Speech by Jackie Huggins
Co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia
For the HREOC Overcoming Disadvantage Workshop
16 September 2005
The Mint
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today and pay respect to those who have gone before us.
Thank you John and thank you to Tom, Darren and the team at HREOC for inviting Reconciliation Australia to co-host today’s workshop, and inviting me and fellow director Mick Dodson to take part.
As the first Reconciliation Australia speaker of the day, there are a few general points I’d like to make about the Productivity Commission’s report – not the specifics but the overall value of the research and its publication. The presence here of so many people, representing so many different organisations working to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians says a whole lot in itself.
The report is critical because its regular, it is developed by a highly credible instrument of government and it’s driven by all Australian governments through COAG.
Many of us have reservations about government and those instrumentalities, and the COAG trials have done little to reassure us. But having high level government support for this kind of regular, robust measurement and reporting tool is essential if we are to set a strategic, evidence based policy framework.
It’s something many
of us in this room were asking for over a long period.
It may not be perfect but we should work together to make it the best it
can be and that’s why we’re all here today.
To share ideas. To understand this data at a level that’s about more than numbers.
I’ve been invited to speak today specifically about crime and justice, and substance abuse, possibly the most frightening elements of the report – for many reasons, including the difficulty in collecting accurate data.
Most of all, it horrified me because of the children and the fact that we face a situation where so little credible data is available on actual levels of child abuse.
I’ll assume that workshop participants are aware of the statistics covered in the report so I won’t go over these. What may be of more value for today’s discussion is for me to speak a little about this manifestation of our disadvantage and the impact it has on the reconciliation process.
And then to tell you something about a new tool Reconciliation Australia is hoping to develop in cooperation with the Productivity Commission and other partners which could provide an alternative way at looking at disadvantage, particularly where statistics are manifestly inadequate.
The high incidence of violent crime and substance abuse in our communities is what many Australians associate with Aboriginality.
It defines us.
To the point where people will argue with alacrity that we are somehow genetically predisposed to violence and drunkenness or that this behaviour is part of our culture.
It allows people to blame us for the problems we experience or to shrug us off as a lost cause.
As you’ll hear from other speakers, in significant areas like community governance and employment, many encouraging things are happening out there and partnerships between all the crucial players are working to good effect.
There are also now some useful trials taking place marrying traditional with contemporary justice systems. But if the reconciliation rhetoric had been backed up in the fundamental area of crime and substance abuse, we would have reached the stage where we would be coming together for an event like this to measure and celebrate the distance we have travelled.
Alas, we cannot afford that luxury just yet.
So here we are, yet again, talking about a level of violence and dysfunction that could see another generation of Indigenous children grow up too damaged to create functional families and communities themselves.
But at least we are here. At least the issue of violence and substance abuse is well and truly out in the open, and not only are our women speaking out about it but so too now are our men, men like my brother Mick Dodson.
But looking at this recent report, we need to ask ourselves why over two years and two decades, have we seen things go backwards rather than forwards?
For the general community, the answer to this question is quite elusive. As I’ve said, It tempts people to fall back on dangerous stereotypes about Aboriginal people and the choices we make and don’t make for ourselves.
The reality is that what has stayed the same over 20 years is the inability of government agencies and mainstream service providers to address our problems effectively.
And when problems like these are chucked in the “too hard basket” over long periods of time, they get worse and worse until they reach the kind of crisis we now face in family violence and substance abuse.
Given that I speak today as Co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia, I also see my role as putting crime, justice and substance abuse into a context with all the interconnected facets of reconciliation.
I told an audience the same thing earlier this year when I was asked to speak on a panel about Indigenous health.
And I started by telling them I don’t enjoy going to funerals any more than the next person. But the fact is that it’s not unusual for Aboriginal people to attend hundreds of funerals in a year.
In fact it's commonplace.
Participants today will spend a lot of time talking about a whole lot of shocking statistics and these are things we need to discuss. But the trouble is Australians have heard these numbers so many times before, they’re numb to the human significance.
Too often, they’re so numb that their first impulse is to blame the victim.
And some of these numb people would have been among the first to express donate to Tsunami relief appeals earlier this year. And while I have no problem with this at all (I donate too), I am concerned when people pride themselves on being compassionate but somehow cannot extend that compassion to fellow Australians living - and dying - in their own backyard.
If we are considering crime and justice and substance abuse, and all the other grim findings of the report we need to talk about how to wake the nation up to the relevance of Indigenous disadvantage to Australia’s overall prospects.
