Culture

On National Sorry Day, It’s Time To Recognise That Saying ‘Sorry’ Isn’t Enough

From the Apology to the Recognise campaign, Australia offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people words and very little else.

by Alex McKinnon  26 May 2016
Sorry Day

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Today is National Sorry Day, and across the country politicians, businesses and media outlets are acknowledging the harm done by successive governments to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and expressing a desire for ‘reconciliation’.

But plenty of people aren’t especially familiar with the history or origin of Sorry Day itself — a history that pretty aptly sums up how little progress Australia’s made on taking Indigenous issues seriously. In the 19 years since the milestone Sorry Day is supposed to commemorate, reforms that may actually result in justice and tangible outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been routinely ignored or dismissed. 

In their place, vaguely feel-good promises and rhetorical flourishes have become the benchmark for what we regard as evidence Australia has progressed away from the bad old days — gestures that allow white Australia to excuse itself of guilt without giving up any of the privileges state-sanctioned racism has given it.

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“Blackfellas Will Get the Words, The Whitefellas Will Keep The Money”

Sorry Day itself, May 26, commemorates the day the Bringing Them Home report was presented to Parliament in 1997. The end result of a two-year inquiry into the Stolen Generations, Bringing Them Home brought the horrendous stories of Stolen Generations members and their loved ones into the public consciousness and recommended that state and federal Parliaments apologise for the suffering they had caused. 

Former Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to give an apology turned the issue into one of the formative political arguments of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Recognising Sorry Day began as an act of protest; in what was the country’s largest-ever mass political action, hundreds of thousands of Australians marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand a national apology on Sorry Day in 2000.

When Kevin Rudd was elected and finally issued the Apology in 2008, it was held up as one of Australia’s finest moments. And at the time, it was; members of the Stolen Generations and other Aboriginal people have spoken of its immense importance as an act of recognition and healing.

But with so much hope and significance placed in Rudd’s Apology, Bringing Them Home‘s other vital recommendations were ignored — specifically, that Stolen Generations members subjected to “gross violations of human rights” be eligible for reparations, including monetary compensation. The language of the Apology, routinely held up as one of Australia’s great oratorical moments, was carefully looked over by lawyers and constitutional experts before Rudd delivered it to ensure it contained no admission of illegality or negligence on the government’s part, without which members of the Stolen Generations can ever reasonably expect any form of compensation.

While state governments in Tasmania and South Australia have put aside dedicated funds to compensate Stolen Generations members for their suffering, at a federal level, the prospect of reparations has been dismissed out of hand by both major parties ever since it was first floated. As prominent academic, author, land rights activist and Kuku Yalanji man Noel Pearson noted at the time: “Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money.”

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Don’t Do It Again: Today’s Stolen Generations

Rudd’s Apology was meant to mark the end of Australia’s horrific treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, especially during the Stolen Generations. Lauded as a defining moment in our national history, fewer remember — or want to remember — that the Apology came at the same time Rudd’s Labor government was implementing the Northern Territory Intervention, a policy that has continued the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families to this day.

Ostensibly introduced to halt child abuse in Indigenous communities after the release of the Little Children Are Sacred report in 2007, the Intervention has been widely condemned as a disaster by human rights experts, legal groups, Aboriginal rights bodies and the report’s original authors, who maintain they recommended nothing like what John Howard ended up rolling out with Labor’s support. The Intervention and similar policies across the country have seen “an alarming increase in the removal of children from their families” — Indigenous kids are 10 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than their non-Indigenous peers, and more Indigenous kids are being removed now than at any other time in history. 

Groups like Grandmothers Against Removals have been campaigning relentlessly to spotlight the fact that governments taking Aboriginal kids from their families isn’t a past atrocity that Australia has atoned for and come to terms with. For thousands of Indigenous people marching, protesting and fighting today, it’s still a lived reality. There’s something profoundly hypocritical about holding the Apology up as a marker of our progress while making no effort to change the behaviours that necessitated an apology in the first place.

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The Hollowness Of ‘Recognition’ And The Need For Treaty

Which brings us to the latest indicator of ‘progress’ that may not live up to the high expectations we’ve set for it. Over the last few years, you’ve probably become aware of something called the Recognise campaign, a push to have Australia’s First Nations peoples formally recognised in the Constitution.

At first glance, Recognise is a slam-dunk. It has the support of both major parties and the Greens, a swathe of large commercial concerns like Telstra and the AFL, and high-profile backers like former Australian of the Year Adam Goodes, singer Archie Roach and newly-appointed ALP Senator Pat Dodson. And there are good reasons to update Australia’s Constitution in relation to Indigenous people: it contains outdated, discriminatory and blatantly racist provisions that deserve to be removed.

But there are serious doubts as to whether Recognise is the right way forward, especially among Indigenous people themselves. Prime Ministers ever since John Howard have been promising constitutional recognition, but they’ve always been decidedly vague on what that might look like. Partly as a result, there’s substantial but severely underreported opposition to Recognise in Indigenous communities. In a 2015 poll, a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander respondents didn’t support the campaign, and 75 percent would oppose a referendum on constitutional recognition that only proposed symbolic change. Feminist, unionist and Arrernte woman Celeste Liddle has called Recognise a “well-funded organisation to peddle the government’s agenda” and “little more than corporate endorsements and photo opportunities for powerful figures to prove how much they like us”.

Those who oppose Recognise have good reason to be suspicious. An acknowledgement provision in the Constitution could undermine the possibility of a more legally, politically and financially empowering option for First Nations people: that of formal, legally binding treaties and increased powers of sovereignty. The prospect of treaties between Australian governments and First Nations peoples hasn’t been seriously raised in politics since Bob Hawke promised one back in 1988, but Indigenous activists and campaigners have been pushing for their introduction ever since. Australia is the only Commonwealth country not to have a formal treaty with its Indigenous peoples.

“A treaty forces you to see me as an equal with a separate identity, history and culture that has existed for tens of thousands of years,” explains treaty activist and Gunaikurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman Nayuka Gorrie. “Recognition forces me to be asked to be seen by you in a colonial system that I don’t want to legitimise. Fuck that.”

There are also questions as to whether writing Indigenous people into the Constitution would further extinguish the already distant prospect that Aboriginal nations could exercise sovereignty and self-determination, including legally enforceable land rights, control over natural resources and the ability to practise traditional law. Unlike Recognise, sovereignty doesn’t enjoy much support from the big end of town, especially from mining and resources companies like BHP Billiton whose right to operate on Aboriginal land would be severely curtailed if First Nations peoples exercising sovereign rights could refuse access to sites under their control.

Despite this grim picture, there are signs of genuine progress. The Victorian government is in talks with Victoria’s First Nations peoples to sign Australia’s first legally binding treaty after a meeting of First Nations representatives overwhelmingly rejected throwing resources behind constitutional recognition. But that sort of dynamic is unlikely to be replicated at a federal level, where Recognise has backing from Parliamentarians of all stripes (although some in the Greens have expressed a desire for further action). Like the Apology and National Sorry Day before it, “change” of the kind Recognise promises talks a big game, but probably won’t actually achieve much.

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The NSW Reconciliation Council’s annual “I’m Not Racist, But…” event, held at Redfern’s Giant Dwarf Theatre on June 2, will feature a diverse and accomplished group of Australians exploring themes of racism, language and belonging. With former guests like Nakkiah Lui, Benjamin Law, Nazeem Hussain and John Safran, ‘I’m Not Racist, But…” is a forum to discuss the complexities of racism and race in contemporary Australia. Further info and tickets are available here.

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Feature image by Michael Davies.