by John Howard
On 22 April 1996, a bare seven weeks after the Government’s election to office, I had seen Mick Dodson, the Social Justice Commissioner, about the inquiry. I told Dodson that I could not give a commitment about future funding of the inquiry, and that there was a question in my mind over its long-term value. I said to him that I understood the intensity of feeling on the subject, but even people of goodwill may form the judgement that there was not a lot to be gained from an expensive inquiry on a long-past policy. I told him directly that my newly elected Government did not have the same attitude on this issue as its predecessor.
On 8 October 1996, in answering a question in the house I said that the removal practices which were the subject of the inquiry were quite unacceptable by contemporary standards and caused great trauma to those affected. I said that it was always hard to impose the standards of today on the conduct of earlier years. I added that despite the criticism it would attract, it also had to be said that some of those involved in the implementation of those past practices believed that what they were doing was right.
I saw Mick Dodson and Sir Ronald Wilson on 17 October and maintained the attitude I had expressed to Dodson in April and had explained to parliament a week earlier. They were unhappy, but intended to finish their inquiry in response to the terms of reference given by the Keating Government. They had wanted more money for the inquiry, but the Government was reluctant to agree to this.
When the report was tabled, I was sympathetic to a number of its recommendations but was unwilling to support a formal apology for the actions of past governments. I had strong doubts about the intellectual rigour of a lot of the report. No attempt appeared to have been made, systematically, to gather evidence from people still alive who had been involved in administering the practices covered by the report. They were very elderly but nonetheless some wanted to participate. Those who conducted the inquiry decided that any person who had provided evidence of their removal should not be cross-examined on their testimony or their evidence challenged. The justification for this was that given the trauma witnesses had experienced, they would be at risk of further trauma. This meant that the report was written almost entirely on the evidence presented from one side.
State governments, including a number of Coalition ones, were quick to offer formal apologies as recommended by the report. The Beazley opposition in Canberra wanted the same thing done by the federal government, but we resisted this. There were some members of the parliamentary party who agitated for a formal apology, but I do not recall a single member of the cabinet arguing for one. Indeed there was considerable scepticism inside the Government about the intellectual integrity of the entire report, which reinforced the generic objection I had to an apology.
My unwillingness to give an apology represented a dividing line between many Indigenous leaders and me for the remainder of my prime ministership. In the wake of the apology given by Kevin Rudd in February 2008, a number of the former members of my Government have said that the Howard Government was mistaken in not tendering a formal apology. I do not question that they now sincerely hold that view.
Relations with the Indigenous communities’ leadership, through 1997, continued to be very strained. This was particularly so with Pat Dodson. He was frequently called the ‘father of reconciliation’ due to his position as chairman of the reconciliation body and a certain level of charisma which he had acquired in the eyes of many Australians. Pat Dodson’s views on Indigenous policy had not altered since the change of government from Labor to Coalition. In the latter part of 1997, Dodson made what I regarded as a calculated decision not to accept reappointment as chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He knew that his action would have a real impact on the Indigenous community and create further problems for my Government.
When I knew that giving effect to this decision was imminent, I invited him to the Lodge on Sunday evening, 2 November 1997 and the two of us spent an hour and a half together, alone, trying to reach a proper basis for his continuing. I wanted him to stay as chairman, but he was determined to go. I walked to the door of the Lodge with him, we shook hands, and he started off down the gravel driveway then turned around and came back and said to me, ‘My position hasn’t changed, but if there is anything I can do in the future to help, I will try and do so.’ This last gesture reflected some recognition on his part that what he had done might be construed in a negative way by some people. He had done it nonetheless. I had tried hard to keep him, and although he would later say that he would reconsider his position, on certain conditions of course, I had to move on. The Government appointed Evelyn Scott in his place.
The 1998 election brought Aidan Ridgeway, an Indigenous Australian, into parliament as a Democrat senator from New South Wales. I got to know him well and within a few weeks of Ridgeway taking his Senate position on 1 July 1999, we were to collaborate in preparing a motion of regret to be presented to both houses of parliament. Whilst Ridgeway didn’t agree with me about an apology, he accepted that I was not going to shift. Instead of standing at arm’s length, he worked with me in devising a motion of sincere regret expressing feelings with which we could all agree. He brought credibility to this approach because he was the sole Aboriginal member of the Australian parliament.
The motion, carried without dissent, expressed ‘deep and sincere regret that Indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many Indigenous people continue to feel as a consequence of those practices’. This was not the language that Indigenous leaders wanted because it did not use the word ‘apology’, but to many it struck the right balance. I knew it would not satisfy the old guard of the Aboriginal leadership, the ALP or others who continued to see good Indigenous policy through the prism of separate development, with a heavy overlay of guilt and shame.
