The processes of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation would just give a warm feeling from holding hands and singing songs, a former head of the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Charles Perkins, said yesterday.
He said the real question was “”who owns this land in the first place”.
He was speaking at a conference on Constitutional Change in the 1990s in Darwin.
He called for immediate talk of sovereignty, national land rights and a treaty. These issues had to come first, he said.
The chair of the council, Pat Dodson, said it could not be done immediately. It required information and education.
Sovereignty, a treaty and national land rights could only come through state and federal parliaments. Whereas the issues were well understood by Aboriginal communities, they were not well-understood Australia-wide. As members of parliaments relied on the electorate for their seats, it was essential to go through an information process first to get support.
The 25-member council brings together land councils, miners, employers, unions pastoralists and Members of Parliament. It has a program of education and reporting culminating in a national convention in June, 1994.
Mr Perkins said a treaty was needed to bury the past. Aboriginal people and other Australians could not feel good about each other until the treaty, sovereignty and national land rights were achieved.
In a speech to the conference, Mr Dodson said that now the High Court had recognised indigenous title to land, there could be no further dispossession. Indigenous title recognised by the common law according to the Mabo decision earlier this year, was as good a title as any other. It could not be taken away without compensation on just terms.
(The Mabo decision said indigenous title applied to all Crown land where indigenous people could show continuous occupation.)
Mr Dodson said the decision meant that Aborigines had been dispossessed, not by the common law, but by the Crown and statutes.
There were some areas left where dispossession had not occurred.
“”Our Australian laws and morals would suggest that, in those areas, no further dispossession should take place,” he said.
The Mabo case meant indigenous people were talking from a position of right; things given to them in the past were out of charity.
Other Australians “”have to change to accommodate those rights”.
“”While this places great opportunities and challenges before us, it also has the potential to intensify the conflict between us,” he said.
He called for a redefining of the relationship between indigenous law and Australian law in formal terms. He said the nation had to put behind the legacy of the brutal and callous interaction between the two groups.
Northern Territory Labor MLA Wes Lanhupuy called for the constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal customary law and culture.
But he recognised there were outstanding questions: who should be bound by it; should it apply only in certain areas; and who should enforce it?
“”In Aboriginal eyes, European law meanders like a river on a flood plain that has no barriers to constrain its flow or direction,” he said. “”Although we can see merit in having a law that can adapt to changing circumstances, it is in complete contradiction to Aboriginal law and custom, where practices and beliefs have carried on for many thousands of years in much the same way.”
None of the Aboriginal people he had spoken to wanted a separate state.
“”It is hogwash,” he said. “”In seeking rights we are willing to participate. We do not want a separate state.”