Towards An Australian Republic
By George Venturini
04 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org
“Does Australia have the desire to move
into the twenty-first century,
or will it continue its retreat into a past
as a colonial quarry for the empire of others,
its public life ever more run at the behest
of large corporations, its people ever more
fearful of others, its capacity for freedom and
truth with each year a little more diminished ?”
Richard Flanagan, from The Australian disease,originally presented as Liberty Victoria’s Alan Missen Oration, and as the Closing Address of the 2011 Melbourne Writers’ Festival
Lies, bread and circuses
2016, in the Chinese calendar, marks the Year of the Monkey. According to Chinese astrological tradition, monkeys are supposed to be intelligent, quick-witted, clever, ambitious and adventurous - but straight.
Unfortunately, as expected perhaps, the year opened with the customary official lies, barbecues and conferral of foreign ‘gongs’.
26 January commemorates, almost correctly, the arrival of the English invaders of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, more or less on 26 January 1788, the subsequent taking possession on 7 February 1788 of the newly found ‘colony’ of New South Wales, and the vesting of all land in the reigning monarch George III by Captain Arthur Phillip, Commander of the Fleet. On landing, Phillip raised the English flag - a red cross over a white field - never to be confused with the present Australian flag, which carries on its top left corner the Union Jack. As a matter of historical record, it was not so on 26 January 1788, and the present version of it was introduced after the final subjugation of Ireland, with the insertion of Saint Patrick’s saltire. In 1801 Britain dissolved the Irish Parliament and formally unified Ireland with Great Britain. The new Union Jack, bearing the cross of St. Patrick, flew in New South Wales for the first time on 27 May 1801.
Phillip was in charge of the surviving 580 male convicts, 247 female convicts and 150 male marines. Between 1788 and 1868, 134,261 males and 24,568 women would be transported. More than a quarter were Irish Catholics; many of the English convicts were from London.
People of the ‘propertied class’ had long been worrying about the increased criminality of those to whom they referred as ‘the lower orders’. But their ideas for stemming the flood of larceny, mayhem and murder were limited. (R. Ward, Concise history of Australia (Brisbane 1992) 47-48) The English governing classes, those whom G.A. Wood called “the men who plundered their country in habitual political robbery”, (G. A. Wood, Convicts, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 8,4, 1922) thought only of terrifying potential malefactors by hanging more and more of the few who were caught. For the one hundred years prior to the invasion the number of capital crimes in the English statute books rose from about fifty to two hundred. For instance, by the end of the eighteenth century hanging crimes included picking pockets of goods worth more than one shilling, shoplifting of goods worth more than five shillings, and cutting down trees in an avenue or garden. (P. Colquhoun, A treatise on the police of the metropolis (London 1800) 437-440) Most convicts had committed petty theft, in a society in which extremes of wealth and poverty made the rich exceedingly anxious about even petty crime. Some, but few of the convicts, had had the audacity to participate in rural protests, or had the temerity to form trade unions !
From the very first day of contact many convicts and marines stole from the Aborigines their fishing and hunting tackle, their women and sometimes their lives, just as the English government, in the person of Arthur Phillip, has already stolen their land.
The Aborigines fought back as well as they could. Celebration of the landing began in 1791; by 1804 26 January was referred to as First Landing Day or Foundation Day and, subsequently and seriatim, as Anniversary Day, Foundation Day, and Australian Natives’ Association Day - transformed into Australia Day for all the components of the present Commonwealth of Australia - although not without some disagreement.
Over what there is no disagreement is that the initial military encampment was established as a prison for people ejected by the English criminal system, and who could not be transported to America after the rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies there.
When Phillip left, the officers of the New South Wales Corps also began the practice, continued by later governors, of granting large tracts of the land to each other. These changes, however discreditable to the officers concerned, did lead to much more efficient farming. The amount of wheat in circulation increased almost as much as the amount of rum. The colony rapidly became self-sufficient in basic foods and the ‘starving time’ a memory. (Historical records of Australia, I,1,413-417)
On 26 January 1804 the colony was otherwise busy: a festering dispute between ‘real estate traders’, merchants and the New South Wales Corps who were in charge of rum, came to an end which resulted in a military dictatorship, properly named ‘the Rum Rebellion’. Another of His Majesty’s gifts will be, and remain, alcoholism.
Three more naval governors, John Hunter, Philip King and William Bligh, tried without avail to break the rum traffic and to mitigate the social and economic evils that it nourished.
Sedated somewhat by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the colony prepared itself for new celebrations on 26 January 1818, officially designated for the first time as a public holiday. Foundation Day, as it was known at the time, continued to be officially celebrated in New South Wales, and became connected with water sporting events.
Macquarie noticed that military and convicts gathered together on Sydney’s streets to enjoy horse races, weighted footraces, fist fights, dog fights, cock fights and any other sort of fights. Like the emperors of ancient Rome, with whom his critics later compared him, Macquarie cemented his rule with bread and circuses. (D. Hunt, GIRT, The unauthorised history of Australia (Melbourne 2015) 215)
Having imported a sufficient amount of Spanish dollars, that he would have ‘holed’ at the centre, Macquarie encouraged exchange among the population. The ‘holey dollar’ was born. In turn, because now people had cold hard cash, Macquarie encouraged D’Arcy Wentworth and others, mostly emancipists, to establish the Bank of New South Wales, Australia’s first public company. The bank was to accept deposits, make loans and print the colony’s first banknotes. The bank had teething problems, but Macquarie would overcome them, and his ‘creative accounting’ would become a source of inspiration for Australia’s largest merchant bank, Macquarie Bank, to adopt his name and take the ‘holey dollar’ as its logo. (D. Hunt, op.cit. 229)
The tradition of celebrating the invasion with games and food was extended to the new colonies, although each of them had its own commemoration for its founding, on different days. Agreement on the same day was found for 26 January 1888, except for South Australia. There were further discrepancies until 1935, when all states celebrated Australia Day on 26 January. The Commonwealth and State governments finally agreed on a common day in 1946. By this time Australia Day had come to mean sport competitions, community barbecues, festivals, outdoor concerts and fireworks.
The invasion has been since referred to as a ‘settlement’, clearly a misnomer: a settlement is only possible among free agents. Such distinction is not anti-historical; it is disregarded only by the occupiers and their successors because they conveniently developed the notion that the Indigenous People who have a history of no less than 60,000 years could not be regarded as personae juris, but were quickly categorised as parts of the environment - with the land legally defined until almost thirty years ago as terra nullius - belonging to no one. As Captain James Cook found in his journey along the eastern coast in 1770, the continent certainly contained oddities enough to fascinate his men of science on board, and bounties sufficient to imagine a future of agriculture and ‘civilising’ activity. Furthermore, Cook was fully aware that the land was inhabited. He was also more dispose to recognise the humanity of the people who already lived in what was to become New South Wales: “They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans.”
Scientist Joseph Banks, who was travelling with Cook, was rather unimpressed and he wrote disparagingly: “[the soil] was so barren and at the same time intirely (sic) void of the helps dervd (sic) from cultivation [that it] would not be supposed to yield much to the support of man.” And of the inhabitants, because they did not practice agriculture, he conjectured that: “their reason must be supposed to hold a rank little superior to that of monkeys.” [Emphasis added] (2 J.C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771 (Sydney 1962) 112-113 and 122-123)
In the end, the original inhabitants could be legally dispossessed, but only if the land was virtually uninhabited or if they were shown to lack the ‘possessive habits’ of ‘civilised’ people. There were some problems. Firstly, the Indigenous People were more numerous than the invaders expected - as they would find out. Secondly, there was no authoritative decision on whether the land was indeed terra nullius - legally unoccupied.
The invasion was therefore a settlement with no one ! Pragmatism would not be the sole gift from the insane Hanoverian king.
Imagination came to assistance: not only did the land belong to no one; no one was there, in fact !
Watkin Tench, an English marine officer who is best known for publishing two books describing his experiences in the First Fleet: Narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay and Complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson, would provide an account of the arrival and of the first four years of the colony but would not help the official version. The Narrative would run to three editions and was quickly translated into Dutch, French, German and Swedish.
Tench was with the First Fleet on the Charlotte. He remained in Sydney until December 1791 and displayed a great interest and some sympathy in the local inhabitants of the Gadigal and Cammeraygal tribes, establishing a friendship with several of them. Unusually, given the insularity of his compatriots, his accounts were influenced by the liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the idea of the ‘noble savage’. Still, Tench and other officials always presumed that English were civilised and Aboriginals were not.
Within a generation a much simple desire for land overcame legal niceties with a violent assault upon ‘the savages’. In time the English easily persuaded themselves that their invasion could only benefit the Aborigines - ‘civilisation’ was the antidote to their natural ‘savagery’.
A gross estimate of the Indigenous population was around one million. On another estimate there were between 315,000 and 750,000 Aborigines in the whole continent - give or take 50,000 or so, and distributed into 500 tribes. Archaeological finds indicate a sustainable population of around 750,000. By the time of the white centenary celebrations in 1888, the number had been reduced to about 60,000 ‘full-bloods’. Yet, to the English eye the land was un-inhabited !
Such illusion did not last long.
The chroniclers of the invasion recorded an outbreak of smallpox among the Aborigines in April 1789. The epidemic killed half of all the Port Jackson Aborigines and spread throughout south-eastern area of the continent, as far west as the future South Australia and as far north as the future new prison camp of Moreton Bay. As an exterminating agent, smallpox proved highly effective and must have caused the death of up to 125,000 people, thus ‘liberating’ enormous new resources for English exploitation. (N. G. Butlin, Our original aggression (Sydney 1983) 16-24)
In the first three years up to December 1790 the Aborigines had killed or wounded seventeen of the invaders. That year, to avenge the spearing of a convict servant, Governor Phillip sent into the bush a ‘punitive expedition’ to collect ten Aboriginal heads and two live prisoners whom he planned to hang in publics so as ‘to set an example’. But the expedition failed - twice. And so much for living “in amity and kindness” - as Phillip had been commanded.
The Aboriginal ‘guerrilla war’ had began, and it would not be fought in terms familiar to the invaders. The invaders continued to believe, perhaps by ‘setting examples’, that the Aborigines could be brought around ‘civilisation’. On the other hand they would be convinced by David Collins - who was responsible under the governor, for the entire legal establishment of the prison colony, and who had begun his duty by reading the Act, commissions and letter patent for the formal inauguration of 7 February 1788 of the military government - that the Aborigines were “ignorant savages” but not beyond influence and remedy. For the moment they were “wholly incapable of becoming one day civilised and useful members of society.” (D. Collins, An account of the English colony in New South Wales (London 1804) 336)
The Aborigines, however, did not care about becoming useful. They preferred their independence of action, followed their own values and refused to adopt those of the invaders. They remained unconvinced of the superiority of the invaders’ ‘civilisation’ - perhaps because of the sight of men chained together in gangs, working under armed guard, floggings and public hangings ?
The abyss of incomprehension between the two groups of contenders for the land, the invaders and the original inhabitants, was graphically illustrated in May 1791. Phillip decided to make another example of a convict caught in the act of stealing fishing tackle from a well-known Aborigine. The man was severely flogged in the presence of many Aborigines who had been ‘made to understand’ the reason for his punishment, but “there was not one of them that did not testify strong abhorrence of the punishment, and equal sympathy with the sufferer.” (W.Tench, A narrative, 111) Aborigines never could understand people who, in cold blood, deliberately inflicted pain on a fellow human being. Unlike nearly all other people on the earth, they never engaged in any form of cold-blooded torture. As the eyewitness Tench put it, the fiasco showed that the Aborigines were “not of a sanguinary and implacable temper. Quick indeed of resentment, but not unforgiving of injury.” ((N. G. Butlin, op.cit. 119-148) Their human and conciliatory temper, like their social organisation and the inferiority of their weapons, remained a fatal weakness in their effort to resist the implacable and bloodthirsty English invaders. (R. Ward, op. cit. 56-57)
Of course, the expansion of ‘squatting’ over most of eastern Australia had nothing to do with the rapid expropriation and extermination of the Aboriginal tribes. Noooh ! Few living Australians, black or white, have any idea of the scale and duration of the slaughter. It is true that dispossession, disease and despair killed more Aborigines than did white murderers, but premeditated slaughter of men, women, children and infants accounted in the aggregate for tens of thousands of black lives. From the beginning it is clear that blacks were murdered with impunity by convicts and their guards, in spite of some earnest official - yet very weak - efforts to protect them. It seems that the first official sanctioned massacre occurred in Van Diemen’s Land when a hunting party of about forty was shot down by soldiers in 1804. (Historical records of Australia, III, 1, 238, 242-243, 282)
At the end of Governor Philip Bligh’s rule in 1808, the prison-colony comprised land within a day’s ride of Sydney and the convict hellholes of Newcastle and Van Diemen’s Land.
Collins’ was not the sole voice. Barron Field, who already had a reputation as a fine poet, arrived in Sydney in February 1817, having accepted a commission as judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Governor Lachlan Macquarie, writing to Under-secretary Goulburn in April thanked him “for making me acquainted with Mr. Field’s character. He appears to be everything that you say of him and I am very much prejudiced in his favour already from his mild modest and conciliating manners, and I am persuaded he will prove a great acquisition and blessing to this colony.” [Emphasis added] In 1825 Field would write of the Aborigines that they “will never be civilised ... We have now lived among [them] for more than thirty years, and the most persevering attempts have always been made, and are still making to induce them to settle and avail themselves of the arts of life; but they cannot be fixed ... [I predict] decay or extermination [for] the simple race of Australia.” (B. Field (ed.), Geographical memoirs of New South Wales (London 1825) 223-224)
An amnesty was declared in December 1816, after which Governor Macquarie increased his efforts ‘to Christianise’ the wayward natives, to whom the Rev. Samuel Marsden had refused to minister on the ground that “Commerce promotes industry - industry civilisation and civilisation opens up the way for the Gospel.”
Marsden’s belief that only people interested in buying and selling things could be Christians meant that the Aborigines were spared organised religious instruction until the first missionary arrived in Australia in 1821. The Rev. William Walker, a dour Wesleyan, wasted no time in advising Aborigines that they were descendants of Ham, the son of Noah whom God had cursed with blackness and condemned to be “a servant of servants to his brothers.” who were ‘white’. Judge Barron Field, a founder of the Society from Promoting Christian Knowledge among the Aborigines, had mused of his charges “Perhaps it is better that their name should pass away from this earth.” With friends like Macquarie, Field and Walker, the Aborigines did not need enemies. (D. Hunt, op.cit. 240)
Field’s belief in the Aboriginal people’s inevitable extinction was embraced by ‘policy makers’ for the next century.
All that, in exchange for the land. The land, boys ! No man’s property was safe, John Macarthur warned, from the hypocritical dictator Bligh, an attack which resonated strongly with the invaders. Ever since, Sydney people in particular ‘love’ real estate; it is all they talk about at dinner parties, preferring to avoid conversation about ‘politics’ or religion as a matter of ‘good manners in polite society’ - and would be aghast at the thought that the government might seize their 1BDR/oBTH hovel with double lock-up convict.” (D. Hunt, op.cit. 188)
In 1838 the most notorious of all clashes happened on Henry Dangar’s Myall Creek Station in north-western New South Wales. This massacre is remembered not because in was more brutal and bloody than a hundred other similar events - it was not - but because it was better documented and because of what it showed about the values and assumptions of white society at the time.
The institutional massacres continued for sure until 1928, at Coniston cattle Station in the Northern Territory, which lasted between 14 August and 18 October. It was the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous People and one of the last events of the ‘Australian Frontier wars’.
Mrs. Daisy O’Dwyer Bates, who had arrived in Australia from Tipperary, Ireland in 1884 and promptly married a wealthy ‘pastoralist’, would later devote herself to studying the Aborigines. Her conclusions are contained in a book in which she wrote: “The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation - but he cannot withstand civilisation.” By ‘the Australian native’ she meant the Aborigines. (D. Bates, The passing of the Aborigines (New York 1973) 57)
It was understood that the progressive invasion of Australia by the newcomers was necessarily to bring about the complete extermination of the Indigenous People, and that the sooner Aborigines disappeared the better they would serve Australian development. All that remained, according to Bates, “was to smooth the dying pillow.”
The only possible, but quite difficult alternative, was assimilation. It was proposed in 1937 in the wake of a new version of eugenics. It would have consisted in a policy of separating the full-bloods on reserves as isolated as possible, and the granting of admission, through institutionalisation, to the ‘white Australian’ society to those of mixed descent.
The predominant view was that “At the coming of civilisation, the Aboriginal tribes dwindle like chaff before the wind” wrote Ernestine Hill in her account of extensive travels through Australia. Except for the doubtful success of eugenics, all Aborigines would be dead by the end of the twentieth century. (E. Hill, The great Australian loneliness (Melbourne 1956) 35)
The prophecy was not very far from the arrival of the German former chicken-farmer Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust.
Similar ‘policy’ would be prosecuted with various vigour and various names: dispersion, reservation, assimilation, even Christianisation, during the following one hundred and fifty years. No one ever bothers to ask ‘the blacks’ what they want for fear that they could say the word ‘treaty’. Had they, the situation would have become, in the Philistine language of the invaders, ‘rather embarrassing’.
Continuous preoccupation with the possible decline of the ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’, commanded a lot of attention to ‘stock’ and ‘breed’ for a long time in the development of Australia: the ‘white Australia’ policy was completely done away only by the Whitlam Government, elected in 1972.
Then, all of a sudden, well-meaning and well-to-do Australia found itself in the hands of a band of clowns, led by the Tallest-Poppy-of-them-all, who proceeded to attempt to take back the farm, to exploit natural resources for the common interest of all Australians and - horror of all - began returning land to the Aborigines, as Whitlam would on 1 January 1975 to Vincent Lingiari and his Gurindji people.
This and other unpardonable ‘sins’ would call the initiative of the Governor-General, assisted as one now knows for sure by the delaying technique of the Crown. A seriously and variously deviant Sir John Kerr saw to it, and sacked the whole troupe.
