BY EWAN SAUNDERS
& MARCEL CAMERON
Last year hundreds of thousands of Australians participated in the "reconciliation walks", the most impressive of these occurring on May 28, 2000, when at least a quarter of a million people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Many of those participating in the reconciliation marches carried placards with a simple message: "Say Sorry". This was directed toward the persistent refusal of Prime Minister John Howard to apologise on behalf of the federal government for the commonwealth's policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families.
In a "khaki" election campaign dominated by Coalition and Labor politicians trying to outdo each other as "tough on asylum seekers" and united in their commitment to wage "war on terrorism", little has been said about another war: the invasion, dispossession and attempted genocide of indigenous people in this country.
At a community rally and march in Brisbane's West End called by the Socialist Alliance to oppose war and racism, Green Left Weekly caught up with prominent Aboriginal leader and Socialist Alliance Senate candidate Sam Watson.
"People were encouraged to march across bridges to illustrate the crossing of the great cultural divide", Watson said. "The marches were a huge success because they galvanised people right across the community who had never made that sort of commitment. The great majority of those people had never been involved in a political demonstration before."
He contrasted this outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with indigenous people with the lack of real progress made in the decade-long official reconciliation process launched by the Hawke Labor government in 1990.
For all the talk about reconciliation, this was a decade in which:
- Both the ALP and the Coalition moved to extinguish native title rights on behalf of the big pastoral and mining companies.
- A new uranium mine at Jabiluka was allowed to proceed against the wishes of the Aboriginal traditional owners.
- John Howard encouraged the racist rantings of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson with his attack on "political correctness", then proceeded to implement many of One Nation's racist policies.
- The Howard government refused to implement key recommendations of the royal commission into black deaths in custody and the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations.
- Funding for Aboriginal services and special assistance programs such as Abstudy have been cut.
"The reconciliation process from the top has been a process of complete denial", said Watson. "The critics of the reconciliation process from within the black political movement have been agitating for some time for true reconciliation in terms of jobs, housing, education and so on.
"Aboriginal people still have the highest unemployment rate in the nation. We have the highest rate of imprisonment, the highest rate of arrest, the highest rate of homelessness. So Aboriginal people have fared very poorly. I believe that real reconciliation is long way off.
"You have a very large and visible Aboriginal community here at West End. But if you look at each of these shops you'll notice that not one of them is owned or operated by an Aboriginal person. Not one Aboriginal person is employed in any of these shops, yet West End is one of the most culturally diverse places in Australia."
According to Watson, any genuine process of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians must start with recognition of indigenous people as the original inhabitants and custodians of their traditional lands. Watson believes a treaty between the government and Aboriginal people is a necessary step towards real justice for Aborigines.
"[A] treaty has been an issue since day one of the white invasion. If you look at the history of the Aboriginal political struggle, you have Aboriginal people stating that this is Aboriginal land and that [we] have a clear and inalienable right to [our] land. There has been no proper transfer of title from Aboriginal traditional owners to the British invaders. That's been a catch-cry of the black political struggle since the early 1800s.
"The first step towards a treaty is that all white Australians must recognise that this is Aboriginal land and that Aboriginal people are the traditional owners. Then we can start to talk about the management of the land because that's very important to Aboriginal people.
"There are sacred places that must be identified and protected and which need to be managed by Aboriginal people. That's far more important than the simple dollar value. We want to be able to look down the time tunnel and hope that Aboriginal children in fifty or a hundred year's time will still be able to see wallabies and koalas on that land. For that to happen there needs to be an enormous change in the approach to land management, and that can only happen with Aboriginal input."
Watson believes that to win the struggle for justice, "the Aboriginal political movement has to establish real and meaningful connections with the mainstream [progressive] movement". He sees the Socialist Alliance as having "shown a very warm and solid support for a treaty, which is why a treaty is one of the first demands you'll see on the Socialist Alliance manifesto".
"From a very humble beginning, the Socialist Alliance is going to become a real political force", Watson concluded.
From Green Left Weekly, November 7, 2001.
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