LITTLE BLACK DUCK: Pining for an end to a gutless gallery

CAPTION: National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union Paul Howes, who’s book Confessions of a Faceless Man provides a raw account of the 2010 election, but fails to mention Aboriginal Australia and the policies affecting the nation’s most vulnerable people. (AAP IMAGE/ALAN PORRITT)

NATIONAL: NICOLE WATSON’S journey through her library of political commentary reveals a troubling lack of insight into Aboriginal affairs.

As I read his latest offering I was taken back to the days of the Hawke government and felt a pained longing. It wasn’t for the Silver Bodgie of course, but for candid and informed writing.

Ramsey’s columns about issues of the day were often replete with the history of the ALP and insights into the personalities within the Hawke and Keating governments.

Ramsey isn’t one to mince his words and the reader is the richer for it. His description of Kevin Rudd as a ‘PPP – prissy, precious pr…’ might well be remembered for longer than many of his political achievements.

Ramsey was just as frank and insightful when he turned his mind to Aboriginal affairs.

He wasn’t afraid to criticise the late Charles Perkins for his role in the Aboriginal Development Commission’s generous funding of an Aboriginal social club, including a proposed grant for the purchase of poker machines.

Likewise, he didn’t hold back from naming the Northern Territory Intervention as Howard’s ‘Tampa Two’.

Ramsey not only believed Indigenous affairs to be within his brief as a political journalist. It was also a responsibility that he appears to have taken seriously.

Whether one agrees with his opinions or not, it is difficult to deny that Ramsey actually took the time to listen to Aboriginal voices.

Sadly, most commentators these days either neglect black voices entirely, or consider that Indigenous affairs begins and ends with the views of Noel Pearson.

A case in point is the recent commentary on the ALP’s disastrous performance in the 2010 election.

Most commentators sheet home at least some of the blame to Kevin Rudd, while at the same time conceding that Labor’s woes reflect a poverty of substance and conviction.

Not one has questioned how Labor could claim the mantle of ‘fairness’, while at the same time erasing the most disadvantaged Australians from its election campaign.

ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy’s book, The Party Thieves is an erudite account of Rudd’s downfall, Gillard’s rise and the subsequent election.

Cassidy’s revelations of Rudd’s character flaws, in particular Rudd’s deluded attempts to control the media, are fascinating.

But after a brief reference to the apology on page nine, Indigenous people disappear into the ether.

Cassidy doesn’t even acknowledge our disappearance, let alone attempt to interrogate it.

In Confessions of a Faceless Man, the National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Paul Howes, offers a raw account of the 2010 election.

It is an entertaining gaze into the daily life of a Labor apparatchik.

Howes is committed to the idea of a just society, as evidenced by his pleas for a humane approach to asylum seekers and his call for Labor MPs to be given a conscience vote on gay marriage.

But Indigenous affairs is conspicuously absent from Howes’ picture of a just Australia.

It is only towards the end of the campaign, when Howes gloomily resigns himself to the likelihood of an Abbott government that he discovers reconciliation, but it’s self-serving: “Social policy, the environment, a republic, reconciliation, equality – all would take a back seat as an Abbott-led government slowly but surely reshaped the country in the man’s own 1950s, white, monarchist image.”

As for the ALP’s performance on reconciliation, there is a deafening silence.

Veteran political journalist and author Mungo MacCallum’s account of the 2010 election, Punch and Judy, is by far the wittiest.

Unlike Howes, MacCallum at least tries to be inclusive of Indigenous people.

What a pity that he does so with breathtaking ignorance.

I almost choked when MacCallum claimed, on page sixteen, that Tony Abbott “has an excellent relationship with Aboriginal Australians”.

MacCallum is a talented, intelligent writer and it is impossible that he would be unaware of Abbott’s complicity in the attacks on Aboriginal people during the Howard era, which ranged from slashing millions from the Indigenous affairs budget, destroying ATSIC and finally, the Northern Territory Intervention.

Likewise, it is inconceivable that MacCallum would be unaware of the loathing within Indigenous Australia for the Howard government, which now extends to Tony Abbott.

As it turns out, however, what is really important and what gives Abbott “credibility on Indigenous issues” is his relationship with one person – Noel Pearson.

While discussing Abbott’s opposition to the Wild Rivers legislation, MacCallum goes on to claim that “no politician in the federal parliament was better qualified to argue the Aboriginal case for Cape York. Not only was Abbott a friend of the Pearsons, he was also a regular visitor to the Peninsula….”

When, pray tell, did Noel Pearson come to represent the entire spectrum of Aboriginal opinion?

Almost 40 years ago, Gough Whitlam described Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people as the “litmus test” by which the rest of the world would judge us.

Those sentiments remain true today.

But Aboriginal people have become more than just the litmus test of Australia’s international standing. We’re the Gillard government’s Luminol too; that nifty blue chemical that reveals the bloodstains left behind in a crime scene.

At least, we would be, if the nation’s political journalists were really doing their jobs.

In a 2003 column, Ramsey described journalism as a “diminished culture”.

He claimed that, “some of us want to cut our throats at times. Some of the readers wish we would”.

Not even Ramsey would seriously suggest that anyone take things that far.

But it’s about time that Australia’s political commentators developed a taste for gumption and brought some intelligent debate to an area too few take seriously.

• Nicole Watson is a Murri lawyer and researcher with the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is a monthly columnist for Tracker.