Race, trade and loyalty to ‘home’
It was Thomas Alexander Browne, a London-born Australian author, who sometimes published under the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood, who lived across the nineteenth century, who became responsible for the dicta “race is everything” and “the triumph of the Aryan stock”. In such a world, the Irish might have been in peril, and the Chinese and the ‘Hindoos’ certainly had a problem. But it was the Aborigines who most deserved his attention: they were apparently doomed by the working ‘natural laws’, and all they could hope for was a sympathy for a ‘dying race’. On the frontier, gradual extinction remained too slow; better apply the violent dispossession such as across Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. (M. Peel, A little history of Australia (Melbourne 1997) 31)
In the 1840s and 1850s the Colonial Office had proposed a General Assembly for the Australian colonies to deal with matters of common Australian interest. But the colonies lacked any compelling reasons to unite and preferred separate self-government. In 1889 the Imperial government tried again, and appointed Major General Bevan Edwards to inspect the defences of Australia. He recommended the establishment of a single central authority to weld the various colonial forces into one army. Australian politicians now agreed on the need for a united Australia: to prevent invasion by Chinese, promote development and preserve the power of propertied interests. The unifiers also shared a rudimentary patriotic and nationalist sentiment based on pride in material pioneering achievement - the extent to which they had subdued the wilderness. (W. J. Lines, Taming the great south land: A history of the conquest of nature in Australia (Sydney 1991) 136)
In time the first occupiers became divided into two parties: ‘exclusionists’ and ‘emancipists’, the former because they sought to exclude from polite society ex-convicts and all other low fellows, the latter because they were emancipated prisoners or friends, associates or descendants of such people. John Hood hardly exaggerated when he wrote as late as 1843: “Caste in Hindostan is no more rigidly regarded than it is in Australia: the bond and the free, emancipist and exclusionist, seldom associated together familiarly.” As well-bred Hood lamented in 1843: “If the truth must be told, the fortunes of many of the exclusionists themselves were not acquired by the purest means; close contacts, the gin or rum-shop, embarrassments wilfully created by insidious loans and ejectments, and other crooked paths, were used equally by both parties, bond and free.” (J. Hood, Australia and the East (London 1843), cited by R. Ward, op. cit. 58,59)
Governor Macquarie had provided opportunities to those born within the colony. Most of his countrymen regarded the native-born as the depraved spawn of criminal degenerates, prone to idleness, compulsive drinking and poor personal hygiene. Actually, the native-born were far healthier than their English counterparts, having eschewed the brutality of growing-up conditions in England. They enjoyed full employment and shorter working hours than English labourers and, even when food was scarce, never had to resort to dead rats, bark or lumps of coal, those staples of working-class English cuisine. Yet, most of these ‘colonial boys’ were convinced of their inferiority. A young naive-born, a protégé of Macquarie, expressed hope that he might one day be trusted to do some exploring, “altho’ an Australian.” The first generation of new-Australians carried chips on their shoulders. Not only that: they believed that English chips were better. Quite likely they had just set-up the ‘cultural cringe’.
Macquarie’s willingness to work with ex-convicts, black sheep, the native-born, women and other ‘undesirables’ has often been portrayed as some kind of ‘champion of Australian democracy’. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Macquarie, a solid, reactionary Scot-turned-Englishman wrote of his implacable hatred of the “infernal and destructive principles of democracy.” In his view it was the sublimation of what he disliked the most: Greek decadence, French extremism, and American danger. He did not have a democratic bone in his body. He was an autocrat who did not mind the origin of his interlocutor and her/his past, so long as s/he obeyed his commands and did not cost him money.
In the twenty-two years from 1861 to 1883, 29 million acres of ‘Crown land’ were alienated, but the area under cultivation grew by only about half a million. E.G. Shann summed up in a well-known phrase the general effects of the Free Selection Acts in all colonies: “And it came to pass that demagogues dispersed the public estate and pastoralists gathered up the freehold thereof.” (E. G. Shann, An economic history of Australia (Cambridge 1948) 233)
For a hundred years most well-to-do, middle-class Australians, whether immigrants or native-born, had seen themselves primarily as colonists whose first and ‘natural’ loyalty was to the ‘Old Country’. For the same period, most poor ‘working-class’ Australians, particularly if they were native-born, had thought of themselves primarily as Australians whose first loyalty was naturally to their own country. Yet, up until the turn of the century, the first group had enjoyed a practical monopoly of political and social power. (R. Ward, op.cit. 188)
In 1888 the people of New South Wales celebrated the centenary of the beginning of the white conquest of Australia. Surviving black Australians were ignored by the merry-makers just as they had been for the whole period in those parts of the continent where they had already been ‘dispersed’, if not wholly destroyed.
For their part, the Aborigines ignored the corroboree in Sydney as did, for the most part white settlers in the other five colonies and in New Zealand, still then thought of as one of the Australian, or Australasian, colonies.
Apparently most white Australians still thought of themselves as ‘settlers in separate colonies’. (R. Ward, op.cit. 187)
All through the 1890s, at the moment of federation in 1901, and for a good decade afterwards, different people had different ‘Australias’ in their heads, different hopes and fears for a new country marooned so far from its ‘Anglo-Saxon’ beginnings.
Workers also talked of profound change. In the ‘new unionism’ of William Spence, ideals of workers’ unity joined an assumption of basic class antagonism. For journalist William Lane, a ‘paradise’ for working men rested in the inevitable victory of socialism over capitalism.
Events in the early 1890s certainly revealed deep social divisions. Employers used ‘scab’ labour to break a maritime strike. Shearing unions won some concessions in 1890, but were shattered by an employer counter-offensive in 1891. These confrontations pitted strikers against police and hastily mobilised ‘special forces’, and convinced many unionists of the need to secure their own political representation. (M. Peel, op. cit. 36)
If the strikes and the depression had revealed anything, it was the need for change. Busts brought foreclosures and bankruptcy to the middle class. Workers wanted protection from exploitation, from the threat the unemployed posed to jobs and wages, and the ‘natural’ servility they saw among ‘non-European’ labour. Farmers and rural labourers wanted protection against droughts and tumbling prices. In ‘overgrown’ and ‘diseased’ cities, comfortable people wanted protection from their poor neighbours’ infections and supposed criminal habits. The poor wanted a decent life, more secure workers wanted to keep the decency they had achieved. The future had to be different, not more of the same.
On the eve of the first all-Australia conference to discuss federation, in February 1890, Sir Henry Parkes, chairman and Premier of New South Wales, reminded the participants that: “The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all. Even native-born Australians are Britons ... We know the value of our British origin; we know that we represent a race, which for the purposes of settling new Colonies never had its equal on the face of the earth.” (B. R. Wise, The making of the Australian Commonwealth, 1889-1900 : a stage in the growth of the Empire (London 1913) 52)
Parkes assured his audience that Australians had “made such progress as has excited the admiration of the best of other countries.” Yet, if he hoped for a pro-federation crusade, he would remain disappointed.
Throughout the conference, speakers stressed their loyalty to the Queen and the Empire - ‘home’ in one word - and insisted that a united Australia could remain British and conservative. They did not envisage federation as a step towards independence or separation from Great Britain. On the contrary, just as the greatness of the United States lay in its sovereignty, the greatness of federated Australia would be its enduring membership of the British Empire. At the end of the conference, Chairman Parkes commemorated Australia’s first step towards federation by planting an English oak tree in the gardens of Parliament House, Melbourne. (W. J. Lines, op.cit. 137)
The idea of federation remained more popular outside the official political process, with the Australasian Natives’ Association and the Federal Leagues reviving it again at conferences in Corowa in 1893 and Bathurst three years later.
Elected conventions began discussing the details in 1897. Less populous states feared domination by New South Wales, while New South Wales doubted its need to dominate them.
In 1897-98 delegates from each colony met to draft a constitution, protective of wealth, and rigidly resistant to amendment, for the new Commonwealth of Australia. The finer details were hammered out in the federal conventions of 1897 and 1898, and the voters of Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia quickly ratified the new constitution.
Having secured some amendments, New South Wales and Queensland joined in 1899.
Colonial representatives met again in Sydney in March 1891 to consider a federal constitution and in 1895 the premiers of the colonies met in Hobart. In the midst of industrial strife and class conflict, many federation advocates regarded Australian political unity as the only means of preventing one or other of the colonies from going over to socialism. (B. R. Wise, op. cit. 222)
The rapid rise of the Australian Labor Party, which captured its first seats in New South Wales in 1891 and briefly held power in Queensland in 1899, was also worrying. Inventing the political structures of a new nation was a risky business, especially as the decision to federate was to rest on colony-to-colony popular referenda.
At its first meeting on 1 August 1890, the Council of the Australian Labor Federation wrote the first plank of its parliamentary platform as “Universal White Adult Suffrage for all parliamentary and local elections” and in 1905 the federal parliamentary platform began: “Objective, - (1) The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community.” (R. Ward, op. cit. 189)
Most Australians, however, remained indifferent to the changes being planned in their name.
Labor’s political leaders actively opposed, or at best were lukewarm towards, federation. Some thought it a conservative device for distracting attention from the need for social reforms. Others thought that the proposed constitution gave too much ill-defined power to the Governor-General, a view which was to be proved disastrously true seventy-five years later.
Conservatives, whether Free Trader or Protectionist in complexion, were divided over federation.
Overwhelmingly the lead came from liberal, middle-class politicians like Alfred Deakin of Victoria, Sir Henry Parkes of New South Wales, and Charles Cameron Kingston of South Australia.
Such men and their supporters were inspired by a sincere and often deeply felt Australian patriotism, but they were also highly practical politicians who seldom lost sight of more mundane matters. (R. Ward, op.cit. 216-217)
They thought, rightly, that federation would pay.
Tasmania, for instance, with its small area and largely rural population, depended heavily upon the exports of agricultural produce to the mainland colonies.
One federal propagandist in the ‘Apple Isle’ found the following speech enormously effective: “ Gentlemen, if you vote for the Hill you will found a great and glorious nation under the bright Southern Cross, and meat will be cheaper; and you will live to see the Australian race dominate the Southern seas, and you will have a market for both potatoes and apples; and your sons shall reap the grand heritage of nationhood, and if Sir William Lyne does come back to power in Sydney he can never do you one penny worth of harm.” (B. R. Wise, op. cit. 356) Lyne was the Protectionist leader in New South Wales who, it was feared, might ruin Tasmania by introducing tariffs to protect the mother colony’s agriculture against Tasmanian competition.
Although electors in each colony subsequently approved the federal proposal, less than 47 per cent of those eligible actually voted. The federators next sought the assent of the British Parliament. The British Parliament ratified the agreement in 1900, despite the dithering of Western Australia, which merged into the new Commonwealth one month after Britain had officially set it up.
The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, however, citing the opposition of banks and other institutions, insisted on amending the constitution to provide for the right of appeal from Australia’s highest court to the Privy Council in London. (J. Quick and R. R. Garran, The annotated constitution of the Australian Commonwealth (Sydney 1901) 235)
The Australian petitioners agreed to the amendment, which effectively permitted Britain veto power over Australian legislation; with the security of British investments assured, the Australian Commonwealth came into existence on 1 January 1901, Commonwealth Inauguration Day. Celebrations were held all over the new country.
The most important enactments were concerned with festering national sentiment and security or with raising living standards for the masses, but, these two policies appeared to many, if not most, people of the time to be two complementary aspects of the one broad national policy. The embarrassing ‘White Australia’ policy, for instance, was established by the first parliament’s Immigration Restriction Act and Pacific Island Labourers Act. (R. Ward, op. cit. 225)
Was the policy inspired mainly by racist or by economic motives ? Careful examination of all the speeches made in the House of Representatives and the Senate shows that both considerations were present in the minds of almost all members.
What have we got ?
The Australian Constitution is really no more than a slightly glorified trade agreement, written in the most uninspiring and pedestrian way imaginable, almost exclusively for the scope of removing tariffs between the various colonies-would-be-states.
It does matter that the Constitution is not even the outcome of the Parliament of Australia. The Australian Constitution is contained in an Act of the British Parliament, which in 1990 was the only body able to make laws for the whole of Australia. A law made by the British Parliament was the only legal way to establish a system of government for the whole of Australia.
Five of the existing colonies agreed “to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.”, as the preamble to the British Parliament Act of 9 July 1990 containing the Australian Constitution recites.
Some of the proponents to moving Australia Day to 1 January to recognise ‘the coming into existence’ of Australia that day have obviously not read, not understood, or do not care about, the document. It makes clear that as from 1 January 1901 Australia would be a self-governing colony, not an independent state: art. 8 of the same Act.
Australia was to be no more than a super colony, largely for business reasons.
Only as late as 1994 Australia Day celebrations were formally recognised as an annual event. There are some civic aspects to the Day, but rarely do they go beyond the granting of Australian ‘citizenship’ - to over 16,000 from more than 100 countries in January 2016 - with the attendant condition of British ‘subjectship’, the conferral of ‘gongs’, and speeches by the Governor-General of the Commonwealth and the Prime Minister. Only the former is provided for in the Constitution, the latter is not even mentioned there. This adds some new facets to Australia: an institutional emphasis on militarism - hence each State has a Governor. As will be seen, there are other characteristics of what ‘makes an Australian’: exclusivism is one - which is expressed in de rigueur public declarations that this is the greatest country in the world; a pervasive feeling that corruption of the Rum Corps has remained and transmogrified into modern expressions; an anti-intellectualism which pervades public life, discourse and education - the latter intended as the gaining of a meal-ticket under form of employment unit certificates; a populism, which is the anti-politics politics of non-thinkers; and an attitude to life which can only be qualified as Philistinism, by which one would see that ‘things of the spirit' are really of no substantial value or importance. Hypocrisy exudes what one would expect from the solemnity of ‘public life’. Public what ? A more recent ‘acquisition’ is multiculturalism, a difficult concept to explain because it contains all possible elements for the life of a ‘good society’ - and their opposite.
It is safe to say that an overwhelming majority of Australians would, particularly if asked by a stranger, or a pollster ‘recognise Australia’s Indigenous People and culture’, or reply that ‘it is important to recognise the cultural diversity of the nation’. This is easy to talk about, and this is where the effort stops: easy talk.
Despite the strong attendance at Australia Day events - mainly welcomed by a general sense of hedonism - and despite an outwardly ‘nice’ disposition towards the recognition of Indigenous Australians, the date of the celebrations remains a source of challenge and, for the few who care, of national embarrassment.
Constitution Day, 9 July, has been suggested as a possible alternative, commemorating the day in 1900 when Queen Victoria gave her assent to the Constitution of Australia. Heaven forbid !
The anniversary of the 1967 referendum to amend the constitutional status of Indigenous People, 27 May, has also been suggested as a possible alternative.
3 March was proposed, as the anniversary of the Australia Act 1986 coming in to effect. The Australia Act 1986 is the name given to a pair of separate but related pieces of legislation - one an Act of the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia, the other an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. While each Act gives its short title as ‘Australia Act 1986’, in Australia they are referred to, respectively, as the Australia Act 1986 (Cth.) and the Australia Act 1986 (U.K.). The Australia Act eliminated the remaining possibilities for the United Kingdom to legislate with effect in Australia, for the United Kingdom to be involved in Australian government, and for an appeal from any Australian court to an English court. These nearly identical Acts were passed by the two parliaments, to come into effect simultaneously, and significantly because of lingering uncertainty as to which of the two parliaments had the ultimate authority to do so.
The Day presents all the elements which concurred in the formation of the place. One fundamental component of the story is this: the Indigenous People, who spoke no English, had no monarch to represent the State, and did not share in Protestant Ethic, were declared uncivilised non-humans and soon made the object of systematic extermination; they - rightly - now remember Australia Day as Survival Day. Deep down in the psyche of modern ‘real’ Australians the Indigenous People are the characteristic Orwellian ‘unperson’. Their past is treated as ‘unhistory’ by the majority, which takes hardly any interest in its own past - and that is another element. The ‘unhistory’ of ‘unpersons’ - wrote Noam Chomsky - is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries.
Such excision of a part of the population - admittedly now a small part: some 2.5 per cent of the total population are from Indigenous People, and there are also some thirty thousand Torres Strait Islanders, with a further twenty thousand people identifying as of both Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander origin - was made possible by the adoption of the ‘White Australia’ policy and the acceptance of a trade agreement amongst the original colonies which passes as the Australian Constitution.
The Australian Constitution still reeks of racism in 2016.
The origins of the ‘White Australia’ policy can be traced to the 1850s and 1860s. White miners’ resentment towards industrious Chinese diggers culminated in violence on the Buckland River in Victoria in 1857 and at Lambing Flat in New South Wales in 1861. The governments of these two colonies introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Later, it was the turn of hard-working labourers from the South Sea Islands of the Pacific - known as Kanakas - black-birded between 1847 and 1904 and brought to work in northern Queensland. Workers in the south of the colony became vehemently opposed to all forms of immigration which might threaten their jobs; particularly by ‘non-white’ people who they thought would accept a lower standard of living and work for lower wages.
Some influential Queenslanders feared that the colony could be excluded from the long-forthcoming federation if the Kanaka trade did not cease. Leading politicians from New South Wales and Victoria warned that there would be no place for ‘Asiatics’ or 'coloureds’ in the Australia of the future.
Once federation was accomplished, in 1901, the new federal parliament passed the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which received royal assent on 23 December 1901. Designed to end the employment of Pacific Islanders, it was euphemistically described as an Act “to place certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants.” [Emphasis added] Removal was the word used at the time for deportation. The process lasted two years.
The Act prohibited from immigration those considered to be insane, anyone likely to become a charge upon the public or upon any public or charitable institution. It also included any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease “of a loathsome or dangerous character.” The Act grouped together prostitutes, criminals and anyone under a contract or agreement to perform manual labour within Australia - with some limited exceptions.
There was one further odious and ‘flexible’ restriction: the Act provided that “Any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of the officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer” would not be admitted. Often such tests were conducted in a language with which the applicant was not familiar and had been nominated by an immigration officer.
Historically, the Australian Labor Party has been a party of racism. From the ‘White Australia’ policy to the ongoing mal-treatment of Indigenous People, Labor has been at the forefront of attacks on ‘non-whites’ - broadly speaking of ‘the other’. In 1992 the Keating Government introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers in an attempt to shore up the racist working-class vote and divert attention away from its neo-liberal policies which transferred wealth from labour to capital. It worked in the short term but helped to lay the foundations for the Howard Government’s ascendancy by making racist ideas ‘respectable’. In 2011 Prime Minister Gillard proposed outsourcing the torture of refugees to Malaysia in an attempt to keep some of the racist working-class vote and divert attention away for its neo-liberal policies which were, again, transferring wealth from labour to capital. Those who are allowed in are still placed in ‘detention camps’. The words ‘detention camps’ are a misnomer. These are concentration camps, of the kind which were first developed by the Spaniards in 1896 in Cuba, and expanded by the English during the Boer war. Hitler gave them a new and even more shocking dimension: Konzentrationslager, administered in the final stage by the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt and guarded by SS-Totenkopfverbände - in English: SS-Death’s head units. Lest we forget !
