14. Reconciliation

Author: Peter Read

In 1980, ‘reconciliation’ meant not much more than ‘strengthening relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, for the benefit of all Australians.’¹

As we now understand the term, ‘Reconciliation’ as a formal national policy grew out of Recommendation 339 of the 1990 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody:

Government acted quickly in establishing the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation of 25 Indigenous and non-Indigenous members. Though it was not the first of the government-sponsored advisory bodies that has been established (then abolished) by federal governments, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation had the clearest charter, sharpest intellects and most experienced executives of any such previous advisory body.³ By the end of its first three-year term, it was clear that a great deal more was expected of the term than the mere ‘improvement of relations’. Foremost of the extended expectations was Truth-Telling, whose classic connection with Reconciliation was made by Governor-General Sir William Deane in 1996:

The Reconciliation Council’s designated span was short (nine years) but its achievements remarkable. Of these, perhaps the most striking was the declaration:

Despite Deane’s advice, Australian governments have been markedly disinclined to investigate their own treatment of Indigenous peoples. Bringing Them Home, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria have been the only enquiries to oppose the withering trend to forget. It is in such a climate that a policy of Reconciliation (and those programs of action that look to improving the future rather than uncovering the past) will flourish.

The Howard Government showed little interest in the Reconciliation Council’s bold recommendations except measures for ‘Practical Reconciliation’; but the most important outcome of these was the establishment of Reconciliation Australia as an important element of Closing the Gap. Though its interest was initially to establish partnerships with Indigenous businesses, in 2006 there emerged proposals for Reconciliation Action Plans to be undertaken by workplaces large and small, from the largest corporations to the smallest primary schools.

These processes, now more refined and demanding, are still followed by Reconciliation Australia. ‘Relationships, Respect and Opportunities’, are the determining principles to ‘provide tangible and substantive benefits for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, increasing economic activity and supporting First Nations self-determination’.⁶

Participation in a Reconciliation Action Plan works like this. An organisation may submit a proposal to Reconciliation Australia (RA) or may be invited to do so. In response to the invitation an Expression of Interest returns which, if approved, will be registered with Reconciliation Australia. Drafting and the submitting of an Action Plan that follows the appropriate templates and procedures comes next. In consultation with stakeholders, a statement follows of the minimum required action and deliverables including a Vision Statement. The draft goes then to the Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) portal for approval. ‘Strategic feedback’ follows, sometimes back and forth three or four times. Finally, the organisation will upload its now ‘officially accredited’ RAP, to promote, publish, draw the attention of staff and begin the implementation of its Plan.

All such initial Plans are known as Reflect the first step of what may be a four-part, 10- or 12-year journey. At the end of the one-year period, after monthly tracking and independent reviews, the organisation is required to complete and submit the Impact Measurement Questionnaire to Reconciliation Australia, to reflect upon its progress, and, if desired, to submit a two or three-year follow-up RAP for endorsement. This second stage is known as the Innovate RAP. Following its completion, it may then proceed to the even more complex and exacting Plans, Stretch and Elevate.⁷

Reconciliation and its critique

Who could find fault with such demanding but worthy proposals? In fact, the reservations are diverse.

Is ‘reconciliation’ even the right word? That point was put to me recently by a young Indigenous Tasmanian artist whom I was interviewing for a National Library Indigenous oral history series. ‘Reconciliation’, he argued, ‘is between two parties, maybe two marriage partners, who have been at peace, then in dispute, and now wish to resolve their tensions through a process of reconciliation. That’s not like us. You imply that there once was peace between us. But there never was. You have always been at war with us. What we need now’, he continued, ‘is something else - maybe an Indigenous Bill of Rights, a Compact, a Treaty, a Makaratta’. But not Reconciliation!

Who wants to be reconciled? Corporation managers cannot assume that certain non-Indigenous staff may be reluctant to embrace a RAP simply out of ignorance. They may think it unnecessary or feel themselves suffering from ‘reconciliation burnout’. They may feel brow-beaten, or that Indigenous people form only a tiny minority, or that they, as non-Indigenous staff, are being made to suffer for past malfeasance.

Even sympathetic and well-informed staff members may feel themselves drawn to the words of the poet Bruce Dawe, himself a strong supporter of Aboriginal rights, when he wrote:

Indigenous people can feel uncomfortable too. Some areas of government that have a high proportion of Indigenous staff (like the Departments of Aboriginal Affairs or the several thousand community-controlled bodies registered under the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2006) should feel confidence in their identity, within a critical mass of Indigenous people. Corporations with a smaller number will have to consider the ‘cultural safety’ of their employees. Indigenous staff must be reassured that they are not, as it was described to me during research for this article, just tokens to be wheeled out on the right occasion. They may ask themselves, ‘Yes, I help to make up the three per cent staff ratio promised in the Reconciliation Action Plan and I’m paraded round in Reconciliation Week. Tick! But what happens to me when my training program runs out?’

The well-intentioned may ask of an Indigenous staff member, ‘What’s the Aboriginal word for Redfern?’ or ‘What’s the difference between Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week?’ The more hurtful questions will include ‘Why do you bother to call yourself Indigenous when you’re not even brown?’ or ‘How come you get a Sorry Day holiday every time you go to a funeral?’ Too many questions directed to just a few Indigenous staff members can be anything from bothersome to insulting. An Indigenous critic quoted by Reconciliation Australia itself, stated:

Indigenous people demand Truth-Telling:

Senior management will have to balance the RAP with their own company objectives, efficiencies and protocols. There will be some sticky issues. Some Indigenous employees may want to live and work on Country: can their equal prospects for promotion be allowed for, or conversely, will team efficiency be impaired when some of the staff prefer to meet on Teams? A road-building corporation, say, must balance its labour force of mainly efficient itinerant workers with local Indigenous young people, some of whom may be starting their first job. Should junior Indigenous staff be allowed or encouraged to attend more senior meetings such as with the New South Wales Coalition of Peak Aboriginal Organisations? Does compliance with RAP consume too much company time?

The Indigenous Professor Marcia Langton identified national Indigenous programs like the Aboriginal Health and Legal Services, Housing Associations and the Link-Up organisations as the outstanding achievements of the past half-century, none of which had anything to do with Reconciliation programs. Rather, they were the fruits of the Indigenous leaders who conceived them, fought for them and now control them. ‘That’s a tremendous achievement’, she declared, ‘in world terms for Indigenous people’.¹⁰

We can identify some theoretical objections to Reconciliation programs too. Their tendency to project improvements in the future rather than to uncover a difficult past, (certainly in Australia where governments have been so reluctant to establish Truth-Telling commissions) oddly echoes the reluctance of international Truth and Reconciliation Commissions overseas to shame, punish, or even name perpetrators of violence against minorities. Criticism of the very principle of Reconciliation has strengthened in countries like post-Pinochet Chile, where survivors and critics began to question what seemed to be their government’s strategy of avoidance of difficult issues.

To some, Reconciliation offered no more than a hoped-for utopia supposed to undo the anger and resentment and encourage forgetting in order to build a better future. Psychologists concede that reliving the past can re-traumatise, say, a Stolen Generations child, but they affirm that memory must be part of the process if the past is to be put behind.¹¹ Even when reparations like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land and Sea Future Fund become the centre of the reconciliation process, the deepest structural problems of society remain untouched.¹² In this way national Reconciliation has been described as a political technique whose long-term aim is to reaffirm the authority of the state.¹³ Reconciliation programs (including Reconciliation Action Plans) can, in this light, be seen as a way to avoid dealing with the past by covering it up.¹⁴

This is also the view of Professor Megan Davis, the eminent academic, constitutional lawyer and a leading author of the Uluru Statement From the Heart. She has argued for some years that Reconciliation has promised too much and achieved too little. In a point missed by most observers, the Statement from the Heart does not use the word Reconciliation once. Similarly the Victorian elders entrusted with investigating the state’s Indigenous past through their Royal Commission pointedly chose to describe their work not as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but as the Yoorrook Justice Commission.

This was no case of mere forgetfulness. Davis demands that we see Reconciliation as a historical phase now coming to an end, analogous to the now discredited era of assimilation. It was nearly ten years ago that, addressing the Solicitor-General’s inquiry into constitutional change, she proposed that:

The next era of Indigenous action was anticipated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Stage 1 of the projected Statement was to be the Referendum for the Voice to Parliament. That was to be followed by Truth-Telling (such as Yoorrook Justice Commission) and Treaty. It is these two objectives, that steered away from Reconciliation and towards a Treaty or Makaratta, that some Indigenous intellectuals like Davis saw as the natural course for Indigenous Australians. That is, the Statement from the Heart directly leads the process of Truth-Telling away from Reconciliation and towards Treaty:

Reconciliation and its champions

The failure of the Voice Referendum seems to have pushed both a national Treaty and national Truth-Telling some distance into the future. Meanwhile, active Reconciliation programs continue.

Of course, as a form of shared action and solidarity, Reconciliation has been pursued for many years. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders operated in the post-war decades as a remarkable non-government voluntary association of Reconciliation (though without officially using the word). Fifty years later the famed ‘People’s Walk for Reconciliation’ across the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a spontaneous gathering of every variety of citizen.

