Can Australia afford not to be reconciled?

Right now – today – some of our greatest living artists, philosophers, spiritual leaders and their families remain subject to the racially inspired Northern Territory National Emergency Response – the Intervention. Against that backdrop, any notion of true reconciliation is farcical.

As long as even one such regime of social oppression remains in place, we remain a subjugated people. As long as any parliament can remove our most basic rights on a political whim, we remain a subjugated people. If governments, newly elected, retain those same impediments to justice – when all available evidence indicates the programs emanating from that oppression are not delivering the asserted outcomes – then reconciliation is no longer a national aspiration, but a ruse to disguise our continued subjugation.

In fact, what remains is simply a manifestation of non-Indigenous people’s impatience with their own inability to accept the scale of the effort required to truly reconcile the nation.

Regardless of the actual intent behind the Intervention, the outcome has been a further breakdown in the stability of remote Indigenous communities, and a vast expansion of bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of our people. The removal of resources sustaining our homeland communities has resulted in population drifts into centralised ‘growth towns’ which themselves are under siege from the impositions of the Intervention. These towns are being expected to soak up these pressures with no additional infrastructure investment – and guess who ends up suffering most as a result of that?

The Northern Territory is simply the front line in this latest assimilation push against Aboriginal people. In other regions of the country, our people understand that Closing the Gap may come to mean Closing the Door – on our culture, our languages, and our right to be uniquely the nation’s First Peoples, with all the rights and responsibilities that go with that status.

Following the 1967 referendum, the nation supposedly set out on a quest for our true humanity. We thought we were moving towards confronting the truth of our history. But we failed to understand what Maya Angelou meant when she said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

As a nation, we chose not to face our past with courage. Rather, we invested heavily, expensively, shockingly, in so-called solutions that further entrenched the assimilation paradigm of the previous 170 odd years. The 1967 referendum turned out not to be much of a step forward at all.