There are competing visions of Aboriginal Australians on offer from the major political parties: victimhood or self-reliance; separatism or assimilation. Guess which one the left are peddling?
Indigenous leader and former Labor senator Pat Dodson says he is “encouraged” by signals the Albanese government remains committed to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, including requests for a treaty and truth telling.
Mr Dodson, who is known as the father of reconciliation, said Australia needed to learn that First Nations people are “sovereign people” rather than a group to be handed “minimalist benefits”.
No, instead he wants to be handed maximal benefits. All bennies, all the time.
And he doesn’t want reconciliation in any meaningful sense of the word: he wants separatism. What else can Dodson possibly mean by ‘Aborigines are a sovereign people’? Unless he’s using words he simply doesn’t understand – a distinct possibility – Dodson is openly peddling a very sinister agenda, and hoping that no one else is going to take serious notice of his wording.
What is sovereignty? Sovereignty is the sole, supreme and indivisible law-making power within a defined territory. Either the Commonwealth of Australia is sovereign over the whole or part of Australia, or someone else is. Sovereignty cannot be shared. If Aborigines are sovereign, then the Commonwealth – which represents all Australians, Aboriginal or non – cannot be.
What Dodson is demanding, then, is an Aboriginal ethnostate over part or the entirety of Australia. If Aborigines are sovereign, then they have a supreme law-making power that no other race or races can have.
There’s a word for that: Apartheid.
Despite Dodson’s babbling about a ‘collective’, he’s very far from representing all Aboriginal Australians, no matter what conceits to the contrary he may nurse.
Fortunately, other Aboriginal Australians do not share Dodson’s ‘gibsmedat’ racist mindset. Especially not the racist attitude that Aboriginality automatically equals disadvantage. As if Aborigines are helpless children: unable to look after themselves or lift themselves up.
Indigenous is not a byword for disadvantage and much of the left’s “truth-telling” ignores the nation’s many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander success stories, the Liberal Party’s new voice on Aboriginal affairs warns.
Kerrynne Liddle, an Arrernte woman from Central Australia, has declared that sound indigenous policy begins with nailing down good services to the nation’s most vulnerable communities.
Which is guaranteed to infuriate the troughers of the Aboriginal Industry. If we start allocating funding on need, how will box-ticking, city-based activists keep themselves in the style they’ve become accustomed to? Those thousands of bucks for a Welcome to Country ceremony only go so far, after all.
Senator Liddle appears likely to clash with the nation’s most prominent indigenous body, the Coalition of Peaks, as she ramps up her calls for a government crackdown on service providers in Aboriginal communities.
Many are Aboriginal corporations that are signed up to do this work in the national Closing the Gap agreement. However, Senator Liddle said too many of these organisations were not accountable to their impoverished Aboriginal clients or to the taxpayer.
Do the maths: we spend some 40 billion dollars of our hard-earned taxes on just three per cent of the population – four times what we spend on other Australians. Roughly $40,000 per Aboriginal Australian, per year. Yet, Aboriginal Australians in remote communities are still living in poverty.
So, where’s the money going?
“At the moment there are over 3000 Aboriginal community-controlled organisations registered and half of those haven’t actually complied with their reporting obligations with the regulator. It is not good enough when they are on the frontline … we have had organisations that have hoovered up government grants that haven’t delivered what they said they were going to deliver.”
As Liddle points out, Aboriginal Australians are perfectly capable of lifting themselves up without relying on handouts. Pretending that they’re not is infantilising and insulting.
“It is disingenuous to suggest that every Aboriginal person is impoverished because that is not true. There are many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working well and effectively in organisations.”
Senator Liddle cited as an example of inconsistency in activist truth-telling the fact non-profit organisation Supply Nation, which helps Indigenous businesses seeking government and corporate contracts, “only represents one-third of indigenous businesses that we know are out there”.
“So two-thirds have operated quite effectively on their own without having to register with what is effectively an Aboriginal support program funded by the commonwealth,” she said. “What we don’t do enough of is asking those people who have been successful: how did they get there?”
Start doing that, though, and the whole notion of ‘the trauma of colonisation’ is under threat. People might start thinking that colonisation was ultimately an opportunity for Aboriginal Australians.
And then the activists would be out of a job. A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist.
