The dramatic turn-around of Gallarrwuy Yunupingu

In Arnhem Land, as in Balmain, boys don’t cry. It is every bit as tough as the old water-front Balmain was. Probably tougher. A sign of weakness can lead to destruction. The Yolngu people have had to deal with the twists and turns of balanda administrations and politics and have taken many casualties. Through it all they have, remarkably, among all Aboriginal nations, survived and even thrived culturally. This is a tribute to Gallarrwuy Yunupingu.

Yunupingu can never be criticized by even the most trenchant critics of Brough and Howard for signing on to a deal that would bring his people at least a step closer to economic self sufficiency and more adequate government services. In one sense Yunupingu has played Brough and Howard in the same way that dozens of Aboriginal communities have had to play Labor and Liberal governments over the past one hundred years – obtaining the best that each side has to offer at the time. All the time knowing that ugly, often racist governments, sometimes deliver the most tangible things on the ground.

The agreement that Gallarrwuy Yunupingu has achieved: the formation of a council of elders with the ability to decide and guide a zone of economic development, investment in economic opportunities that will benefit his people with jobs and work, social and infrastructure investments that will bring his community’s social capital up to a fraction of what most non-Indigenous people would regard as rights; is what every Aboriginal nation and community around the country is entitled to. It simply represents the right and the capacity to develop a housing development within the framework of Indigenous culture and governance.

There is a lot more than this that needs to be achieved before Indigenous Australia can be satisfied. As Indigenous economic experts and leaders are quick to point out there needs to be massive levels of spending to ensure that social and economic infrastructure in Indigenous communities is barely sufficient. There also needs to be major private investment in new economic opportunities within regional and remote Australia – something that is being achieved in some regions. Most of all if we are not to replicate the salaried silos of the public service in Indigenous organizations, there needs to be a hunger, ownership and responsibility exercised by Indigenous people themselves about their organizations and the way they do business.

Nevertheless the agreement the Yunupingu has wrought is an essential part of a global blueprint that Labor should try to implement when they come to power. Every year the Commonwealth government spend $3 billion allocated through an army of Canberra bureaucrats and agencies. The appropriate strategy for the future is for the Commonwealth government to negotiate with all Aboriginal communities in just the way has been done with Gallarrwuy Yunupingu. Certainly there can be conditions attached to funding but the same principles and entitlements that Gallarrwuy Yunupingu has been able to negotiate should be the entitlements of all Indigenous communities.

So putting aside the repugnant propaganda that Brough and Howard have used to justify their intervention in the Northern Territory, putting aside their flawed arguments about child abuse in the Northern Territory, putting aside the way they have ridden rough shod over the natural leaders of Indigenous communities; they may have unwittingly created a model for the way in which economic and social investments in Indigenous communities should be implemented in the future. Yunupingu, a wise leader, will know this and will be prepared to accept the spears and barbs of other leaders to achieve the greater good.

Of course the real bad taste of the Brough negotiations with Gallarrwuy Yunupingu concerns the divisions within the national Aboriginal leadership in Australia. Many Indigenous leaders will simply shrug their shoulders and say “what would I have done in a similar situation”. But all will hope for some better way of working, all will crave some decent basis for national negotiations that benefit all Indigenous people.

I have read and heard a number of views over the years that suggest that national leadership of Indigenous Australia is an impossibility. Leaders can only represent their own communities, clans and families. They cannot speak for others. It is therefore impossible to hold any leader to a national position other than the general position of defending each communities interests and rights.

This is a shocking and limiting framework for Indigenous Australians to have to cope with in the context of the nation. The impossibility of a national Indigenous leadership falls like a shadow over ATSIC and it also defines the ruthless pragmatism exercised by Indigenous leaders in achieving results for their people. It also condemns Aboriginal Australia to be represented by an appointed series of representatives/administrators at a national level who speak for everyone and no-one. But even more this it explains why national organizations such as the ILC, IBA and most of the Federal Aboriginal bureaucracy are so bad at what they do. There is literally no independent Indigenous national monitoring group that has any credibility in bringing these national organizations to account. They are simply held together and accountable to non-Indigenous accounting systems, audits and governance forms in their droves that completely debilitates practical work on the ground.

