Self Determination! Continuing the Conversation with Australian of the Year Professor Mick Dodson

The second in a regular series of conversations with the Australian of the Year Professor Mick Dodson took place in Belmore Park, Sydney in the early afternoon of Tuesday 9 March. The conversation lasted for forty minutes. Extracts of Professor Dodson's thoughts below. It will cost you $1.10 to download a copy of the conversation as a podcast recording which you can download and play back at your leisure. Invest in independent news and commentary this charge covers the basic costs of putting the podcast together and broadcasting it via the web.

UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights

“My understanding is that Australia is going to make an announcement soon on the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights. The Labor Party’s politics has always been to support the declaration, to endorse the declaration. They’re going to do that and it may be as soon as the next meeting of the Permanent Forum which will be at the UN headquarters in New York City in the last two weeks of May. So we could get an announcement then. I understand all the treaty processes (though this isn’t a treaty) have been conformed with. The key stakeholders have been consulted. An announcement is imminent. What I would be concerned about is if the announcement comes with too many ryders or qualifications or explanatory statements about what particular articles of the declaration mean for the Australian government. In other words, what interpretations they put on it. I fear that because it could make the endorsement fairly nurgatory..”

“What the declaration permits is the right to self determination. Now that’s heavily qualified in the declaration itself, but what we’re really talking about in Australia is autonomy or self government”.

Self Determination has never been tried in Australia

“There’s a false perception that self determination has been tried in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s but that’s absolute nonsense. Self determination has never been tried in Australia. They may have called it that at the time but it has never been tried. ATSIC was not an exercise in self determination …I think the government should keep well away from national representative bodies but they’re determined to do so, so I am trying to get involved in that so they don’t go too far. ATSIC had very little control over its money. They had a say over a tiny proportion over government funding of Aboriginal affairs. They didn’t have freedom to make decisions about spending. They had a very tiny discretionary budget. .. ATSIC didn’t run the hospitals or the schools or the public transport systems. They were never in charge of infrastructure installation. They were all government responsibilities. ATSIC wasn’t an exercise in self determination, it was a government established commission – an authority established by the government to give Aboriginal people some pseudo control over infinitesimal amounts of money”.

“I don’t think that any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group have ever thought about self determination in anything but an internal sense .. A lot of that is already happening. I think, for example, the Torres Strait Regional Authority will become a self governing entity… I think there are opportunities in other parts of Australia where we could do that and it makes a lot of sense… Most of the remote areas and government service governance is being delivered by people on the ground not by Canberra or Sydney or Darwin or Melbourne. ..I think we should enhance that because until people are put in control of their own affairs, until people make real decisions about the things that affect their lives, its very difficult to make progress.”

“Self determination is a highly practical matter. Sure it has some symbolism to it but in the end its about real decision-making … I am not talking about self determination in the sense of foreign affairs powers, control of weights and measures and currency and absolute control over democratic institutions that’s not what I am talking about at all. I am talking about actual practical things that people have themselves considered and analysed for themselves… People need to have the power to make those decisions and not have them imposed upon them.”

“It should be understood that the declaration {on indigenous rights} wasn’t put together over night. It took over two decades. 23 years I think it was. I was there for most of that time. It wasn’t a thing that was rushed into. I was totally bemused, under the previous government, when Mr. Downer said to me at one point “What’s your rush?” The Australian government wanted to hold it up in what’s known as the third committee. I said “Rush! Rush! We’ve been at this for two decades!!”

“The declaration doesn’t create any new rights its based on existing standards and at the heart of it is self determination and the right to have your free, prior and informed consent obtained”.

“Ultimately the question about self determination and autonomy is a very local question. Its about where people live and what happens around them in their lives. This is the where the rubber hits the road on self determination. At a national level we need a body of our own choosing that advocates for them. That’s where my thinking is going with this. The capacity to take control of your lives at the most basic family level, then to the country, then to society and the nation in general. Not the other way around.”

A national Indigenous body

“A national body elected by us should have an advocacy role and a scrutiny role. It should make sure government is accountable”.

“I’ve never been an advocate for any particular selection formula or model. What I think is important is the people choose the model that suits them. Whether that’s a democratic election if that’s freely chosen then let that be the model. If they want to have a foot race between the candidates, let them have that method. If they want to have a drawing of straws let them have that model. If they want to have a community meeting and elect the people, let them have that meeting. If they want the elders to do it, let them have that. So long as they are freely choosing the method. Because in the end what we are seeking to do here is deliver representatives who have legitimacy in the eyes of the people they represent. I must say I think ATSIC had some problems in that area. Particularly because the democratic model was forced upon everybody. It wasn’t a compulsory vote. Some electorates had very low turn outs. People then said. I didn’t have anything to do with this and I don’t agree with this. This person isn’t legitimate in my eyes and you got people elected on ridiculously small margins. I certainly think that was a problem for ATSIC. I do think ATSIC had some fundamental conflicts. On the one hand it had to be an advocate. On the other it was delivering some programs for government. It was over-sighting government expenditure that was fixed. It had a bureaucracy that it had no control over. It didn’t employ the bureaucracy. It couldn’t hire or fire. So it was hamstrung in lots of ways and conflicted. I think that these are things we have to learn from.”

Education

“Give the community a say in the school. Don’t lock them out. A lot of people are talking about a 48 week school where the community is involved. Even on weekends there is something happening. I’ve been to some of these schools where the community is involved. There’s a Friday bbq for the whole community. There are weekend school excursions. There are excursions during the week. Artists in residence. Visiting elders group visits, bush tucker trips. There’s a whole range of things that involve the community in the school and it places kids lives into the lives of the school. These aren’t matters for Einstein or Stephen Hawking”.

“We have schools in part of Australia that are like fortresses with huge wire fences around them. They’re locked up outside of school hours. Education authorities wonder why the communities don’t support them. It’s because people are excluded from them..”

“My understanding is that the Territory government gets funding for enrolments for schools but what the Territory funds the remote schools for is attendances. So theoretically in those remote area there could be 60 or 70 per cent of those kids not going to school, so they cater for the 40 per cent who do and what they do with the other money is a mystery. But I assume it is being spent on education in the non-remote areas. So the remote areas which have overwhelmingly Indigenous populations and schools are getting short changed because they’ve got very poor attendance rates, because they’ve got very poor infrastructure, because for many, many years the Territory government has been siphoning off the full enrolment money. They’re spending the attendance money but not the enrolment money. That’s my understanding. That’s why you are getting schools where teachers are only rocking up two or three days a week.”

Coercion

“Anything that is forced inevitably breaks down… and it is quite contrary and anathema to principles of community development. Above all what you need to do is get onside with the community’s priorities and their initiatives. And again it is about decision making ruling power. If people feel they’ve got no say about decision making power about fundamental things that concern their lives there’s no ownership or support.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any problem with volutary welfare quarantining. If people want to do that go for it. What I object to is the forced quarantining, and moreover supporting the quarantining, by suspending the Racial Discrimination Act. We don’t need to be racially discriminatory to achieve public policy objectives and the Federal government have admitted that by reinstating the RDA in the Northern Territory. I think they should do so immediately. I don’t know what they’re hanging around for”.