Bennelong Society Conference 2008:
The NT Emergency Response: appraisal and future

Bennelong Medal presentation for 2008 to Mal Brough
on 19 June 2008 at The Windsor Hotel, Melbourne

Medal presented by Keith Windschuttle

It is a considerable honour to make this presentation. Mal Brough is without a doubt a most fitting person to be awarded the Bennelong Society medal. Even though he is now out of government, he remains the most important public figure in Aboriginal policy today. This is, of course, something of a paradox, but nonetheless true.

Not the least of the reasons is the reputation he has earned among Aboriginal people through the force of his personal presence and the fact that he speaks directly about their condition today. He is not someone who talks in politically correct, bureaucratic circumlocutions and euphemisms. Moreover, the Northern Territory intervention showed he is a politician who actually does what he says he will do. This is a rare quality in this policy area and is clearly one of the chief reasons why the APY people, for instance, have invited him back to assist their troubled community.

But there is a bigger reason involved here as well, which I'd like to discuss by looking at the Northern Territory intervention into the context of the recent history of Aboriginal policy.

In 1996, one of the people who eventually became involved in founding the Bennelong Society, Geoffrey Partington, wrote a very important book about Aboriginal policy. In fact, it is probably the most important book written on that topic in our time. It was called Hasluck versus Coombs and was a comparative analysis of the ideas and actions of Paul Hasluck who, until 1966, controlled Aboriginal affairs in the Menzies government, and of Dr Herbert (Nugget) Coombs the former economist who became head of the Australian Council of Aboriginal Affairs in 1967.

Coombs's period in office, during which he advised three Prime Ministers and supported the growth of a wide range of both government and community organisations, defined self-determination and a return to traditional culture as the appropriate goals for Aboriginal policy. After he left the scene, the Hawke and Keating governments cemented his policy framework within the nation's psyche. By the 1990s, there was hardly anybody at all, and certainly no one with the ear of government or the media, who disputed the prevailing paradigm on Aboriginal affairs. So deeply was this entrenched that anyone who dared to think otherwise was immediately branded immoral, antediluvian, beyond the pale or, worst of all, racist.

Geoffrey Partington's book, however, reminded us that before Coombs there had been an entirely different approach. Paul Hasluck had advocated assimilation, declaring that Aboriginal people should "attain the same manner of living as other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community enjoying the same rights and privileges". Assimilation was not a policy to be forced on Aboriginal people, Hasluck insisted, but he nonetheless tried to create a policy regime of gradual transition to the modern world. Hasluck had had a close concern about Aboriginal affairs since his youthful career as a journalist in Western Australia. No one could call him immoral or suggest that anything he did was racist.

What Partington's book accomplished was to transform the mindset of those who read it. Instead of seeing the Coombs regime as the right and proper and, indeed, natural thing for Australia to institute, Partington revealed it as nothing but a man-made set of policies, or I should say white-man-made set of policies, because it was decided not out in Aboriginal communities but down in Canberra. Moreover, by 1996 it had become quite apparent to anyone with eyes to see that it brought in its train some terrible failings, especially in the precipitous decline in the quality of life of those subject to it. In other words, instead of an approach that should remain unquestioned, the Coombs strategy was revealed to have been nothing but a lengthy, expensive and ultimately failed social policy experiment.

Once people could see this, the door opened for a different approach, for evaluations and criticisms, and for other challenges to those who shouted "racist" at anyone who thought differently to themselves.

This did not mean that those of us who responded to the book simply fell back on exactly the same approach that Hasluck had used in the 1950s and 1960s. The process has been a bit more dialectical than this. In the Bennelong Society, the operative term has not been "assimilation" but "integration". We've argued that Aboriginal people need to be engaged with the wider society and economy, to share the common values of mainstream Australia, to speak English and to have a sense of Australian citizenship and loyalty, while at the same time maintaining a strong sense of Aboriginal identity and a commitment to those traditional values and customs that are not in conflict with the modern world. Integration does mean assimilating into the modern economy and its education and health systems and practices, but it does not mean the obliteration of the distinctiveness of Aboriginal culture and identity.

But all of this had remained at the level of talk, thought and writings. Before Mal Brough assumed the portfolio, the Howard government had taken one giant step forward by abolishing the separatist organisation ATSIC, but apart from that had generally been operating in a defensive framework, administering the system it inherited, trying to make improvements here and there, as well as responding to some of the most irresponsible and mischievous claims ever made by political activists in this country, such as the accusation of genocide by Mick Dodson and Ronald Wilson in the Bringing Them Home report.

Until Mal Brough came along, the paradigm shift that had occurred in the intellectualisation of the issue had not been matched by a political response of similar magnitude. Today, that is no longer true. The Northern Territory intervention has set a precedent of political action that is impossible to reverse. We now have a model of intervention that others in his position will follow. There is widespread acceptance of this within Aboriginal communities themselves, especially among the previously silenced victims of abuse. Within the Australian population at large, there has been a collective sigh of relief that at last something has been done to address what are widely regarded as conditions that are unacceptable in this country. While it is probably true that there are no votes for politicians to win from a positive Aboriginal policy, there are certainly a lot of votes to lose if governments get it wrong. If the current government fails to recognise this, and goes back to the policies that prevailed in the 1980s and 90s, it will regenerate all the opprobrium that that those policies brought to Labor governments of the past.

In the press today, the new Labor government is talking in a Mal Brough manner about continuing the intervention. Whether it does so, or whether this is just a public relations exercise, remains to be seen. But nonetheless the idea that the intervention is the way forward seems now entrenched in almost a bipartisan way.

In short, in the history of Aboriginal affairs, Mal Brough has been the most effective political figure since Paul Hasluck. He is a most worthy recipient of this award.