Marie McInerney writes:
Leading Indigenous advocates of the Uluru Statement from the Heart have urged allies to call out the Federal Government’s apparent shift away from a Makarrata truth-telling body, saying politicians, media and opponents have no right to conflate the No vote for the Voice as extending across multiple rights and reform areas.
Uluru Dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson told the first annual National Allyship Summit in Wollongong yesterday (8 August) that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “seemed to walk back his support for the Makarrata Commission” last weekend at Garma when he offered support only for “the idea of coming together”.
“The establishment of Makarrata was an election promise and is much more than a get-together,” Anderson told the event. It is a “bricks and mortar body of historic stature”, she said.
Anderson said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were getting a “sense of déjà vu, that familiar feeling when retail politics and short-term thinking start to motivate the abandonment of a key Indigenous reform”, of politicians as just “fair weather friends”.
While that made her all the more grateful for steadfast allies and for the 6.2 million Australians who voted Yes, she was worried “we will see the Makarrata baby thrown out with the referendum bath water”.
Fellow leading Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo shared Anderson’s concerns at the failure of political courage, telling the summit that one of the biggest challenges now was “how progressive politicians are intimidated by the (referendum) result and…seem to be walking away from commitments”.
Describing the Uluru Statement as “the most powerful, most eloquent and succinct document in this country”, Mayo called on supporters to “dust ourselves off and be louder and prouder than ever” to persuade hesitant politicians to “show some leadership and take on the lies that the Coalition pedalled last year”.
He warned that a Coalition win at the next federal election would herald “the darkest times that we have seen for a long time”, saying it was incumbent on Uluru Statement supporters to talk about the political repercussions of such choices in their homes and communities amid an urgent need to restore bipartisanship on Indigenous issues.
Heart-wrenching
The summit was hosted in Wollongong on the lands of the Dharawal people by the Allies for Uluru group, in partnership with the Woolyungah Indigenous Centre at the University of Wollongong.
Marking the inaugural International Allyship Day and the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 2024, it was designed to promote a deeper understanding around allyship, the journey forward for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and to encourage concrete actions towards progress and support.
Delivering the Welcome to Country, Aunty Barbara Nicholson, an Elder of the Wadi Wadi people of the Illawarra region, said the disastrous result of last year’s Voice referendum had left her “gutted”.
She had wondered how she could ever welcome non-Indigenous people to her Country again, when 60 percent of the country said ‘we don’t want you’, until she realised: “How could we not? To not do it keeps us invisible and plays into the politics of hate and discrimination.”
In her keynote opening speech, Anderson also talked about the “heart-wrenching loss” of the referendum, and how the last ten months have been a real struggle for her and many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
“I’m sad and I’m angry,” she said, outlining how more than a decade of work had gone into the development of the Uluru Statement, at the request of governments, in the interest of constitutional reform, and following on efforts over generations towards structural reform, justice, and finding “a place in our own country”.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander proponents of the Voice then had to watch a “simple, pure idea” be misrepresented and distorted, where the “spirit of Uluru was buried under lies and disinformation” in an era that is seeing politicians and media able to lie with impunity.
They watched “as democracy itself seemed to buckle, as social media seemed to supercharge the most polarised, virulent and inaccurate perspectives,” and as “zealots got wildly creative” with some of the imagined consequences of a Voice to Parliament, as they had previously during the native title debates — “everything from black fellas setting interest rates….to charging (a fee) every time you went to the beach”.
Anderson said one of the greatest distortions was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not overwhelmingly support the Yes vote, which was proven groundless in voting records from remote community ballots, up to 92 percent in Wadeye in the Northern Territory.
“For our mob…it was a crystal clear ‘yes’,” she said.
As Professor Megan Davis has also recently outlined, Uluru Dialogue research has shown the No vote is not so easy to fathom, she said.
Anderson said racism absolutely played a part for some voters – “a certain segment of the population, mostly of a certain generation, that thinks us blackfellas have gotten too big for our boots, the type of person who booed at the footy, the type of person who sees the Welcome to Country as some kind of affront”.
“This type of individual saw the referendum as a chance to remind us who’s boss,” she said. But while that is shocking, it only accounted for 15 percent of No voters, according to the research. Others were driven by a range of factors, including a lack of knowledge and education on history and civics and lack of bipartisanship.
Anderson said that, while it was important to understand every facet of why people voted No, it was equally important to know what they voted No to, and what they did not vote on.
“They did not vote no to Truth, to Truth-telling. They did not vote No to Treaty. They did not vote No to constitutional recognition. They voted No to a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, not all of these other things,” she said.
