Reconciliation Australia’s Two-Faced Activism

Every year, Reconciliation Australia Limited (RAL) marks the period between the anniversaries of the 1967 referendum (May 217) and the Mabo judgment (June 3) as National Reconciliation Week. Last year, the theme was “Be a Voice for generations”, a reference to the looming referendum. This year’s theme, “Now more than ever”, reflects the organisation’s unprocessed shock and denial at the result. According to RAL, “as a nation we stumbled” but “the fight” must continue.

Really? RAL has now been operating for 23 years, more than twice as long as the statutory Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation that preceded it. As I have argued in a new paper for Close the Gap Research, “surely so emphatic a defeat of what advocates called ‘an act of reconciliation’ demands an objective assessment of the continued viability of that process.”

That assessment must begin with a difficult and still largely unexplored question: Is reconciliation what Aborigines actually want? In an address delivered during the last Reconciliation Week, ‘Yes’ campaigner Megan Davis cast serious doubt on this. During consultations in the lead-up to the 2017 Uluru Statement, she told a Townsville audience, “our old people kept saying, unsolicited and organically, that reconciliation was the wrong process, that reconciliation was the wrong word.”

We do not know how many of these “old people” there were, much less whether they represent a significant body of opinion among Aborigines. However, Davis’ comments are helpful because they at least acknowledge the diprotodon in the room. Reconciliation has always been promoted as a means to cement national unity. As such, it is inimical to a radical Aboriginal rights agenda centred on the indicia of a separate race-based nationhood: sovereignty, self-determination, international recognition, treaties, embassies and so on.

The Uluru Statement endorses the Aboriginal nationalist program first developed by the National Aboriginal Conference between 1979 and 1981. This includes Aboriginal sovereignty, a treaty (makarrata), reparations and recognition of customary law. The Voice to Parliament, the brainchild of non-Aboriginal academic Shireen Morris, was a novel addition. As later accounts of the convention that produced the Uluru Statement demonstrate, a treaty was the top priority for many delegates. They needed to be persuaded that the Voice was a necessary preliminary measure. This tension is reflected in the final text of the Statement, which characterises a treaty as “the culmination of our agenda”.

There are good reasons to question whether the Uluru Statement reflected Aboriginal opinion at the time.

First, the 13 regional ‘dialogues’ were invitation-only, and roughly half the convention delegates were chosen directly by organisers. Second, the outcome of the process was determined in advance. As one Council member later wrote, “rather than arising from consultation with Indigenous Australians,” the Voice “was in fact sold to them”. Third, after securing endorsement of the Statement, organisers made no effort to validate this result through consultation at the local level. As the Blak Sovereignty Movement later observed, the Referendum Council process was “neither consistent with [Aboriginal] cultural protocols [nor] the democratic principles of the colonial system.”

With that said, ethnic nationalism cannot be assumed to be a fringe ideology among Aborigines. In 2023, many polling booths serving majority-Aboriginal communities posted solid ‘Yes’ majorities. And accounts of the convention debates seem to suggest that, if anything, organisers were seeking to moderate delegates’ demands.

There have long been two competing visions of race relations in Australia. Their point of difference is whether this country is to be considered one nation or two. The vision of a single, inclusive nation was summarised by Billy McMahon in April 1971:

We believe that Aboriginal Australians should be assisted as individuals and, if they wish, as groups to hold effective and respected places within one Australian society with equal access to the rights and opportunities it provides and accepting responsibilities towards it. At the same time they should be encouraged and assisted to preserve and develop their culture their languages, traditions and arts so that these can become living elements in the diverse culture of the Australian society.

This approach is sometimes called ‘integration’, though McMahon himself cautioned against “attempts to embody complex policies in single words … capable as they are of varied interpretations”. While the term ‘reconciliation’ ultimately fell victim to a similar problem of interpretation, what common ground there is would seem to overlap neatly with the passage above.

