Australia

Turnbull no longer cares about reconciliation with Indigenous Australians

While the world watches, our prime minister is failing to take his task seriously. It’s time to reopen the dialogue on Uluru

n recent years, Australian politics has degenerated from comedy (Tony Abbott grovelling to the Duke of Edinburgh) to tragedy (Malcolm Turnbull grovelling to Peter Dutton) and now farce (with Barnaby Joyce … well, just being Barnaby Joyce). The ability of the country to conduct anything approaching a serious public policy debate on any aspect of our strategic, economic, social or environmental future seems to have disappeared.

As a national polity, we have fallen victim, like much of the collective west, to the globalisation of superficiality. We savour the titillation of the moment. We have acquired the national attention span of a gnat. All while the mega-changes that are fundamentally impacting all our futures – from artificial intelligence, block chain, cyber, politically destructive levels of inequality, the rise and rise of China and irreparable climate change – are raging around us without any effective policy response.

One part of this broader picture is the absence of any effective debate about the collapsing bipartisanship in what we had once believed was a collective, national project of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. This has been a half-century-long undertaking.

It began with the 1967 referendum. It continued under Gough Whitlam with the Northern Territory Land Act and the Racial Discrimination Act. It expanded under Paul Keating with Eddie Mabo, the Wik and the Native Title Act. Then followed the Bringing Them Home report, the Sorry Day marches and the stories of the stolen generations. Next the national apology, the national Closing the Gap strategy and the initiation of the processes of constitutional recognition of our First Peoples. And most recently the Uluru “statement from the heart.”

Yet during the week of the 10th anniversary commemorations of the national apology on 13 February, and the government’s response to the 10th Closing the Gap report to parliament, it was almost impossible for either Indigenous or non-Indigenous voices to be heard at all, as we all wallowed in the next instalment in the New England chronicles of the decline and fall of Barnaby Joyce. The government, perversely, was delighted. It masked Malcolm Turnbull’s pusillanimous response to the fact that we are currently on track to achieve three of the seven Closing the Gap targets we set back in 2008 in education, health, housing and employment.

The national apology was an important element of the reconciliation process. The political right reject it as “mere symbolism.” Leaving aside the fact that this was a formal recommendation of the report of the royal commission into the stolen generations, it was also necessary to begin the process of healing after centuries of mistreatment of our Indigenous brothers and sisters. It was an emotional bridge that had to be crossed, recognising at a most elementary, human level that fundamental wrongs had been committed by white Australians against black Australians. It couldn’t just be swept under the carpet. It was time, after 210 years, to own up. And we did.

The practical part of the reconciliation process came with Closing the Gap. The far right, and others from the faux left, have long attacked the Closing the Gap strategy. My response has always been “what gets measured gets done”. And “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done.” As for those who have argued that the targets we set for infant mortality, mandatory pre-school, literacy and numeracy standards, school attendance rates, year 12 completion rates, employment and life expectancy were too ambitious, again my response is: they are deliberately ambitious because of the depths of Indigenous disadvantage. Is anyone seriously suggesting that we should aspire for something less than Indigenous equality with non-Indigenous Australians?

The uncomfortable truth is that a major reason we are falling short of meeting all our Closing the Gap targets is the steady withdrawal of commonwealth policy and funding effort over the last four years. In 2014, the current government withdrew $500m from the strategy almost as soon as they took office.