The figures seem to confirm that practical reconciliation is not enough

In this way, the government has tried to “sell” reconciliation to Australians who are fearful of the concept. People who can get their heads around the idea of women and children needing to be protected from violence, but who can’t accept that present suffering has anything to do with past dispossession of land and culture.

Let alone accepting any notion of Australia’s first peoples needing and deserving a special place and special rights, officially recognised and enshrined in our nation’s laws and symbols.

In this highly controlled context, and after the emotional triumph of the bridge walks in 2000, it is true to say that many in the community have been left with the impression that the reconciliation agenda in Australia has run into the sand. Others have been basking in the mistaken belief that reconciliation has already arrived.

The truth is somewhere in between.

Significant as they were in a symbolic sense, the bridge walks masked the harsh reality of a lot of what we call “unfinished business” – issues tied in with reconciliation that have not been resolved and that Indigenous people have identified as being fundamental to the process.

Those of us involved in reconciliation and Indigenous affairs have had to make a choice about whether to keep beating our heads against a wall on those particular issues or whether we look to what can be achieved in the political context in which we find ourselves, and try to move forward.

And that is the choice we have made. We have a responsibility to keep the rest of the agenda alive but we also have a duty to engage and to continue to progress things that can be progressed.

This has posed a serious dilemma for many of us, as believers in the vision of a truly reconciled Australia. And so we find ourselves, in November 2003, at a kind of moral crossroads.

At the very least, I believe we have an obligation to hold the government accountable on the basis of its own rhetoric.

If practical reconciliation is the test, how are we performing?

Given that we have been operating now for seven years on the basis that we can address one level of reconciliation – the practical – without accepting the importance of the other – the symbolic – surely we have reached a point where we are entitled to start evaluating the effectiveness of this approach.

We’ve heard the statistics on Aboriginal disadvantage often enough. In fact they are glibly repeated to the point where most Australians no longer register their human significance.