By ABC's Jonathan Green Thursday 20 November 2014
Photo: Tony Abbott visits Arnhem Land as opposition leader. (AAP: Alan Porritt)
Beyond the convenient promises of campaigning lie the deeper moral obligations of the state. How will Tony Abbott respond as Indigenous Australians face the prospect of being driven once more from their traditional lands? Jonathan Green writes.
The routine political promise is like a piece of Mary Poppins pastry: easily made, easily broken.
And do we care? Probably not so much. Trust has been worn down by the constant repetition of brazen insincerity. We are resigned.
"No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS."
No change either to the post-truth framing of modern politics, a place where a promise is simply a piece of positioning to sway popularity whose impact is immediate and not dependent on execution.
If we wanted truth, we'd probably vote for it. As it is, we seem to prefer a more gestural approach: a sense of plausible coherence rather than too much specific commitment. We want a sense that things will be better, that things will be managed. That we all might quietly prosper and get on.
Truth is as far from the point as conviction.
It certainly wasn't our issue with the last administration. To take the "Juliar" campaign as a pointed pursuit of honest politics is to mistake the rhetorical veneer for the character assassination it concealed. The carbon promise was a crack in credibility that subsequent consistency and unified confidence could have papered over, the same sense of confident denial the Abbott Government is using now to insist bluntly that black is almost certainly white if you consider the full ramifications of the changing context.
And to be fair, we're flexible enough to admit that circumstances change and that campaign promises are largely rhetorical gestures that shouldn't stand in the way of greater responsibilities.
That's a practical as well as moral convenience, one that saves us from the awkward prospect of holding the simultaneous notions that truth matters while admitting that politics is inherently mendacious. We need that grace of flexibility.
And yet there is another level of political truth on which honesty matters very much indeed. Beyond the convenient promises of campaigning lie the deeper moral obligations of the state ... to fairness, justice, equity, opportunity.
These are the sort of issues that draw broad declarations of noble intent, the sort of statements that truly go to something deeper than political character.
This kind of thing:
I want a new engagement with Aboriginal people to be one of the hallmarks of an incoming Coalition government ... I hope to be a prime minister for Aboriginal Affairs.
This is more than Tony Abbott the politician, this is Tony Abbott the man dealing with an issue that is at the core of the most fundamental moral obligations of any Australian Government: to attempt some honest betterment of the state of Aboriginal Australians.
As much as any current politician he has put words to the profound necessity of a just settlement between Australia's first and colonising peoples. As he told the Parliament in February 2013:
Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing - we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago.
We have to acknowledge that pre-1788, this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.
Clearly we are far from achieving that healing. The Productivity Commission report released this week, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage, details a people in a state of psychological crisis. A people amongst whom suicide, self-harm and mental injury are rife.
There are slow improvements in things like infant mortality, but it seems that when many young and adult Indigenous Australians confront their life circumstances, they see little grounds for hope or evidence of opportunity.
And despite the Prime Minister's declared intention to be "a Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs", a Prime Minister who might move to heal this "torn people", they also see a leader who fits, perhaps unwittingly, into the assimilationist orthodoxies of hyper-conservative Australia, of that body of bizarre opinion that sees any gesture toward Indigenous autonomy, self-determination or recognition as some queer inverted racism visited upon long suffering white Australia.
The sort of view promoted with endless vigour by the likes of Andrew Bolt:
I am an indigenous Australian, like millions of other people here, black or white. Take note, Tony Abbott. Think again, you new dividers, before we are on the path to apartheid with your change to our Constitution.
I was born here, I live here and I call no other country home. I am therefore indigenous to this land and have as much right as anyone to it.
It's a lunatic fringe, but its impact is borne out in documents like the Productivity Commission report, a report that was preceded by news from Western Australia that the State Government intends to close over a hundred remote Indigenous communities, communities now defunded by the Commonwealth and thrust upon the slim resources of a state that sees little future in supporting them.
Their people will be driven, once more, from their traditional lands, by a Government that fully comprehends the consequences. As WA premier Colin Barnett put it:
It will cause great distress to Aboriginal people who will move, it will cause issues in regional towns as Aboriginal people move into them.
And here is a test for the PM, to stand by those principles he presents as deep conviction, as the fundamental tenets of his moral self.
This is as far from a dumb promise shaken out in the excitement of 11th hour campaigning as you can get, and something that might stand as a serious test of character for Tony Abbott, something, that if he is not careful, might yet make a Juliar of him.
Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
When broken promises become tests of character - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
