Australia’s aborigines: You say Australia, I say invasion
WHILE many Australians head to the beach on January 26th, some aboriginal leaders plan to use the holiday marking the country’s national day to occupy lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra. Australia Day marks the anniversary when the British first settled Australia, on the shores of what is now Sydney, 224 years ago. Many indigenous Australians see the anniversary somewhat differently: as invasion day. This Australia Day sees the start of a process that will try to resolve the two viewpoints. At long last, Australians will soon have a chance to vote in a referendum on recognising aborigines in the country’s constitution.
The Canberra demonstration planned this Australia Day concentrates minds on yet another anniversary in aborigines’ long struggle for recognition. Forty years ago, on January 26th, 1972, a handful of young aboriginal protesters pitched a tent on lawns in front of Parliament House. They were fed up with the then conservative federal government’s refusal to grant traditional land rights to their people. The centre of the protest became known as the “Aboriginal Tent Embassy”; it stayed on in various forms for years. Four years after the tent’s pitching, another conservative government enacted legislation, drafted by its Labor predecessor, to grant aboriginal land rights for the first time.
The fact that this took so long reflected a principal concept for the men who drafted the constitution, under which Australia’s six states formed a federation in 1901: that Australia was terra nullius, or unoccupied, when Europeans first settled. Today Australia’s 500,000 aborigines (about five times their number in 1901) comprise about 2.5% of Australia’s 23m people. They still lag behind the rest of Australia in health, education and life expectancy.
In 1967 Australians voted overwhelmingly to drop a clause from the constitution that had excluded aborigines from being counted in the census. But that proved to be unfinished business. On January 19th, a panel of 22 experts, more than half of them aboriginal people, delivered a new report to the Labor government of Julia Gillard. It recommends questions for yet another referendum aimed at bringing aborigines into the country’s founding document. Ms Gillard has promised the referendum by the time of the next federal election, due in 2013.
The panel said Australia has an “historic opportunity” to remove the “last vestiges of racial discrimination from the constitution”. These vestiges are two remaining sections that sit oddly with Australians’ evident pride at having built a successfully multicultural country. One gives states the power to disqualify people of “any race” from voting in state elections. The other allows the federal parliament to make “special laws” for “any race”. Drawn up in the era of the discredited and long since abandoned “White Australia” policy, these sections were also aimed at preventing people from Asia and the Pacific islands from taking Australian jobs.
The panel called these sections a “blemish on our nationhood” and said they should be repealed, not before time. In their place, it recommends a new section recognising “that the continent and its islands now known as Australia were first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”; the same new section would give parliament power to make laws for the “advancement” of those peoples. In one respect, the panel went further than some expected: it called for another new section, which would take up a blanket ban on racial discrimination, on grounds of race, colour, ethnic or national origin.