Drawing Level VS Closing the Gap

| July 6, 2009

Meaningful change needs to be a two-way street.  

One of the key components in restoring full health and well-being to Australia's First Peoples is to lighten the load placed on them, day in and day out, by introduced practices. This requires non-indigenous people to change our ways.

An example is provided by the campaign aimed at closing the standards of living gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. As commendable and fundamentally important as this campaign is, there is a real risk that it fails to address a much more difficult challenge.

Senior indigenous lawmen from Central Australia have, in the past,  spoken about the need for two peoples to become level. Recognition of ‘two laws' is one example of what is required from this perspective, as is ensuring that non-indigenous people in Australia have a real understanding and appreciation of indigenous peoples' cultures, values and world views.

By measuring standards of living in entirely Western terms – housing, education, employment and health – a "Close the Gap" campaign may fail to recognise the need for reform of Anglo-Australia's institutions and ways of life in order to better accommodate indigenous realities. And accommodating of First Peoples realities is a key component in restoring their full well-being.

While a "Close the gap" campaign may seek to change the lives of First Peoples ("to raise them up" to modern Western standards) it carries a presumption that the positions of non-indigenous peoples are somehow privileged and not required to change.

This contrasts with the message coming from some senior indigenous lawmen – where the need is to bring non-indigenous ways back to earth and into better contact with our true surroundings.

They know that until Western ways of life are better earthed, the lives of First Peoples will continue to be ripped apart in a mad modern spin.

And that earthing process requires engaging in a real dialogue with First Peoples as cultural partners, not merely as to their Western defined ‘needs' but also as to how non-indigenous practices and organisations need to change.

CONSTITUTIONAL AND PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

The ongoing promotion of the pretence that any Australian government and Parliament (as presently constituted) can promote, restore, protect and maintain the well-being of Australia's surviving First Peoples demonstrates that a fundamental  lesson of the last 100 years (at the Federal level and longer in most States) has not been learnt.

Part of that lesson is that the ‘modern' forms of Australian governance have to be reformed if we are ever to maximise the possibility of ensuring full health and well-being to Australia's First Peoples.

At this time, members of a Steering Committee are struggling with difficult organisational questions as part of a task to develop a preferred model for a new national Indigenous representative body.

They are unlikely to be able to call on indigenous forms of organisation as models for a national representative body, but may be required to comply with bureaucratic design specifications laid down by the modern nation-state – just as ATSIC was a revamped Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

Such an organisational design, duty statements and accompanying recruitment criteria (as well as the ‘unconscious' processes by which like selects like) can promote and enable only those who are better able to deal in Western realities. This can have the consequence of disempowering important senior lawmen, whose role is vital in maintaining good governance (for the whole of life). 

Nor is it likely that the members of the Steering Committee can address a key component for the whole process to work – to reform the major non-indigenous forms of organisation in order to better hear and act on the messages received from collective indigenous voices.

As things presently stand there is not a single indigenous representative in the Australian Parliament, and the Northern Territory emergency legislation is a telling example of why there should be.

Why should we not have, in addition to a new national indigenous representative body, dedicated seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives to ensure indigenous representation, from their representative body if not from States and Territories, in the law-making and governance processes?

The present Australian Constitution was framed in the 1890s when First Peoples were totally marginalised. As a consequence, the text (an Act of the British Parliament) enshrines a non-Australian spirit which passed its use-by date some time ago.

During the 21st century, and as new forms of representation become mature enough to carry out the consultation tasks, we need to negotiate a new Constitution with First Peoples as cultural partners.

The recognition of original Australian law (with all that flows from that)   needs to be included on the discussional agenda for this new Constitution, as do ‘post-modern' notions of co-existing sovereignty.

The message is simple – First Peoples have done an amazing amount of change to adapt to forcefully imposed non-indigenous ways of life, and now it is time for non-indigenous people to make some real changes.

Drawing level AND closing the gap is the healing way ahead.

Bruce Reyburn (62) grew up in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. He studied anthropology in New Zealand and enjoyed a brief career working on land claims in the Northern Territory in the early 1980s. Described as a ‘maverick' anthropologist by his gentler critics, Bruce gained a Lionel Murphy Scholarship in 1990 to work (under the late Ken Maddock) on how to improve dialogue between two systems of law in Australia. He separated (by mutual consent?) from modern anthropology in 1991, calling himself a ‘former anthropologist' (a la Prince). For much of the 1990s he used the internet as a means of advocating for the rights of First Peoples and to promote reconciliation and treaty matters. 

Bruce is presently working on his long-time "Australian life studies" project (see http://www.ozstudies.com.au/) and gets it out of his system and ‘out there' as an occasional blogger. See http://songlinesoz.spaces.live.com/ http://www.songlines.org.au/ http://breyburn.blogspot.com/ and, since he lives in Wollongong (NSW) where the need for reform is particularly pressing http://www.reformwcc.info/

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