Labor could have shown leadership by explaining to the Australian people why the tiny trickle of refugees coming to Australia, as compared with other countries, are to be welcomed and supported - not vilified.
The fact is that, from the beginning of Australia, and with severe measures, the implementation of the ‘White Australia’ policy was warmly applauded in most sections of the community.
In 1919 a well-practiced turn-coat politician, former Labor, then National Labor, Nationalist - for a time Prime Minister, then Australian, United Australia and finally Liberal, William Morris Hughes, hailed the Act it as “the greatest thing we have achieved.”
Left initially to ignorant enforcers of Her Majesty’s ‘order’, meaning by that the orderly running of the sub-tropical version of the Westminster System, the Act was used in turn against Italian anti-fascist refugees, Jews, anyone really who appeared, sounded, acted as ‘different’.
It was only the Whitlam Labor Government which completely disposed of the ‘White Australia’ policy and took three decisive steps in removing the consideration of ‘race’ as an element for admission to Australia.
For the purpose, the new Parliament was able to pass legislation providing that all migrants, of whatever origin, would be eligible to obtain citizenship after three years of permanent residence, new policy instructions would be issued to overseas posts totally to disregard race as a factor in the selection of migrants and, most importantly, all international agreements relating to immigration and race were ratified. Until then there had been two entities on Earth: Australia and the rest.
The reforms of the Whitlam Government survived - in part - the ousting by the Royal coup of November 1975.
New policies were introduced with the coming of a parallel interest in multiculturalism: they included three-year rolling programmes to replace the annual immigration plans of the past, a renewed commitment to apply immigration policy without racial discrimination - spurred on by the international treaties ratified by the Whitlam Government, a more consistent and structured approach to migrant selection and an emphasis on attracting people who would represent a positive gain to Australia.
The present position with regard to immigration is suffering from the hostility shared between Government and Opposition to ‘unauthorised admission seekers’ - a ‘polite’ way of referring to the refusal to admit certain persons seeking refuge in Australia on ground of heartlessness, xenophobia, religious prejudice and others undeclared biases. The ‘policy’ is working and helpful to both wings of the Westminster System as ‘working’ in Canberra. That the yearly maintenance of one alone of those victims of Australian racism may cost up half a million dollars is not well-known. If it were, probably it would not matter: the end of keeping out ‘the enemy’ would be worth the cost. And that is not very much Christian, but perfectly Jesuitical.
Mandatory detention has set in train an ever worsening response to refugees. According to statistics provided by the Australian Department of Immigration and Borders Protection, as at 30 November 2015, there were 1,852 people, including 104 children (< 18 years) in ‘immigration detention facilities’, including 1,683 in immigration detention on the mainland and 169 in immigration detention on Christmas Island. There were 534 detainees, including 70 children, in the Republic of Nauru, and 926 detainees on Manus Island of Papua New Guinea. Many of them have been held for years.
This is of course despite the population being as at 12.00 of 26 January 2016: 23,980.425 million residents - who are proudly advertised as “45 per cent born overseas, coming from 250 ancestries, and speaking some 200 languages, in addition to indigenous languages” in a place which does not discriminate on grounds of ethnicity, culture, religion or language, ‘provided that they meet the criteria set out in law’ - and that as defined from time to time.
And there is the rub.
A diffused sense of ‘unhistory’ spills over from the attitude to Indigenous People to the search for an Australian identity. This is not an overwhelming concern of general interest: the average Australian is satisfied with common places such as the fair go, which is supposed to preside over social policy and its development and mateship, that almost indefinable relationship amongst ‘real’ Australians - which anyway is exclusivist in nature because to be shared only among men.
The average Australian would not have a clue about the process by which s/he is governed and in particular about the Constitution.
Assuming that s/he is willing and able so to articulate the thought, s/he would say in the same breath that Australia is the ‘greatest country’ and its Constitution ‘the very best’ in the world. Exclusivism there meets nationalism and both are supported by anti-intellectualism and an always ill-disguised tinge of racism. Of course, s/he has hardly read the Constitution: not at primary or secondary school, where it goes unmentioned, and not even at university - except perhaps in the social science fields, where the most important section, at least in law schools, is section 92. That section goes to the very essence and purpose of the Constitution: to guarantee that “trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States shall be absolutely free.” The precise meaning of this expression is the subject of a considerable, vexed body of judicial interpretation.
And that smells of mercantilism. Once again: the land, boys ! Now: the business, boys !
What is meant by mercantilism is not some up-dating of highfalutin economic theory but the ‘practical offering and acceptance’ of the ‘reality of life’. According to this ‘reality’ and view of things what are regarded, even in Australia, as fundamental - albeit never defined - social rights are now dependent exclusively on the possession of money, and a lot of it.
A recently departed - and for higher position, of course - former treasurer put that cheap philosophy rather clearly when he advised fist homebuyers “to get a good job that pays good money.” (The (Melbourne) Age, 9 June 2015) The Roy Morgan Research gave the following datum for un-employment that month: 9.3 per cent. And that does not measure under-employment and mis-employment. And there is where effrontery meets imbecility.
Hence the basic rights to housing, education, health are left to the vagaries of ‘the market’ and, in the end, to the possession of money. Failing that it is confined to the demeaning activity of ‘charity’ organisations.
With it goes the acceptance of a regime in which, according to the Tax Justice Network’ recent report of Australia’s 200 publicly listed companies, 29 per cent have an effective tax rate of 10 per cent or less and 14 per cent have an effective rate of zero. The statutory corporate tax rate is 30 per cent. The T.J.N. report claims that if the ASX 200 paid the statutory rate, the government’s coffers would rise by $ 8.4 billion annually. In addition, it seems that 750 (?) foreign corporations operating in Australia pay no tax, because the Cayman Islands are regarded the ‘normal’ safe-keeping place by those who should pay tax in Australia but may afford the financial advice for tax ‘minimisation’. It is, after all, at one of the Cayman Islands that the ship of moral fibre ran aground and completely dispersed its precious cargo.
All this takes place on the provincial theatre of ‘the System’ where ‘the other side’ in Parliament may indulge in rhetorical exercises and vain threats, waiting for their time to govern the corporate-neoliberal regime recently revived by the Hawke/Keating governments. The beneficiaries know that the ‘good life’ on that stage depends on ‘faking it’ for the time being.
The obsession with maintaining “the purity of the British race” had pervaded the Constitutional debates. In 1898, one of major contributors, Edmund Barton, the future first Prime Minister, expressed the prevailing view that the proposed sec. 51 (xxvi) of the Constitution would be necessary to enable the Commonwealth “to regulate the affairs of the people of coloured or inferior races who are in the Commonwealth.”
One hundred and sixteen years since, the section is still in operation.
It is often said that the Constitution is enriched by tacit agreements and conventions. Such archaic way of regulating public affairs in unworthy of a modern country. Legitimistic reliance on ‘conventions’ cost Mr. Whitlam and the Australian people their elected government in November 1975.
Some silent provisions are actually beyond an honest reading of the document. It is hard to give any comforting meaning to sec. 61 of the Constitution which provides that “ The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative, ...” Section 62 provides that “There shall be a Federal Executive Council to advise the Governor-General in the government of the Commonwealth, and the members of the Council shall be chosen and summoned by the Governor-General and sworn as Executive Councillors, and shall hold office during his pleasure.”
No mention is made of a prime minister in Chapter 2 of the Constitution which deals with “The Executive Government.” The Governor-General is the prime minister.
Other sections confers on the Governor-General the power to appoint officers as ministers of state, in such number as the Governor-General decides, to fix the salaries of such ministers, to appoint civil servants and to command “the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth as the [English monarch]’s representative.”
In a system such as this a foreign monarch is the absolute ruler, the Governor-General its representative, and the residual colony is run through a maze of conventions conferring mostly unwritten, limited powers, save for some which are the subject of ‘reserve’ and hidden powers in the hands of the Governor-General. If W. S. Gilbert had written a libretto for this farce it would have challenged any Arthur Sullivan to set it to music.
Designed further to rivet Australia to foreign interests, the Constitution for the enlarged colony was provided with an amendment sec. 128 calculated to make any meaningful change impossible: a “majority of the States [and] a majority of the electors” are necessary for the alteration of the Constitution. Thus far only 8 referenda out of 44 to amend the Constitution have been successful.
The Indigenous ‘Unpeople’ who survived the invasion and the attempts at extermination continue to be the victims of that antiquated federal agreement. Despite the almost heroic effort of 27 May 1967 which recognised them as ‘citizens’ of Australia, their subjection is still contained in section 51 provision. Before the enactment of the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) Act [No. 55 of] 1967, placitum xxvi of section 51 provided that “The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: the people of any race [other than the aboriginal race in any State], for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.” [Emphasis added]
One other odious provision has been removed, such as sec. 127 which said: “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” That section was repealed by the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) Act [No. 55 of] 1967. But the following remains, lest one forgets. Sec. 25 still reads: “For the purpose of the last section (on the constitution of the House of Representatives), if by the law of any State all persons of any race are disqualified from voting at elections for the more numerous House of Parliament of the State, then, in reckoning the number of the people of the State or of the Commonwealth, persons of that race resident in that State shall not be counted.”
Parliament being deprived of the final decision on going to war, and always overseas of course, there is - in the silence of the Constitution - a rampant opportunity for ‘vicarious imperialism’. And Australia has a sad distinction in making its presence felt overseas !
Concluding a study on the subject, Dr. Gideon Polya, a distinguished student of history, noted that: “Australian forces have made it to more countries (85) than those invaded by France (80), the British (193), the US (70) or Apartheid Israel (12) ... albeit as lackeys of British or American imperialism. ... because look-the-other-way Australia has an entrenched culture of denial, this remote and wealthy country is currently intimately involved in US Alliance military actions in a swathe of Muslim countries - Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, the Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan - variously with troops on the ground, bombing or the targeting of drone strikes. (Gideon Polya, As UK lackeys Or US lackeys Australians have invaded 85 countries (British 193, French 80, US 70), 09 February 2015, www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm)
It is not difficult to understand how Australia Day has become an artificial fabrication designed by governments, the corporate world, the media and smug ‘established’ Anglo-Australians to ensure that people ignore or forget the real history, in a conflation of triumphalism, racism, trumped-up nationalism, and overwhelming hypocrisy.
Nor does it appear strange that most of the celebrants - ‘old’ and ‘new’ - opt on that Day for the traditional pursuits of barbecue and beach, or park on the couch for a long day watching tennis. Others receive their ‘citizenship’ at ceremonies around the country, while a growing number of the locally born wrap themselves - literally - in the flag, in a manner which was unknown to the Australia of even twenty, thirty years ago.
There are undoubtedly difficulties
First of all some figures, graphically to illustrate the boundaries of those difficulties.
At the time of the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia the countable population was 3,765.000.
At the time of the invasion, the Indigenous population was estimated to have been between 315,000 and 750,000, divided into as many as 500 tribes speaking many different languages. In the 2011 Census, 495,757 respondents declared they were Aboriginal, 31,407 declared they were Torres Strait Islander, and a further 21,206 declared they were both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The population of Australia was estimated as at 12.00 of 26 January 2016 to be 23,980.425. (Population clock - Australian Bureau of Statistics
www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/0/1647509ef7e25faaca2568a900154b63
For generations, the vast majority of both colonial-era and post-Federation immigrants came from the United Kingdom and Ireland, although the gold rushes also drew migrants from other countries.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, on 30 June 2014 there were 6.6 million residents who were born outside Australia, representing 28 per cent of the total population. The Australian resident population consists of people who were born in the following countries:
Country of birth ................Estimated resident population
United Kingdom.................1,221,300
New Zealand........................617,000
People’ Republic of China......447,400
India.......................................397,200
Philippines..............................225,100
Vietnam....................................223,200
Italy............................................201,800
South Africa..................................176,300
Malaysia......................................153,900
Germany.......................................129,000
Greece...........................................119,950
Sri Lanka.........................................110,520
United States.....................................104,080
South Korea........................................102,220
Hong Kong..........................................94,420
Ireland....................................................93,180
Lebanon.................................................92,220
Netherlands...............................................85,650
Indonesia..................................................81,140
Singapore...................................................70,100
Fiji.............................................................69,940
Croatia.......................................................65,420
Iraq............................................................63,860
Thailand.....................................................61,910
Poland.......................................................56,360
Taiwan........................................................55,960
Japan..........................................................54,830
Canada........................................................50,940
Macedonia...................................................50,610
Iran...............................................................50,370
Pakistan........................................................49,770
Malta............................................................45,920
Egypt..............................................................43,890
Turkey.............................................................40,660
France.............................................................39,950
Afghanistan.....................................................39,790
Bosnia and Herzegovina..................................38,930
Bangladesh.......................................................37,950
Zimbabwe..........................................................37,700
Nepal.................................................................36,940
Cambodia..........................................................35,000
Serbia.................................................................34,410
Papua New Guinea.............................................33,100
Chile....................................................................29,760
Myanmar..............................................................29,300
Mauritius................................................................27,140
Samoa.....................................................................26,980
Russia......................................................................24,170
Sudan.......................................................................23,090
Brazil........................................................................22,050
Hungary.....................................................................21,700
Cyprus.........................................................................20,780
About 90 per cent of Australia’s population is of European descent. Over 8 per cent of the population is of Asian descent - predominantly Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian. The total Indigenous population is estimated to be about 520,000 individuals, including people of mixed descent. The population of Queensland also includes descendants of South Sea Islanders brought over for indentured servitude in the nineteenth century.
In the 2011 census 60.2 per cent of Australia’s population declared European ancestry. In addition, many of those who chose Australian ethnicity were not of Indigenous ethnicity. The total Indigenous population is estimated to be about 520,000 individuals, including people of mixed descent.
In the 2011 Census Australians reported around 300 different ancestries. The most commonly reported ancestries were English - 33.7 per cent and Australian - 33 per cent. A further 6 of the leading 10 ancestries reflected the European heritage in Australia: Irish - 9.7 per cent, Scottish - 8.3 per cent, Italian - 4.3 per cent, German - 4.2 per cent, Greek - 1.8 per cent and Dutch - 1.6 per cent. Other most common ancestries in the top 10 were Chinese - 4.0 per cent and Indian - 1.8 per cent.
At the 2011 Census residents were asked to describe their ancestry, in which up to two could be nominated. Proportionate to the Australian resident population, the most commonly nominated ancestries were:
English............... (36.1 per cent)
Australian............ (35.4 per cent)
Irish..................... (10.4 per cent)
Scottish................. (8.9 per cent)
Italian ...................(4.6 per cent)
German.................. (4.5 per cent)
Chinese................... (4.3 per cent)
Indian..................... (2.0 per cent)
Greek....................... (1.9 per cent)
Dutch........................ (1.7 per cent)
At the 2011 census, 53.7 per cent of people had both parents born in Australia and 34.3 per cent of people had both parents born overseas.
The demographics of Australia also, and quite interestingly, covers religion and languages.
Australia is religiously a vastly different country from what it was in 1901.
Christianity is still the predominant faith of Australia, though this is diminishing. In the 2011 census, 61.1 per cent of the population classified themselves as being affiliated with a Christian faith, down from 67.3 per cent ten years earlier at the 2001 census. The largest religious denomination was Roman Catholicism, with 25.3 per cent of the population. The next largest Christian denomination was Anglican at 17.1 per cent, and all other Christian denominations accounted for a further 18.7 per cent of the population.
The second-largest group, and the one which had grown the fastest, was the 22.3 per cent who claimed to have no religion.
Minority religions practiced in Australia include Buddhism - 2.5 per cent of the population, Islam - 2.2 per cent, Hinduism - 1.3 per cent and Judaism - 0.5 per cent.
The most commonly spoken languages other than English, which is the national language, are Italian, Greek, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese varieties, Indian languages, Arabic and Macedonian, as well as numerous Australian Aboriginal languages. On data available as at February 2012, more than 15 per cent of Australians speak non-English languages at home and more than 200 languages are practised.
Language.................Speakers
Only English ...................15,581,333
Italian...............................316,895
Greek...............................252,226
Cantonese..........................244,553
Arabic................................243,662
Mandarin...........................220,600
Vietnamese.......................194,863
Spanish............................98,001
Filipino............................92,331
German...........................75,634
Hindi...............................70,011
Macedonian....................67,835
Croatian..........................63,612
Australian Aboriginal Languages.................55,705
Korean...........................................................54,623
Turkish............................................................53,857
Polish...............................................................53,389
Serbian .............................................................52,534
French............................................................43,216
Indonesian....................................................42,036
Maltese.........................................................36,514
Russian...........................................................36,502
Dutch..............................................................36,183
Japanese.........................................................35,111
Tamil.............................................................32,700
Sinhalese......................................................29,055
Samoan........................................................28,525
Portuguese...................................................25,779
Khmer..........................................................24,715
Assyrian (Aramaic).......................................23,526
Punjabi..........................................................23,164
Persian..........................................................22,841
Hungarian......................................................21,565
Bengali............................................................20,223
Urdu...............................................................19,288
Afrikaans.........................................................16,806
Bosnian.............................................................15,743
It is obvious that words - and concepts ! - such as representative democracy, secret ballot, proportional representation, separation of powers, division of functions, and referenda present - if and when they do at all - in different hues to many residents of Australia; and a government of, by, and for the people will only be possible through a process of education of the population. That - it seems - should be one very and perhaps thus far unexplored purpose of multiculturalism.
Furthermore, who were ‘the people’ in the 1890s and 1900s ?
This is something that ‘old’ Australians, particularly those who still feel an emotional attachment to the United Kingdom as ‘home’ and who are a large percentage by a minority with respect to ‘new’ Australians, should keep in mind in answering the question.
They should remember that, although a majority of voters said ‘yes’ to the Constitution for a federated Australia, this did not amount to a majority of the population of the colonies. At the time of Federation, voting was not compulsory. Many eligible people did not vote and a considerable number were not eligible at all.
Here are the results of the 1899 referendum - the last before federation:
.............................................Yes ......................................................No
New South Wales.................... 107 420................................................ 82 741
Queensland ...............................38 488 ...................................................30 996
South Australia.......................... 65 990 ....................................................17 053
Tasmania.................................... 13 437 .........................................................791
Victoria...................................... 152 653 ............................................................9 805
Out of a population of 3,765.000, 377.998 said ‘yes’ and 141.386 said ‘no’ to federation. Such figures may be further elaborated: out of a countable population of 3,765.000 one should exclude about 30 per cent of people below voting age: about 1,281.000 and one half of the remainder: about 1,281.000 women, not entitled to vote. There remain 1,281.000 males, not all entitled to vote, of course. 377.998 voted ‘yes’. They still represented less than 47 per cent of those eligible actually voted.