It is the Indigenous leaders themselves that have to address these limitations and problems of national governance. It is understandable that the current generation of Indigenous leaders like Pearson, Yunupingu  and Dodson now place a priority on their own homelands and people. All three have done a huge amount of work for the intangible thing we call Australia, and all of them returned home to find that not only did it not matter on the ground for their own families and people, but that rightly or wrongly not many Indigenous people knew or even cared about their national and international achievements.

The great challenge of achieving results for local people for these leaders has probably exacerbated the general issue of the vacuum of national leadership for Indigenous Australia. Why devote more time to intangible national issues when things just get worse in your own local community?

It is said that when all national leaders do finally get together, like the meeting of Yunupingu and Pearson, things start tense but ultimately everything falls into place. But this is just not good enough any longer. Nor can individual leaders hold out against the larger group or undermine national organizations capable of doing good. There needs to be a national forward agenda so that the results that are achieved by some can be achieved by all. There needs to be ownership of national Indigenous institutions and organizations so that they achieve across all communities.

The divisions within the national Indigenous leadership now go back some decades.

During the negotiations over the parliamentary response to the Mabo High Court decision, a larger group of Aboriginal leaders and peoples met at Eva Valley in the Northern Territory. Meanwhile in Canberra the so-called “A Team” engaged in tough negotiations with Paul Keating, the Opposition and the major national interest groups. Within the “A Team” it was Noel Pearson who did most of the heavy lifting and thinking. As in the current case, no-one could justifiably criticize Pearson. He saw what could be achieved and obtained a stronger outcome than anyone else could have obtained. This is a formula which has been replicated again and again. Yet the schism within the larger Aboriginal leadership group remains and grows ever bitter.

For our time in history Pearson’s political mastery and the quest for a democratic national Indigenous leadership reflecting the national governance structures of Indigenous society were inevitably doomed to clash. There has to be give and take to achieve any kind of unity going forward.

There has to be an understanding of what is required in tight negotiations by the larger group, but there also has to be a willingness by brilliant individuals like Pearson or pragmatic leaders like Yunupingu to assign some importance to achieving national consensus outside of their own comfort zones. There is now only one man who can bring all of the sections of Indigenous Australia together – Patrick Dodson. The great man was born to be the uniting force for all of the Indigenous nations and, he fights everyday, with more and more impatience for enough resources to do the job. After the battering he has received from Howard and his troops I hope that he still has the will for the task.

Let us all fervently hope that the incoming Rudd Labor government and Jenny Macklin will realize this and provide Dodson with the opportunity to build a new unity and forward looking agenda amongst Aboriginal leaders. There will always be, as in any leadership group, differences and disagreements, but only Dodson is capable of ensuring that they do not become marks of division and weakness.

There are serious questions not only for Aboriginal leaders but for the non-Indigenous community arising from the Brough negotiations with Gallarrwuy Yunupingu.

Does Aboriginal leadership come down to who does the most pragmatic deals on behalf of their own people?

Does it come down to who is the most skillful negotiator and tactician? Or who is most needed to achieve a political outcome?

 Is it a matter of simply going along with the pattern of obtaining the most favourable rights deal from a Labor government and the most lucrative “guns and butter” deal with the Liberals?

John Howard’s view is that there should be no separate laws or cultural rights for Aboriginal people within the Australian nation is simply unacceptable. But does signing up to a deal with him mean that one accepts this outcome? Clearly not for Yunupingu and Pearson, but what for other politically weaker communities? 

Is it up to each Aboriginal nation and community to obtain the best “guns and butter” deal they can within the nation?

Of course there has to be something more that Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians should be talking about, than just this pragmatism. But if so. Who in the Aboriginal community should be doing the talking and who can they talk for? It might be argued that the current lack of unity amongst Aboriginal leaders has lead to the current incursions into the Northern Territory. Not only is there no forward plan for Aboriginal Australia that has been agreed to by the larger Aboriginal leadership but the binding aspect of leadership has been reaction.

The current situation suits opportunistic politicians of either party who can divide and rule or just plain ignore the Indigenous community. The larger population of Aboriginal Australia will not benefit from the pragmatic, opportunistic way in which decisions and investments are currently determined. They cannot. Those without a voice or a place at the table or who disagree with the current government’s rhetoric or rationale or who have no strategic advantage, have no basis for bargaining. This is something that non-Indigenous Australians with any ounce of integrity must strive to remedy