TRANSCRIPT:
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Thank you very much. Look, it is true that, uh, I and many others have been, uh, talking and writing about this question for a long time.
Anthony just reminds me that we published a book called Recognize What in 2014. And that discussion about recognition of aboriginal people in the Constitution has been with us for at least that long, let's say 10 years. But it's become warped. It's no longer about recognition. We're only about recognition. Maybe we could do a deal.
So our group, which I'm Secretary, is Recognize a Better Way, and it's to get permission to enter the discussion, to say there is a discussion that could be had about an historic form of recognition. Tuck it away in a preamble perhaps. But if you seek to recognize an existing group of people, you immediately step into all the problems that James has talked about.
So we've said and recognize a better way. We could have an historic form of recognition. And then let's get down to tin tacks.
Only 20% of people of Aboriginal descent in Australia are doing badly. The other 80% are doing about as well as every other Australian. So we have in fact, closed the gap. It's just the last 20% who can't find a way in.
And one of the reasons they're literally locked out of the modern economy is that we came up with the idea of native title. That is you can sit on and own collected title rather have certain rights over land and call, call it native title. And then we've said, you can stay on that land and be an aboriginal.
Well, we are here to tell you that being aboriginal is not enough. It's not enough to simply say that I'm of Aboriginal descent and you owe me.
The consequences are what happens in Alice Springs and north of there and South every night of the week that kids are running wild and they can't go home because it's too dangerous to go home.
That is not fault of some invasion 235 years ago if there is a fault. It was initially racism. But more recently, there are two things that have happened. One is of course the welfare dependence, but the other is an attitude of mind among a number of Aboriginal people that says, we don't have to play your game anymore.
So let me give you a little illustration of this.
So I was born in 1952, and in 1952, the University of Sydney was running advertisements for scholarships for quote unquote aboriginal boys. Young Abes were invited to go to Sydney University in 1952.
The doors were open for aboriginal people to enter the highest forms of education. That's 70 years ago. And many had, we had 50,000 graduates of University of Aboriginal descent, 70,000 TAFE graduates.
So if you like that open door, that welcoming dare we call it integration has happened. It was all happening and has been happening for two and three generations, arranges until we close the door. And I'm gonna tell you when that door closed.
I've got a lovely quote from Kath Walker Muckle in later life. And of course as Brisbane I, we we know of her well.
So she was quoted in the New South Wales Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare in 1970. So she'd written prior to that, the magazine was called New Dawn, a magazine for the Aboriginal people of New South Wales. And she said, quote, white men had to learn civilized ways. Now it's our turn. End of quote.
You couldn't say that today and not be home because aboriginal leaders today have stolen, if you like, our culture, which is one that has developed over several thousand years.
They used the term First Nations as if they had nations. They didn't. They had groups of families that roamed around just as all our forebears did.
The creation of a nation state is probably one of mankind's greatest creations because within that nation state, heavily defended, there is the possibility of peace and a good welfare state where people can be looked after and where the rules are agreed and can be voted on through democratic processes and so on.
But only a few months ago, me, professor Megan Davis, who's woman from of aboriginal descent, was giving her yes speech in Perth, spoke for an hour about the mechanics of the voice, possibly the treaty and the truth telling.
We might have questions about that later.
And the first question to her was, how will this help aboriginal children? And she answered, oh, I wasn't prepared for that.
So years of diligent toil, putting together this piece of architecture to go into the Australian constitution, which if it steam says, and its fans alone, will have enormous power, was for what?
There is simply no relationship between what these yes people are asking us to do, and the solution for really poor lives that few aboriginal children are le are leading. And the reasons for this is reasonably simple.
A number of years ago, we stopped looking at and being critical of the way others lived. Remember that you could be moral at a time and say, this is a good way to live and this is not a good way to live. Now not all cultures are the same. They're not all useful. There are things that are, that are sick in cultures.
So the way that our society treated women and, uh, let's say gay people until relatively recently was bad.
And there was a significant struggle to have those people treated the same as everyone else. But in aboriginal society, they haven't got close to that debate yet.
So they've stolen the idea of a nation without going through the hard yakka, part of which includes adapting to your culture or rather adapting your culture to the circumstances. Someone, someone says, we have, you know, the, the world's longest living culture, 50 or 60 or whatever the number is now, a thousand years.
I'd have to say not much happened.
I'm not overly proud that very little happened. But nevertheless, they survived. One of the ways in which they survived in a, in a horribly poor, brutal manner was to turn inward, not in on themselves, but to turn inward. So most of their life was lived around social relations.
They could make sense of the world, I guess in two ways. One, through their belief in animism, that is that rocks and soil and earth and so on would, would literally speak to you.
It was a way of understanding their physical environment.