Following Pat Dodson’s withdrawal, Evelyn Scott, a dignified and capable woman, became chairman of the council. She proved a gracious and effective chairman, who at the time of the concluding stages of the council’s work in 2000 exposed the male domination of Indigenous policy and, by implication, the stifling of female opinion. Along with the historian Jackie Huggins and the WA magistrate Dr Sue Gordon, who I appointed to chair the National Indigenous Council in 2005, I found Evelyn Scott the most impressive female Indigenous leader in my time as Prime Minister.
The legislation setting up the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation appointed May 2000 as a completion date for its work. There was to be a huge gathering at the Opera House in Sydney, and an agreed reconciliation document was to be ceremonially handed to the Governor-General. Inevitably agreement could not be reached on the terms of the document. The two big sticking points were the apology and a push for recognition of customary law in cases dealing with Indigenous Australians. In the end a document containing the views of the council, including on those two issues, was handed over.
I chose to ignore the differences when I spoke to the gathering. Most of those there were unsympathetic, and because I did not say what they wanted I was heckled. As it was in Sydney, much of the organising had been done by the NSW Government. Its officials wore stickers calling for a treaty. To my knowledge, having a treaty was not formal ALP policy at either a federal or state level.
The next day probably 200,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for reconciliation. Kim Beazley walked, as did John Herron and Philip Ruddock. I did not. Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser walked and both attacked me for not doing so. I had decided some weeks earlier that I would not participate.
We had discussed the bridge walk in cabinet, with some colleagues arguing that we should all walk. There was divided opinion on this; I said that I would not be walking and it was loosely agreed that Herron and Ruddock should take part. Later that year there was a similar walk in Melbourne. Peter Costello and a number of Victorian ministers took part. This had also been raised in cabinet. I had no objection to their participation. Ine
vitably the press drew comparisons between my non-participation, and Costello walking. I was not greatly troubled by that.
The Coalition’s big win in the October 2004 election shifted the attitudes of Aboriginal leaders such as Pat Dodson. A major meeting took place at Port Douglas on 26–27 November 2004 at which a cross-section of the Aboriginal leadership agreed to seek a new and better understanding with my Government on Indigenous issues. After eight years and four election victories, the old guard had finally accepted the legitimacy of the Howard Government. After the meeting Pat Dodson said, ‘We want to re-open the dialogue with the Prime Minister.’2 I welcomed that but reflected that in turning his back on my entreaties, seven years earlier, not to give up the chairmanship of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, it had been Pat Dodson, unarguably at that time the most influential Indigenous leader in the nation, who had turned his back on dialogue with the Prime Minister of the day.
Noel Pearson, who by this time had become an increasingly powerful force in the Indigenous firmament, had clearly influenced the likes of Dodson and others. Chairman of the Cape York Land Council, Pearson scorned passive welfare, stressed the imperative of Indigenous self-reliance and was impatient with those in his own community who saw Indigenous advancement purely in terms of treaties and statements of rights. He understood the need for Aboriginal Australians to become part of the mainstream of the nation.
A week later Michael Long, the popular and talented Essendon footballer, completed his long walk from his home in Melbourne to Canberra to draw attention to Indigenous disadvantage. I happily saw Michael, who was accompanied by Pat Dodson. It was a positive meeting.
There had been a tectonic movement in attitudes. It was tempting to think that years had been wasted, and to some degree that was right. But it was more complicated. For a generation, almost the dominant thought stream about Indigenous Affairs in Australia had been that of separate development. To challenge that in any way, as I had begun to do from the start of my prime ministership, was to be accused of wanting to return to paternalism and even racism.
So much of the debate had been conducted against a background of guilt and shame, with little attention being paid to the responsibilities of individuals within Aboriginal communities. It was a one-way application of the rights agenda. By simply opposing the Keating Government’s approach to native title, Liberals were accused of racism and intolerance. Even Noel Pearson, who in time would have more influence on me and other Coalition figures than any other Aboriginal leader when it came to Indigenous policy, would call Liberals ‘racist scum’.3 He said this in angry response to the Wik plan on 31 October 1997. If ever there were a policy area which matched the metaphor of a slow-turning ocean liner, it was Indigenous Affairs.
Our last year in government finally saw a paradigm change. It was as if the dam had finally burst and much of the approach which had held sway for a generation or more was swept away. The catalyst for this was the report into child abuse in the Northern Territory entitled ‘Little Children Are Sacred’, and the historic intervention in the Territory launched by my Government in response to the appalling failure of the Territory Government to provide even the most basic protection to the children of the Territory.
I was transfixed by an exchange on Radio National, on successive mornings — 20 and 21 June 2007 — between Pearson and Tom Calma, the Social Justice Commissioner and very much an Indigenous leader in the old-guard mould. Calma attacked the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, part of the intervention, and generally maintained the rights agenda approach, totally misreading public feeling that the issue at stake was protecting little children. If that required putting aside the act, then so be it. Pearson took Calma apart; in so doing, he spoke for mainstream Australia as well as many in his own community.
