Within the ruins of time, as the avalanche of blows continue to pound our bodies and spirits, I have found myself ruminating on the violence that is at the heart of Australia’s reconciliation process.
History is alive, and for the best part of the last two decades, Australia’s reconciliation process has been cleverly wielded to thwart off the threat of a Black-led uprising from bursting out of the empire’s belly.
Instead of an audacious experiment that reparatively runs against the tide of history, Australia has carefully opted for what Prof Megan Davis describes as “a manifesto for maintaining the status quo”.
Davis’s summation is backed by Charlotte Lloyd, a Harvard sociologistwho studied Australia’s reconciliation process because she found it to be globally unique. While almost all reconciliation processes derive from the foundations of truth and justice, conveniently, Australia’s did not.
Despite generations of state-sanctioned savagery, when the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation folded in 2001, prime minister John Howard ensured that Australia removed itself from the truth and justice components that underpinned the theory and practice of reconciliation globally.
Australia avoided the establishment of a formal truth-telling process to bring the settlers’ atrocities to the surface and a mechanism of justice to hold the perpetrators to account. This ensured, among many things, that the original lie of terra nullius remained, Indigenous people were deprived of reparations for the gross and systematic human rights violations that we faced, and that open season would continue.
The Howard government’s decision to absolve itself from the truth and justice components was an attempt to exonerate white Australia of accountability.
In 2006, Reconciliation Australia launched a uniquely Australian initiative, Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs), a framework that is said to enable organisations to take meaningful action to advance reconciliation – with procurement and employment being the major benchmarks of progress.
In June of the following year, barely 12 months after the launch of RAPs, the Howard government, with enthusiastic support from it’s Labor opposition, suspended the Racial Discrimination Act to implement the Northern Territory Intervention – allowing martial law to be invoked upon 65 Aboriginal communities until they were acquired by the government.
The NT Intervention (which was then extended by successive governments until 2022) has supercharged the devastating socio-economic outcomes for Indigenous communities. Conveniently, it has also opened up huge swathes of land for extractive companies to pillage and plunder.
Speaking with me recently, Senator Patrick Dodson described the NT Intervention as “the darkest day in Australia’s political history”; a serious feat considering the depth and scale of malice that Canberra has conjured over the years.
A few months later, 144 countries voted in favour of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), at the UN general assembly in New York. Shamelessly, Australia, alongside New Zealand, Canada and the US were the only countries to vote against it.
Oren R Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan from the Onondaga Nation, writes that the passing of UNDRIP was a “hard blow to the racist doctrine that had imprisoned all humanity – the gatekeepers as well as their Indigenous victims – since 1492”.
All of this is important because in a global era of restoration and repair, and as RAPs were being ushered forward as the “centrepiece of practical reconciliation” that would launch Australia into a new and harmonious era, the Australian government continued its quest to dominate the natives.
Despite claims that RAPs support First Nations self-determination, the reality is that they are designed to accommodate whiteness and advance institutional aspirations. They are nothing more than a means to an end; a tool for its’ holders to maintain their image and market share by posturing as a valiant corporate citizen devoted to human care.
Atop of the RAP apex are companies like Westpac, whose investment strategy includes financing industries with business models that rely on the extinguishment of our rights to, and relationship with, the lands that they plunder.
Broadspectrum, which builds prisons for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people to fill, is another company that has ascended to the position of being a champion of change. Alongside them is BHP, who destroy our songlines and erode our sovereignty by obliterating the worlds most significant cultural heritage sites, and Services Australia, who administer a human rights breaching cashless debit card to a majority Indigenous populace.
But it’s more than just the explicit functionality and behaviours espoused by these companies that undermines whatever integrity reconciliation ever had. By accommodating whiteness, “compatibility” between the natives and the settlers is measured by assimilatory definitions of success, forcing Indigenous people to integrate and align with institutional aspirations by conceding our own.
RAPs have helped create an entire complex of learning modules focused on convenient market trends rather than dignified truths.
Optional learning modules such as “cultural competency training” – whereby a millennia of genius is dumbed down into a 20-minute powerpoint presentation – and “unconscious bias training”, a false doctrine designed to circumnavigate race and power, embolden settlers to destructively take up more space, not relinquish it.
The careful placement of Aboriginal art on the walls helps paint a narrative of a vibrant and inclusive workplace, while the sterile and performative delivery of acknowledgments of country assuages a perception of atonement for all of the settlers’ ongoing sins. They seem to say: “This is more than enough, it’s time to call it square and move on.”
By unpacking the mechanics of Australia’s standardised commitment to reconciliation, you can see how RAPs are giving their holders licence to inflict more harm on the communities they claim to be in steadfast solidarity with. Violence isn’t just the norm, but a necessity.
As John Howard knew in the early 2000’s, and as we are seeing now, a money-hungry and growth-at-all-costs society is entirely incompatible with the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and our ontologies.
Ben Abbatangelo is a Gunaikurnai virtuoso executive leader, freelance writer and storyteller
