Floating Life

Yes, I am still thinking about these matters. It is good that Australians do think about them, but I do realise that it is not at all as simple as perhaps I would like it to be, a reference to my vent the other day — which I still stand by for what it’s worth.

Jim Belshaw took me to task rather on that one, and subsequently addressed one aspect rather persuasively.

First, the comments that follow link just to issues associated with the stolen generation. Were these to become involved with other issues, then I would need to judge in the context of those issues.

At a past point I did a fair bit of work on the history of child welfare in NSW. When the stolen generation issue first came up, I wanted to know what the distinctive features were as compared to other elements of the treatment at the same time.

I think that the evidence is conclusive that indigenous, especially mixed race, children were treated differently…

I do not feel in any way guilty at a personal level about the treatment afforded the stolen generation since I had no influence or control over the matter. However, I do regard it as perfectly appropriate for a Government, in this case the Federal Government, to apologise for past injustices carried out by its predecessors. Here there is a direct institutional link…

I make a clear distinction in my mind between past and current events.

History is littered with injustice. However, in the case of the stolen generation we are not dealing just with a past event, but with an event whose victims are alive today, are with us. This issue is not just a matter of history, but of current politics and policy.

To the degree that people now living in the Australian community have been affected by Government injustice, then they deserve compensation linked in some direct way to the injustice. This is what any Australian would expect…

Jim goes on to propose a form of compensation that differs from what some propose, and from what the Tasmanian government already has in train; it is worth considering. I commend Jim’s idea as being more about reparation than compensation; I think a lot is to be said for that position.

Tasmania is the only state that has set up a compensation scheme for the stolen generation. A $5 million fund is expected to result in payments of $40,000 to $100,000 to surviving members of the stolen generation or payments to their children capped at $20,000 per family.  There are likely to be about 150 claims. [Hobart Mercury January 02, 2008.]

In my post Rudd to say sorry, but rules out compensation yesterday I was not, by the way, being cynical; rather, I was trying to divine what the Rudd government was actually offering. Whatever that turns out to be I do think it will be a decided step forward, but the stolen generation business is just one aspect of the reconciliation debate. The broad picture remains controversial, and there is still, it seems to me, some confusion between the two matters, though one is a subset of the other, but also a subset of other issues regarding child welfare. Jim Belshaw does see this clearly, and from what I would gather has reservations about the larger picture.

I have reservations too about the style and actions of people like Michael Mansell: see PM called on to outlaw flag-burning.

The Aboriginal Centre’s Michael Mansell says people should not be allowed to wave flags while celebrating Australia Day.”If there’s legislation to prevent people using them in an offensive way, then as long as that’s applied across the board,” he said.

This is in justification of burning the Australian flag on Australia Day, and sorry, Mr Mansell, but I think that was a really stupid thing to do and serves the cause of reconciliation not one iota. Even symbolically it is wrong. Hope, if there is to be hope, is in the Australia that is, not in some Australia that can never return.

The bigger issues in reconciliation really are moral primarily. I am persuaded that the morality invoked is more than commendable, and believe, as I have said many times before, that when we make the moral choice of reconciliation and acknowledgement of dispossession we are not being masochistic or wallowing in guilt, but rather are dedicating ourselves and the nation to a true sharing that lays a much better foundation for future practical action.

As a recent book, Taking Wrongs Seriously, published in the USA notes:

Danielle Celermajer begins the section with a look at the Australian apology for the social policies enacted by their government against Aboriginal indigenous peoples.  He points notes that this apology is unique because it expanded the conception of social responsibility.  Those who apologized did not necessarily accept causal responsibility, but rather acknowledged that they are members of a nation in whose name misdeeds were committed.  This expression of shame recognizes the breakdown of norms and simultaneously restores a commitment to ethical principles considered essential to national identity.

Though that is of course rather odd as such an apology has not happened at a national level yet.

A reasoned and somewhat more sceptical look at some of these issues in a global context may be found in Reconciliation for Realists by Susan Dwyer.

… While such efforts may seem laudable, it remains unclear whether they constitute a just or adequate response to the historical injuries they seek to address. The problem resists solution, in part, because as a moral and political concept, reconciliation raises inherently difficult questions. For example: Is reconciliation the end-state towards which practices of apology and forgiveness aim, or is it a process of which apology and forgiveness are merely parts? Can reconciliation occur without apology and forgiveness? By what social or institutional means is it to be achieved, and under what conditions should it be sought? Curiously, given the frequency with which the term is used, we lack any clear account of what reconciliation is, or what it requires.

