Text: What's Next for First Nations Justice? FWD+Organise 2024 Round Up by the Commons Library. Includes a photograph of Celeste Liddle.

What’s Next for First Nations Justice?

By

Introduction

Celeste Liddle presented the opening keynote at FWD+Organise 2024. Celeste is an Arrernte woman living in Melbourne, Australia. She is a trade unionist and a freelance opinion writer, social commentator and public speaker.

Voice Referendum: Performance not Progress

I think I speak for many mob in the room when I say that in the twelve months that have followed the referendum, I have been called upon to reflect so many times on what its loss has meant to all of us in the Indigenous community. What’s more, I have, at times, felt pressured into a position, particularly by mainstream progressives, as an identifying progressive myself. There are many out there who want us to reiterate that the loss was a win for racism, that it has set the Indigenous rights movement back decades, and that the next steps are always going to be clouded with this failure.

There’s a massive problem though with expressing these views – they simply are not true. Indeed, their truth exists only in the minds of these mainstream progressives who fervently believe that their support of the Yes campaign was, in and of itself, a stand for anti-racism. Yet in so many instances, these people were the same people who, when confronted with the Indigenous progressive no arguments, accused those championing alternate ways forward of “siding with the racists”. 

In effect, therein lies the essence of why it was I believe the referendum was always doomed to fail – its aim was to perform a mainstream gesture of progress, rather than to be progressive. It missed the opportunity to sit back, listen to the Indigenous community discussions, and challenge people’s worldview. Fundamentally, most were not prepared to interrogate the very racist foundations of Australia and their contributions to that status quo.

They wanted an easy answer to deal with the longstanding “Aboriginal problem” where no such solution exists.

This is why too I have found myself, in the wash-up, advising Aboriginal people younger, more energetic, and less jaded than me not to judge other members of our community for positions they took in the lead-up to the referendum. In an environment, where our only choice was to vote yes or no, for a powerless and potentially undemocratic voice in a document which was designed to erase our very existence and, to this day, still contains multiple racist passages making the foundational ideas of this country all too apparent, how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people chose to navigate that toxic situation in order to survive ultimately does not matter. Whether we voted yes, no, or flatly refused to turn up to the booths at all, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with the exception of those who inexplicably aligned themselves with the pro-colonial No movement, felt put through the wringer. The statistics that demonstrate an uptick in mental health episodes at the time in our community shows that the cost of what we were being through had very little to do with the dollar amount of the referendum itself.

What I am stating quite plainly here is this: there was nothing inherently progressive about the Yes campaign and what may have followed it had it succeeded.

Indeed, the entire point of the proposal was to give a conservative option to the Australian public in the hope it would be as non-threatening to them as possible. I saw many progressive activists draw parallels between the marriage equality campaign and the Voice, and yet the only real link I saw between the two campaigns was that both reinforced the primacy of existing institutions, rather than fundamentally shifting the country into a bold new era. There was no proposal to remove the other still racist sections of the constitution, such as the right to bar people from voting on the basis of race, or the blocking of dual citizens from holding federal seats – this stuff was not on the table. All that was was an undefined Voice, with no power of legislative veto, the structure of which would be determined by the parliament of the day.

That this, very conservative, proposal lost at the ballot box is not an end game for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and nor should it be viewed as such by any progressive activist.

Lessons from the Referendum Process

While there were many devastating parts of the referendum process, we need to get real about what we gained via going through the process as well. At the end of the day, what we did gain was an incredible understanding of how Australian society is made up, and how much social ignorance there is. We also gained an insight into the warped values many cling to desperately in order to feel pride in themselves and their position in this settler-colonial state. Millions of adults in this country took to the polling booths having very strong views on a proposal they knew utterly nothing about, to potentially alter a document most have never read, nor do they know what it does. The conservative No campaign actually won the day not because they were the true warriors for justice and equality in this country like they painted themselves, but rather because they recognised this fact about Australian ignorance, and they exploited it well. 

Truth Telling

So what then, do I claim, are some of these facts and teachable moments from the referendum, and as progressives, where do we go next?

To start with, we need to get real about truth-telling.

It is a real shame that when the Uluru Statement was devised, truth-telling was the last order of business rather than the first. The architects of the statement had their reasons for deciding why they felt this was the correct sequence, but I never agreed with them. 

