Promises of help have a hollow ring for Aborigines

As far as the Aborigines are concerned, the election is an irrelevance that will bring them nothing. GREG ANSLEY reports.

In the tiny village of Cherbourg, nestled at the northern tip of the Bjelke-Petersen Dam, Kim Beazley's promise to apologise to Aboriginal Australia rings hollow.

Around this community, northwest of Brisbane, sprawl the rich beef and cropping farms of Kingaroy on land which once belonged to the Gabi-gabi people before they were rounded up by the Queensland Government at the turn of the 19th century and settled in a town named after a French naval port.

Cherbourg's needs are basic: work, health, halfway houses for the disproportionate number of Aboriginal prisoners restored to their communities, real solutions to domestic violence and effective court orders to protect women and children, help for alcohol and drug abuse ...

"Sorry is just another piss in the wind as far as we're concerned," says Cherbourg community leader Bertie Button, chairperson of the Goolburri Regional Council. "Sorry is nothing."

To the south, in the national capital, the brightly painted containers that house the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Old Parliament House, the same cynicism encases a protest that once symbolised the hope of emergent indigenous activism.

In 1972, soon after the embassy was set up as a permanent embarrassment to white Australia, then-Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam sat on the grass with protesters and promised a new future for Aboriginals under a Labor Government.

Inside Parliament House, Neville Bonner was sitting in the Senate as the first Aboriginal to succeed in federal politics: ironically, as a Liberal.

This week Arabunna elder Kevin Buzzacott sits at the embassy and dismisses the heat of the campaign for the November 10 election and the promises that have been made to indigenous Australia.

"It's a big con job," he says. "It's a big trick to keep us out of sight, keep us invisible, like they've been doing for 200 years.

"They couldn't give two stuffs about us. It's all about their stuff."

At this point of the campaign, with just one week before the nation votes, Buzzacott articulates a depressing truism: once again, Aboriginals are the invisible Australians.

In the campaign's sole debate between Prime Minister John Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley, indigenous aspirations flickered briefly with Beazley's promise of a formal apology for past federal sins if he won power, and of real and early consideration of some form of agreement between white and black Australia.

Since then the silence of both leaders on Aboriginal issues has been thunderous, broken only by brief answers to callers on talkback radio - Howard to prevaricate, Beazley to reiterate that an apology does not constitute legal responsibility and thus compensation.

"There is a difference between an apology and feeling sorry," said Howard.

"I mean, as a person I feel very sorry for the injustice that was delivered to indigenous people in the past ... but I think a formal apology assumes that I accept responsibility and the current generation does [but] I don't think that's right, and I don't intend to."

Elsewhere, Beazley told listeners: "The only parliamentary institution now which has not formally apologised to the Stolen Generation [Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their parents by the state] is the House of Representatives.

"I think that sticks out unconscionably, and we will do that [apologise].

"The good news is that in the one court case that has proceeded so far, there is no implication in an apology in the Parliament for any litigation. None whatsoever."

Brief points-scoring on a formal apology aside, nothing has been heard from the two men around whom the campaign is whirling, and on whose qualifications for leadership the nation will largely decide its vote.

Neither Howard nor Beazley announced their party's indigenous policy.

That was left to the underlings: Reconciliation and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Minister Philip Ruddock and his Labor counterpart, Bob McMullan.

As a result, neither policy gained more than cursory coverage by a media focused squarely on the clash of the titans and on the grave issues of Afghanistan and illegal asylum seekers.

This is something indigenous Australia has come to expect.

At the last federal election, in 1998, even with the inflammatory rhetoric of One Nation's Pauline Hanson, the scant notice paid to Aboriginal issues by the major parties outraged church leaders.

An open letter from the leaders of the four largest Christian denominations urged the parties to swing debate from the economy to "the most important moral challenge facing our society".

The focus remained on GST.

In political terms, this is the natural order of things.

Regardless of any moral imperatives, the mathematics are simple: of Australia's 19 million people, only 427,000 are Aboriginal - fewer than the number of expatriate New Zealanders - and only about half of those are able to vote.

Nor are Aboriginal issues the ones that decide the votes of the rest of Australia.

Aboriginal policy and reconciliation rate highly in emotion and rhetoric, but not in substance: even a poll of the nation's young voters by the Democrats found that while 63 per cent believed a treaty should be signed between black and white Australia, only 13 per cent considered reconciliation among their most important concerns.

Despite huge efforts by Aboriginal leaders and the Australian Electoral Commission - which touts for enrolments and votes through Alice Springs black television station Impartja, and flies polling booths to remote dots in the outback - history has also cast a great political lethargy across indigenous Australia.

