational debate about what a permanent advisory body to the
parliament and executive, whose actual remit would be defined and
controlled by the parliament, might mean both symbolically and
practically to Indigenous Australians.
Once
again, it seems our leaders and newspapers "are not brainy
enough or honest enough to try to teach Australians what it means".
And
this is not because those leaders didn't know.
Conflict
over how to help Indigenous people
French
quotes John Howard — now a vocal campaigner against the Voice —
from 2007, saying:
"I
believe we must find room in our national life to formally recognise
the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the
first peoples of our nation. We must recognise the distinctiveness of
Indigenous identity and culture and the right of Indigenous people to
preserve that heritage. The crisis of Indigenous social and cultural
disintegration requires a stronger affirmation of Indigenous identity
and culture as a source of dignity, self-esteem and pride."
Now,
Howard says, people should vote no to "maintain the rage"
against the Voice, which he says would create "a new cockpit of
conflict about how to help Indigenous people".
Conflict
over how to help people — if conflict was what the Voice produced —
is apparently a worse outcome than possibly addressing "the
crisis of Indigenous identity and culture".
Howard's
self-described political love child, former prime minister Tony
Abbott — who has always claimed a special interest in, and affinity
for, Indigenous people — said this week that, rather than pursue
the Voice, "we should end the separatism, which has bedevilled
Indigenous policy for many decades now".
"Aboriginal
people are fine Australians," he told ABC RN, "and they
should be encouraged to integrate into the mainstream of our
society."
What
"integration" means is as unclear now as it was when Abbott
advocated the "mainstreaming" of Indigenous services when
he was prime minister.
And
if there is any model that currently defines how Indigenous policy is
executed at the federal level, it is the one imposed on us by Abbott
as prime minister when he insisted on bringing Aboriginal affairs
into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — a department
with no experience in service delivery.
Blocking
change, no matter what the truth is
No
campaigners regularly now rage about some mysterious bureaucracy
which allegedly worthlessly chews up billions of dollars in wasted
funding to Indigenous people.
That
would be the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the body set up
by the Morrison government and which morphed out of the structure set
up in PM&C by Abbott.
The
Coalition also appointed an Indigenous Advisory Council "to
provide advice to the Government on Indigenous affairs, [focusing] on
practical changes to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people".
The
inaugural, government-appointed chair of the council — which sounds
like it had a job pretty much identical to that proposed for the
Voice — was another prominent No campaigner, Warren Mundine.
That
the policies that many of the prominent politicians leading the No
campaign are actually campaigning against come from their own side of
politics, or are based on their own previous statements, and their
own policy legacy, is just one more depressing aspect of what has
proved a very flawed debate.
Coalition
figures from Howard to Peter Dutton insist their difficulty is not
with constitutional recognition but with the specific proposal for
the Voice.
Robert
French on Friday reflected that the very act of recognition proposed
by the referendum "is the creation of the Voice".
"I
do agree with John Howard that recognition in the Constitution is a
strong affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture," he said.
"A
stronger and practical affirmation will give content to that
recognition by the creation of the constitutional voice to Parliament
and the Executive Government," he said
After
many months of bitter debate, his words remind us that we are back at
a point where it seems that, no matter what the truth may be, we will
not let it lead to any change.
Laura
Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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