If you boil down ‘race relations’ in Australia it pretty much starts to look like a simple divide between two types of policy approach, the “We’re all Aussies” and the “Inter-Ethnic Ghetto Chaos Hell of Terrorist Apartheid”. What took me the longest to twig to was that multiculturalism, the Great Nemesis of racists everywhere, is actually a form of “We’re all Aussies”.
No… really. As an ideology multiculturalism is at its most basic a moral justification for tolerance of difference and nothing more. Philosophically the argument goes:
i. People are different.
ii. Difference is only a big deal if you make it one.
iii. Don’t make difference a big deal and,
iv. it will eventually ‘go away’.
Australian multiculturalism operates exactly along this line. Essentially it’s a ‘live and let live’ system that kind of ignores difference unless it makes things difficult for people (such as racial vilification), in the expectation that the melting pot will eventually smooth out the mix inter-generationally. And in many respects this is true, the melting pot does work. Although legend has it that immigration officials during the 70s and 80s preferred the term ‘de-wogging’.
The key to making this work is to not officially endorse any minority group. If you do that, then they have claim to means to permanently entrench themselves (hence the ghetto fears). So in practice, you can permit Chinese festivals and the like, but you don’t form a ‘Ministry of Asian Affairs’, because this would acknowledge and potentially perpetuate their difference. In short, while the private lives of citizens may be culturally diverse, their public (i.e. political) lives are not.
I write this because the only indigenous bureaucracy of any note in Australia’s history, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), was officially terminated this past week. And exactly why this has occurred is not too difficult to fathom.
As I may have mentioned before, ATSIC was hardly without its problems. Set up as a vehicle to bunch federal funding on Indigenous Affairs after the proliferation of programs and grants initiated during the 1970s, the Commission inherited all the prejudices and problems of its disparate bureaucratic forebears. Burdened with a learning curve like a figure eight, corruption, under-funding, mainstream bigotry and general ignorance, and of course a few mighty dodgy Commissioners, ATSIC was effectively ensured of never surviving.
I saw it as important though because ATISC was without doubt an effort to have indigeneity entrenched in the bureaucracy, and diversity used as a guiding principle of Indigenous Affairs. As a step towards real self-determination by Aboriginal people it was an actual step, and not a cacophony of vocal largesse.
Since taking office in 1996 Howard’s Government has consistently worked to have ATSIC removed from the bureaucratic landscape, via the systematic removal of key programs like health care, and squirmed uncomfortably when placed under political pressure by Commissioners. And naturally, the biggest issue taken up by ATSIC was the demand for Howard to say ‘sorry’ for the treatment of the Stolen Generations.
For those who came in late, from the 1880s to the 1970s, Aboriginal children were systematically taken from their parents. This was for various reasons, sometimes legitimate, but by far the most common justification was to destroy traditional Aboriginal lifestyles. Anyhow, it’s a woeful period of Australia’s history that I like to harp on about, so if you’re curious go to the archives, or read The Way We Civilise by Rosalind Kidd.
With ATSIC bringing deliberate and specific pressure to bear on Howard for an apology, something he saw as likely to result in compensation payments, the magic word has never appeared. The details of this issue aside, the interesting fact is that despite Howard declining the issue, it refused to go away while ATSIC kept referring to it.
In other words, ATSIC was pushing a political agenda not of Howard’s liking, and more particularly not of his own making. Now, I’d think, ‘oh, this is an indigenous issue’ and treat it with due importance, but Howard seemed to treat the demands as ‘unAustralian’, and there’s the catch. As a body of policy Indigenous Affairs is, like multiculturalism, largely about turning an ethnic minority into dinky-di ockers. Aboriginal people seem in the current policy environment to have little recourse but to culturally assimilate into the majority and leave their indigeneity as a private identity.
So for those at the back, Aboriginal people are welcome to become Aussies, but Aboriginality, the thing that makes them Aboriginal, is to be left off the political agenda. And well off the political agenda. Well off like five day old prawns off.
And I worry about that. With Senators like Vanstone, the Minister for ‘Outsiders’, making statements welcoming the end of the “sorry saga”, it seems that any independent voice for Aboriginal people has been finally dealt the coup de grâs in favour of an appointed council of Howard-friendly ‘advisors’. And I see Aboriginality dying a little more every day.