By 1900 Western Australia had still not taken steps to hold a referendum. In protest, residents of the Eastern Goldfields took steps to form a separate colony. Finally, on 31 July 1900, when the Commonwealth Constitution Bill had already been enacted by the British Parliament, a referendum was held in which a large majority voted in favour of Federation.
Result of the referendum held in Western Australia in 1900:
Yes ....................No
44 800................ 19 691
Only South Australian and Western Australian women voted in the referendums. Indigenous Australians, Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders were not allowed to vote in Queensland or Western Australia unless they owned property. In several colonies poor people in receipt of public assistance could not vote and Tasmania required certain property qualifications. The Commonwealth legislation for voting in federal elections lifted some of these restrictions.
Since Federation, the Australian population has changed dramatically, and now Australia has become one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Australians are generally older, there are fewer United Kingdom and European migrants and more Asian newcomers, who tend to be younger. Temporary migrants outnumber permanents. More than a quarter of Australians are born overseas.
So Australia is continually becoming a new country and a new nation. Old assumptions no longer necessarily apply.
Any revaluation and definition of Australian identity cannot be done without a total revision of the Constitution, and to embark on that course puts any consideration of the flag, the anthem and Australia Day into a perspective which may appear too difficult and sensitive for Australian political and social systems to deal with.
Despite the beautifully presented study-kits distributed from time to time by the federal government to the nation’s schools, and despite the ‘history wars’ and the ‘culture wars’ of the last generation, most Australians, ‘old’ and ‘new’, have never read either the Constitution itself or a reasonable summary of it, at school or since.
The Constitution does not protect the basic rights of the Australian people, nor does it list its rights, but only a few scattered provisions such as trial by jury, a range of religious freedoms and freedom of interstate trade. As an eminent constitutionalist, professor George Williams has written: “... the few rights that are listed in the Constitution are scattered about the text and are ad hoc rather than comprehensive. The result is that many basic rights receive no constitutional protection. ... For example, the text of the Australian Constitution does not include anything amounting to a freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex or race, and, while it has been interpreted to protect freedom of political communication it lacks a more general right of free speech. The Constitution does not even contain an express guarantee of the right to vote.”
What are the problems ?
First in line seems to be the perennial problem of Australian identity.
In such ethnically different society it is difficult to define who or what is an Australian. Generalisations do not help.
Early last year J. D. Anthony wondered about Australian identity. Is it advancing or waltzing ? (‘Australian identity: Advancing or waltzing ?’,theaimn.com/, January 23, 2015) He wrote that many Australians, both ‘old’ and ‘new’ know little about the flag, less about the concept of ‘nation’, and practically nothing about the anthem they sing/mumble on occasions such as Australia Day. They may just reach the second part which says:
“ Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;”
There is more than one obstacle there: the Southern Cross ? the welcome to those who have come by sea ?
But there is more: “in Australia all three common markers of nationhood - Flag, Anthem and National Day - are clearly devoid of monumental symbolism, overt division, sense of superiority or pretensions of grandeur.
In some ways this mirrors the favourite identity that Australians, until now, have chosen for themselves. It is formulated in different ways, but typically includes a laconic, egalitarian figure who stands up for the underdog and reckons everyone should get a fair go; a good sportsman or woman who likes a beer and a laugh; a bronzed Aussie who either rides through the outback or patrols a surf beach - probably male; one whose values are measured by football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.”
Curiously, the Bureau of Statistics reveals that the current ‘average’ Australian is a 37 year old woman who works part time as a sales assistant ! She finished school and went on to further training, got married or partnered up and has two children. She is a non-practising Christian. At 71.1 kg and 161.8 cm tall, she is officially overweight.
And the picture that most Australians like to paint of themselves is: one who values time over money, family over possessions, and who is optimistic about the future.
But these stereotypes ignore the real diversity of Australia and more pertinently do not help to understand an Australian’s identity.
Racism in the Constitution
Plainly put, the Australian Constitution is racist. It was not written as a people’s constitution. Instead, it was a compact between the Australian colonies designed to meet, above all things, the needs of trade and commerce.
As professor George Williams wrote: “The document does not expressly embody the fundamental rights or aspirations of the Australian people. It contains few provisions that are explicitly rights-orientated. According to Lois O’Donoghue, a former Chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission: ‘It says very little about what it is to be Australian. It says practically nothing about how we find ourselves here save being an amalgamation of former colonies. It says nothing of how we should behave towards each other as human beings and as Australians.’ ”
Racism was reflected in the terms of Australia’s Constitution:
Section 25 recognised that the States could disqualify people from voting in the elections on account of their race.
Section 51(xxvi) provided that the Commonwealth Parliament could legislate with respect to “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”. This was the so-called ‘races power’.
Section 127 went further in providing: “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” Significantly, neither provision spoke of Indigenous peoples as people, but in the latter case as “aboriginal natives.”
Williams again: “Section 51(xxvi) was inserted into the Constitution to allow the Commonwealth to discriminate against sections of the community on account of their race.
Of course, Aboriginal people were not subject to this section. However, this was not because they were to be protected, but because it was thought that the Aboriginal issues were a matter for the States and not the federal government.
By today’s standards, the reasoning behind s 51(xxvi) was clearly racist. Edmund Barton, the Leader of the 1897-1898 Convention and later Australia’s first Prime Minister and one of the first members of the High Court, stated at the 1898 Convention in Melbourne that the power was necessary to enable the Commonwealth to “regulate the affairs of the people of coloured or inferior races who are in the Commonwealth.”
In summarising the effect of s 51(xxvi), John Quick and Robert Garran, writing in 1901, stated that: “It enables the Parliament to deal with the people of any alien race after they have entered the Commonwealth; to localise them within defined areas, to restrict their migration, to confine them to certain occupations, or to give them special protection and secure their return after a certain period to the country whence they came.
One framer, Andrew Inglis Clark, the Tasmanian Attorney-General, supported a provision taken from the United States Constitution requiring the “equal protection of the laws.” This clause might have prevented the federal and state Parliaments from discriminating on the basis of race.
However, the framers were concerned that Clark’s clause would override Western Australian laws under which “no Asiatic or African alien can get a miner’s right or go mining on a gold-field.” Clark’s provision was rejected by the framers who instead inserted s 117 of the Constitution, which merely prevents discrimination on the basis of state residence.” This was done to appease Sir John Forrest, Premier of Western Australia.
Classism in Australia
Egalitarianism is an article of faith in Australia. While the nation still faces issues of class, Australians tend to be uncomfortable about discussing these or acknowledging their extent.
But faith is not reason. Reason and experience suggest otherwise, and class is alive and well in Australia.
To mention class in Australia is likely to provoke cries of ‘class warrior’ or ‘chardonnay socialist’, as if class were invented by ‘communists’ or idle ‘wankers’. Behind the vitriol and mockery is what John Howard invented the ‘aspirational’ Australia, an ideal: Australians have freedom, mobility and opportunity - the oppression of other countries or eras is long gone. And because of some fantasy, attempts to improve inter-generational poverty or deprivation are misguided: class is a thing of the past.
With the exception of much of the Indigenous population, most Australians have a high standard of living, relative to many countries: low infant mortality, long life expectancy, low levels of crime and so on.
Any departure from this ‘norm’ is regarded as lower class - someone from the ‘criminal suburbs’: areas of socio-economic disadvantage, where crime is more frequent and danger perceived as greater.
This is not to say there is no violence, coercion or exploitation among the upper middle-classes. But research continually finds clusters of disadvantage: problems of physical and mental health, crime and deprivation, going hand in hand with very specific locations, ethnicities and education.
When George Orwell was living rough with the tramps in northern England, his Etonian English had not left him. “Even with miners who described themselves as Communists,” he wrote in The road to Wigan Pier, “I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me ‘sir’.”
As Damon Young, author, philosopher and fellow at the University of Melbourne, wrote: “[Australians] have a flatter society but the patterns of class remain, from disadvantage to dress.” And in the broadsheet press, such unusual appearance of ‘values’ often confirms Orwell’s observation: “It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions ... are essentially middle-class notions.”
As Orwell wrote, people often sneer at class - dress it in burlesque Hollywood clothes and laugh at it, or mock it as the crumbled ruins of a bygone age.
(Damon Young, ‘Instructive lesson in class at the auctioneers’, The (Melbourne) Age, 18 August 2010,
http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/instructive-lesson-in-class-at-the-auctioneers-20100817-128aw.html#ixzz3vUXaa9vn)
Australians often set aside the notion of class and disregard such ‘minor matters’ as financial means, and the luck of being born ‘on the right side of the tracks’ into a wealthy family, ‘of the right kind’ - as it were. They easily attribute such ‘different circumstances’ to ‘individual choice’ and ‘choice of life-style’.
The only time Australians are prepared to discuss class openly is when it can be viewed from the safe distance of the past or another country. Class in this world is a simple matter of legend, of upstairs/downstairs.
Income, occupation, residence and eating and activity habits are all part of what defines people’s class.
In everyday’s life popular culture makes no sense without class. Consider plays - and movies based on the plays - like David Williamson’s Don’s party and Emerald City, or read novels like Helen Garner’s Monkey grip and Christos Tsiolkas’ The slap, or watch comedies such as The castle, Kath & Kim to see that they are premised on the social realities of class. (Christopher Scanlon, ‘No one wants to admit it, but there’s a class system in Australia’, Business insider, 25 February 2014)
The existence of class is further dealt with by Tim Winton in a recent essay on ‘Some thoughts about class in Australia’.
He opened by saying: “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that citizens in contemporary Australia are now implicitly divided into those who bother and those who don’t. It seems poverty and wealth can no longer be attributed - even in part - to social origins; they are apparently manifestations of character. In the space of two decades, with the gap between rich and poor growing wider, Australians have been trained to remain uncharacteristically silent about the origins of social disparity. This inequity is regularly measured and often reported.
In October, John Martin, the OECD’s former director for employment, labour and social affairs, cited figures that estimated 22% of growth in Australia’s household income between 1980 and 2008 went to the richest 1% of the population. The nation’s new prosperity was unevenly spread in those years. To borrow the former Morgan Stanley global equity analyst Gerard Minack’s phrasing about the situation in the United States, “the rising tide did not lift all boats; it floated a few yachts”. And yet there is a curious reluctance to examine the systemic causes of this inequity. The political economist Frank Stilwell has puzzled over what he calls contemporary “beliefs” around social inequality. Australians’ views range, he says, from outright denial of any disparity to Darwinian acceptance. Many now believe “people get what they deserve”, and to my mind such a response is startling and alien. Structural factors have become too awkward to discuss.”
Because of these misguided ‘beliefs’, anybody reckless enough to declare class a live issue is likely to be met with howls of derision. According to the new mores, any mention of structural social inequality is tantamount to a declaration of class warfare.
Despite all the changes of the past thirty-forty years, class never disappeared from cultural consciousness. Surprisingly, it was not the poor and overlooked who resorted to class discourse. The union movement that had once given voice and language to class struggle had been smashed or had imploded. It all began with Margaret Thatcher declaring that there was no such thing as society. “Australian governments gradually internalised that view and appropriated policies that sprang from it. Governments of both major parties oversaw a transition from collective citizenship to consumer individualism that remade our conceptions of taxation, health and education. Federal ministers - Labor and Liberal - who’d been educated in the era of Whitlam promptly pulled the ladder up after themselves.” wrote Winton.
During the Hawke years, as during the corresponding years of the Thatcher government, the transfer of wealth, from the bottom to the top, was epic. That was done by a Labor government, by the Treasurer Paul Keating, and by the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. So the ground has been well and truly laid for the inevitable - that is, an extreme political system which was to be implemented by the Abbott government.
The final piece of Jesuitism arrived with John Howard in 1996. He perverted the familiar word ‘battlers’ and re-deployed the word - as Winton wrote - “as a deliberate attempt to appropriate the power of class language while simultaneously declaring class a dead issue. Once it was rebadged, the middle class that the conservatives had first courted and then ennobled felt increasingly emboldened to expect greater patronage, extra tax cuts, more concessions, a larger slice of the welfare pie. As a result, subsequent governments have been forced to contend with a middle class that has an increasing sense of entitlement to welfare. And these funds were duly disbursed – largely at the expense of the poor, the sick and the unemployed. This, of course, was the real politics of envy at work. John Howard exploited middle-class resentment of the so-called welfare class and pandered to a sense of victimhood in Middle Australia that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard either couldn’t refuse or wouldn’t see. Battlers morphed into “working families” as prospering Australians were taught to minimise their good fortune and expect more state aid.”
As the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor Ross Gittins wrote in the lead-up to the September 2013 poll, “If you think the class war is over, you’re not paying enough attention.” He said: “The reason the well-off come down so hard on those who use class rhetoric is that they don’t want anyone drawing attention to how the war is going. To suggest that ours is a classless society or that matters of class are resolved because of national prosperity and the ideological victory of the right is either tin-eared or dishonest. At least the Americans are brutally frank about it.” Gittins went on to quote the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who declared: “There’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
In this kind of new ‘new world’, “people have begun to live more ostentatiously, projecting social aspirations that owe more to the entertainment industry than political ideology. The soundest measure of a person’s social status is mobility. And the chief source of mobility is money.” Winton wrote.
Whether one is ‘born to it’ or accumulates it, in Australian society wealth determines a person’s choices of education, housing, health care and employment. It will be an indicator of health, of longevity. Money still talks loudest. Even if it often speaks from the corner of its mouth. Even if it covers its mouth entirely. And governments no longer have a taste for the redistribution of wealth. Nor are they keen on intervening to open enclaves and break down barriers to social mobility. Apparently these tasks are the responsibility of the individual.
Where once Australia looked like a pyramid in terms of its social strata, with the working class as its broad base and ballast and the rich at the top, it has come to resemble something of a misshapen diamond - wide in the middle ... The problem is those Australians the middle has left behind without a glance.
At the bottom, of course, there are the poor, who make up almost 13 per cent of Australia’s population. The most visible of them will always be the welfare class: the sick, the addicted, the impaired and the unemployed, who only exist in the public mind as fodder for tabloid TV and the flagellants of brute radio. But if ever there was a truly “forgotten people” in our time it must be the working poor. These folk, the cleaners and carers and hospitality workers, excite no media outrage.
Winston concluded his essay with some bitterness: “ ...it disturbs me to see governments abandoning those at the bottom while pandering to the appetites of the comfortable. Under such conditions, what chance is there for the working poor to fight their way free to share in the spoils of our common wealth ? No one’s talking ideology. There is no insurrection brewing. For many Australian families, a gap in the fence is all the revolution they require. But while business prospers from the increased casualisation of its workforce, and government continues to reward the insatiable middle, the prospects of help for the weakest and decency for all seem dim indeed.” (Tim Winton, ‘Some thoughts about class in Australia - The C word’, The monthly, December 2013-January 2014, https://www.themonthly.com.au/.../1385816400/tim-winton/c-word)
What do Australians believe ?
There may be no pretension in much simplicity, but there is a lot of lack of knowledge and more so of self-satisfied Philistinism.
For one would be entitled to ask in 2016: what happened to ‘a fair go’ in Australia ?
Above all else, Australians value ‘a fair go’ for everyone, that is a demand for equal and unbiased treatment for everyone, which is no more than an empty slogan and a fugue from reality. A fair go for 97,5 per cent leaves out the Indigenous People.
Next: Australians value the assumed order, dignity and righteous process of ‘the queue’.
Ask the average Jack or Jill, and s/he would say that all Australians are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law and the agencies of the government. Furthermore, s/he would say to believe in equality between men and women. Well, sort of.
S/he would think of Australia as a responsible member of the international community, in which Australia comes first, and is ‘sick of being lectured’ on by organs such as the United Nations, after a report finds anti-torture breach: former Prime Minister Abbott (The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 2015). Never mind that just about every international treaty and/or convention adhered to by Australia - including the comprehensive International Bill of Human Rights - has been systematically violated by governments of the last forty years.
S/he strongly supports the Defence Forces but despises ‘politicians getting us continually involved in other people’s wars’, roughly the history of Australia at war. And, of course, returning members should be ‘properly looked after’ by the government. And there is where the matter ends.
S/he expects ‘the leaders of the country’ to provide security, but not to use ‘national security’ or ‘law-and-order’ as a pretext to reduce civil liberties.
S/he does not care for politicians with ‘a sense of entitlement’ because “everyone in Australia must do the heavy lifting” and “the age of entitlement is over” - at least since thus declared by then Treasurer Joe Hockey on 3 February 2014. There have been some departures since: the same Treasurer being paid the same amount as Newstart, $ 1,000 a month, to sleep at his wife’s house (The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2015); former Prime Minister Abbott using a V.I.P. jet to fly to Sydney for a 20-minute press conference on foreign investment, news.com.au., 25 February 2015; the same spending $ 3,000 per week for a mansion he did not really want (The Australian, 18 November 2015) ; the government paying $ 330,000 for a room it does not use (The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July 2014); taxpayers spending $ 150,000 in rent for ministerial office with no Minister (The Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2014); Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce insisting that a $ 4,600 trip to watch State of Origin and N.R.L. finals was for government business, news.com.au,, 6 November 2013) And then there is Speaker Bronwyn Bishop ... But the three word slogans are over - old hat; now Australians enjoy “liberty, the individual and free market” - six words, better suit, more ties and top forensic style.
Against all evidence to the contrary, s/he would believe that Australian leaders should focus on making an equitable society rather than widening the gap between the rich and the poor.
Some thirty years into galloping neo-liberalism s/he would reject foreign ideologies designed to give advantage to the privileged few and/or facilitate laissez faire capitalism.
Contemptuous of the Thatcherite experiment, s/he proclaims to be living in a society, not an economy.
Because time is more important than money - or so the rhetoric goes - s/he would reject government policy based on simplistic financial profit and loss.
Contrary to everyday experience, s/he would be satisfied of the government - regardless of its hue; respect for economic value, social responsibility and environmental responsibility strikes a chord with the average Australian.
S/he would want job security. And if s/he were to be unfortunate enough to lose employment s/he would want to count on government assistance to find a new job.
S/he would demand that full-time workers receive ‘a living wage’: a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, as established in 1907 by H.B. Higgins and which has gone out of fashion decades ago along with the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration system.
It is ‘of common knowledge’ that government agencies would be properly staffed and resourced to enable them to fulfil the role assigned to them by the Parliament.
Despite ‘the reform’ initiated by Labor thirty years ago and aggravated by the Coalition since, s/he would still believe in education and training opportunities for all young Australians based on merit - not on ability to pay.