Which is why Reconciliation Australia has started talking to the Productivity Commission and other agencies about establishing a Reconciliation Barometer, something like one that is operating now in South Africa.
This tool would allow us to dig in behind the kind of statistics uncovered in the Productivity Commission reports to evaluate the context in which the disadvantage is being experienced. The attitudes and expectations of the community, as well as the performance of democratic institutions in promoting reconciliation.
The barometer would show what Australians understand of reconciliation, who they believe is responsible for bringing about change and whether these people and institutions are meeting expectations.
For a start, it’s taken these people far too long to recognise that different aspects of disadvantage are inexorably linked, that one problem predisposes us to the next and the next and the next until it becomes virtually impossible to break through and take some control.
If we consider the problem of petrol sniffing in isolation, we get nowhere. Dipping into sections of the Productivity Commission report looking for a problem snapshot has limited value. We need to look at the picture of disadvantage as a whole and address it as a whole, and the barometer would help us do that.
Australia has also been on a slow learning curve when it comes to acknowledging that government or business or anyone else trying to develop substance abuse, justice or other projects without the close, constant and respected involvement of Indigenous communities are on a road to nowhere.
I so often find myself on panels as the sole Indigenous voice talking about family violence, trying to explain things that should really have been understood by now. Surely we’re past the point where we imagine that a bunch of white people talking about how to solve the problems of black people is going to get us very far.
The rhetoric at least is improving and well-overdue insights about putting control into the hands of Indigenous people provide a foundation of common ground between the main stakeholders involved in Indigenous policy.
But if these insights are to amount to anything in terms of improved outcomes and progress towards reconciliation, they must be backed with very different structures and practices from what we’re used to.
Mick will talk a little later about Reconciliation Australia’s Indigenous governance work which represents the approach our organisation is taking to address disadvantage as a whole by building capacity and putting control into the hands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
I’d also make the point that the failure to see any improvement in areas of Indigenous disadvantage is a clear sign of the limitations of so called practical reconciliation. This approach has argued for some time that practical measures can somehow operate in isolation of those other more spiritual aspects of reconciliation that recognise and respect difference in culture, priority and approach, and the overarching significance of family and community.
In reality, the practical and the symbolic sides of reconciliation are impossible to separate because that sense of who you are and how you feel about yourself is intrinsic to how you behave and how you shape solutions to problems that affect your community.
The sense of how connected you feel to fellow Australians.
If you believe you’re an outsider, you are an outsider.
If you believe you’re beaten, then you’re beaten.
If you believe that the rest of Australia has no respect for you or your culture, then for all intents and purposes it doesn’t.
These things are self-fulfilling and we have to find the symbolic basis, as
well as the practical basis, for living together and bringing out the best in
one another.
If the Australian Government speaks of shared responsibility without shared
power, then agreements being drawn up with communities are in themselves only
symbolic.
Recognition of the special place of Indigenous people on the other hand, the kind of recognition that has been extended to Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada and New Zealand, has enormous practical implications. It is the basis on which people can take control of their own lives.
It provides the only real basis for lasting reconciliation.
Most people here would recognise that crime and substance abuse are about many things and perhaps we are just starting to understand that well enough to end the cycle of failure.
We are all involved in reconciliation and that’s why we can’t afford to receive what we hear today in a passive mode. It affects all of us, no matter whether we in government, in education, in the community.
It matters what we think and what we say. And it matters most what we believe about this stuff.
Governments will only go so far without backing from all areas of the community. They don’t like taking risks or providing the space for Aboriginal communities to make mistakes as we start to make decisions for ourselves.
We’re human beings - you have to expect that mistakes are going to happen from time to time.
But you also have to expect that great things will happen. We will succeed. We will prosper, as Indigenous peoples around the world have shown they can prosper when they’ve been given the chance.
Around Australia, exciting examples are already out there to see in our communities as Mick will outline this afternoon, and we’re ready to join the points of light.
Instead of funerals, I look forward to the graduations, the birthday parties – for 60th, 70th and 80th birthdays – and seeing my great great grandchildren for that matter!
I look forward to a true and lasting reconciliation where the life chances and expectations of kids all over Australia are equal.
We have a real opportunity now to shift direction and make all of this possible. Let’s really use these reports for the purpose they are intended.
Not simply to show what’s wrong but to make it so clear and impossible to ignore, that we become determined as fellow Australians to join hands and work to make things better.
Last updated 28 September 2005.
