I think I've missed something... what on earth does bifurcating the legislature on gender lines have to do with Aboriginal reconciliation?

whistler,

The 1967 referendum did not mean that “Aborigines came under the auspices of the Constitution”. This is just another myth on the ever-growing list of myths re that referendum.

The 1967 referendum did two things: it gave the Commonwealth, rather than the states, the power to make laws regarding Aborigines; it removed the section under which they were not counted for the purposes of allocating seats in the House of Representatives and grants to the states. (Paradoxically, this section prevented states like Queensland, in which Aborigines did not have the vote, from getting more seats and states like Victoria, in which they did have the vote, from getting fewer.)

The 1967 referendum did not mean that Aborigines were counted for the first time in the census. The 1911 census recorded 19,939 Aborigines.

Nor did 1967 referendum make Aborigines citizens, something they had been since 1949 when all Australians, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, became citizens, as opposed to British subjects that they had all been previously.

Nor did the 1967 referendum give Aborigines the right to vote, something they had in the nineteenth century in some colonies and which they kept in those states continuously at the state level and, if they had voted in 1901, continuously at the federal level. Federal voting rights were extended to all Aborigines in 1962.

Chris Curtis

Brendan Nelson, as leader of the Federal Coalition's parliamentary opposition, was doing the honorable thing backing up Rudd's apology, and thereby making the apology unanimous as far as the federal parliament was concerned, and thereby reinforcing the objective that the apology would be truly representative of the whole of the Australian non-indigenous populace. Brendan's mistake was to mention that the current generation was not responsible for the "stolen generation", that the intent of the relevant relocations had not been vindictive, but had rather been seen as being in the best interests of those relocated; and he also mistakenly (for many) mentioned that some of the "stolen" had fared well from their relocation.

He was in effect backing up the previous Howard govenment policy regarding potential compensation. I did not notice Rudd government representatives turning their backs, but only the indigenous contingent within the House, and some non-indigenous joining the same indigenous response on the lawn outside the House.

It should be noted that Howard's policy regarding an apology was not that of a majority of Australians, or even a majority of Lib/Nat voters, and thus was just another failing of the Howard government, as was his refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Howard didn't get the message until the 2007 election result, and probably still sticks to his original ill-advised attitude.

Whistler, I assume this womens' and mens' legislature idea comes from secret mens' and womens' business in indigenous culture, but the whole idea is so over the top, and is so far beyond the idea of recognition of the first peoples in the Constitution or the Preamble, that I am forced to assume that you have a very much more extensive agenda, and one which could therefore never come to fruition - for it smacks of independent sovereignty, governance, judiciary etc. This would be wholly un-Australian.

Why aren't we calling it the "Colonial Australian Constitution", and why don't the Aboriginals draw up their own "Indigenous Constitution", wherein after a suitably damning preamble they grudgingly acknowledge the invaders, despoilers, child-nappers and rapists in a magnanimous spirit of reconciliation with their luckless fate?
I cannot believe the effrontery of a referendum that condescends to "recognise" the inhabitants and custodians of this ancient land from time immemorial. The same supremacists who have and continue to patronise, ostracise and demean them. I'm not sure whether to praise aboriginals for their forbearance or harangue them for their acquiescence. They're too decimated/assimilated in numbers and wasted in spirit to offer viable resistence, but it seems to me they should be resisting the tyrant's "recognition" until the full horror of what has and continues to be perpetrated against them is understood by the whole population and a genuine apology is forthcoming.
Aboriginal identity has always been and remains a curse that drives many to self-destruction in a mainstream white supremacist culture where "other" ethnicities precede and the aboriginal comes last.
At the very least, indigenous representatives should refuse to recognise the invaders until the upstart Australian flag incorporates the Aboriginal flag in the left hand corner. A nice splash of colour!

Instead of just a symbolical reconciliation why don't all parties in Australia agree on a date for day 1 from whence all people are Australian with one set of responsibilities & rights for everyone, no exception. Moving on will prove far more beneficial than trying to turn back the clock in order to evade responsibility. To move on will bring far more satisfaction than forcing people to accept a hand-outs life forced onto them by ignorant do-gooders.

Plenty of comments running a number of ways; pseudonyms abound; no grouping or tendency seems to have a monopoly on discourtesy: it's a classic online debate. A few of the comments have focused on the research our article has reported, so I might respond to them specifically here.

Amicus, I respect your concerns about 'confirmation bias.' The purpose of this pilot study was to test whether the results from research into non-Aboriginal attitudes in Canada – a country with a history of colonial development and conflict similar to Australia's in important ways – would be likely to crop up in this country. That is, we were testing a hypothesis. We have worked very hard to confine the bias of our research — although we knew that there is a structural bias just in getting non-Aboriginal people to talk about Aboriginal reconciliation. In a sense, our research explores just what different people’s ideological assumptions about that topic might be.

Curmudgeon and Hasbeen, the views you express are very similar to what several participants in our focus groups (both the pilot groups in Australia and the more developed study in Canada) have said — although it is worth noting that the medium of online debate encourages greater self-assurance and certainty of opinion than the standard focus group setup. While you both seem more skeptical about reconciliation as a policy project than I am, so were some of the participants in this study. We are trying to represent their views fairly, too.

Skeptical, supportive, apathetic, or just profoundly uncertain: the participants in this study consistently made use of that key grammatical feature we describe, a version of ‘us and them.’ It assumes a division between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, sure — but we are especially interested in the way it seeks to unite the non- Indigenous population, and wants all of ‘us’ to work out what ‘we’ stand for in the reconciliation negotiation with ‘them.’