Jack and Jill would be surprised that any government may think of tampering with Medicare or the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme safety net.
The average Australian would not tolerate attacks on the most vulnerable in society, but would expect that senior citizens and those with disabilities would be cared for by governments.
S/he is prepared to accept State ownership of some key assets in a mixed economy, but prefers private ownership because ‘more active, responsible and profitable’.
It goes without saying that in the prevailing climate of ‘fair go for all’ corporations and rich people would pay their fair share of taxes; the Treasury and the Taxation Office would ensure that they do so.
And of course, every Australian would expect a fair return to the public purse for allowing resources owned by the people to be exploited by private corporations.
S/he would support free trade deals which do not benefit ordinary workers and Australian industry; and would only accept fair trade for everyone: nothing but the so-called level playing field.
S/he would not support unrestricted sell-offs of Australian land, enterprises and residential properties to foreigners.
‘The government’ should be committed to invest in research to develop proactive solutions rather than trying to solve problems with reactive band-aid solutions. It should ensure that Australia’s technological infrastructure remains on par with the rest of the world, and protect the environment in a sustainable way. (with acknowledgement to, J. Gleeson, ‘Australia's core beliefs - where are they now ?’, theaimn.com, February 8, 2015)
S/he is comfortable with the ‘British rules for good living: never explain, never apologise, never resign’.
This ‘system of beliefs’ is of course fruit of too much television watching, myth, little schooling, ‘pub talk’, fantasy and a tale as old as the ‘paese di Bengodi’ - which has been for centuries, and across national boundaries, a fictional location in the popular imagination where there is luck, especially in the material sense, happiness and abundance, where nobody has problems or financial worries, and everyone can eat and drink at will. The name itself, made up of the Italian words equivalent to ‘good’ and ‘enjoy’, makes itself the idea. It is a place where it is ‘normal‘ “to bind the vineyards with sausages.” - like in The Decameron, VII.3 by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375).
Such ‘system of beliefs’ is a combination of hypocrisy and cant.
Is there no hope ? Yes, that springs eternal, and it is based on the diversity of the population which might not have been reached by the professional pollsters who are quite comfortable with the national language.
It is quite possible that the campaign for ‘recognition of the Indigenous People in the Constitution’ is the product of that fantasy, or imagination - and distraction. Only a proper referendum amongst the Indigenous People would determine whether they want that or they prefer ‘serious recognition with restitution and compensation’, which are acts of acknowledgment of past wrongs and reparation for continuing abuses. Such process is only possible by speaking clearly to the whole of the Australian people, old and new, explaining that what they talk about when they talk about rights is only available and guaranteed in a republican system of government, established with or as a precondition to a treaty with the Indigenous People. The task is difficult, but so was the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority, by people from more than a hundred countries, and so was the erection of the Opera House, the fruit of creative genius by its designer, the Pritzker Prize winner Danish architect Jørn Utzon.
The task is particularly difficult because there are signs that the Australian populace has been enfeebled by ‘the System’.
As Marius Benson noted some years ago, “There has been renewed debate over the malady that lies at the heart of modern Australian politics.”
Yes, democracy is being dumbed down principally by the media, with politicians complicit in the process. The media and politicians do have much to answer for. Their self-serving world of half truths, beat-ups, misrepresentation, slogans and fudge is a poor substitute for reality.
But the real problem is not the media, not the politicians: it is with the Australians’ attitude to public life. Most of them go to vote in a near complete ignorance of current issues.
Faced with this level of indifference and ignorance what are politicians meant to do beyond picking three slogans, repeating them endlessly and hoping something will get through to people who only hear them accidentally when they tune in too early for Master Chef and catch a political grab on the news headlines ?
The alienated voter may have a point when s/he wonders: “Why should I pay attention to the political debates ?” and adds: “95 per cent of government goes on unchanged regardless of who’s running the show. Of the bit that changes 95 per cent has nothing to do with me. If you want me to spend my time understanding something to find the five per cent of the five per cent that matters, forget it, it’s not an efficient use of my time. Besides, a lot of the stuff is beyond knowing. A lifetime of study would not provide a definite answer to issues like global warming and what is the best way to deal with it - or how best to equip the country for the future of technology.
Politics is vitally important to people who make money out of it - like politicians and political journalists. I’ve got a life to run.”
It may not be a view which provides a good basis for a good civic society, but it is understandable. (Marius Benson, ‘Dumbing down politics: the problem is you’, 10 May 2011, www.abc.net.au/.../dumbing-down-politics-the-problem-is-you/2714542)
Poll data have revealed Australians’ waning interest in politics and a decline in support for democracy. Recent research has confirmed that most Australians no longer think it matters which major party is in government. It has also revealed a significant decline in support for democracy over the past years.
A study, conducted by the Australian National University in partnership with the Social Research Centre, found satisfaction with democracy slumped from 86 per cent in 2007 to 72 per cent when attitudes were surveyed again in June 2014: the number of Australians who believed it made a difference which party was in power plunged from 68 per cent to 43 per cent in the same period.
After the unprecedented instability of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, professor Ian McAllister, who was responsible for the research, said that the Abbott Government should have generated renewed political confidence but for the first time in the poll’s history, the election of a new government did not see increased satisfaction. “We had an all-time low in this ANU poll. We would have expected after the 2013 election, with a change of government, that there would have been an increase. But it continued its downward decline.” he said.
Earlier in 2014, the annual Lowy Institute poll of Australian attitudes found that 40 per cent no longer believed democracy is the best form of government.
The main reasons given were that democracy was serving vested interests rather than those of the majority, and that there was no real difference between the two major parties.
“It’s not that they think democracy is bad, but that there is something about the political system that’s not working.” said the Lowy Institute’s Ms. Alex Oliver, Director of the Polling Programme. “We have had long decades of prosperity and no major wars. I think people have lost touch with what democracy means. I think people have to modify or lower their expectations of what democracy is - it is adversarial and full of compromise. I think people have unrealistic expectations.”
The result ? Nearly 20 per cent of eligible voters, about 3 million Australians, effectively opted out of the 2013 federal election by either failing to enrol to vote, not showing up to vote or voting informally.
The ANU-SRC poll also found record high levels of national pessimism about the future with just 30 per cent of Australians believing their lives will improve in the next five years.
There may be some silver lining out of so much darkness: politically engaged voters may be shifting away from major parties.
Professor McAllister said that the ANU-SRC poll showed that Australians still have very high levels of confidence in key institutions such as the courts, the police, the defence force and universities. (‘Poll data reveals Australia's waning interest in politics, decline in support for democracy’, Lateline, by Margot O'Neill, 12 August 2014.www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-11/poll-data-reveals-waning-interest)
The tenth annual Lowy Institute Poll, released in June 2014, found that only 60 per cent of Australians, and just 42 per cent of young Australians 18-29 years of age, believe that ‘democracy is preferable to any other kind of government’.
When asked to choose between ‘a good democracy and a strong economy’, only a slight majority of Australians - 53 per cent - choose a ‘good democracy’. When asked their reasons for not preferring democracy, the strongest responses are that ‘democracy is not working because there is no real difference between the policies of the major parties’, and that ‘democracy only serves the interests of a few and not the majority’.
“For the third year in a row, the Poll reveals the high number of Australians, particularly young Australians, who are ambivalent about democracy. However, our new results dispel the notion that apathy is the main reason for this ambivalence. Neither is the attraction of another, more authoritarian type of system the main driver of their disenchantment.” said Ms. Oliver, Director of the Polling Programme. (2014 Lowy Institute Poll confirms Australian’s ambivalence.www.lowyinstitute.org/news-and-media/press-releases/2014-lowy)
The trouble is that Australia’s system of so called representative democracy is controlled by the major political parties, which bend it to their own purposes, leading to widespread voter dissatisfaction, as David Donovan pointed out. He quoted Carmen Lawrence, a former Western Australia Premier and Federal cabinet minister: “Political parties have created political identities, framed electoral choices, recruited candidates, organised elections, defined the structure of legislative politics and determined the outputs of government.”(Carmen Lawrence, ‘Ideas to save our withering democracy’, public lecture at University of WA, 7/8/03, http://www.safecom.org.au/lawrence03.htm)
However, because political parties are central to the way ‘the System’ works, almost all aspiring Australian politicians must join a major political party and gain pre-selection to achieve a seat in Parliament. This directly leads to the situation where, for most politicians, their primary loyalties lie not with their constituents, but instead to a corporate entity - the political party.
Despite their virtual duopoly in Parliament, political parties cannot even remotely claim to be representative of the wider community or its interests. In 2006, for instance, the Australian Bureau of Statistics put the total party membership in Australia at just 1.3 per cent of the adult population and falling. (Norman Abjorensen, ‘The parties’ democratic deficit’, Inside Story, 10/2/2010, http://inside.org.au/the-parties-democratic-deficit/)
And according to Lawrence, political parties routinely put forward candidates that are not reflective of the wider society, leading to public mistrust: “What kind of representation is it where the candidates are not even remotely typical of the wider society, even using crude indicators such as age, gender, income and occupation? Voters need to feel that their representatives - at least in aggregate - can understand their circumstances and have sufficient identity with them to press their interests. The greater the distance of representatives from electors, the greater the mistrust. These weaknesses begin with the political parties who determine who will be presented to the community for election and who govern the behaviour of their members in law making.” (Lawrence, op.cit.)
It is clear that political parties do exercise powerful control over elected representatives and the way they vote. Professor John Power of the Australian National University points to “the problem caused by rigid party discipline.” (John Power, ‘Fiducial governance: an Australian republic for the new millennium’, ANU e-press, 2009, http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Fiducial+Governance%3A+An+Australian+republic
+for+the+new+millennium/257/ch02.xhtml)
Carmen Lawrence deplored the control exercised by the Executive and the party room:
“While most MPs…are conscientious, they are largely unable to influence the legislative or policy agenda except behind the closed doors of the party rooms. Even then, there is often little room to manoeuvre because decisions have already been made by the Executive. Matters which deserve free and open consideration are often submerged because of anxiety about dissent. The media feeds this paranoia by portraying even the most minor disagreements as tests of leadership or signs of party disintegration.” (Lawrence, op. cit.)
“To sum up, there is no doubt that representative democracy has provided a degree of stability to our system. However, this stability does nothing to allay the general feeling of dissatisfaction in our society that we are being poorly served by our party political representatives. Australians see our system as dysfunctional because party politics is aggressive, obstructionist and undemocratic, and leads to generally poor standards of governance. People should feel unease about our system, as it is indeed deeply flawed — and the flaws all stem from the stranglehold held over our democracy by an unrepresentative party political duopoly.” (David Donovan, ‘Our fake Australian democracy’, 28 March 2012, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/our)
It was about fifty years ago that a distinguished law professor, the late Geoffrey Sawer, took time and pain to explain to a newcomer the nature of the Constitution - that ‘foundation’ document: one the amendment of which “proceeds with glacial speed.”
Distinguished constitutional law expert, professor George Williams, described Australia as the ‘Frozen Continent’ - as in frozen in time; stuck in quicksand, a continent and people stuck with a Constitution which has hardly changed in over one hundred years.
Professor Williams summed up Australia’s situation as follows: “Australia was regarded as a leading innovator and moderniser in 1901, but the tag has long since slipped. We lag behind many other countries and are now seen as having one of the most static systems of government in the world.”
And he explained why this has happened: “The cause of our predicament is not a series of false steps, but inaction. We have failed to sufficiently update and improve the good system of government we gained more than a century ago. It is as if, having built Australia on the foundation of a new constitution in 1901, the task finished and there was no need for renovation. Without coups, revolutions or other social and political upheaval, we have been happy to leave things be and focus on other priorities.”
The Australian constitution and political system have remained frozen in time, but everything else in the world has moved on.
Media ownership is much more concentrated now than it was 120 years ago, large multi-national corporations manipulate governments and policies globally seeking the best deals for themselves, and the political framework has not protected Australia from a massive loss in manufacturing ability and some of the highest house prices in the world.
In terms of human and citizens’ rights Australians might also be going backwards.
And what are those rights ?
Laureate professor Cheryl Saunders answered as follows: “Civil and political rights provide a framework within which people can participate as equals in a democratic community, subject to the rule of law. They include, for example, the right to vote, freedom of speech and protest, personal liberty, the right to property and various guarantees of fair treatment, both generally and under the criminal law. Many of these rights require restraint on the part of governments in exercising the authority of the state.
A second category of rights comprises economic, social and cultural rights: to housing, to education, to health care, to employment, to live in accordance with your own customs and traditions. Many of these rights require positive action on the part of governments in managing the resources of the state.
A third category of rights, which are likely to become increasingly important, concern the environment. These require positive action on the part of the state as well.”
The learned professor Saunders suggests what has to be done to protect these rights:
“The Australian record is far from perfect, however. On this ground alone, the Australian approach to rights protection deserves critical scrutiny.
Nor can Australia afford to be complacent about maintaining even present standards of rights protection.
The Australian approach relies heavily on a political culture that respects rights. Political culture changes over time and Australia does relatively little to reinforce the understanding of the significance of rights and the willingness to give them priority that such a culture requires.” (Mathew Mitchell, ‘Australia’s frozen Constitution and Swiss-style democracy’, 16 February 2014, https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/australians)
There may be a rather pessimistic view of the issue. As Paul G. Dellit wrote:”Well, we may well have reached the tipping point between genuine democracy in Australia and the beginnings of creeping fascism. You may think this to be one of those ‘shock-horror’ attention-grabbing opening sentences. It is. And I also believe it to be an unalloyed statement of the danger we now face.
History is littered with hindsight surprise that those with power and those who might have opposed those with power didn’t take action to avoid an obviously looming disaster. Of course, the ‘loomingness’ of disasters is often not appreciated by its contemporaries. It would be naive to expect otherwise. Couldn’t they see that the South Sea Bubble would burst? Couldn’t they see that a grossly overheated investment market populated with stocks that were either massively overvalued or worthless would result in ever-widening ripples of market failures and a worldwide Great Depression. Couldn’t they see you don’t fix Depressions by reducing the size of economies. Obviously they couldn’t see any of those things. And with the dawning optimism of a new century, they couldn’t even remember them, or if they could, they were playing that ‘main chance’ game of ‘I’ll make what I can make out of this and bugger all of the rest of them who lose the lot’.”
The writer was alarmed - and correctly so - that the former Prime Minister Abbott and then Ministers Dutton and Morrison, would propose the passing of a law which would create a precedent, possibly for the end of the rule of law in Australia. It would invest a Minister with the powers of policeman, judge and jury to act upon an untested suspicion of guilt to deprive an Australian of her/his ‘citizenship’. Following the then present practice, the reasons for stripping someone of her/his ‘citizenship’ would be deemed secret for security reasons. So this ministerial power would be exercised covertly and absolutely beyond judicial or other form of independent review. The Minister would be required to form his suspicions on the basis of the intelligence provided to him. But even if Australian security organisations and the foreign security organisations with which they trade information were infallible, and even if they had no self-interested agendas, the Minister invested with this power could exercise it to suit his own ends - say, just before an election - to manufacture a terrorist scare and then appear to be the ‘man of the hour’ who restores Australians’ peace of mind.
True, some of the more intelligent members of Cabinet objected to the proposal, but two thirds of the government Back Bench - the so called Liberals and Nationals - had signed a letter in support of the proposed law.” (Paul G. Dellit, ‘Australian democracy at a tipping point,’ May 31, 2015, theaimn.com/australian-democracy-at-a-tipping-point)
Recognition. Of what ?
The latest pressing adventure seems to be the “Recognition of Indigenous People in the Constitution.”
Hardly anybody has cared to explain the miserable content of that merchant-use document, where the only seriously debated issue flows from sec. 92 on interstate trade. The other sections are expressions and tools - some of them quite noxious - in the hands of ‘recognised powers’ or for use of ‘reserve powers’, by which is meant the Crown or the monarch in London, whoever s/he may happen to be.
The rest is stale, passé, conversation of the kind which goes with the discredited qualification of ‘academic’. So, now come the Liberals - well, most but not all of them, the Nationals - probably countable on one mutilated hand, and the Laborites, with some silent voice and some illustrious opposing, to declare their agreement to ‘recognising’.
The matter has been around for some years. And let us be clear.
For about 140 years ‘Frontier wars’ raged across the continent. Historians generally regard the wars to have ended in 1928 with the killing of 31 Warlpiri people by a police punitive party at Coniston in the Northern Territory. They were studied and documented by distinguished historian professor Henry Reynolds in Forgotten war (Sydney 2013)
Several Australian historians, and recently Henry Reynolds, have proposed that the Australia War Museum remember the Frontier wars, by erecting a memorial to the Indigenous Frontier war dead alongside existing sculptures commemorating Australian war dead which line Anzac Avenue in Canberra leading to the War Memorial. But the Museum has steadfastly refused to consider the matter. The War Memorial Council has insisted that frontier conflict falls outside its charter - a claim which is disputed by historians and military academics.
War memorials honour the fallen in battle and celebrate sacrifice and valour in war. They are central to a country’s national identity. Australians should commemorate Indigenous People - more than 20,000 of them - who fell fighting the invaders on their lands.
This is a fundamental issue; it is incumbent on non-Indigenous Australians to own their past and accept that the invaders and successive generations perpetrated wrongs against Australia’s Indigenous Peoples.
After the second world war, Indigenous People even in the remotest areas of the central-western Australian desert, of the Kimberley and of the Arnhem Land were no longer massacred. Throughout the long, soporific Menzies’ conservative government - 1950-1966 - they continued to be segregated as far as possible in reserves and on ‘mission’ stations, and ignored. Most had no vote to trouble politicians and no rights, except special rights of the kind reserved to ‘protected’ people, such as the right - and the corresponding duty - of not drinking alcohol. ‘Fringed-dwelling’ Aborigines continued to exist in ghettos on the outskirts of most country towns. They were prevented by custom and terror from using public facilities on the same terms as ‘white’ Australians.
The ‘great Australian silence’ continued until anthropologist William E.H. Stanner delivered his 1968 Boyer lecture: ‘After the dreaming’, black and white Australians - an anthropologist’s view.
By the end of the year 1972 things began to change. The Whitlam Government recognised Aboriginal land rights on federal lands. Since then, state governments have legislated to permit - albeit very, very slowly - such claims on un-alienated land within their boundaries.
Three years later came the Royal coup.
In 1988 then Prime Minister Bob Hawke, while visiting a Northern Territory Aboriginal community, promised Australia would enter into a treaty with Indigenous Australians by 1990. Words, just words: the treaty never eventuated.
