RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Since the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, small steps have been made by Australian governments towards righting some of the wrongs of invasion and colonisation. But recently, progress seems to have ground to a halt.

The federal government has shown next to no interest in advancing landmark reforms like the calls contained in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Today - Wirlomin Noongar author and playwright Claire G Coleman on how tokenistic gestures have replaced the real change demanded from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison

[Presser set up sounds]
“Well happy new year Australia, For we are one and free.”

RUBY:

Claire, on New Year's Eve, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that he was going to change one word in the national anthem.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison

“Our anthem is about us, who we are, and who we hope to be as well.”

RUBY:

Young and free would be changed to one and free and he said that this was about acknowledging Australia's Indigenous history.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison

“We are a strong and vibrant liberal democracy, we live in a timeless land of ancient First Nations peoples.”

RUBY:

Can you tell me what you made of that change and that claim?

CLAIRE:

Well, I thought the change was not only kind of silly and tokenistic, but actually just ludicrously silly. It doesn't change anything for anybody. I feel like it was a move of someone who's desperate to try and have some sort of relevance. Of all the things that our prime minister could have done for Indigenous affairs in Australia. That's what he chose to do? That's almost insultingly stupid.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison

“How good is Australia? And our anthem should reflect that. And the changes that we’ve made and that we’ve announced today, I think, achieve that goal.”

CLAIRE:

If you think about the idea of kind of one and free, it smells a bit of One Nation and the way they think about Australia. The idea of thinking of Australia as one, is rather than being unifying to make it just smacks of assimilation policies.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison

“And I think this very much sits in the mainstream of where Australia would like us to go and I think it's a great way to start the new year.”

RUBY:

Mm and you're saying that this is not a meaningful approach to change this one line, and I'm wondering if you can go back and tell me about the last time you think that the Australian government did meaningfully engage with Indigenous communities?

CLAIRE:

Ah well, when I think..when I really think about it. The whitefella politician that most Aboriginal people remember having tried something and even if you go to the Northern Territory, they speak of this, this is Gough Whitlam.

Archival Tape -- Gough Whitlam

“All of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.”

CLAIRE:

He was not a perfect politician, I'm sure he annoyed some Aboriginal people, but he was part of the largest handovers of Aboriginal land under land rights of any politician.

Archival Tape -- Gough Whitlam

“We will legislate to give Aborigines land rights – not just because their case is beyond argument...”

CLAIRE:

This is before even the Mabo decision. He handed over vast tracts of land at government expense, including the handover of Wave Hill, a big chunk of Wave Hill Station, to the Gurindji people

Archival Tape -- Vincent Liagiari

“My name is Vincent Liagiari, and I came down here to ask all these fellowmen here about the land right, that land belongs to me, belongs to Aboriginal man.”

CLAIRE:

It was symbolised by the amazing Mervyn Bishop photo of Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Liangiari’s hand.

Archival Tape -- Gough Whitlam

“I want to give back to you formally in Aboriginal and in Australian law ownership of this land of your fathers.”

CLAIRE:

There was no legal way to do this. I just thought it was the right thing to do. There was no government legislation. It was kind of an executive decision. Even Aboriginal people who are not currently particularly engaged in politics now, remember those acts and remember the way he treats Aboriginal land rights with the kind of love and a longing that it's kind of would be great to have a politician who cared that much now.

Archival Tape -- Gough Whitlam

“I want to promise you that this act of restitution which we perform today will not stand alone, your fight was not for yourselves alone and we are determined that Aboriginal Australians everywhere will be helped by it.”

RUBY:

So we’ve gone from Gough Whitlam who more than 40 years ago was making real, material changes on issues like land rights to Scott Morrison who changes one word in the anthem. Do you see a trend here where politics in this space has become more symbolic and less tangible?

CLAIRE:

I mean, the fact is that the Office of the Prime Minister has a certain ability to make executive decisions. You know, the change of the national anthem was not a decision that needed even a cabinet meeting or it didn't need a vote in parliament, it was just done.

But there's also genuine change that could be done by the prime minister or that the prime minister could at least institute for. But it's not happening, I think for example, the Uluru Statement From The Heart, the government response to that has been nothing but tokenistic and extremely shallow and completely and utterly disconnected from what is actually being asked for.

RUBY:

And so what do you think is going on here? Is this inaction - is it because of a concern about backlash?

CLAIRE:

Well, there is a lot of concern about backlash whenever a.. you know since Prime Minister Whitlam, everytime a politician has done something genuinely effective to help Aboriginal people, they've been punished for it in the polls. And I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that Australia still plays complete fidelity to settler colonialism.

The average white Australian still lives with this notion deep down that Aboriginal people have no right to or connection with the land itself. And I think there’s this attitude that you sometimes get where if an Aboriginal person asked for some minor concession, the response from a lot of mainstream Australia is that we always want something that we don't deserve or we want something for free. And it fascinates me that we all get so often told they were asking for something for free. What we're asking for is land rights, asking for land back.

Even though the Mabo decision overturned tonalities in law, there's nothing has been done in social engineering or in looking at the history books to overturn terra nullius in the minds of the average Australian. The average white Australian still for some reason imagines that when the English colonizers arrived here, they lived to an empty land and just took over the land without hurting anyone. That imagination, that imaginary scenario is still dominant in the Australian psyche.

RUBY:

We'll be back after this.

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Archival Tape -- Group of Protesters

“(Clapping) Land rights! Land rights!”