The alternative vision of two racially, culturally and administratively distinct nations received its most authoritative articulation in the NAC’s treaty campaign, which began with the following resolution in April 1979:

[W]e as representatives of the Aboriginal Nation … request that a Treaty of Commitment be executed between the Aboriginal nation and the Australian Government.

That first treaty debate ended in stalemate over sovereignty. Bob Hawke revived the topic in 1987, apparently believing that he could succeed where his predecessors had failed. Having built up expectations among Aboriginal nationalists that he would negotiate a genuine treaty, Hawke clarified, sotto voce, that he “did not have in mind a treaty in the international sense but a general statement”. He and his ministers repeatedly reminded audiences not to worry too much about what to call the agreement. This approach is familiar to conflict resolution practitioners the world over as constructive ambiguity—or, in layman’s terms, fudge. When these word games failed to deliver the hoped-for consensus, the Government sought agreement on a new framework for negotiation: reconciliation.

The reconciliation process was devised by the Hawke Government and endorsed by the Opposition, State and territory leaders, ATSIC and key interest groups. It reflected Labor’s desire to secure a “formal document or formal documents of reconciliation” without making any concessions on sovereignty. A new Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) would spend nine years trying to persuade Aboriginal nationalists that this “document” was a treaty, while simultaneously convincing the Coalition and the public at large that it wasn’t.

This failure to honestly confront the central one-nation-or-two question constitutes a fundamental flaw in the reconciliation process to date. While the CAR promoted its vision of ‘a united Australia’, it simultaneously worked to ensure that Aboriginal nationalist ideas were not forgotten. For example, its 1995 submission Going Forward: Social Justice for the First Australians reports Aboriginal demand for reparations. While the document concedes “there would be little prospect of broad support” for such measures, it warns “that these issues should not be removed from the agenda of debate on indigenous policy matters” and should “be the subject of further broadly-based policy debate.”

In its final report, Reconciliation: Australia’s Challenge, the CAR speaks of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as two parts of a single nation. Yet it also includes an “agreement or treaty” in a list of “things which remain to be done”.

Even the Uluru Statement, a clear expression of the Aboriginal nationalist agenda, nods to national unity with its appeals to “a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” Similarly, RAL campaigned for the Uluru programme while simultaneously calling for “a shared national identity” and “national unity.”

Despite her candour in acknowledging discontent with reconciliation, Megan Davis probably did not intend to inspire any serious discussion on this point. Certainly, she and her Referendum Council colleagues felt it would be best if the concerns raised by “our old people” were kept out of their 5,000-word Uluru Statement and 180-page final report.

The latter report even goes so far as to recommend a new “expression of national unity and reconciliation” in the form of a symbolic ‘Declaration of Recognition’.

The supposed torchbearers of the reconciliation project—the CAR, RAL and the Referendum Council—have played a significant role in platforming and even promoting Aboriginal nationalist ideas. It is relevant to ask to what extent the resilience of this ideology, demonstrated through the Uluru process and remote-area referendum results, is due to the reconciliation process itself.

In his 1991 report, Royal Commissioner Elliott Johnston acknowledged the overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote in 1967 as “the first step in the process of reconciliation” in that it “demonstrated overwhelming acceptance for the view that Aboriginal people should be part of the national polity.” Reconciliation means coming together: answering, in the words of Christian leaders in 1988, “the longing of all to belong.”

Last year’s emphatic ‘No’ vote settles one important question: most Australians continue to see reconciliation in terms of unity and inclusion. However, it would be folly to ignore the signs—whether in the Uluru Statement or the referendum returns in remote booths—that ethnic nationalism retains a base of support in parts of Aboriginal Australia. RAL’s own research shows that the number of Aborigines who agree it is “possible for all Australians to become united” fell between 2018 and 2022.

‘Now more than ever’ means more of the same. If RAL is to play a constructive role in the future, it must either embrace national unity, or cede its role to those who do.

Joe Stella is a PhD candidate at Griffith University’s School of Government and International Relations. His new paper, “Now more than ever: How Aboriginal nationalism defeats reconciliation”, is now available for download