The most graphic and significant event for land rights followed the long legal fight waged by the indomitable Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo. Mr. Mabo had been appalled to find out that his ancestral garden on Murray Island was not protected by his law - it belonged to the Crown. He fought his case all the way to the High Court. On 21 January 1992 Mr. Mabo died. Five months later, on 3 June 1992, the High Court announced its historic decision, overturning the doctrine of terra nullius. (Mabo v. Queensland (No.2), (1992 175 C.L.R. 1, [1992] H.C.A. 23)
The High Court went beyond Mabo’s garden: it recognised that the whole of Australia, had belonged to Indigenous People and Torres Strait Islanders all along. It declared that though it might be legally unviable for Indigenous People to claim all privately owned land, they had a right to un-alienated land and were the traditional owners of all of Australia.
The Court stated a principle, but there were bigger problems to be solved - and most have remained there.
Five years later, in 1997, the Bringing them home report, concerning stolen generations of kidnapped and de-tribalised Indigenous children, was tabled in Parliament. There followed much debate, but demand for adequate remedies and compensation fell on deaf ears during the eleven years of the morally deaf Howard Government.
Nineteen years after, Indigenous deaths in custody continue. Indigenous life expectancy is still almost twenty years behind that of non-Indigenous people. As at January 2016 Indigenous People, still 2.5 per cent of the population, accounted for nearly 28 per cent of gaol inmates and 20 per cent of the deaths in custody. Aboriginal imprisonment has increased 57 per cent during the past 15 years, although some sources put the rate of increase at 88 per cent in the past 10 years. Most alarming are the figures for women and juveniles. Since 2000 the imprisonment rate for Indigenous women increased nearly 60 per cent, compared with 35 per cent for men. Indigenous youth are now 31 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous juveniles, despite the overall decrease in crime throughout Australia over the past 20 years. In the State of New South Wales, by the time Indigenous People have reached the age of 23, more than 75 per cent have been cautioned by police, referred to a youth justice conference or convicted in a criminal court. The corresponding figure for the non-Indigenous population is 16.9 per cent. Western Australia has its own special problems: accounting for 3 per cent of the State’s population, Indigenous People make up 40 per cent of its prison population. And - something which should attract the attention of the ‘average Australian’, ‘white’ of course - the State of Western Australia is spending about $ 250 million a year to imprison Aboriginal adults. In 2015 it cost $ 300,000 a year to keep a minor in detention. For children who have the greatest number of ‘contacts’ with the Western Australian criminal justice system, based on auditor-general figures, that is running at about $ 500,000 a child.
Fewer than one in 10 urban Indigenous persons achieves a university degree, and fewer than 3 per cent in remote areas.
Indigenous People and Torres Straits Islanders had to wait until February 2008 for Prime Minister Rudd to offer a broad apology to all of them and to the Stolen Generations for their “profound grief, suffering and loss” in a carefully worded statement which was greeted by a standing ovation. Incidentally, Peter Dutton, who has the mind of a 1920s Queensland constabulary, and is at present Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in the Malcolm Turnbull Government, when simply an Opposition front bencher refused to participate and abstained from the apology.
Thousands gathered in Canberra to watch the historic apology, which was televised around the nation and shown at special outdoor settings in remote Indigenous communities. Many of those watching had personal experience of the forcible removal of people, and there were emotional scenes as the apology was delivered. The emotion was overwhelming, the rhetoric was high, but there was no mention of compensation which ordinarily, under the law of civilised countries, follows the admission of tortuous behaviour.
Anger and resentment may not be justifiable, perhaps - but people practiced in the business of deception should understand the feeling of the victims and their cynical view that the ‘white man’ is a con.
Nine years ago began what was even more insensitively called ‘the intervention’ in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. That was prompted by another report, this time by the almost self-anointing title Little children are sacred (report - inquirysaac.nt.gov.au,www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf), which dealt with child abuse in some ‘re-settlements' in the Territory. It was done in the heavy way, which almost symbolises an ‘Australian way’ of facing social problems: the sudden arrival of troops and police contingents - clearly seen as ‘re-occupation’, and an insufficient number of health workers.
Introduced by the Howard Government during the lead-up to the November 2007 federal election, The Northern Territory National Emergency Response was a combination of changes to welfare provisions, law enforcement, land tenure and other measures, most of them in violation of international treaties and obligations, and allegedly to meet claims of rampant child sexual abuse and neglect.
In the end, the Australian government’s ‘response’ implemented only two out of ninety-seven of the report’s recommendations. The ‘response’ was harshly criticised by the then Labor Opposition, but received bipartisan parliamentary support. The Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments did make some adjustments to its implementation. The government of Prime Minister Gillard continued to support certain aspects of the ‘response’. It was simply another move: from paternalism to maternalism.
The 97.5 per cent majority stood by while governments suspended the right of people in Indigenous communities to be free from racial discrimination, so that the government could send troops into Aboriginal communities without their consent, reclaim land and implement paternalistic policies such as welfare quarantining.
United Nations expert on racism panels have complained for years that the Northern Territory ‘intervention’ continues to discriminate on the basis of race and restricts Indigenous People’s rights to land, property, social security, adequate standards of living, cultural development, work and legal remedies. One is certainly not confident as to what impression young new-comers from Africa or from mainland Asia - Indian students, for instance - should have in view of a continuous experiencing of racial targeting, harassment and slurs.
It is early in the piece to predict what will happen to the latest report: Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Peoples in the Constitution. But the chances are not the best.
On 8 November 2010 Prime Minister Gillard announced the establishment of an expert panel for the purpose. The panel was given terms of reference on 23 December. The panel delivered its report to the Prime Minister on 19 January 2012.
Punctually, on 27 January 2012, the former ‘Labor’ New South Wales Premier and at the time the Foreign Minister in the Gillard Government, Robert John ‘Bob’ Carr, commented: “Suddenly we are presented with a demand for ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ - which can only mean separatism - which nobody has defined and which, on principle, 99 per cent of Australians would oppose and a majority of Aborigines oppose.”
The main recommendations are for the repeal of sec. 25 of the Constitution, which carries Provisions as to races disqualified from voting, for the amendment of sec. 26 (xxvi) concerning the legislative powers of the Commonwealth Parliament in relation to The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws; and the insertion of new sec. 51A on recognition in the Constitution; sec. 116A on prohibition of racial discrimination; and sec. 127A on recognition of languages.
Then Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Abbott referred to these reforms in a ‘statement of clarification’. This may give the impression that there was firm ‘bipartisan’ commitment to put forward a recommendation for a referendum. But the matter had already been trivialised and abused by irresponsible commentators and the many voices of Murdochracy had already claimed that succeeding events may frustrate any success of a referendum. In any event, the Gillard Government, so solicitous in proposing the new study, did not seen fit to set down a date for the referendum - firm or approximate. Nor did the shortly succeeding Rudd government, the former Abbott government, or the present Turnbull government. The issue of constitutional recognition is now likely to be pushed beyond the date for an election, its future dependent upon the present government being willing to restart the process - maybe.
It is quite on the cards that the Indigenous and Torres Straits Islander Peoples could be taken once more from one enticement to another, and another, and another and one final swindling.
People who rely on an unwritten tradition must be provided with a long memory. Indigenous people have a long history and a long memory.
The major part of the other 97.5 per cent can afford approximation, because in the general indifference the people of ‘unhistory’ can be made to believe anything, anytime - for a time, anyway.
What history is studied by that majority disregards all the mistakes, all the atrocious abuses of 228 years of occupation. That ‘history’ is surrounded by a continuous fog, and to top it all up, by way of short cut, the story of Australia seems to have begun at Gallipoli. That is, with the same rhetoric which triumphs at the celebration of Anzac Day. Forward now to April and more Anzackery !
Delivering his talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Sydney Opera House on 31 August 2014, John Pilger wondered: is there a danger of paternalism in a white, non-Indigenous man speaking on Indigenous people’s behalf ?
“Well, you could ask [the well known and respected historian] Henry Reynolds that, or any of the other chroniclers or allies of Aboriginal people.” said Pilger. “I don’t speak on behalf of Aboriginal people. All my views have been well and truly discovered from the moment I - quote - ‘discovered’ Aboriginal people when Charlie Perkins [the late Indigenous activist] took me to the Northern Territory.
All of my views have been developed and honed by my association with Aboriginal people. I never speak on behalf of them, and I think if you ask any of those interviewed by me, they would say the same.”
Is ignorance or denial to blame for the ‘great Australian silence’ he identified ? “All those things.” he answered. “There may not be rights, there may not be good healthcare for Aboriginal people, there may not be land rights, but there sure are plenty of excuses. Australia is a land of excuses. It’s usually blaming the victim, and follows a colonial pattern.”
What Australia is missing, he said, is the celebration of its most enduring culture. “You find - and this is really puzzling to foreigners - almost a contemptuous view of Indigenous people.” Moments of optimism such as the 1967 referendum which granted Indigenous people citizenship in their own country, or the 2000 march for reconciliation, were both about ‘ticking a box’.
While the majority who walked across the Harbour Bridge [on 27 May 2000] were sincere, as were those running the Sorry campaign, Pilger called them “small-L liberal campaigns that assume goodwill on the part of the political leadership of Australia. There isn’t the goodwill.”
Mr. Pilger called for a treaty with Australia’s Indigenous People, not all of whom support what some see as an important first step: constitutional recognition. But if Australia can’t have the kind of conversations swirling round the war memorial, how will it find the words to write a treaty ?
“A treaty could be the beginning.” said Pilger, who believes that a majority would welcome what he likens to a bill of rights for Indigenous People - covering health, land rights, educational rights and the right to live securely. “All those questions that you raise could be dealt with in a treaty. It could be all-encompassing, not just a piece of paper.”
Pilger cited the Alyawarr, Arrernte and Anmatjerre elder and actor Rosalie Kunoth-Monks when he restated that Indigenous people never ceded ownership of Australia. “This would be an historic convention, long overdue. Some would say, a couple of hundred years overdue, between the original owners of the country, who have never ceded ownership, and the colonisers.”
All the advances of the latter 20th century - “Mabo, native title, Wik and so on” - have been distractions, he added. A treaty is the main game.
“Until that happens then Australia will be, even compared with other colonial states, quite primitive. Compared with New Zealand, the United States and Canada, where there are many problems, in Australia there isn’t even the will or the goodwill to recognise these problems. There’s an indifference that easily becomes cynicism.”
The matter of recognition has been around for some years. (Australian Human Rights Commission, ‘Constitutional reform: creating a nation for all of us’ (2011) (https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/)
There is a long history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people calling for
‘recognition’, including:
1938 – Aborigines Conference
1967 – Referendum and preceding campaigns
1988 – Barunga Statement
1988 – Constitution Commission’s Report
1995 – Social Justice Package submissions
1999 – Referendum on the preamble of the Constitution
2000 – Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Report
2008 – 2020 Summit
2008 – Social Justice Report
2009 – Australian Human Rights Commission
Professor Megan Davis, who is the Director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales, who had a prominent part in the preparation of the report submitted on 19 January 2012 to then Prime Minister Gillard, observed that there are a number of key possibilities for reform within the existing provisions of the Constitution, some of which have been proposed over the years including:
- inserting a new preamble recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples - -- amending the races power (sec. 51 (xxvi)) - either total repeal or amendment so that it can only be used for beneficial purposes
- the deletion of sec. 25, which contemplates electoral disqualification on the basis of race
- dedicated parliamentary seats for Indigenous people
- the entrenchment of a treaty or a treaty-making power
- the protection of Indigenous-specific rights, such as rights to lands and territories
- guarantees of equality and non-discrimination
- changes to how federalism impacts on Indigenous people
- the move to an Australian republic. [Emphasis added] (Megan Davis and Dylan Lino, ‘Constitutional Reform and Indigenous Peoples’ (2010) 7(19) Indigenous Law Bulletin 3, 3-4)
Such reform could be seen as the lynchpin of a new stage in the reconciliation process. It might open up the Australian political and legal system more actively to include Indigenous peoples. And this is reflected in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples negotiated over more than two decades between nations and Indigenous peoples. The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 by an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favour and only four votes against, cast by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Good company !
Professor Davis returned once again to the subject of recognition of the Indigenous People in the constitution and concluded that ‘Recognition alone won’t fix indigenous affairs’. She expressed her plain views in an essay titled ‘Gesture politics’ (The monthly, December 2015-January 2016,ttps://www.themonthly.com.au/)
“Despair.” was her opening word, and she went on: “ ... this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia. The gentleman of Australian politics, former Aboriginal affairs minister Fred Chaney, put it this way when he spoke to the Australian before Malcolm Turnbull’s coup: “I’m despairing, quite honestly. In a way I think the war is lost, because I think politicians are so f . . king stupid.” Make no bones about it, deep funding cuts and uncertainty about government plans have created, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner [at the Australian Human Rights Commission] Mick Gooda suggested, “one of the largest-scale ‘upheavals’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.”
The sources of that despair were many; and “A cursory glance at the papers wouldn’t suggest much is wrong. Cut-and-paste government press releases routinely masquerade as analysis; “bipartisanship” is the technical term for “move away, nothing to see here”; and a prime minister visiting an Aboriginal community for a few days – a seriously unremarkable thing for a prime minister in days gone by – is conflated with policy. There is a taxpayer-funded campaign to bestow settler recognition on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution, while the purported subjects of that recognition are ambivalent, at best, because they are overwhelmed with what Marcia Langton has labelled “the most incompetent and damaging experiment in Indigenous Affairs in many decades.” [Emphasis added]
Since being elected [in 2013], the government has overhauled its policy approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ affairs, creating the Indigenous Advancement Strategy. It’s a strategy that, according to Gooda, has a “lack of clarity” and is “causing widespread uncertainty and stress”. The “advancement” involves, among many things, the streamlining of some 150 programs into five streams. These five streams are not decided by Aboriginal people, mind you. [One “big cauldron”, as an Indigenous activist called it.] The funding for specialist agencies is now siloed in a single department. The first application process for funding was a circus. The selection procedure, as only the Australian newspaper uncovered, was defined by lack of transparency, no clear guidelines and no empirical evaluation of what works. Consequently, important grassroots community initiatives had their funding reduced or received nothing.” [Emphasis added]
Professor Davis offered several examples of government failure, with the result that “[w]hile Aboriginal children will bear the brunt of the cuts, that swelling cauldron became paydirt for not-for-profits and corporates with Reconciliation Action Plans, whose missionary zeal of “philanthrocapitalism” has replaced self-determination as the path to modernisation – and all on taxpayer coin. Noel Pearson refers to these beneficiaries as “parasitic”. He is rightly frustrated that, as he told the Australian, “most Australians have no idea that the greatest beneficiaries of investment of indigenous funds are non-indigenous organisations not based in the communities in whose name the expenditure has been justified by parliament.” [Emphasis added]
And professor Davis concluded bitterly: “Yet the narrative fed to the media was that those who were not funded were undeserving. If you were not funded, you were not effective. Simple.”
As the mild mannered Patrick Dodson told the Australian, “How do we expect to see growth, development and independence in the Aboriginal community if they are not part of how resources are being expended?” Davis, of course, agreed.
“Meanwhile, oblivious to the greatest upheaval in decades, earnest folk retweet support for recognition while the manifestations of the ancient culture that such an act would reify face obliteration around the country.” commented Davis. And the evidence ?
“Sydneysiders routinely cycle and stroll across rock engravings because the protection framework is unenforced and underfunded, and vandalism – yes, vandalism – has become a threat to Aboriginal cultural sites nationwide. Amendments to the Western Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act threaten ancient rock art, and the decision to protect or not lies in a narrow definition of “sacred” – devoted to a religious use but not subject to mythological belief.
Given that heritage is mostly the responsibility of states and territories, how does recognition of indigenous culture in the Constitution lead to its protection? Through the vibe?” wondered the writer. And she specified: “”Herein lie two problems of the recognition project. First, what is the problem the nation is trying to fix? And second, how is the upbeat and hyperbolic narrative of “recognition” related to the chaotic public policy and the facts on the ground?
[T]he present phase is also distinguished by “bipartisanship”. Bipartisanship has been essential for the Council of Australian Governments’ closing-the-gap agenda. Intuitively, bipartisanship makes sense – it promotes coherency and continuity. But it does not always sit well in a parliamentary liberal democracy, where institutions function on the mediation of disagreement. Bipartisanship has limited, and on occasions excluded, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in policy development.
A handpicked group of indigenous and especially non-indigenous advisers cannot be a proxy for that input.”
Recognition, as presently conceived, is not that narrative, although it could be, according to Davis. “But in the absence of an attendant framework providing for participation in and scrutiny of decision-making between ballot boxes, it is all gesture politics.”
Professor Davis went on to examine various suggestions, put forward by Tony McAvoy SC, the Empowered Communities, Marion Scrymgour and Noel Pearson amongst others, and the media reaction to them. The respectful press was just reeking hypocrisy: the proposals were too complex, too difficult.
Here is Davis again: “The despair and voicelessness are being channelled into clever and thoughtful law reform ideas, which the state has not been prepared to countenance. June Oscar nailed it in regard to funding: “While we are expected to meet every compliance requirement, how do we ensure equal accountability on the part of this government?” And this is it in a nutshell. This is the kind of meaty, hard-headed, sophisticated debate the Aboriginal community wants directly with the Australian community.”
Professor Davis spelt it out clearly: “We are not seeking recognition. We are seeking more. We are seeking formal, institutionalised safeguards and the right to be consulted, and to participate actively in decision-making. [Emphasis added]
Instead, in the place of serious law and policy debates, the polity has adopted contrived rituals of forced attention: a low-hanging hook to sling its hat on. Recognition risks becoming this. Some recognition is better than no recognition, [Emphasis in original] we are told. Or worse, that symbolism is substantive reform, or that any change to the Constitution is more than symbolic; as if the natives aren’t well attuned to settler semantics. When we push back, saying we are seeking reform, not non-reform, something transformative, not decorative, we are described as ambitious; [Emphasis added] the blacks are taking a hard line. [Emphasis in original] They, on the other hand, routinely and unselfconsciously describe themselves as modest, considered, conservative.[Emphasis in original] The presupposition in the mainstream recognition conversation, that this was only ever about symbolism, is erroneous. It is restraining any sophisticated public debate.”