“We can’t allow the referendum to cast a shadow over these powerful ideas,” Anderson said, accusing some Coalition messaging of suggesting a verdict had been cast on the entirety of Indigenous reform. As well, sections of the media, such as Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph, had claimed the Makarrata was implicitly rejected by the Voice referendum.
At best, such claims are an “appalling misunderstanding of what voting is, what democracy is”, at worst they are “intellectually dishonest, deliberate attempts to falsely extend the reach of the No [vote], an effort to inflict collateral damage from the referendum”.
Clearly outraged at how the debate was twisted, Anderson talked about her own experiences as an Alyawarre woman growing up in Darwin, being told she could never aspire to anything but domestic work, having to enter the cinema through a separate doorway and subject to race-based policies across the board – only to be accused during the referendum campaign of being “divisive” and “racially based”.
Transcend the toxicity
Despite all this, however, “we’re staying true to Uluru”, Anderson said, urging allies to build a people’s movement from the 6.2 million Australians who voted yes, to support the case for rights and justice even when the political and media circuses “have moved on and left us in the dust”.
“So what gives us that hope to continue this work? The short answer is you,” she told summit attendees. “The referendum gave us a gift: 6.2 million friends we didn’t know we had.
“That’s a movement, that’s what it’s going to take.”
But she urged allies not to attack No voters, and to instead to transcend the toxicity of current politics.
“We’re all in this together, and I think the future of what kind of a society we are will rely on this moment now in time,” she said.
It was a call echoed by Mayo. Given there was no longer a deadline, as there was with the referendum, he urged people to “take your time with your friends and family”, to respond to their misconceptions and concerns.
As part of a summit discussion on Voice, Treaty and Truth, Mayo and other leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander panelists also called for a “people’s movement” to come out of the 6.2 million Yes voters and talked about the grounds for hope, particularly strong support for Voice from young people.
They urged allies to step up and use their privilege, power and platforms to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the voice they were denied, to call out racism and to hold politicians and sections of the media to account on misinformation and disinfomation.
Geoff Scott, CEO of Just Reinvest NSW and a Wiradjuri man, encouraged allies to remind their local members of Parliament that they are there to represent the interests of their constituents and states and territories, not just their parties.
Professor Bronwyn Fredericks, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Engagement) at the University of Queensland, urged allies to “stay true to Uluru” and said it was important for them to think about their role in systemic and structural change.
“How do you do that, in terms of the mechanisms that you have influence over and influence with? How do you navigate that?”
Fredericks said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people needed allies to facilitate discussions that could bring about change, “to talk to your families, to continue to talk to the sports clubs you’re with and all the community groups you’re connected to”.
“Look at how you can help locally, what types of things can you counter that help with policy and those bigger issues?”, she said, explaining that she regularly wears clothes and jewelry featuring hearts because they become conversation starters about the Uluru Statement.
Accountability
Jaki Adams, who has ancestral links to the Yadhaigana, Wuthathi and Gurindji peoples and extended family relationships with the people of the Torres Straits and Warlpiri (NT), said she was fortunate to work for the Fred Hollows Foundation which practices allyship on a daily basis.
“My ask for allies is always about accountability,” she said. “You can’t just support us by wearing a shirt, there have to be actions attached to your support”.
With Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people “really hurting” in the wake of the referendum, Adams said they needed allies to step up, to have “those conversations that need to be had”, to call out racism and disinformation.
Her big takeaway from a recent workshop on allyship was the need for truth-telling within and for organisations, to be asking: “What is the history of my organisation, and how do we move forward to being a better ally, improving our processes and our systems for Aboriginal and Torres, Strait Islander peoples?”
“We live in a very colonised world, and our systems are very colonised. We know they need to change. So how do we do that? How do we collectively make the changes in our spaces of influence that inform the future of this country?” she asked.
Another panel discussion on Allyship in Practice featured allies and ally organisations, including Oxfam Australia, the Australian Council of Social Services, and former Socceroos captain and human rights advocate Craig Foster.
Foster raised concerns about the impact on public discourse from the over-concentration of Australian media, particularly News Corp, proliferation of misinformation and “our inability as a country” to have difficult conversations – something he said that will need to be nurtured in the next generation.
That capacity for difficult conversations is, he said, extremely challenging in a global environment where young men in particular are being told that First Nations rights or gender equality and other issues “are an imposition on their rights”, prompting dangerous pushbacks on key social justice progress in recent decades.
You can watch the summit on YouTube.
Previously at Croakey
Dr Summer May Finlay: Allies and accomplices urged to get uncomfortable, speak up – and challenge power and privilege
