Let's finally give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a voice (2009)

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Let's finally give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a voice

Author: By Tom Calma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner

Publication: National Times, (Mon, 21, Sept 2009 )

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are not represented in our Federal Parliament. Five years ago, they ceased altogether to have a representative voice when the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was abolished. We have suffered as a result.

The Federal Government's lack of engagement with Indigenous peoples has resulted in poorly planned and administered policies, with initiatives that communities have not embraced or taken ownership of.

This lack of partnership can be seen through the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program, which has experienced considerable difficulty in engaging with the community, and the Northern Territory intervention measures which have further complicated the very issues they aim to overcome.

The Government has also suffered from the absence of a national body to engage with and take advice from.

Unlike farmers, ethnic communities, welfare recipients and many other groups in society, we have been left without representative processes for national advocacy.

The new body being considered by the Federal Government offers us a way forward. It is a beacon of hope, a call to action and a mobilising force. It's a marshalling point for the many successful Indigenous programs and organisations already in place across Australia addressing health, education, alcoholism and domestic violence, in culturally-appropriate and locally-adapted ways.

The most recent Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report reveals the scale of the challenge that we still face. Australia, a prosperous nation, has failed in the past 10 years to put a dent in the social and economic inequality that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

The over-representation of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, both as young people and adults, has not declined in recent years.

Mortality rates for Indigenous infant and young children remain two to three times as high as those for all infant and young children.

The report shows that an increase in resources alone is not enough. There is a pressing need for the Closing the Gap agenda to become a shared agenda between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Surely the time is right for fresh approaches which work from the basis that the answers to many of the long-term problems facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities will not come from Canberra, but from those communities themselves.

The national representative body proposal before the Government is a radical model – quite different from anything we have seen before.

What is proposed is a small executive that will conduct the day to day advocacy of the organisation, informed by a congress (which will meet every year) to bring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders together to set the national agenda. Indigenous people will be represented in the congress by existing elected peak bodies or state level bodies, by other bodies like land councils or legal services and by individuals. This allows communities to guide decision-making, in a way that truly can turn the tide that so desperately needs turning.

Just imagine how different the Northern Territory intervention may have been if there had been input from communities at the start? Having all of the issues squarely on the table from the beginning could have prevented the need for such 'emergency measures' in the first place.

We need to move away from the intervention being an 'emergency measure' to one with a community development focus. That way, we can build the confidence and the capacity of Aboriginal-Islander people to take it forward.

This body will be different from any other that preceded it because it accepts the challenge of 'earning' legitimacy. Power and legitimacy are not conferred on you by statute – they are earned through having credible, robust processes that are truly representative of the communities being advocated for.

We have seen this work through powerful organisations like the Assembly of First Nations in Canada or the National Congress of American Indians in the USA.

AFN National Chief Phil Fontaine was one of the first former students to go public with his own ordeal of the sexual and physical abuse he encountered in a residential school.

Through his incredible leadership, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was established in 1998, three months after the Canadian Government issued a 'Statement of Reconciliation' and the 'Gathering Strength – Canada's Aboriginal Action Plan'. This included a one-off $350 million grant for healing programs to address the physical and sexual abuses that occurred in the residential schools.

The foundation has since developed robust representation and governance structures, supporting healing initiatives developed and implemented by Indigenous communities across Canada. In June 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to give survivors of the residential school system an opportunity to share their stories, and compensation claims have also been dealt with.

Leadership from the national representative body was critical to these developments and in supporting Indigenous communities to take ownership on issues such as violence and abuse.

Through the recent national consultations here, there was almost unanimous support for the new national representative body to prioritise national issues over service delivery or allocation of Government funds.

There are thousands of Indigenous organisations that will continue to deliver services on behalf of the Government. We will draw on their expertise in this new national body but we will not supplant their role.

The model we have proposed ensures gender equality, with men and women sharing the decision-making and the responsibilities that go with it. It ensures voices can be heard from the remotest of homeland communities in the Northern Territory through to health services operating in south west Sydney. And it will ensure that the highest standards of ethical conduct be met. We are dealing with these issues at the design stage, rather than when things go wrong.

The new representative body has taken Article 18 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as its guiding principle. This states that indigenous peoples have the right to participate in decision-making in matters that affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves in accordance with their own procedures, as well as to maintain and develop their own indigenous decision-making institutions.

The new body is critical if we are to ensure the full participation of Indigenous people in our democracy.

The groundwork has been laid for a new relationship - one based on respect and equality. The task of creating a new body is an enormously complex and challenging one. We have taken the first difficult step.

Let's now get on with the job of giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a voice.

Tom Calma is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.