The symbolism as well as the practical meaning of this cannot be overstated. Here was the man who by then had become the most respected Indigenous leader in the nation as well as enjoying widening support in his own community, backing a Howard Government action which enabled the quarantining of welfare payments. He also backed setting aside the permit system, which had allowed Indigenous people to block access to even public areas by other Australians.
Through the intervention, the Commonwealth took over Indigenous Affairs in the Territory. A taskforce chaired by WA magistrate Sue Gordon, a respected Aboriginal figure in her profession and state, and under the executive control of Major General David Chalmers, who had headed the army’s mercy mission to Aceh in Indonesia, after the tsunami, in 2005, was given the responsibility of implementing the intervention plan. There was massive public support, with a sense that at long last action had been taken to fix fundamental problems of law and order and health within Indigenous communities.
Mal Brough, as the responsible minister, handled the intervention with real skill. His defeat in 2007 was a great loss to the Liberal Party and the parliament. He had the right style for dealing with Indigenous issues, being sympathetic but possessed of a direct, plain-speaking manner. His army training had given him a mix of authority and mateship. Three years on, Brough remains the person most publicly identified with the intervention, but it would not have happened without the expectation of Pearson’s understanding, and the knowledge that he would reject the ‘rights at any price’ approach of the old guard such as Tom Calma. That was a defining change. The ocean liner had finally completed its turn.
In July 2007, shortly after the intervention had been announced, Mal Brough and I dined at the Lodge with Noel Pearson and Sue Gordon. There had been many dinners and other functions at the Lodge involving Indigenous leaders and me as PM. This one was different, because for the first time I felt that there was a real meeting of minds about what had to be done to improve the condition of Indigenous people in Australia. So many of the previous gatherings had been exercises in political circling. Pearson and Gordon did not agree with me on everything, but we shared the view that the way ahead must involve Indigenous Australians having full access to the basic entitlements of mainstream Australian society. One of those was protection of children from abuse. This meant that the separate development policies of a generation had to be abandoned.
Noel Pearson and I had grown to respect each other. I admired his intellect, his writings and his courage in espousing the need for individual responsibility on the part of Indigenous Australians. Successfully, he combined this with a patent pride in and passion for his Aboriginal identity.
Following a lengthy meeting in Sydney in September 2007, he wrote a detailed letter to me on 17 September which displayed his acute understanding both of Australian history and what had been wrong with the republican push of the late 1990s. He correctly analysed that Paul Keating and others were mistaken to base their advocacy of a republic on a repudiation of our British inheritance. Pearson wanted a republic, but rightly argued that if it were to ever come about it had to be on the basis of affirming our British inheritance and not repudiating it. He felt that I was the one political leader who could carry conservative Australia towards a republic on that basis, as well as enlisting conservative opinion to support a new preamble. ‘Preamble’ is the description given to the historical and aspirational words at the beginning of our Constitution.
I was at one with Pearson on the preamble and the wisdom of shifting from a welfare state to an opportunity state. My Government’s policies had always been designed to encourage individual effort ahead of welfare dependency. But I did not want a republic, and told him that nothing would change my mind on that subject.
Noel Pearson was an Aboriginal leader with whom I could talk not only about Indigenous issues but, of equal importance, issues which affected all of us as Australians. This was the secret of Pearson’s appeal to the wider public. He spoke from the heart in a unifying manner about our daily lives and the national condition, but in a manner which did not sell his own people short.
When I proposed, in a speech to the Sydney Institute on 11 October 2007
, a referendum for a new preamble to our Constitution which would acknowledge the first Australians, I was ridiculed for having come too late with such ideas. In retrospect, of course, I had; the Coalition was on its way to electoral defeat, although Kevin Rudd said that he agreed with my proposition for a new preamble.
The reality, however, was that it would have been premature for a proposition of this kind to have been put much earlier. The ocean liner was still completing its turn. In 1999 I had proposed a new preamble, in conjunction with the republican vote, which fully and appropriately honoured the first Australians. But because it had come from me, whose legitimacy was still not accepted by the Indigenous old guard, they turned their backs on it. A great deal more time would need to pass and a change of heart would be required before the issue could usefully be revisited.
Kevin Rudd promised during his campaign to deliver an apology if elected, but it was not a big talking point in his election pitch. It was not mentioned during Labor’s policy launch. The apology was delivered with great expressions of media and apparent public support. How deep that public support was will never be known — newly elected governments carry the public with them on such symbolic issues.
Several days before the apology was given, Noel Pearson wrote of being ‘convulsed’ by the contradictions involved. In a column in the Australian on 12 February 2008 he said, ‘The 1997 report of Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson is not a rigorous history of the removal of Aboriginal children and the breaking up of families. It is a report advocating justice. But it does not represent a defensible history.’ He wrote further: