Some Aborigines are seeking independence with international recognition, others are joining the Federal Government’s reconciliation process and others still want a treaty.
In Canberra this week a visiting Canadian professor put up a model for Canadian Indians which is different from all of these. He thought the Canadian First Nations could become a province of Canada, the equivalent of an Australian state.
The professor, Tom Courchene, said at the outset that his model was purely Canadian and he did not want to give it an Australian application.
None the less, the idea of Australia’s indigenous people becoming a state is not as looney as it sounds.
Superficially, the thing could be dismissed on two grounds. If it is to include all Aboriginal people, it would have to be people-based, rather than territory-based. This would cause enormous difficulty legally and administratively. If, however, it is to be territory-based, the “”homelands” objection arises. The territory would presumably be a chunk of northern and central Australia. It gives rise to unsavoury comparisons with South African homelands.
But what about a mix of a people and land-based state?
The theory behind it would go something like this:
Every Australian is entitled to the same level of government service wherever he or she resides in the Commonwealth.
It takes Western Australia more money to educate its children because of distance and other difficulties than it does NSW. So the Federal Treasury pays some extra money to Western Australia. In the case of the Northern Territory, there are exception costs in providing public housing, roads, hospitals schools and the like. And thus the Federal Government subsidies the Northern Territory to the tune of about $6000 a head and Tasmania by about $1400.
This happens because we believe in an Australian compact, that we are one nation and there should not be huge disparities of access to government services depending on which state or territory a citizen happens to reside in.
The Commonwealth Grants Commission works out how much each state should get as part of this levelling exercise. In total, the Commonwealth provides $26 billion a year to the states and territories.
The state governments are elected by the people of the states and get a very large say in how that money is spent, though the Commonwealth puts its bureaucratic nose in, especially in health and education.
No-one begrudges the Tasmanians or Northern Territorians their access to this equalisation process or their right to spend the fruit of it in ways they see fit. This is the Australian compact.
However, when that compact was made, in 1901, the Aboriginal people were excluded. They did not vote in the lead up to Federation and were not counted as Australians for electoral and other purposes until 1967. That was because Australia, unlike New Zealand and Canada, was regarded as empty land when the whites came. No treaty was made with the indigenous people.
So the people of the colonies, which became states, became part of a financial equalisation process while retaining a great degree of self-determination, while the indigenous people did not.
Since then, the indigenous people have, at least on paper, taken part in the financial equalisation, especially in the past 20 years. But they have not had the same degree of self-determination as the states.
Perhaps this is why that despite all the money being spent, Aboriginal health, education, life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy and demonstrably worse than white Australians.
There is a very solid argument that self-determination with accountability and responsibility provides much better administration and much better results. There is better value for money, which means better services for people. This applies to everyone, indigenous people and, of course, the states. If we are to have an indigenous-people’s state it would first require changes to the way the states function now.
At present the main function of the states is to spend other people’s money. Federal grants make up an increasing percentage of state budgets. The states are not responsible for raising their own revenue. So they become distanced and unaccountable. They borrow and spend as if there were no tomorrow. So the Federal Government feels it must take control. It sets up a large supervisory bureaucracy which duplicates the one that is not working in the states, especially in health and education.
Only now are some of the states doing a repair job, but it can never be complete without the accountability and political responsibility that come from raising their own revenue such as income and sales taxes (and the latter would require a constitutional change).
The administration of services to indigenous people suffers the same drawback, only to a greater degree. They have absolutely no power to raise revenue. Like the states, they should be able to impose their own income and sales taxes in a state that is partly land-based and partly people-based. That would give them political responsibility and accountability.
Indigenous people are already partly there. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission is elected by indigenous people throughout Australia and is responsible for spending about $600 million a year. There is at least another $400 million spent on indigenous people in Australia each year. We’re looking at an amount almost the equivalent of the budget of Tasmania for an almost similar population.
Since the creation of ATSIC in 1990, the decision-making on spending is already devolving. The trouble is that ATSIC has no revenue-raising powers and no law-making powers. In other words, it has no sovereignty. It relies on the hand-out from the Federal Government and relies upon an Act of the Federal Parliament for its existence.
While ever state governments and the Aboriginal government (insofar as ATSIC is one) rely do not raise the bulk of the money they spend they will not be accountable and they will be inefficient and profligate.
A seventh state, predominantly Aboriginal could be made from existing Aboriginal land, including land available under Mabo. It need not be contiguous. There is no reason (other than a mental block) why islands of land cannot make up a state, especially with modern communications.
It would be a state in the Commonwealth and be subject to constitution requirements of free trade and movement between the states and non-discrimination by any state against the residents of another state. It would be sovereign, in the sense that the Australian states are now, but not a nation like Italy, Argentina or Afghanistan, because like the other states it has to fit in a Commonwealth of Australia.
It would have its own justice and legal system, which given the make-up of the majority of the population, would be heavily influenced by traditional law. In Canada, for example, the civil law applies in Quebec and the common law elsewhere.
And there could be some people-based law. So that people living in Sydney, for example, could chose to pay some state taxes to NSW and others to the indigenous state. In Canada, for example, people can chose to pay to the Catholic education system rather than the state one. That depends on üwho you are, not üwhat you are.
This is not an apartheid suggestion, quite the opposite. Grants Commission equalisation payments would ensure equal access to services. Section 92 and the other constitutional non-discrimination clauses would ensure free movement. People of any race or colour can live in any state in Australia.
Creating a state out of what is now indigenous land and fitting it in as a state the present constitutional framework it not off the planet. It is certainly not as looney as a completely separate nation-state at international law. And could only be an improvement on the sorry history of the past 205 years.
The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Robert Tickner, said this week that questions of constitutional change and republicanism were inexorably interwoven with the process of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. If we are looking at a republic, the role of the states, the position of indigenous people then the whole constitutional compact should be open for redefinition.
The creation of a predominantly indigenous seventh state borrows ideas from all over: from the radical end of the Aboriginal community which wants sovereignty to the economic dries who want the states in Australian compact to work better and includes some of the ideals expressed by indigenous people in ATSIC and the National Reconciliation Council.
The seventh state could give sovereignty, reduce welfare dependence, give equality through the Grants Commission process, and enable indigenous people to be part of the constitutional compact which is the foundation of Australian society.