Did the Olympics help reconciliation
BY PETER BOYLE 
According to Sir Gustav Nossal, chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation, the Olympic Games have done more for Aboriginal reconciliation
in two weeks than months of negotiation. Meanwhile, Prime Minister John
Howard — still smarting from Midnight Oil's “Sorry” suit statement at the
closing ceremony — claimed that the Olympics had demonstrated that Australia
was “probably a lot more reconciled than some people had allowed for”.
A few days later, reality knocked on the door. As one wit quipped in
the Sydney Morning Herald letters column, “How far has reconciliation
come? Four hundred metres.”
So what's the truth? How far did the Olympic Games advance Aboriginal
reconciliation?
The PM and his minister for reconciliation, Philip Ruddock, are still
making Pauline Hanson redundant.
The federal government is preparing new attacks on the historic Northern
Territory Land Rights Act. Racist mandatory sentencing laws still keep
the jails disproportionately full of Aboriginal youth; indigenous people
are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than the rest of the population.
And the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody has risen to 147 since the
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reached its findings
in 1991, while in the 10 years before the royal commission there were 99
such deaths.
There is a federal election next year, but Labor, which began the whittling
back of native title, offers little different.
The Olympic Games did not turn the racist tide in Australian government.
Pauline Hanson's racist One Nation party continues to implode, but pollsters
and election analysts predict that the nearly 1 million who voted for One
Nation in 1998 will remain an influential factor in the next election.
That's why Howard and Ruddock still play to a racist audience. That hard-core
racist section of the population has made its presence felt in the letters
pages of the press right through and after the Olympics.
The Olympics were politicised to a degree around the issue of reconciliation.
The overwhelmingly positive public response to the opening and closing
ceremonies and the wild adulation of Cathy Freeman underlined the fact,
before the world, that a large and growing section of the Australian population
acknowledges that something has to be done about racism in this country. 
The positive public response to the symbolic political statements by
Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett and others did show that there is still widespread
dissent to Howard's racism; and Howard's face became a scoreboard that
flashed “Bullseye!”
The world's media, assembled in Sydney for the games, did not really
have to be told that the federal government is increasingly unpopular on
Aboriginal affairs. They knew it already and had started to tell the story
from the time of the huge Corroboree 2000 marches in May and June.
Those marches, or “walks” as their moderate organisers dubbed them,
were meant to be apolitical. But that was rendered impossible by the Howard
government's intransigence on the stolen generations issue.
Too passive
However, the many Australians who do disagree with Howard's treatment of
Aboriginal affairs could have done more than applauded Freeman and the
ceremonies imbued with Aboriginal motifs. This response was reassuring
(especially to indigenous Australians), but far too passive to make a serious
political impact.
They could have made a more active, mass, independent political statement
in the streets — like those made earlier this year at the huge marches
for reconciliation. These need not have disrupted the Olympics in any way,
but would have made big steps towards genuine reconciliation.
Tens of thousands of people would have come out if there was a strong
and united call from indigenous leaders. But there wasn't such a call,
probably because most indigenous leaders agreed with ATSIC chairperson
Geoff Clark when he said the closing ceremony was “better than any protest
we could manufacture”.
It is an understandable but mistaken view. The ceremonies put together
by Ric Birch, with the help of Stephen Page and Rhoda Roberts, did project
indigenous culture and identity, which white Australia has stifled and
denied for centuries. But being acknowledged in Olympic ceremonies is not
enough to turn the racist tide in Australian government. It was not even
the best we could have done.
Clark's hope that “our own political leaders should now pay heed” will
remain just that — a hope.
The point is that these are not “our leaders” and no amount of pleading,
screaming or embarrassing them in front of the world media is going to
change that fact. Most people have long realised that the Coalition and
its traditional alternative in government are fundamentally representatives
of a corporate rich which does not want to pay the overheads of land rights
or compensate the stolen generations or redress the gross social conditions
of most indigenous communities.
Calling for “vision” from these politicians is an utter waste of time.
Howard and Beazley have a vision: one of ever-fatter mega-profits for the
corporate monopolies they serve. Most people know that, but you wouldn't
tell that from the scribblings of the nation's liberal intelligentsia.
Reconciliation and national identity
Public discussion about racism in Australia has for some years become confused
with a debate about national identity. Fundamentally, this reflects the
great discomfit that a large section of the intelligentsia have with the
social conservatism of the Howard government.
These intellectuals are embarrassed by the racist image Howard, Ruddock
and Hanson may be projecting of them to the outside world. The “reconciliation”
debate is about their image and their identity, not, fundamentally, about
addressing the gross injustices still faced by the victims of racism in
Australia.
For instance, Robert Manne, a conservative writer who in recent years
has often been the first to publicly criticise the Howard government's
racist attacks, revealed his obsession with identity in his Olympic wrap-up.
“Concerning the Games, I felt only two twinges of regret. It was wonderful
that Cathy Freeman was chosen to light the cauldron, that she won her race
with such authority and style, and that no-one cavilled when she draped
herself in both the Australian and Aboriginal flags. The age of Bruce Ruxton
and Arthur Tunstall is, it appears, at long last at an end.
