Constitutional change will divide not unite the nation Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor AUSTRALIAN SEPTEMBER 20, 2014 AUSTRALIA stands on the brink of making a terrible mistake. That mistake is introducing ethnic distinctions into our Constitution and inevitably into the nature of our citizenship. It would be a grievous error for Australia to pass by referendum a new preamble to the Constitution that acknowledges Aborigines while it does not similarly acknowledge all the other Australians; it would be a mistake to set up a new Aboriginal consultative body under the Constitution; and it would be an absolute disaster to establish racially or ethnically reserved seats in parliament. There is no doubt that throughout Australian history Aborigines suffered terrible injustice. Australian history, like that of all nations, contains plenty of good and plenty of bad. John Howard is right to hail the grandeur of the Australian achievement in nation building. Noel Pearson is right to draw our attention once more to the capricious cruelty and killings that occurred often in colonial times. I am not someone who denies historical injustice done to Aborigines. But you cannot redeem historical injustice by creating ethnic divisions for the descendants of that injustice in a society based on equality of citizenship. It is difficult to oppose these initiatives because so much goodwill lies behind them. But history and international relations teach us that wherever citizenship is linked to ethnicity it is a poor outcome at best, and often catastrophic. Any attempt to make indigenous people “super Australians” would be bound to end in their becoming “not really normal Australians”. It would insert division into a matter, civic status, where in principle and in practice absolute equality is infinitely the best solution. Like every decent Australian, I want only good things for Aborigines. But I am an old-fashioned liberal on race. I think a person’s race is the least interesting thing about them. I don’t want the government to pay any constitutional attention to someone’s race, or ethnicity, except to make discrimination on grounds of race illegal. Like Martin Luther King, I want every man and woman to “be judged on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin”. We all come to these issues with our unique perspectives. How did I come to these views? The first time I met an Aborigine I was nine years old. Raphael came from around Temora somewhere, and I wonder now whether he wasn’t part of the Stolen Generations. I have no idea how he came to be at a Catholic day school in inner-western Sydney. For the year he was at our school he was my best friend. He was very good at ball games the rest of us decided because he came from the country “where they stone the crows”. After Raphael left our school my best mate, Andrew, was a Chinese kid from New Guinea. His house was a bit more commodious than the upstairs flat my family lived in but I was surprised his family wasted the precious bounty of a back yard by growing vegetables. When I changed schools my closest playground collaborator was Richard, from Singapore, whose ethnic background I suspect was Eurasian. These were commonplace friendships, but it never occurred to me that any of my mates was any different, or could ever be any different, from me or from each other. We were all Australians, though that hardly needed mentioning. When I became active in politics at high school and university the context was the conflicts of the Cold War. I was powerfully attracted by the civic ethos of the US, that once you were a citizen then you were absolutely equal, in civic terms, to everybody else who was a citizen. Although as an undergraduate I hadn’t travelled beyond New Zealand, we cast our arguments in sweeping, global terms. I always vastly preferred the US to Europe, I always preferred the US to Britain, because in the US there was no hierarchy of descent. It didn’t matter what your father did. It mattered what you did. There were no lords and ladies, no inherited titles, no racial distinctions in the civic status of Americans. Of course the US had terrible racism in its history. In the institution of slavery it had denied absolutely the humanity of African Americans. When it came to giving justice to African Americans, it didn’t make a special constitutional provision. It did the most important and effective thing it could. It made clear that all the provisions of the constitution, and all the rights, privileges and obligations of citizenship, applied equally to blacks as well as to everybody else. The mechanism of integration was common citizenship. This did not solve all the problems overnight. But now the US has a black President. It might have had one as early as 1996. White House officials from Bill Clinton’s presidency have told me they were terrified that Colin Powell might be the Republican challenger that year. The US also has a couple of state governors who are Indian, another who is black. Citizenship has been a powerful engine of inclusion. In Australia, we tend to make our most epic achievements with little symbolic accompaniment. Indeed, you could almost say there is a direct, inverse relationship between public hand wringing and private achievement. Almost nothing in Australian history has been as successful as Asian immigration. As recently as 50 years ago, in the mid-1960s, Australia had a White Australia policy. Asian Australians had been few and had suffered a great deal of discrimination, some of it violent and murderous. Once Alice Springs had been majority ethnic Chinese. From the late 70s, less than 40 years ago, Australia began accepting large numbers of Asian immigrants. Almost from the first words I wrote for public consumption I have strongly supported this policy. It has resulted, incidentally, in a kind of benign cultural genocide. The old race of “Austral-Britons” is gone forever. It was not a bad race and it produced a good culture. Don’t think this was not a real identity. National leaders as recent as John Curtin and Robert Menzies called Australia a British nation, or even more explicitly, “a nation of Britishers”. We are certainly not that now. The old Austral-Britons have been supplanted by a much more diverse range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I don’t feel at all unhappy about that because race and ethnicity are the least interesting or important things about a person. It is the content of their character that counts. In 40 years the racial and ethnic identity of Australia has been completely transformed. This has all happened with an astonishing absence of friction and strife. The footling and trivial activities of multicultural agencies have had almost nothing to do with this success. The integrating civic institution has been citizenship, while the society itself has been predominantly easygoing and accepting. Given the astonishing success of universal, equal citizenship in Australia, it is the height of folly to trifle with it. Much more important, it is wrong in principle. It would also be wrong in practice. The road of symbolic gestures has been pretty much a dry ditch for Aboriginal policy. The Australian way with symbols is to find something minimally agreeable and barely ever mention