Reaching a point of exasperation, professor Davis wrote: “Most of the mob are waiting on a model before they can say which way they would vote. In fairness, this is a position any reasonable person would take before forming an opinion. The uncertainty alone distinguishes this process from the unanimity of 1967. There are a number of camps: a principled-resistance camp, a resistance-to-anything camp, a wait-and-see-camp, a not-yet camp. It is certain that the no-referendum option will also be on the table. [Emphasis added]
The meeting of 40 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders at Kirribilli House [in July 2015] reflected what is arguably the indigenous middle ground; what symbolism and minimalism constitute. A model that provides only preambular recognition, deletes section 25 (provision for disqualification of races from voting) and moderates the race power does not go far enough, and would not be acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
A fourth deliberative process in five years is lined up. The recognised are reduced to the stakeholder position, feeding their routinely unheard aspirations through another entity outsourced with the task of deciding that which the parliament should really resolve. The downside of retrofitting recognition in the world’s most rigid constitution is, after all, the unavoidable sign-off by the masses rather than a negotiated settlement with the Crown.
In 2011, I was part of a group that undertook comprehensive consultations across the continent, the likes of which will not be taken again. Australians told us that they did not want tokenism. Australians wanted something that would change people’s lives. I still fervently believe this sentiment exists. It may be transmuted by the time the next process is concluded, as Australians’ instinct for no bullshit and intuition for structural reform is tamed by the simple, the modest, the conservative.”
Against the pervasive cynicism: “No change dressed up as change. The design of this recognition process became incongruent long ago, probably at the moment leaders became committed to being committed. The process has reduced the Australian people in all their colour and texture to a one-dimensional portrait, based on eight referendum successes, the last being almost 40 years ago, in 1977. We are much more than this. Unless something radical is done to reverse the beige path we are treading down, the process will come to a completely unsatisfying conclusion. Still, there is renewed hope among the community that Prime Minister Turnbull, a lawyer, a referendum veteran and a big-picture leader, will exercise leadership and make it more about the reform and less about the sell. At the moment the question of meaningful reconciliation “is being treated as a numbers game and, as the numbers men have been saying, you do not need the Aboriginal vote to win a referendum. That, my friends, is no basis for reconciliation.” [Emphasis added]
Similar - if not more radical - views were expressed in May 2015 by Ms. Celeste Liddle, a proud Arrernte woman whose traditional lands are in and around Alice Springs, and the current National Indigenous Organiser for the National Tertiary Education Union, while speaking at the Australian Council of Trade Unions Congress.
The N.T.E.U. has been one of the few unions to maintain a broadly questioning view on the idea of constitutional recognition. The union membership views have been vast, ranging from members who support constitutional recognition, or at least believe it could be a good thing, all the way to a sizeable number indicating complete opposition to the concept - usually on the basis of sovereignty.
On the subject the union “has maintained a questioning stance. One reason is that the referendum questions themselves have not been finalised and without knowing what it is that we are being asked to endorse, there is no good reason to endorse it.”
Clarity informed the speech:
” ... Australians are the beneficiaries of stolen lands which were never ceded by the original owners is an “unfinished business” and the impacts of this colonisation continue to affect our lives today. Yet despite community indicating that the issue of our sovereignty is incredibly important – 88% of National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples according to the expert panel report on constitutional recognition – it is not an issue that gets prioritised by the governments.” [Emphasis added]
And again: “There is a definitely view among opposing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that to agree to recognition within the Australian Constitution is for us to submit to the rule of the crown while there is nothing in place to protect our rights as sovereign peoples. The constitution was a document written with our purposeful exclusion and imposed upon our lands without our consent. The act, therefore, of righting this wrong by simply writing us into the document is interpreted by some Indigenous people to be a mere act of assimilation which would not address the fundamental issues with the document.” [Emphasis added]
Ms. Liddle continued: “My views are in line with those who state that a treaty first between First Peoples and Australia is crucial. I believe that our rights need to be enshrined first.” [Emphasis added]
As things stand, the speaker said: “ ...we remain powerless in the system as it currently exists. The system therefore needs to change. [Emphasis added]
At this juncture, it is important to note the findings of the expert panel on constitutional recognition on the question of sovereignty, for the detail contained here is crucial at gauging where Australia sits currently in relation to its first peoples. Within the conclusion of this section it states, and I quote: Any proposal relating to constitutional recognition of the sovereign status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be highly contested by many Australians, and likely to jeopardise broad public support for the panel’s recommendations. Such a proposal would not therefore satisfy at least two of the panels principles for assessment of proposals, namely ‘contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation’ and ‘be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the social and political spectrum.’ ”
And there is the rub.
It is quite obvious “ ...that Constitutional Recognition is a conservative goal by its reference to the fact that any proposal needs to be capable of being supported broadly by Australians therefore not centralising Indigenous needs and stating that including provisions on sovereignty would be divisive and lead to electoral failure. There is, therefore, currently no space for our sovereignty to be acknowledged within the Australian constitution. It also frames “reconciliation” as something that is not possible at this point in time if an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty is included – a point which reinforces to me that reconciliation is still seen as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people assimilating into mainstream Australia, not the country transforming.” [Emphasis added]
The speaker mentioned, as an aside, that it had been pointed out to her “that writing us into the constitution as “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” homogenises our identities rather than recognises our own sovereign nationhoods and identities. The terms “Aboriginal” and “Torres Strait Islander” are not our terms but rather ones which have been imposed upon us. It was therefore argued that to recognise these terms in the constitution is reductive and could have serious consequences for our claims as a diverse people in the future. [Emphasis added]
Additionally, at this point in time we have state-based examples of how including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in these constitutions has not led to an increase in our rights and the esteem in which we are held by society. Here in Victoria, for example, an amendment to the state constitution was passed in 2004 acknowledging our “unique status as the descendants of Australia’s first people”. Despite this, our infant mortality rates in this state are still double those of other Australians and Welcome to Country ceremonies at government events were referred to by previous Premier Bailieau as “unnecessary”. When you think about the other states which have recognition contained within their constitutions – NSW, QLD and SA – and you reflect upon the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, can you honestly say that this acknowledgement has improved things ?” [Emphasis added]
There is a large chance - said Ms. Liddle - that a repetition of the Howard government attitude to Indigenous People could bring about the only possible reform: non-reform.
Finally - said Ms. Liddle - “I do feel that going to referendum in the first place has the ability to jeopardise aspirations for a treaty and the resolution of Indigenous sovereignty. Why? It has taken us almost 50 years since the referendum recognising us as citizens to get around to the point of addressing whether we also have a special status as First Peoples. My concern here is straight-forward: regardless of the outcome of the referendum, will we be waiting another 50 years before we see moves toward a resolution of our sovereignty. If the referendum is successful, will we get responses similar to what followed the Apology claiming that Indigenous people are never satisfied when we push for the resolution of sovereignty? If it’s unsuccessful, will that mean our recognition, in any form, is seen as a non-issue for this country, never to be visited again? I believe these are real concerns held by a lot of Indigenous people, for and against the proposal, and with good historical reason.” (Celeste Liddle, ‘Sovereignty and the constitutional recognition debate’, Australian options, winter 2015, No. 81,August 2015, 7-9)
All these arguments seem not to disturb Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who came up with another suggestion in December 2015. Speaking on 28 December 2015 at the Woodford Folk Festival, he urged Australians to embrace the nation’s Indigenous history through constitutional recognition.
Mr. Pearson was a member of the expert panel which recommended that the constitution be altered to remove racist sections, but in September 2015 he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that that position might not win enough voter support. As he told the Woodford audience “it's not enough to get 51 per cent of Australians to put their hands up, you've actually got to get states like Western Australia, Tasmania and indeed our own state of Queensland.”
“There is still a lack of consensus on the best model for change.” he said. And he proposed a new representative body for empowering Indigenous Australians to be recognised in the Constitution.
He again called for all Australians to embrace the Indigenous heritage of their country.
“It should be the duty, and it should be the privilege, of all Australians to own this heritage.” he said. “In order for us to do that, we must formalise that recognition in our constitutional arrangements.” (‘Woodford Folk Festival: Noel Pearson calls for Indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia’, by Kathy McLeish, 28 December 2015,www.abc.net.au/news/.../noel-pearson.woodford-folk-festival/7056846)
From military encampment to republic
There have been only four episodes of rebellion to ‘constitutional authority’ in the history of Australia: the Castle Hill revolt of 1804, the um Rebellion of 1808, the Eureka Stockade of 1854 and the Darwin Rebellion of 1919. The first of these was an Irish convict attack on the army; the second was a move by a group of scoundrels to seize a monopoly of the distribution of land and rum in the still young prison-colony. The Darwin Rebellion was sparked off largely by a government edict raising beer prices. Only in the case of the Eureka Stockade was the flag of a republic unfurled, but the chief aim of the uprising were more narrow and its leader, Peter Lalor, was the most conservative of 150 revolutionaries. He went from being the leader of the Eureka Stockade in 1854 - an event most questionably identified with the ‘birth of democracy’ in Australia - to becoming the only outlaw to make it to the Victorian Parliament, and be elected to the position of Speaker in 1880.
The lack of rebellion in favour of a republic - bourgeois or socialist but reflective of the society does not matter - or other kinds of utopia is a feature of Australian history. It could be explained, but that would involve an excursus into a number of aspects of Australian political development features: the legacy of the prison-colony period, the upward social mobility for large sectors of the population after the end of the 1840s, the peculiar nature of Australian nationalism and democracy, the limited horizons of the labour movement, and the role of the State.
If the political history of Australia indicates a quietism and pacifist attitude to revolution on the part of the people, those same Australians have exhibited a militant nationalism.
It has not been the kind of nationalism which would lead to a republic. Its main characteristics have been racial pride tinged with fear and hatred of Asians and Melanesians, an ambivalent attitude to English intrusions in local affairs and the identification of nationalism with the problem of self government and what was called, incorrectly from the very beginning, representative democracy. Hancock thought it just “possible to imagine a nationalism gradually developing from the old colonial society, uninterrupted by the upheaval of the gold rush, proceeding by a gradual separation of English and colonial interests and affections, and directed (as happened in America) by substantial landowners and merchants.” (W. K. Hancock, Australia (London 1930) (Melbourne 1961, 5th ed. 47)
He employed this theme to make the point that the conservative classes of Australia joined with the radicals on the nationalist issue and came to resent the appellation ‘colonial’ as applied to Australians. But such a picture needs to be supplemented by paying due attention to the resistance of the monopolistic landowners - the large ‘squatters’ - which, in setting off an unsatisfied demand for ‘responsible government’, also meant that “Australian nationalism took definite form in the class struggle between the landless majority and the land-monopolising squatters.” (Hancock, op. cit. 44)
Did a conservative historian such as Hancock mention, and repeatedly, class ?
The first real glimmering of a proposal for an Australian republic, and the desire for an end to the class divisions typical of England, are to be found during 1824-1855 in the newspaper The Australian. Editorials by Robert Wardell opposed regulations for land disposal as “ruinous to agricultural interests, ... production of revenue and the progress of immigration,” (2 C. Manning H. Clark, A history of Australia (Melbourne 1982) 182) but mainly expressed early nationalism. However The Australian was only one of a dozen newspapers and it reflected the views of only a section of the emancipists - not the whole class. Agitation in Australia for independence from England increased between 1835 and 1843, and received full support from the New South Wales Legislative Council, which concluded in 1844 that “there is but one remedy for all other evils - responsible government in the sense in which it is understood in England as the absence of interference on the part of the home authorities, except on questions purely Imperial.” (1 C. Manning H. Clark, Select documents in Australian history, 1788-1850 (Sydney 1950) 367)
The gold rushes of the 1850s brought self-reliant migrants, but their view on democracy, self-government and nationalism were not of a utopian, republican or socialist kind, and they were satisfied when between 1855 and 1860, the five major colonies were given control of their own destinies as ‘state’ governments, elected by universal manhood suffrage.
Xenophobic nationalism emerged in the 1850s. Political agitators like Daniel Deniehy raised against the danger of immigration of the ‘Asiatic hordes’. This was to be the authentic voice of Australian nationalism for many years. By 1861 meetings of Queensland workers were petitioning the government to make illegal the import of all ‘Kanaka’ or Melanesian labour for Queensland sugar fields. (W. J. H. Harris, The struggle against Pacific island labour, 1868-1902, [1968] Labour history (No. 15) 40)
Agitation for this aim increased sharply in the 1870s and 1880s, and by January 1898 the Australian Labour Federation decided that “pending the exclusion of Asiatics and other coloured labour, the Provincial Council of the A.L.F. urges upon the Parliamentary Labour Party the desirableness of introducing legislation during the coming session providing for the payment of all employees of such labour a wage not less than that paid to white men.” (W. J. H. Harris, op. cit. 42)
There were similar moves in South Australia and in New South Wales.
To many if not most contemporaries, nationalism and levelling, democratic ideas seemed merely different aspects of a single ideal, summed up in its most romantically exaggerated form by The Bulletin in an editorial of 2 July 1887: “By the term Australian we mean not those who have been merely born in Australia. All white men who come to these shore - with a clean record - and who leave behind them the memory of the class-distinction and the religious differences of the old world; all men who place the happiness, prosperity, the advancement of their adopted country before the interests of Imperialism, are Australian ... In this regard all men ... who leave their fatherland because they cannot swallow the worm-eaten lie of the divine right of kings to murder peasants, are Australian by instinct - Australian and Republican are synonymous.”
The Bulletin was a weekly journal first published in Sydney in 1880. Under the editorial guidance of J. F. Archibald, its policy was strongly nationalist, radical and republican. After the achievement of federation in 1901, republicanism was quietly dropped from its programme, and it became less radical and less ‘anti-imperialist’ or anti-British with the years, but it did not take on its later conservative colouring until about the time of the first world war. (R. Ward, op.cit. 197)
There was some contribution of the conservative classes to nationalism: The Bulletin was nationalist and republican, but anti-federalist and reactionary on many issues. In 1896 The Bulletin and the Truth reached something of a peak in vigorous republicanism and anti-monarchism. On the occasion of Queen Victoria’ reaching a record term as sovereign on 23 September 1896, Truth wrote:
“In these degenerate days of political apostasy and slavish sycophancy, ... it is the chief pastime of the ‘very nicest of the nastily nice and nicely nasty’ people to glory in the fact that they and their countrymen were ruled 60 years ago by a silly, snivelling girl at 16, and today by a semi-senile old woman of over 70 ...”
It described The Queen as “this flabby, and flatulent looking scion and successor of the most ignoble line of the Royal Georges,’ and denounced these monarchs as madmen, ignoble lechers, bastards and blackguards.”
Of George IV it said, “He was the biggest blasphemer, the greatest liar, the foulest adulterer, the most infamous swindler and impudent turf blackleg or ‘welsher’ that the world has ever seen. He was a bigamist, a wife-beater and a madman with prolonged lucid intervals.”
And William IV, Queen Victoria’s uncle, was “a cross between a wild and a mad bull. By a Mrs. Jordan, whom he afterwards cast off in a most callous fashion, this scoundrel had 16 bastards, all of whom were foisted on the State.”
The Queen ... “while amassing a fabulous private fortune and drawing enormous State allowances without performing the duties for which they were granted ... has literally swamped the Court with German princelings,” all of whom were pensioners on the British taxpayer.
None the less ... ‘God save the Queen’ ‘if only to keep her rascal of a turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching, boozing, rowdy of a son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, off the throne.” (Quoted in C. Pearl, Wild men of Sydney (Melbourne 1965) 117-118)
Having ‘integrated’ the country in systems of ‘mutual defence’ controlled by Washington, ‘globalised’ the economy, sold everything which stands or moves, desecrated public services, organised banking on a four-pillars oligopoly dependent on foreign support, trivialised information through the concentration of its sources: newspapers and television, delivered the populace to infotainment: ‘death hours’, fire-and-flood, travel and cooking programmes, and to ‘lotto quiz’ with such difficult questions as “How many were the seven hills of Rome ?”, transformed higher education into an ‘industry’ delivering bachelors in hairdressing, masters in real estate auctioneering and pee-aitch-dees in master cooking, while the once serious studies: medicine, law and science are placed and accepted to be beyond the reach of the average family - and never mind ‘the arts’, concentration on matters of public interest is re-directed by both wings of ‘the System’ to the personal mixed-fortune of the Royals. There is, just about as there was 120 years ago, the occasional talk about ‘the Crown being above politics’, a sense of empathy for a Queen engaged in “amassing a fabulous private fortune and drawing enormous State allowances” after having swamped the Court with half-German parasites - part tree-huggers, part weapons-merchants, horse-trainers or quietly living off the Exchequer, and all that under the clear eye of ‘The Hun’ - as his future mother-in-law referred to Philip.
The time has long passed for Australians - all Australians - to develop a historically correct and truthful awareness of their past, identity and character, abandoning forever the shallow jingoistic parody one sees on such events as Australia Day. That may only come by entering into a treaty - something which may scandalise the Oxford-branded ‘legal philosophers’, but is justifiable by basic decency - embracing and reconciling with the Indigenous People and their culture in a true and meaningful way, but above all in a way that they understand and appreciate. With that goes a serious commitment to reparation for past tragedies. And that means cancelling any trace of racism and of its consequences. It may take time, but this must be done, not only for the Indigenous People but also for the young generations of new migrants, beginning with changing completely Australia’s attitude to asylum seekers. In welcoming rather than imprisoning them all other Australians would honour themselves.
Passing provincial actors who cover themselves with the flag: the Rudds, the Gillards, the Abbotts - and it is too soon to say the Turnbulls, but the time may come - Governors-Generals and State Governors, whose first and foremost loyalty oath is to the Queen, will pass.
They are not even telling the truth, misrepresenting the wish of the Australian People: two out of three persons prefer a flag without the Union Jack.
That will pass, too. Only then, perhaps, Australians will direct their collective mind to real problems which have been facing them from the beginning of Federation: a really representative democracy, an overdue re-organisation of the constitutional arrangement, and - to guarantee all that - a peaceful, reconciled, federal, secular republic.
What kind of republic and how to get there
There are some 600,000 non-for-profit community organisations in Australia. There are serious organisations devoted to analysing, thinking, reasoning. There is an Australian Republican Movement, there still is around a Republican Party of Australia. They could all help. Whatever their purpose, it should be easy to write to the Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, or the Parliamentary Library requesting a copy of the Constitution.
No expert analysis would be need to examine the document and conclude that it is - not old - but archaic, and totally unsuitable to a modern country in which Australians aspire to live.
Every organisation could proceed to elect a Citizen’s Committee with the specific duty
- to prepare and conduct discussions on the principles to be inserted in a republican constitution,
- to maintain contacts with other similar committees. One of the purposes of such contacts should, eventually, be the preparation of a petition to the Prime Minister of the time, seeking from government the presentation and tabling before the House of Representatives of a bill containing a proposal for the setting up of a Constituent Assembly of, say, no more than 120 members to be elected according to a proportional representation system, including the D’Hondt method, similar to the one presently used in Albania, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Kosovo, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Timor-Leste, Turkey, Uruguay and Wales; or alternatively the Webster's method, which is employed in New Zealand, Norway and Sweden.