It is a truth that Australians do not understand that with the false doctrine of terra nullius, the very bedrock of what established this colony was racism and the erasure of many thousands of years’ worth of history, knowledge, and survival. Australians do not understand that the constitution was drafted by a bunch of white men, some of whom were also instrumental in installing the White Australia Policy.

Australians don’t know what Indigenous sovereignty is, what land rights is, and they certainly do not understand how genocide has operated in this country. They don’t know it when they are walking across a massacre site, or that the stolen generation actually went on for about 3 generations and was not due to just one policy but actually several policies running concurrently across the various states and territories. They don’t know that by 1894, all Aboriginal people in South Australia over 21 years old were able to vote, and that this right to vote was actually taken away in 1902 when white women won the vote.

The short of why truth-telling is so important is this: for ages, it has been practice for Australians to push a narrative of “Aussie pride”, yet there is actually nothing tangible they base this mythology on. They don’t know the facts, the history has been erased, and they therefore attempt to build an identity on lies. Australia then, in turn, forces other people who come to these lands to absorb these lies in a process of assimilation. What if, instead, the ugly truths were known, the country accepted these truths and pledged to ensure they were never repeated, and finally, in partnership, they worked towards a collaborative, knowledgeable, future? That could actually be something to be proud of.

Treaty

My second point is this: as someone who cut her teeth as a child in the land rights movement, I state plainly that the Voice should never have been on the table without treaty happening first.

I firmly believe this, and while I acknowledge that there are other sovereignty activists in the Indigenous rights movement who reject treaty on the basis of this land already having laws and lore, and I believe this argument has validity, I also believe that we will never be able to decolonise fully.

My own existence is tied up in two different histories of colonisation: I am an Arrernte woman who exists due to the process of British colonisation on my homelands, and I am also a Dutch-Burgher woman who only recently found out that I partly exist due to the Dutch colonisation of Sri Lanka as well. That is a deeply complex identity to have, yet I feel many in the audience will identify with the grappling with our individual identities as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, or indeed any other group of colonised non-white people, in the society we find ourselves in.

We can concurrently be colonised, while also be a coloniser, and that dynamic is a difficult one to sit with, yet a crucial one to explore because reconciling within ourselves makes us more able to then positively push for larger challenges such as justice, treaty and reparations.

Many Indigenous activists have stated that the treaty is the end of the war. But the problem in Australia is so many members of society do not get that there has been a war that has been ongoing since the beginning of colonisation. First, it was the frontier wars which went on for almost 150 years all up, if you use the Conniston Massacre as the endpoint. Then it was the intellectual war – the war which squashed language and culture, removed children, incarcerated people, killed hundreds. Indeed, an example of this plays out still, each year, on the front page of the Herald Sun, when columnists wail about how Aboriginal people are cancelling “Australia Day” – never mind the facts.

When I have gone back to my homelands, people out there don’t usually say “sovereignty” or “treaty”. They are more likely to talk about wanting the right to practice culture, teach in lingo, and make their own decisions rather than governments dictating the parameters of their lives all the time.

They want to be free, not live under siege. Regardless of how we express it, all call for land rights and self-determination. That call won’t end until it is finally answered, and our rights are protected, and indeed, celebrated.

Get Real About Racism

Finally though, progressives cannot be lax. In all my years in progressive spaces, I have found limited knowledge on the topic of racism, and even an arrogance – a belief that as progressives, we cannot be perpetrators. Yet the failure of non-Indigenous progressives to take a back seat, listen to the array of Indigenous opinion when it came to the referendum, and demand that the government does too, states otherwise. The “Yes” should never have been an anti-racist performance. Rather, for mainstream Australians, it should have been a decision they came to because they educated themselves, listened to Indigenous debate, and made an informed decision for justice.

My answer to where next is this: we must build movements.

Engage in active listening, collectivise the struggles and the tactics needed to overcome them, and turn the minorities into majorities via collaboration. It is only through our combined knowledges, energies and will, that we can start to push back, against racism, against capitalism, against powerful and damaging people and systems, and turn this world that is fast running towards destruction, into a healthy and nurturing place for all.

Thank you. 

Explore Further

Share Resource

Share on LinkedIn

Topics:

Collection:

Tags:

Format:


image Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC

Contact a Commons librarian if you would like to connect with the author

Topics