WHILE many Australians headed to the beach on January 26th, some aboriginal leaders and their supporters used the holiday marking the country’s national day to occupy lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra. It turned unexpectedly dramatic. Australia Day marks the anniversary when the British first settled Australia, on the shores of what is now Sydney, 224 years ago. Many indigenous Australians see the anniversary somewhat differently: as invasion day. This Australia Day sees the start of a process that will try to resolve the two viewpoints. At long last, Australians will soon have a chance to vote in a referendum on recognising aborigines in the country’s constitution.
The Canberra demonstration this Australia Day concentrated minds on yet another anniversary in aborigines’ long struggle for recognition. Forty years ago, on January 26th, 1972, a handful of young aboriginal protesters pitched a tent on lawns in front of Parliament House.
They were fed up with the then conservative federal government’s refusal to grant traditional land rights to their people. The centre of the protest became known as the “Aboriginal Tent Embassy”; it has stayed on in various forms ever since.
The demonstration this Australia Day to mark the embassy’s founding showed the issues it represents remain just as volatile today. Julia Gillard, the Labor Party prime minister, and Tony Abbott, the conservative Liberal Party opposition leader, were at a nearby restaurant for an unrelated event. Earlier, Mr Abbott told journalists who had asked if the tent embassy was still relevant, that it was “probably time to move on” from it.
Taking his remarks as a call for the embassy to be closed, demonstrators converged on the restaurant. They banged on its glass walls, chanting “racist” and “shame”. The two political leaders stayed inside until police and security officials arrived, surrounded them and bundled them out in dramatic scenes past the demonstrators. Michael Anderson, one of the tent embassy’s founders, called Mr Abbott’s comments disrespectful. “He said the aboriginal embassy had to go. We thought 'no way', so we circled around the building.” No one was injured or arrested.
Four years after the tent’s pitching, in 1972 another conservative government enacted legislation, drafted by its Labor predecessor, to grant aboriginal land rights for the first time.
The fact that this took so long reflected a principal concept for the men who drafted the constitution, under which Australia’s six states formed a federation in 1901: that Australia was terra nullius, or unoccupied, when Europeans first settled. Today Australia’s 500,000 aborigines (about five times their number in 1901) comprise about 2.5% of Australia’s 23m people. They still lag behind the rest of Australia in health, education and life expectancy.
This time, the omens are more promising. Despite their rancour on almost every other issue, both the Labor government and the conservative Liberal-National opposition support constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians in some form. Some constitutional experts worry nonetheless about the sort of campaigns that might be launched by fringe groups and conservative radio “shock jocks”, and urge that the referendum's questions be kept simple and incapable of distortion. Australia is a bigger and more complex country than in 1967; deleting an exclusionist clause about aborigines then was probably an easier process than inserting fresh ones, as now proposed. The 90% yes vote of 45 years ago remains a record.
Still, Patrick Dodson, a co-chairman of the expert panel, says that as Australia “repositions” itself in a global world, and casts a critical eye over other countries' human-rights records, “we have to get our own house rectified”. Known as Australia’s “father of reconciliation”, Mr Dodson says that of all his battles for his fellow aboriginal people, a yes vote would be a “source of greatest pride”.
Mark Leiber, his panel co-chairman, says the stakes in this referendum are greater than in earlier ones: “A no vote would send a terrible message.”
In 1967 Australians voted overwhelmingly to drop a clause from the constitution that had excluded aborigines from being counted in the census. But that proved to be unfinished business. On January 19th, a panel of 22 experts, more than half of them aboriginal people, delivered a new report to the Labor government of Julia Gillard. It recommends questions for yet another referendum aimed at bringing aborigines into the country’s founding document. Ms Gillard has promised the referendum by the time of the next federal election, due in 2013.
The panel said Australia has an “historic opportunity” to remove the “last vestiges of racial discrimination from the constitution”. These vestiges are two remaining sections that sit oddly with Australians’ evident pride at having built a successfully multicultural country. One gives states the power to disqualify people of “any race” from voting in state elections. The other allows the federal parliament to make “special laws” for “any race”. Drawn up in the era of the discredited and long since abandoned "White Australia" policy, these sections were also aimed at preventing people from Asia and the Pacific islands from taking Australian jobs.
The panel called these sections a “blemish on our nationhood” and said they should be repealed, not before time. In their place, it recommends a new section recognising “that the continent and its islands now known as Australia were first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”; the same new section would give parliament power to make laws for the “advancement” of those peoples. In one respect, the panel went further than some expected: it called for another new section, which would take up a blanket ban on racial discrimination, on grounds of race, colour, ethnic or national origin.
The Gillard government has yet to respond on whether it will accept the panel’s recommendations as the basis for the next referendum’s questions. Choosing the questions will be crucial. Thanks largely to the founding fathers’ strict approval rules, Australia has a dismal record on constitutional change: for a referendum to succeed, there must be an overall majority yes vote in the country, as well as a yes vote in at least four of the six states.
Consequently, less than a fifth of 44 referendums that have been attempted since 1901 have passed. Governments seeking to modernise the constitution have often seen their campaigns fail when opposition parties refused to support change. (The last failed referendum, 13 years ago, on whether
Australia should become a republic, bucked the pattern. This was the sole case of a prime minister, then John Howard, both initiating a referendum and then campaigning against it, thus ensuring its defeat.)
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