it again. Anzac Day is almost the only exception. The real purpose of symbols is to be a background framework that the society can then basically forget about. Symbols can never achieve policy outcomes. Aboriginal policy is full of symbols. We walked across the Harbour Bridge. There was an apology for the Stolen Generations. For some, there’s a Sorry Day. There are endless acknowledgments of traditional owners, welcome to country ceremonies and so on. But symbols have produced little improvement in Aboriginal life. The smart response may be to wonder whether symbols are of much use. Instead those concerned with Aboriginal policy respond to the failure of symbolism with ever greater efforts at more symbolism. A lot of these symbolic gestures are virtuous. But they can be harmful if they convince Aborigines, and Aboriginal leaders, that the road to betterment is symbolism. Our Constitution is uniquely ill-suited to symbolism. A new preamble to the Constitution, reflecting progressive views of today, is an absolute folly. It is full of real danger because even if it contains words to the effect that it must have no influence on how the Constitution is interpreted, it is virtually impossible to stop activist judges reading things into any part of the Constitution. Any grandiloquent word in any constitution becomes in time a licence for judges to make law. That is profoundly anti-democratic. But my objection is more basic and more at the level of principle. I don’t want the Constitution, or its preamble, to mention one group of Australians. In itself, this creates categories of Australians. It is true that the Constitution already contains two provisions that make reference to race. One could be got rid of easily and I would support that as a single, discrete referendum question. The other allows a government to make laws that affect Aborigines. Many of the best constitutions around the world contain anachronistic clauses. The US constitution empowers Washington to regulate commerce with Indian tribes and provides for Indians who don’t pay tax to be excluded from civic life. The Americans have never bothered to remove these clauses. Australia could keep the anachronistic clause that allows Canberra to make laws that help Aborigines or it could get rid of that clause and replace it with something better worded, or get the states and territories to refer their relevant powers to the commonwealth. But even here we are remedying a problem that does not exist. The commonwealth parliament does not make laws designed to hurt Aborigines, just as it doesn’t make laws designed to hurt Parsis or Irish Australians or the disabled or scientists. It is wrong, misguided and dangerous to put categories of people into the Constitution or its preamble. There is nothing that we would want to do in relation to Aboriginal policy that cannot be done under the existing Constitution. Therefore, we shouldn’t change the Constitution. If it would be helpful for a new Aboriginal consultative body to be set up, as Pearson argues, then it should be set up. There is no need to make that part of the Constitution. The Constitution belongs to all Australians. Nobody who does not make a racist argument should be accused of racism in this debate. The Australian people should not be intimidated, fooled or bamboozled into changing their Constitution. It is axiomatic that once a constitution changes the nature of its relationship with one group of its citizens, by that fact alone it changes the nature of its relationship with all its citizens. The Australian Constitution is exceptionally good partly because it is so functional and non-symbolic, and because it is hard to change. It is not devilishly hard to change. You just need a majority of people in a majority of states. If we believe in democracy, that is pretty reasonable. You might conclude that the defeated proposals to change the Constitution would not have improved Australia. These changes reside in that category. Numerous Liberal Party figures, some very senior, have told me of their extreme ambivalence or, privately, their outright opposition to the constitutional changes proposed. They haven’t spoken publicly because of their goodwill towards Aborigines, their respect for people involved in the debate and their desire not to provoke public disunity in their own party. And for some there may be a fear of being labelled racist, which happens far too often in these debates. But what are Liberals for if not to defend the universal liberal principles that underlie the Constitution? Are there no liberals left in Australia? Are there no liberals left in the Liberal Party? Changing the Constitution is a fateful business. Some ideas are worse than others. The idea of Senate seats reserved for people of one ethnic background, whether achieved through an ethnic limited electoral roll or a gerrymandered new senator-electing micro (in terms of population) district is offensive to every basis of universal democracy and citizenship. No conscientious liberal could support that. If there is to be a referendum, the no case should be funded equally to the yes case. If the idea for change is compelling it can survive robust debate. There have been moves in the Liberal Party to make the equal funding of yes and no cases in any referendum party policy. This is the sort of provision Tony Abbott once would have defended with vigour. Which brings us to the question of Abbott. In a recent speech he nominated multiculturalism and paid parental leave as two issues where he has had a change of heart during his time in politics. In fact, his biggest change has been on the Constitution. For a long time he believed the only change to the Constitution should be to expressly forbid the foreign affairs power from eradicating any states’ rights. Now he countenances the most radical constitutional change in our history. Why? I believe there is an element of moral greatness in Abbott and his support for these changes springs from a feeling of solidarity with Aborigines and the deep and good friendships he has established with some Aboriginal leaders. But he is going too far. An inflamed heart often produces a clouded mind. Or, less dramatically, sentiment and sentimentality almost never offer a good guide to policy. I want Aborigines to succeed. I want all Australians to succeed. But this does not require, and in fact will be hurt by, introducing constitutional distinctions. I have almost infinite respect for Pearson and have learned a great deal from his writings. But I disagree with him profoundly that Australia should conceive of itself as one nation and two peoples. In his latest Quarterly Essay he says he is not tackling the legal basis of Australian sovereignty but braver souls than he will do so in the future. This is one of many reasons we should stop constitutional change now. If these constitutional changes go through, that will not be the end of the matter. It won’t complete the Constitution. There will be new claims, new symbols, new divisions. It’s better to stop this business now. Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land, earlier this week. Picture: Jack Tran Source: Supplied
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:50:29 +0000
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