Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Being black is a waiting game

Indigenous Australians know how to wait, a lesson they have learned from long and often bitter experience.

But their latest moves to try and bring the government to at least some understanding of some of their problems is probably born more of desperation than of hope. With the prospect of at least three and possibly six more years of the Coalition in power in Canberra, there is a recognition that time is running out for the previous generation of Aboriginal leaders, and the current one isn't getting any younger either.

The indefatigable Patrick Dodson must finally be nearing retirement and Noel Pearson has spent much of his political energy on his own country in Cape York. Aden Ridgeway has lost his place in the Senate and Lois O'Donohue has effectively bowed out of the fight. And those waiting in the wings, the angry young men like Murrandoo Yanner, are more bent on confrontation than reconciliation.

It was no doubt this grim prospect that prompted Dodson and Pearson, urged on by many of their senior colleagues, to offer yet another olive branch to the recalcitrant John Howard in an attempt to keep the lines of communication open. After all, they had nothing much left to lose; or, as Pearson put it, "It had to be Nixon that went to China and we have a Nixon who can help us ..."

As it happened their approach coincided with Howard's meeting with the black footballer Michael Long, an unsophisticated but tough-minded man who had refused to be compromised by taking a position on Howard's hand-picked Advisory Council but hoped, naively, to move Howard (whom he once called a cold-hearted prick) to compassion. Long asked for a hug, but had to settle for a manly handshake in a photo-op which Howard no doubt thought would wrap up Aboriginal affairs for the year, if not for most of his last term.

And in a patronising reply to Dodson and Pearson, Howard said that he was always willing to talk, but his main source of advice would of course be his own Council, and he was not to be moved from his goal of "practical" reconciliation, by which he meant attending to the material disadvantage of Aborigines and forget about reconciliation and apologies and treaties and all that airy-fairy, bleeding heart, black armband stuff. In other words, indigenous Australians are to be treated as just another disadvantaged group; their unique status as the original custodians of the land, as the victims of colonisation and all the ills that flowed from it, is to be ignored.

This, of course, is assimilation by another name, part of Howard's dream of a totally homogenised Australia. He is, he says, concerned with outcomes, not with symbols. The statement is, of course, a lie; when it suits him Howard will wallow in the symbolism of Anzac Day (though not Eureka). His entire foreign policy is built around symbolism: there is nothing more symbolic than Australia's token contribution of forces in Iraq. But when it comes to the Aborigines he prefers to be pragmatic and tough-minded. It never seems to occur to him that his government has a duty to attend to both aspects of indigenous disadvantage, the cultural as well as the material - that he should perhaps try to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But then, he has never even acknowledged that cultural issues are involved. The predictable outbreak of violence at Palm Island after a death in custody - a death which very few people believe was entirely accidental - is just another instance of the distance separating Howard's viewpoint from that of indigenous Australia, and indeed from the awful reality. Dodson, in particular, has tried to explain the complexities of the situation to Howard many times, with absolutely no success.

We can only wish him better luck this time. But it might be more productive to write Howard off as a hopeless case and concentrate on his successors. In the past Peter Costello has expressed at least the desire to walk across the bridge. As always, indigenous Australians will have to wait.

Until last week very few Australians would have been aware of the existence of an organisation called SONA, which is exactly the way the government would have liked it.

SONA is an acronym for the wonderfully vague Strategic Opportunities National Allocation, a branch of the Regional Partnerships programme which was used as a pork barrel with cavalier disregard for proper process during the lead up to the last election. The great advantage of SONA is that you can't disregard proper process because there isn't any; while purporting to provide a short cut for urgent projects of broad national need, in fact it operates as a ministerial slush fund, pure and simple. Thus De-Anne Kelly was able to dip into it for such vital projects as the dredging of Tumbi Creek in the very marginal seat of Dobell, without accounting to anyone.

John Howard expressed surprise that there should be an outcry, and even a brisk senate inquiry before the government takes control; after all, he said, ministers were elected to spend public funds. Well, Coalition ministers anyway: when Labor ones do the same, they are hounded out of politics, as he helped to with Labor's Sports Minister Ros Kelly. But then, Labor didn't have SONA. Let it never be said that the Howard Government lacks innovation.