By chicanery and malevolence, the early, if largely unknown, rights to vote were progressively stripped from Aborigines after the first federal election in 1901 and were not restored in full until 1962 by the Coalition Government of Sir Robert Menzies.

Within three years Western Australia and Queensland, the only two states still rejecting Aboriginal suffrage, had caved in and allowed indigenous voting.

But Aborigines have never been well represented, in either state or federal parliaments.

In 1976 Sir Douglas Nicholls became the first Aboriginal Governor of an Australian state, and two Aborigines have held the northwestern seat of Kimberly in the WA State Parliament.

The late Neville Bonner, a distinguished, silver-maned former itinerant worker from Ukerbagh Island on New South Wales' Tweed River, broke the boundaries when the Queensland Parliament appointed him to fill a vacant state seat in the federal Upper House.

Bonner convinced the Senate to formally recognise prior indigenous ownership of Australia - written into law two decades later in the High Court's Mabo ruling - and sat in parliament until 1983 when he quit the Liberals to stand as an independent.

Federal parliament's only other Aboriginal member is Democrat Senator Aden Ridgeway, a 39-year-old member of the northern NSW coastal Gumbainggir people who is now deputy leader of his party and spokesman for, among other portfolios, financial services, industry and reconciliation.

In Northern Territory, four Aboriginal Labor MPs were elected in the landslide that thrust the party to power for the first time since self-government in 1978.

This federal election sees only a handful of indigenous candidates even among Labor and the left-of-centre Democrats and Greens, with few likely to join Ridgeway in Canberra.

For many Aborigines, this says it all.

"I don't believe we're getting a fair hearing," says Button."I believe, regardless of whether it's the Coalition or whoever, Howard or Beazley or whoever else, the Aboriginal issue is going to be on the backburner.

"The Westminster political system is totally useless to us, because it caters for the rich and it caters for individualism. Our history of life comes from commune-ism looking after each other, caring and sharing and respecting each other."

Warren Mundine, indigenous uncle of controversial boxer Anthony Mundine and number three on Labor's NSW Senate ticket, told the Sydney Morning Herald that getting Aboriginal people to vote was his biggest problem.

"They see it as a white man's game," he said. "They don't connect it to [Aboriginal] funding or school funding."

There were some expectations that after the huge demonstrations of support for reconciliation that followed the walk by hundreds of thousands of Australians across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in May last year, this election might be different.

Fred Chaney and Shelley Rees, the co-chairs of Reconciliation Australia - the federal body set up after the bridge walk to guide the process - appealed to all parties to place the issue alongside the crises of international terrorism, economy and refugees.

In Canberra, 58 community and welfare organisations created a new sea of hands at the National Museum to push for a similar election emphasis, and to press the case for a treaty.

But the policies of the major parties came with fine words and aspirational programmes, and vanished with barely a ripple save disappointment in their substance.

Other events and issues have also been swallowed by the campaign: The first-ever hearing by a Federal Court on land under traditional claim in Queensland, the emotive admission of colonial guilt by the WA Governor and former Army General John Sanderson for a 19th-century massacre, the controversial inaugural conference of the Bennelong Society to counter Aboriginal separatism, a major conference on indigenous health, even a High Court ruling on Aboriginal claims over the sea - all passed unnoticed or in a flicker.

At the time the major parties were releasing their indigenous policies, the annual reports of key federally funded Aboriginal organisations were released to similar silence despite their often heart-rending pleas for understanding.

"People are going crazy,"Central Land Council chairman Kunmanara Breaden wrote in his report. "Grog makes them wild and there's too much fighting. People are getting killed, stone dead, and women are getting bashed. It's terrible."



Statistics fill in the picture: high rates of STDs and smoking, huge overrepresentation in the nation's jails and in deaths in custody, alarming rates of violence - especially within families - and drug and alcohol abuse.

Aborigines have higher death rates, shorter life expectancy and are more likely to be hospitalised than other Australians.

A major federal survey of living conditions showed one-third of the homes in Aboriginal communities needed major repairs or were uninhabitable, and water supplies to a third had broken down or failed health tests at least once in the preceding year.

The answers, Cape York indigenous leader Noel Pearson said in an attack on both major parties during a Sydney University lecture this week, lay not in apologies but only in policies that gave real help to Aboriginal Australia.

In Cherbourg, Button agrees: "We need economic self-determination, instead of handouts or some bullshit cultural programme or whatever. We don't want to go back and sit on the side of a hill with a spear chasing kangaroos.

"We need to live in this world, today."