Despite this, reconciliation continues to be urged upon people who have been bitter and murderous enemies, upon victims and perpetrators of terrible human rights abuses, upon groups of individuals whose self-conceptions have been structured in terms of historical and often state-sanctioned relations of dominance and submission. The rhetoric of reconciliation is particularly common in situations where traditional judicial responses to wrongdoing are unavailable because of corruption in the legal system, staggeringly large numbers of offenders, or anxiety about the political consequences of trials and punishment.

A natural worry, then — one exacerbated by the use of explicitly therapeutic language — is that talk of reconciliation is merely a ruse to disguise the fact that a “purer” type of justice cannot be realized. Until we have a clearer conception of what reconciliation is, we cannot know whether it is right — or even morally desirable — to pursue it…

I have suggested that reconciliation is fundamentally a process whose aim is to lessen the sting of a tension: to make sense of injuries, new beliefs, and attitudes in the overall narrative context of a personal or national life. Reconciliation is guided by normative ideals of intelligibility, coherence, and
understanding; and the mechanisms of reconciliation I have described are, broadly speaking, epistemological, in the sense that they are strategies of narrative revision.

This understanding of reconciliation applies at the micro- and macro-levels. It makes the application of the concept appropriate, even in circumstances where there is no prior positive relationship to be restored. In this sense, reconciliation does not pretentiously masquerade as wiedergutmachung — making things good again. Coherent incorporation of an unpleasant fact, or a new belief about an enemy, into the story of one’s life might involve the issuance of an apology and an offer of forgiveness. But it need not. Reconciliation, as I have presented it, is conceptually independent of forgiveness. This is a good thing. For it means that reconciliation might be psychologically possible where forgiveness is not.

Of course, nothing I have said rules out the misappropriation of the concept of reconciliation by politicians and others. Governments will always attempt to hide their inactivity behind positive-sounding therapeutic language. But I hope to have shown that reconciliation need not be a mere consolation prize for individuals and nations in the aftermath of violence and oppression. If this is less than some advocates of reconciliation would like, perhaps that is because of their tendency to talk of reconciliation in abstraction from the kind of reconciliation we humans can and do engage in.

Whatever emerges here in Australia, I do hope it will be rather more than “positive-sounding therapeutic language.” I remain committed.

See also these two files: Speech By Mark Leibler, co-chair Reconciliation Australia, in Sydney on May 29 2006 (PDF) and Mick Dodson, “Whatever Happened to Reconciliation?” (PDF).

See also: Reconciliation: A resource guide for teachers, and on my site Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s speech at the University of Melbourne Law School, October 26, 2007.

And that’s where I will leave the matter for now.

FOOTNOTE

Jim said I make a clear distinction in my mind between past and current events. It would be interesting to find out whether that very western viewpoint is shared by Aboriginal people. Just a thought.

Update from ABC News

The Federal Government has set February 13 as the day for a formal apology to the members of the Stolen Generation.

The apology will be the first item of business for the new Federal Parliament and will be delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin says the apology is on behalf of the Australian Government and will not be attributing guilt to the current generation of Australians.

Ms Macklin says the content of the apology is still subject to widespread consultation, but she says it will form a necessary step to move forward.

A traditional Welcome to Country will be held as part of the Parliament’s opening ceremony by members of the Ngunnawal people.

Indigenous groups have warmly welcomed the announcement of a date for a formal apology to the Stolen Generations…

Liberal Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Sharman Stone says the Coalition should join Labor in an apology to Aboriginal people. Dr Stone’s northern Victorian seat of Murray has the state’s largest population of Indigenous people outside of Melbourne. She says the former Coalition government’s Motion of Regret in 1999 did not go far enough to acknowledge past wrongs.

“We are told by many Indigenous Australians that still is unfinished business,” she said. “There wasn’t a belief that it was really strong enough to be considered a Government apology for past laws, regulations and practices.”

Observant readers will note a “Welcome to Country” in the side bar on each of my blogs.

AND…

A couple of other blogs on these matters, off the usual round of political blogs:

• Australia Day Vs Invasion Day.  “Gday I am Chezza and come from the land down under and live in a small town on the banks of the Murray River. Basically I am like everyone else, just trying to do the best that I can with the hand of cards that I have been dealt.”
• Thanks to Chezza. Australia Day - a minor side note; The Hardest Word - Part One: Me (an answer to “…I did not steal children and therefore I have nothing to apologise for…”); The Hardest Word - Part 2: The Facts; The Hardest Word - Part 3: Compensation; The Hardest Word - Part 4: Australia Day. Daddy-Fu lives in Canberra.