Archival Tape -- Newsreader 1

“Organisers say their Invasion day ceremony highlights how whites should have behaved 205 years ago.”

Archival Tape -- Unknown Activist at Protest

“The last time in the 60’s when they had crowds this big it forced the government to pull the troops out of Vietnam, let's hope we can force Bob Hawke to do something about Aboriginal people this time around.”

Archival Tape -- Newsreader 2

“Thousands have turned up and literally they are still flowing down the street here.”

Archival Tape -- Newsreader 3

“Thousands of protesters are taking part in Invasion Day rallies across the country, the protests are being held in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin, Brisbane and Townsville.”

Archival Tape -- Group of Protesters

“We won’t stop, we won’t go away, we won’t celebrate Invasion day.”

RUBY:

Claire, every year we see more and more Australians march on Invasion Day to protest racial injustice. But those marches don't seem to have translated into real action, whether that's something like enacting the calls from the Uluru Statement From The Heart or raising the criminal age of responsibility from 10 to 14. Can you tell me why you think that is?

CLAIRE:

I can't be sure, but I've got a couple of theories. One is that both parties are more concerned about the white nationalist/white supremacist-type combining to vote them out is probably part of the issue. I think a part of the issue could be the Murdoch press that seems determined to force the government to be more right wing than the people are. I actually believe that the Liberal Party are bowing down to the far-right kind of way of thinking, even further than they ever have before. And the Labor Party, rather than coming up with a genuine difference, rather than being actually thoroughly different to the Liberal Party, are kind of doing a piss weak, half arsed kind of right wing ‘lite’.

I think both parties believe that if they gave Aboriginal people, if they gave us what we wanted, that they would be punished for it. I imagine they also believe that the people marching at Invasion Day might march, but unwilling to change their vote based on what the government does. And to be honest, I'm not sure if I disagree with them. I'm not 100 percent certain that the people marching on Invasion Day would vote for a party that would give Aboriginal people more rights. Just for that reason. I think that it had to be part of a larger package that is more than just Aboriginal rights. I think it's easier for people to march, but it's hard for them to take a risk in their vote, I think.

RUBY:

Right, so you’re saying that people might be willing to march to show support, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to how they vote?

CLAIRE:

I think that is the issue. And I think...I suppose that as a nation, Australians tend to be quite conservative as voters. It was quite obvious at the last federal election where real reform was voted down in favour of tokenistic reform and a bribe, essentially in tax cuts. So Australians tend to vote in two ways and think that they tend to vote in ways that are determined by economic gain to themselves, and they tend to vote how the newspapers and television tell them to vote. I'm constantly aware of the fact that no matter what we think of our Prime Minister. He was voted in, which means that Australians made the choice to choose Scott Morrison over the alternatives. So I think that's the malaise in Australia as much as racism is a problem in Australia. But our tendency to vote based on spin and publicity and optics rather than voting for genuine change is a problem that has to be addressed.

We have to have people make a commitment, voters making a commitment to vote in whichever party decides to do the right thing for Aboriginal people. You know, at least 25 million people living on this continent. I think we need to have millions of people, literally millions of people make a commitment that whichever party commits to improving Aboriginal affairs, whichever party commits to the Uluru Statement, is a party that gets their vote and that might make a difference.

RUBY:

Claire, it feels like while Australia has been stuck on these really fundamental issues around sovereignty, land rights and a real political voice for Indigenous communities, other countries have been making some progress on racial justice. The Black Lives Matter movement in the US, for example, significantly shifted the discussion in that country. I’m wondering how do you think Australia compares internationally on issues of race?

CLAIRE:

Every year or more than once a year, somebody international will excoriate Australia on our race relations.

Archival Tape -- Newsreader 1

“The UN assembly shone a spotlight on Australia's human rights, one key topic was the treatment and imprisonment rate of Aborignal and Torres Strait islanders.”

CLAIRE:

Australia's excuse is always “ahhh, we don't have police shootings in the street of Aboriginal people or other people of colour”. And my response to that is the reason we don't have, that people aren't shot is because generally the police in Australia have a low tendency to draw their guns. Instead, they'd rather beat someone to death.

And if you think about things like the death of Mr Doomadgee in Palm Island, beaten to death by a cop who, rather than being fired for it, was moved and then he was finally sacked because he hit a white person.

Archival Tape -- Newsreader 2

“Justice Mortimer found police did not act impartially and independently in the investigations into Cameron Doomadgee’s death with police officer Chris Hurley never treated as a suspect or stood down.”

CLAIRE:

Our government would like us to think they're actually not a racist country. And Australians like to pretend we're not racist, but Aboriginal people can see it. Other people of colour can see it. And, of course, refugees in Australia can see how racist this country is. And when you finally tell Australians who think that they're nice people, that this is a racist country, they tend to get upset. And I suppose for one thing, I really think it's important to think about is that we need to understand that somebody can consider themselves to be a good person and still be racist and someone who can genuinely be a good person and do terrible things for other people. I think it's clear that Australia is a very racist country and it's clear from the way the rest of the world reacts to Australia, that our racism is not acceptable anywhere else in the world.

RUBY:

Claire, thank you so much for your time today.

CLAIRE:

No worries, thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today, Invasion day rallies are being held in cities across Australia, despite some state government’s claiming they breach public health orders. In order to ensure the rallies are Covid-19 safe, organisers will be splitting protesters into smaller groups to comply with health restrictions.

And the Therapeutic Goods Administration has provisionally approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for use in Australia. The vaccine rollout is due to begin next month.

I’m Ruby Jones, see you tomorrow.