The Constituent Assembly should invite, receive and accept a final proposal from the Indigenous Peoples of a treaty for recognition and reparation, provided that such final, proposed treaty is submitted within six months of the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly elected for the preparation of a republican constitution to be submitted to the vote of all Australians - Indigenous and non-Indigenous. A favourable vote of a simple majority should be sufficient to proceed to enactment of the Constitution of the Republic of Australia. Simultaneously a new Parliament, made up of a House of Representatives and a Senate, should be elected.
These could be the broad-lines of a reform, which could guarantee a possibility of success if the present Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition were to be the same persons after next election, which is said to be due sometime in 2017. Both such persons are reputed to be of republican conviction, and one of them was prominent some twenty years ago in agitating for a republic.
Australians believe that they live in a situation of respect of, and abidance to, the international treaties of which the country is a party, and in one case: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, as co-author. This and other treaties, particularly those referred to collectively as the International Human Rights Bill, should be referred to in the preamble to the Constitution and their provision ‘domesticated’ so as to become the content of a specific section of the Constitution.
In order to gain assistance from the experience of other countries, the administration of the following Charters of freedom should be consulted: the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms/ La Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, part of the Constitution Act 1982; the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 and Human Rights Act 1993; the South African Bill of Rights 1997; the United States of America Bill of Rights.
Outside the Anglophone world, one recent experience in advancement of recognition of human rights is that of Finland. It is a highly educated country and - for that alone - a point of comparison and source of admiration in the whole ‘western’ world.
The basic right to education is enshrined in the Finnish constitution. Public authorities must secure equal opportunities for every resident in Finland to receive education and be able to develop her/himself, irrespective of her/his financial standing. Legislation provides for compulsory schooling and the right to free pre-primary and basic education, which includes daily meals for students and subsidised transport. There is a strong atmosphere of trust in the teachers; they have a lot of freedom in their classrooms, do not have to submit their pupils to benchmark testing, and are highly respected within the community.
Education in Finland is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and Culture, which is the third largest; in 2014 its share of the state budget was 12 per cent. The Finnish National Board of Education works with the Ministry to develop educational aims, content and methods for primary, secondary and adult education.
Local administration is the responsibility of the regional municipal authorities, which play a prominent role as education providers. Kindergartens, day-care centres, comprehensive schools, upper secondary schools, vocational and further education centres are all administered by the local municipality. This includes responsibility for teaching staff salaries, employment conditions and professional development.
Every teacher in Finland - apart from kindergarten teachers - holds at least a Master’s degree as a minimum requirement. Teacher training is organised in the eight universities offering it at University Teacher Training Schools which belong to the Faculties of Education. Teachers in these schools are actually employees of the university, while the schools themselves still follow the National Curriculum and enjoy the same independence that other schools do.
Higher education is also the responsibility of the Ministry and all university tuition is free for all - including for foreign students. Finland has 14 universities.
There are other aspects of the development of Finland which deserve attention: a recent independence: 1917-1918, a modern republic, respectful of minorities, uninterested in foreign adventures, a responsible member of European Union since 1995 and actively committed to the enforcement of the European Convention of Human Rights. The extensive reform of Basic Rights in Chapter II of the Constitution Act came into force in August 1995. The original Constitution Act was enacted in 1919, soon after Finland declared its Independence in 1917, but the current Constitution came into force on 1 March 2000.
A republican constitution for Australia could look like this:
- A preamble
- A first article to read:
1) Australia is a secular, democratic, federal republic.
2) Sovereignty belongs to the Australian people who exercises it in the forms and limits of the constitution.”
The following articles could read:
Article 2 Human rights
1) The Republic recognises and guarantees the inviolable human rights, be it as an individual or in social groups expressing their personality, and it ensures the performance of the unalterable duty to political, economic and social solidarity.
2) For the purpose, the Republic hereby receives into the national law the following instruments: the International Bill of Human Rights, that is to say the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966 with its two Optional Protocols and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007; the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951; the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965; the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979; the Declaration on the Elimination of all forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination based on religion or belief, 1981; the Convention against Torture and other cruel, inhuman or regarding treatment or Punishment, 1984; and the Convention on the rights of the child, 1989.
Article 3 International law
1) The legal system of Australia conforms to the generally recognised principles of international law.
2) Legal regulation of the status of foreigners conforms to international rules and treaties.
3) Foreigners who are, in their own country, denied the actual exercise of the democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Australian constitution, are entitled to the right to asylum under those conditions provided by law.
4) Foreigners may not be extradited for political offences.
Article 4 Equality
1) All citizens have equal social status and are equal before the law, without regard to their sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, and personal or social conditions.
2) It is the duty of the Republic to remove all economic and social obstacles which, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent full individual development and the participation of all citizens in the political, economic, and social organisation of the country.
Article 5 Work
1) The Republic recognises the right of all citizens to work and promotes conditions to fulfil this right.
2) According to capability and choice, every citizen has the duty to undertake an activity or a function which will contribute to the material and moral progress of society.
Article 6 Local autonomy
The Republic, one and indivisible, recognises and promotes local autonomy; it fully applies administrative decentralisation of services and adopts principles and methods of legislation meeting the requirements of autonomy and decentralisation.
Article 7 Linguistic minorities
The Republic embraces the multicultural experience and protects linguistic minorities by special laws.
Article 8 Religion
1) Religious denominations are equally free before the law.
2) Denominations have the right to organise themselves according to their own by-laws, provided they do not conflict with the Australian legal system.
3) Their relationship with the state is regulated by law, based on agreements with their representatives.
Article 9 Research and culture
1) The Republic promotes cultural development and scientific and technical research.
2) It safeguards natural beauty and the historical and artistic heritage of the nation.
Article 10 Repudiation of war
Australia repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of other peoples and as a means for settling international disputes; it agrees to limitations of sovereignty where they are necessary to allow for a legal system of peace and justice between nations, provided the principle of equality between nations is guaranteed; and it promotes and encourages international organisations furthering such ends.
Article 11 Flag
The flag of the Republic will be adopted by special law.
Part I Rights and duties of citizens
Title I Civil rights
Article 12 Personal liberty
1) Personal liberty is inviolable.
2) No one may be detained, inspected, or searched nor otherwise restricted in personal liberty except by order of the judiciary stating a reason and only in such cases and in such manner as provided by law.
3) As an exception, under the conditions of necessity and urgency strictly defined by law, the police may take provisional measures which must be reported within 48 hours to the judiciary and, if they are not ratified within another 48 hours, are considered revoked and remain without effect.
4) Acts of physical and moral violence against persons subjected to restrictions of personal liberty are to be punished.
5) The law establishes the maximum duration of preventive detention.
Article 13 Personal domicile
1) Personal domicile is inviolable.
2) No one’s domicile may be inspected, searched, or seized save in cases and in the manner laid down by law conforming to the guarantee of personal liberty.
3) Verifications and inspections for public health and safety, or for economic and fiscal purposes are defined by law.
Article 14 Freedom of correspondence
1) Liberty and secrecy of correspondence and other forms of communication are inviolable.
2) Limitations may only be imposed by judicial decision stating the reasons and in accordance with guarantees defined by law.
Article 15 Freedom of movement
1) Every citizen has the right to reside and travel freely in any part of the national territory except for limitations provided by general laws protecting health or security. No restriction may be imposed for political reasons.
2) Every citizen is free to leave the territory of the Republic and return to it except for obligations defined by law.
Article 16 Right of assembly
1) All citizens have the right to assemble peaceably and unarmed.
2) For meetings, including those held in places to which the general public has access, no previous notice is required.
3) For meetings held in public places previous notice must be given to the authorities, which may prohibit them only on the grounds of proven risks to security or public safety.
Article 17 Freedom of association
1) Citizens have the right freely and without authorisation to form associations for those aims not forbidden by criminal law.
2) Secret associations and associations pursuing political aims by military organisation, even if only indirectly, are forbidden.
Article 18 Freedom of religion
Everyone is entitled freely to profess religious beliefs in any form, individually or with others, to promote them, and to celebrate rites in public or in private, provided they are not offensive to public morality.
Article 19 Religious associations
The religious character or religious or confessional aims of associations or institutions do not justify special limitations or fiscal burdens regarding their establishment, legal capacity, or activities.
Article 20 Freedom of communication
1) Everyone has the right freely to express thoughts in speech, writing, and by other communication.
2) The press may not be controlled by authorisation or submitted to censorship.
3) Seizure is permitted only by judicial order stating the reason and only for offences expressly determined by the press law or for violation of the obligation to identify the persons responsible for such offences.
4) In cases of absolute urgency where immediate judicial intervention is impossible, periodicals may be seized by the police, which must immediately and in no case later than 24 hours report the matter to the judiciary. If the measure is not validated by the judiciary within another 24 hours, it is considered revoked and has no effect.
5) The law may, by general provision, order the disclosure of financial sources of periodical publications.
6) Publications, performances, and other exhibits offensive to public morality are prohibited. Measures of prevention and repression against violations are provided by law.
Article 21 Citizenship and name
No one may be deprived of legal capacity, citizenship, or name for political reasons.
Article 22 Personal services
No one may be forced to perform personal service or payment without legal provision.
Article 23 Right to be heard in court
1) Everyone may bring cases before a court of law in order to protect her/his rights under civil and administrative law.
2) Defence is an inviolable right at every stage and instance of legal proceedings.
3) Anyone who has no financial means is entitled by law to proper means for action or defence in all courts.
4) The law defines the conditions and forms for reparation in the case of judicial errors.
Article 24 Defendant’s rights
1) No case may be removed from a court, but must be heard as provided by law.
2) No punishment is permitted except provided by a law already in force when the offence has been committed.
3) Security measures against persons are only permitted as provided by law.
Article 25 Rights of the accused
1) Criminal responsibility is personal.
2) The defendant may not be considered guilty until the final sentence.
3) Punishments may not offend a sense humanity and must aim at re-educating the convicted person.
4) The death penalty is prohibited.
Article 26 Extradition
1) A citizen may be extradited only as expressly provided by international conventions.
2) In any case, extradition may not be permitted for political offences.
Article 27 Responsibility of public officials
Public officials and employees of other public bodies are directly responsible under civil, criminal, and administrative law for acts committed in violation of rights. Civil liability extends to all public bodies.
Title II Ethical and social relations
Article 28 Marriage
1) The family is recognised by the Republic as a natural association founded on marriage.
2) Marriage entails moral and legal equality of the spouses within legally defined limits to protect the unity of the family.
Article 29 Family
1) The Republic encourages family formation and the fulfilment of related tasks by means of economic and other provisions with special regard to large families.
2) The Republic protects maternity, infancy, and youth; it supports and encourages institutions needed for this purpose.
3) The Republic admits same-sex marriages.
Article 30 Parental duties and rights
1) Parents have the duty and right to support, instruct, and educate their children, including those born out of wedlock.
2) The law provides for the fulfilment of those duties should the parents prove incapable.
3) Full legal and social protection for children born out of wedlock is guaranteed by law, consistent with the rights of other family members.
4) Rules and limits to determine paternity are set by law.
Article 31 Health
1) The Republic protects individual health as a basic right and in the public interest; it provides free medical care to those without means.
2) Nobody may be forcefully submitted to medical treatment except as regulated by law. That law may in no case violate the limits imposed by respect for a human being.
Article 32 Freedom of arts, science and teaching
1) The arts and sciences as well as their teaching are free.
2) The Republic adopts general norms for education and establishes public schools of all kinds and grades.
3) Public and private bodies have the right to establish schools and educational institutes without financial obligations to the Republic.
4) The law, when defining rights and obligations of those private schools requesting recognition must guarantee full liberty to them and equal treatment with pupils of public schools.
5) Exams are defined for admission to various types and grades of schools, as final course exams, and for professional qualification.
6) Institutions of higher learning, universities, and academies have the autonomy to establish by-laws within the limits of public law.
Article 33 Education
1) Schools are open to everyone.
2) Primary education, given for at least eight years, is compulsory and free of tuition.
3) Pupils of ability and merit, even if lacking financial resources, have the right to attain the highest grades of studies.
4) The Republic makes this right effective through scholarships, allowances to families, and other provisions, to be assigned by competitive examinations.
Title III Economic relations
Article 34 Labour
(1) The Republic protects labour in all its forms.
2) It provides for the training and professional enhancement of workers.
3) It promotes and encourages international treaties and institutions aiming to assert and regulate labour rights.
Article 35 Wages
1) Workers are entitled to remuneration commensurate with the quantity and quality of their work, and in any case sufficient to ensure to them and their families a free and honourable existence.
2) The law makes provisions limiting the length of the working day.
3) Workers are entitled to a weekly day of rest and to annual paid holidays; they cannot waive this right.
Article 36 Equality of women at work
1) Working women are entitled to equal rights and, for comparable jobs, equal pay as men. Working conditions must allow women to fulfil their essential family duties and ensure an adequate protection of mothers and children.
2) The law defines a minimal age for paid labour.
3) The Republic establishes special measures protecting juvenile labour and guarantees equal pay for comparable work.
Article 37 Welfare
1) All citizens unable to work and lacking the resources necessary for their existence are entitled to private and social assistance.
2) Workers are entitled to adequate insurance for their needs in case of accident, illness, disability, old age, and involuntary unemployment.
3) Disabled and handicapped persons are entitled to education and vocational training.
4) These responsibilities are entrusted to public bodies and institutions established or supplemented by public law.
5) Private welfare work is free.
Article 38 Trade unions
1) The organisation of trade unions is free.
2) No obligation may be imposed on trade unions except the duty to register at local or central offices as provided by law.
3) Trade unions are only registered on condition that their by-laws lead to internal organisation of a democratic character.
4) Registered trade unions are legal persons. Being represented in proportion to their registered members, they may jointly enter into collective labour contracts, which are mandatory for all who belong to the respective industry of these contracts.
Article 39 Right to strike
The right to strike is exercised according to the law.
Article 40 Freedom of enterprise
1) Private economic enterprise is free.
2) It may not be carried out against the common interest or in a way which may harm public security, liberty, or human dignity.
3) The law determines appropriate planning and controls so that public and private economic activities may be directed and coordinated towards social ends.
Article 41 Property
1) Property is public or private. Economic goods may belong to the Republic, to public bodies, or to private persons.
2) Private ownership is recognised and guaranteed by the law, which determines the manner of acquisition and enjoyment as well as its limits, in order to ensure its social function and to make it accessible to all.
3) Private property, in cases determined by law and with compensation, may be expropriated for reasons of common interest.
4) The law establishes the rules of legitimate and testamentary succession and its limits and the public entities’ right to the heritage.
Article 42 Taxation
1) Everyone must contribute to public expenditure in proportion to her/his/its capacity.
2) The tax system conforms to the principle of progression.
Article 43 Expropriation
In the common interest, the law may reserve establishment or transfer, by expropriation with compensation, to the Republic, public bodies, or workers or consumer communities, specific enterprises or categories of enterprises of primary common interest for essential public services or energy sources, or act as monopolies in the primary public interest.
Article 44 Land
1) For the purpose of ensuring rational utilisation of land and establishing equitable social relations, the law imposes obligations on and limitations to private ownership of land, defines its limits depending on the regions and the various agricultural areas, encourages and imposes land cultivation, transformation of large estates, and the reorganisation of productive units; it assists small and medium sized farms.
2) The rights to land of the Indigenous Peoples are respected and protected.
Article 45 Cooperatives
1) The Republic recognises the social function of cooperation for mutual benefit free of private speculation. The law promotes and encourages its implementation with suitable provisions and ensures its character and purposes through proper controls.
Article 46 Workers’ participation
In order to achieve the economic and social enhancement of labour and in accordance with the requirements of production, the Republic recognises the right of workers to collaborate in the management of commercial entities, within the forms and limits defined by law.
Article 47 Savings
1) The Republic encourages and protects savings in all its forms, regulates, coordinates and controls the provision of credit.
2) It favours access savings for the purchase of homes, for worker-owned farms, and for direct or indirect investment in shares of the country’s large productive enterprises.
Title IV Political rights
Article 48 Voting rights
1) All citizens, men or women, who have attained the age of majority are entitled to vote.
2) Voting is personal, equal, free, and secret. It is compulsory because its exercise is a civic duty.
3) The right to vote may not be limited except for incapacity, as a consequence of a final criminal sentence, or in cases of moral unworthiness established by law.
Article 49 Political parties
All citizens have the right freely to associate in political parties in order to contribute by democratic methods to determine national policy.
Article 50 Petitions
All citizens may address petitions to the Chambers of Parliament demanding legislative measures or presenting general needs.
Article 51 Public offices
1) Citizens of one or the other sex are eligible for public office and for elective positions under equal conditions, according to the rules established by law. To this end, the Republic adopts specific measures in order to promote equal chances for men and women.
2) The law may grant Australians who are not resident in the Republic the same rights as citizens for the purposes of access to public offices and elected positions.
3) Anyone elected to public office is entitled to the time necessary for the fulfilment of the respective duties while keeping his or her job.
Article 52 Military service
1) The defence of the Republic is the sacred duty of every citizen.
2) The organisation of the Defence Forces must conform to the democratic spirit of the Republic.
3) The Defence Forces must be organised essentially for the purpose of acting as auxiliary Civil Defence in case of floods, fires or similar natural occurrences.
4) The Defence Forces cannot be employed outside the territory of the Republic except by decision of the government ratified by Parliament.
Article 53 Loyalty to the Constitution
1) All citizens have the duty to be loyal to the Republic and to observe its constitution and the laws.
2) Citizens entrusted with public functions must perform them with discipline and honour, and take an oath of office where required by law.
Following parts of the Constitution should contain provisions on the organisation of the Republic in two chambers: House of Representatives and Senate, lawmaking, the President of the Republic, the government, the Council of Ministers, the organisation of the public administration, the auxiliary institutions, the Judiciary and its organisation, provisions on jurisdiction, the constitutional guarantees and the function of a Constitutional Court, the States and local authorities, provisions to amend the Constitution and one final declaration to the effect that “The republican form of the federation cannot be changed by way of constitutional amendment.”
“You see things; and you say, ‘Why ?’
But I dream things that never were;
and say ‘Why not ?’ ”
in Back to Methuselah, pt. I, act IGeorge Bernard Shaw (1921)
Dr. Venturino Giorgio Venturini devoted some sixty years to study, practice, teach, write and administer law at different places in four continents. He may be reached at [email protected]