But the way in which they coped socially must have very close social relations. And that you had a place within those relations, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins, the skin, et cetera. And that if you knew your place in the world, you might survive at least socially. But if you stepped beyond the bounds of those rules, you would die. So let's have a look at some of those rules.
First of all, um, most disputes were settled by violent means. The reason they're settled that way is because you couldn't build a jail and set someone aside for a while. Um, you needed an immediate solution, which would either be with a club or a spear or whatever. None of this is true. This is just the way it was for us as well.
The second element was that you had very strong inter, inter-family obligations. The reason being that if you caught a kangaroo today and I didn't, then I'd like some of your kangaroo, because tomorrow I might get lucky, you know?
And over tens of thousands of years, we had a a, a relationship which kept us alive. Today, though, those obligations tend to remain and they're, and they're powerfully bad.
So that young ones will go to an age pensioner and demand money, demand sharing, and they'll threaten that pensioner with violence if they don't hand over the money. So I've had, so for 30 years now, I've had Aboriginal people come to me and say, I just have to get away. I cannot survive in that culture anymore. 'cause I've got a job, I have a good income, and the more I earn, the more cousins I get. They just come for the money. And the obligations are so strong that there is a sense in which you have to hand over the money. So it's very difficult to escape.
So call us whatever you like, capitalists, and you know, individualists and all the rest of us, we've learned how to survive in that way. And then the, the third most damning element in some way is that because of the obligation, if say someone falls ill or dies in your care and in your care might be simply driving them in a motorcar, then you are held responsible even if the person dies from cancer, because there is no understanding of the medical basis of disease.
And I'm not kidding,
I talk to people in the center a lot and they say that lack of understanding is true today. But rather than we carry on and educate Aboriginal people, we've, we've gone the other way. So you'll find that, uh, medical faculties now teach their graduates about aboriginal medicine. I mean, you fools you are putting off the day that a person realizes that's sitting next to someone and having them die of cancer is not your fault.
You are under no obligation other than the sort of obligations we would have of love and care and attention and so on. You're under no greater obligation than that. So culture, there is another book I've just written, which, sorry, I've got with another Publish I The Burden of Culture, okay?
Because I, I want to call out the fact that culture can be a burden and it can stop you from changing the way you live and adapting to not the white society, the society in which we all live.
And of course we are less white than we used to be. And aboriginal people, by and large, are less black than we used to be.
It's just not that exotic anymore, quite truthfully. Um, you know, the idea of reconciliation, which has held up as is the purpose of all this was met years ago.
The intermarriage rate between aboriginal people and non-aboriginal people is around 70%. And along the east coast, it gets up into the 80%. But if you're in the Northern Territory outside Darwin, and you're an aboriginal male, it can be lower as 4%.
So you basically fall in love or whatever it's one does with, with with people you meet, right? It's, it's, it's as simple as that. And Aboriginal people have been meeting white people since 1788.
And I'm not suggesting that the whites have not been brutal to Aboriginal people or that there has not been racism, but racism exists among all groups.
I might say that this society has at least not, not at least we are the least racist according to lots of polls than it, than any other society because we are a settler society. And people knew people keep coming all the time. And when I was growing up in Kensington and Melbourne, we were being unhappy with the Greeks and the Maltese and all that sort of stuff until we went to school and knocked around and played hockey or cricket or footy or whatever with them. And then no one cared that much, although there was some unwritten rules about integration, learning English, learning the ways, and basically passing your exams, getting a job. And the rest is up to you. But we are in a position now where the sons and daughters of the 1967 adults, right, the 67 referendum was a vote for equality.
And those sons and daughters have gone off to university and learned about identity politics, and they've learned that they are different, when in fact they're becoming less different. So it's simply an ideology that is a form of belief that says we're special.
Now, the only way in which they're literally special is that they are visible in Northern and Western Australia when they sit on native title and when they turn in on themselves and beat the heck out of each other. So women would escape their troves and run off to the missions for protection.
So missions were doing good work in protecting women, saving half cast children, and prote preparing Aboriginal people for the only world that the missionaries knew was available to them.
That is a modernizing world. But by the sixties, they were really asked to leave and the missionaries walked away. So all of that knowledge of aboriginal language and aboriginal ways, which would enable white people to help aboriginal people knowing that they think very differently, the pathways to come into society, so much of that is, has been lost.
So look, ours is a noble job to say no, because if this yes gets up, it just gives more power to Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Megan Davis, Tom Calmer, and everyone else who's on the payroll.
I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm saying they're terribly misguided and they want power.
They want, I, I think this is a vanity project on behalf of what I see as a fading leadership. This is their last gasp. This is their chance to be great. This is our chance to smash this Yes case and then early next year under Recognize a Better Way, uh, I wanna start a major conference. Uh, the title will be something like The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.
And we'll start a more honest conversation to save the lives of the 20% who've been locked out of the open society. Thank you.
