White Australia Policy Lives On

Let's Not Kid Ourselves
It's really sad when you are made to reflect on your own country while abroad, and find it incredibly inadequate and wanting.
While I was over in New Zealand, I stayed at a hotel called the Grand Chancellor near Auckland airport. I arrived at midnight or sometime after. The concierge was Maori, as was the porter. In the morning, I found both the front desk women were Maoris, as was the restaurant maitre 'D as well as the cleaning ladies. To all intents and purposes it was an all-Maori outfit. They were all very pleasant and polite, so this is not about me griping about service or something.

What got me thinking was trying to imagine the equivalent in Sydney. That is, you go to the Mercure hotel near the airport and everybody working there is aborigine. For the life of me, I just couldn't see it. I could imagine all kinds of people working there but it was really hard to imagine an all-Aborigine outfit working the hotel.

Now, a knee-jerk Leftist response would be to decry that the Maoris were all getting bummed with the menial jobs. Yet, it was hard to argue with the fact that they actually had those jobs and had them for some time; and that they were having proper careers in the hospitality industry, like any regular person would - and why shouldn't they? This is the part that got me thinking, why is this the case?

The common answer that's given is that there aren't the population ratio of Aborigines left, unlike he portion of Maoris in New Zealand. I used to believe it, but having reflected on it, I'm beginning to seriously question this assumption. Let's face it, it's been a mere 40 years since the referendum that allowed Aborigines to have citizenship in their own country. For the last 10 years of that 40, we have had a Prime Minister who has steadfastly refused to apologise lest his apology put the Government in a legally compromising situation. ATSIC has been dismantled in the wake of gross mismanagement by the likes of Geoff Clarke, and the cause of the indigenous peoples of Australia has advanced about an inch in that time. One could not be more marginalised and alienated in one's own country than to be an Aborigine.

The issue of leadership inevitably comes up in all of this. One of the interesting things I heard while over in New Zealand is that the Maori casualties in World War II robbed the Maoris of a generation of social leaders, which in turn led to social turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s. If that were the case, I wondered, when was the last time the Aborigines had stable leadership to navigate them through White Australia and its legal mores. Perhaps generations upon generations of Aborigines have been denied of that leadership and that in turn has brought their population to its current state of extreme alienation and marginalisation.
In saying that, I'm not blaming them - the responsibility for the absence of Aborigine leadership rests upon our shoulders collectively for it is our side of the community that has robbed them of their leaders.

It's a sad sight to see Noel Pearson saying his fellow Aborigines ought not to get welfare unless they sign a covenant-contract to say they won't indulge in alcohol or wife-beating. It's sad that he has to be in a position to say those things. What has happened to us as a nation?
Furthermore it's actually really embarrassing when one finds oneself talking to a Maori about Australia's treatment of its indigenous people. Most days we treat it as a government problem or a social problem or a media-beat up, but the reality is, when we front for ourselves as Australian and wish to own the good bits of Australia, we'd better own up to the massive dark aspect of our history and society. I know that the Prime Minister sees this as "the black arm-band view of history" but clearly he is mistaken. He may not personally feel he has stolen from anybody to have his assets and wealth, but surely he inherited a society that was created by the those who did the stealing. And while I do believe that there is a statute of limitation on historic acts, there's an outstanding debt.

The problem of governments past is that they have tried in vain (and I cannot express how deeply in vain it has been) to solve it with money. The whole community sentiment of Australia revolves around do we give more money (Labor & Greens) or have we given them enough (Liberals) or too much (Nationals) or way too much (Pauline Hanson). What is painfully obvious from the distance from policy making is that we have given back nothing of symbolic importance except for the Mabo Decision by the judiciary. When the judiciary has to set the terms, then you can tell your executive branch of the government has been pretty slack. It's a deep mental illness on the part of the mainstream Australia that persists in thinking money should solve this historic problem. It's simply not going to go away until our hearts are behind our efforts to right these wrongs. And the wrongs are clearly wrongs.

In the mean time, public opinion is hostage to the media relentlessly talking about the alcohol abuse and rape and violence and pederasty and prostitution that goes on in the remote Aboriginal communities as if to say, "These people are not really normal. They are essentially screwed up beyond our suburban moral position."
Is this doing them any service?
How much dignity is an Aborigine allowed to have in his own country? Judging from the media, about zip. And the ironic thing is that all the while Australia proclaims White Australia is dead and buried - I just don't think this notion can be sustained in anyway given the reality of our society.

Here's how it really works: Australia is like a club where membership is tendered by being inducted into 'White'-ness.
Italian and Greek immigrants used to be 'Wogs' and 'New Australians'. Now they're accepted into the mainstream (read White Australia) because it turned out they were white Europeans after all. Well, my ancient history teacher could have told you that the West is the legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome. It would have been a bit rich to say they weren't Western enough. Me being Japanese? Well I'm honorary White, just as the South Africans would have designated me. Gradually the membership is expanding. One day the Chinese and Vietnamese may get full membership; The promise is there. Even the Lebanese may get in if history proves anything.
However the one people who are seemingly doomed forever to be alienated and marginalised are the very indigenous people who lived here before any of us got here: the Aborigines.
So tell me how this is all that different to apartheid?

I know some of you may disagree our society is like this. My contention is that the day you don't mind staffing your entire office with Aborigines, and you haven't even noticed that that has happened, is the day we have come to true reconciliation. Now, meditate on how far our greater society has to go before we get there. This is why we haven't come anywhere near far enough in reconciliation. Needless to say I was mightily embarrassed to call myself an Australian, and I don't wear a black arm-band for anybody.