“Yet how even more wonderful it might have been if her pivotal Olympic
role had been able to symbolise the act of reconciliation, the apology
to the Aborigines, that as a nation we still await.”
Manne marvelled at the “extent to which creative Australians are now
reliant on motifs borrowed from Aboriginal culture for their sense of what
makes this country distinctive”.
Well whoopee-doo, let's have more Aborigines dancing, singing, running
and jumping “for Australia”. But let's also note that in the United States
— where African-Americans comprise most of the sporting heroes, singers
and dancers — institutionalised racism still shows through in the prison
population and poverty statistics.
Manne couldn't resist seeing the Olympic torch relay as “a powerful
symbol of national unity”. “Its arrival in particular neighbourhoods or
towns reawakened in many a sense of the value of community, which they
felt was being lost in our hyper-individualistic age.”
Then he slipped into hyper-fantasy: “The relay became, too, an exercise
in grassroots democracy — a way of honouring those who had served their
communities selflessly and of cutting local tall poppies down to size”.
National unity is a lie in Australia. This society has been class-divided
since European colonisation and is well on the path to becoming a society
as sharply class-divided as the US, where the average chief executive officer
now earns 475 times that of their average employee. We can sing Waltzing
Matilda till the cows come home and it won't change that fact.
The rise of racism and the “Hansonisation of Howard” are side-effects
of this deepening class divide in Australia. The politicians of the corporate
rich need racism in Australia to divide and rule.
Sure, people love to cheer for our side in a sporting event. But how
many people believe the Murdoch editorial which screamed that Cathy Freeman
showed “Australians are better than anybody else” when she won the women's
400 metres?
But Freeman's potency as a popular hero is built on her defiant victory
lap with the Aboriginal flag at the 1994 Commonwealth Games. Her status
was magnified when she shot down the Howard government's denial of the
existence of the stolen generations by simply announcing that her maternal
grandmother was a member of the stolen generations.
Her popularity shows the reach of a new mood of rebellion in Australia
after a decade and a half of attacks by the corporate ruling class.
New leadership
The call for “reconciliation” rests on the desire of hundreds of thousands,
possibly millions, of Australians for some sort of settlement of the racial
conflict at the heart of modern Australian society.
This is positive, but it is simply not enough. Most of these people
agree that reconciliation requires a just settlement to the legacy of decades
of racism, violence and dispossession. But this is not an organised movement
that has begun a serious, democratic discussion of how reconciliation is
to be achieved.
There is a blockage. The “reconciliation movement” is led by a far too
conservative crew to get anywhere. It's a bureaucratised, top-down movement
led by people with a big stake in keeping society the way it is. That is
why this “movement” has so far passively accepted, and even applauded,
months of fruitless but costly “negotiations”.
The reconciliation movement accepts the liberal illusion that change
will come by persuading the powers that be of the merits of its arguments.
It generally avoids mass mobilisations, preferring small meetings, photo
opportunities or performances by artists, performers and “prominent Australians”.
Seas of colourful plastic hands have been dutifully planted in parks
all over the country, but organising a march was not on; until the famous
reconciliation walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and its sequels in
other cities.
Those marches were a mistake in the eyes of some of the leaders of the
“reconciliation movement”. But it was a beautiful mistake that heralded
the possibility of a new mass movement against the racist offensive in
Australia.
This movement united around a single demand — an apology for the stolen
generations. But if it is to go further, it needs a broader platform of
anti-racist demands.
Howard has locked his government into a particularly conservative social
stance, partly to fight the challenge from its right flank that One Nation
was beginning to pose. But a new federal Labor government, or even a future
Costello-led Coalition government, could easily decide to issue a token
apology and be done with it. Most state parliaments have done this with
little but symbolic gain for Aborigines.
Look to the youth
The Olympics didn't bring reconciliation. We had a celebration of the symbols
of reconciliation but, as Clark conceded, we still need to “pursue substance
and not mere symbolism”.
But where will the leaders of a new anti-racist movement come from?
Basically from a new generation of youth rebels, black and white.
In terms of the political future, the three days of protest in Melbourne
outside the World Economic Forum meeting in September (S11) were far more
significant than the Olympics-generated messages of reconciliation.
Anti-racist activists of the younger generation had the courage to take
to the streets when One Nation reared its ugly head, while an older generation
of “progressives” wrung their hands at how the Australian identity might
be tarnished.
This younger generation of activists has tasted the power of independent
political action at S11 and is free of many of the ideological hangups
of older generations of Australians. Race and nationality are not as important
to younger Australians as they are to their parents' generation.
The legacy of the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the multiculturalisation
of Australia has pushed back the idea that people of one race or nationality
might be superior to another. It is hard to believe that this idea was
pervasive in Australia just four decades ago.
This younger generation also accepts, not just cultural diversity, but
that we live in a class-divided society, that there is conflict in Australia
and that “reconciliation” will remain elusive while the corporate rich
continue to run society for their profit. It will be from them that hope
comes.
[Peter Boyle is a member of the national executive of the Democratic
Socialist Party.]