While it is true that the Indigenous-inspired initiatives like the Aboriginal Legal Service have much to be proud of, the government initiatives, which can certainly be described as acts of Reconciliation by the state, have also moved mountains. Aboriginal Hostels (which manages 47 culturally safe accommodation hostels for Indigenous people), Abschol (the Aboriginal training and education scheme), the Aboriginal Lands Right Act 1983 (NSW), and the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and Reconciliation Australia itself are all instances of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, inspired by schemes born within state and federal bureaucracies, working together rather than the going it alone that is implied by Treaty. Away from the state bureaucracies, the rolling out of RAPs by Reconciliation Australia has been spectacularly successful. In 2022 Reconciliation Australia’s RAP Impact Report, collecting data from 1,428 RAP organisations in the 2021-22 financial year, reported that nearly 4 million (3,743,939) people worked or studied in an organisation with a RAP. It noted a marked increase of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in leadership positions, as well as the growth in partnerships between RAP organisations, and First Nations organisations and a sustained increase in employment and procurement opportunities across the RAP network.¹⁷

Treasury and Reconciliation

As the financial base camp of the State, NSW Treasury does the heavy lifting. Worldwide and throughout the nation, it aims to promote ‘excellence in the way we manage the State’s finances and balance sheet’, and ‘to deliver innovative and strategic policy, reform and delivery based on rigorous analytics’.18 The demands made on it are enormous, including (at various points in its very recent history) Procurement, Tourism, Energy and Climate, Small Businesses, Destination NSW and Trade. Though its permanent Indigenous workforce is tiny, Treasury bears the potential to employ many more in statewide projects.

As a first venture, in 2020 Treasury began at the beginning of the RAP hierarchy, with its plan Reflect.¹⁹ The guidelines demand that ‘committing to a Reflect Reconciliation Plan’ means ‘scoping and developing relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders, deciding on your vision for reconciliation and exploring your sphere of influence.’

In March 2021, as the closing date of this first RAP approached, Treasury created its dedicated Reconciliation Delivery team to provide delivery support for the RAP and to report monthly to the Treasury leadership team on progress. It reported that 200 staff had attended actual or virtual National Reconciliation Week activities and that more than three quarters of Treasury staff had completed the SBS online training module for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Awareness. More than 150 staff attended Reconciliation Week activities in person. The jewel in the crown of achievements was that, working with all NSW Government agencies, Treasury’s Aboriginal Procurement Policy (APP) had delivered an 89 per cent ($173 million) increase in direct spend with First Nations businesses over the 2019-20 financial year, and more than tripled the number of Aboriginal-owned businesses pre-qualified as suppliers. It continued to review HR policies and procedures to identify existing anti-discrimination provisions, future needs and cultural learning needs within the organisation.

The admitted shortcomings included that:

And more generally that:

Midway through 2021 Treasury had completed its Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan and was about to begin the second, for the period 2021 to 2024.

The terms, actions and responsibilities of the succeeding plan, Innovate, were significantly greater than the first. The guidelines insist that the Plan should:

Serious planning began:

To guide and monitor these deliberations, Treasury simultaneously negotiated with a First Nations Advisory Council to advise on First Nations priorities, considerations and reconciliation programs. The membership included four independent First Nations advisors, at least one First Nations Treasury staff member, the Secretary’s delegate, and two senior executives. It approved Treasury’s obligatory statement of intent:

The advisory Council was granting no favours when in approving Treasury’s proposed ‘robust and flexible governance framework’ it reminded its officers sternly that delivering Innovate included monthly tracking, biannual reflection sessions, annual surveys and independent reviews, following the approved inclusion principles and in holding Treasury’s leaders accountable for delivering Reconciliation outcomes.²³

As Reconciliation Australia had noted, large companies can sign off RAPs but forget their responsibilities. To obviate any such tendency, Treasury next created a RAP Working Group of three ‘delivery squads’, meeting fortnightly to focus on cultural changes and reporting on its monthly meetings.

The current plan aims to increase the number of First Nations employees at Treasury, but currently only 10 employees of 747 identify as First Nations²⁴, none of whom is above the level of Director. It plans to contribute to the Premier’s Priorities for world-class public service by increasing the number of Indigenous people in senior leadership roles by 50 per cent by 2025 (to 114 from 57). It endorsed the NSW Implementation Plan for Closing the Gap 2021–22. Recommendations 6 and 29 seek to ensure that all public sector staff undertake Aboriginal cultural awareness training, and that the training include mandatory information about the impacts of past forcible removal policies and practices on Aboriginal communities.

Treasury’s extensive commitment to government to best-practice financial management had now to be balanced, through the terms of the Innovate plan, to parallel undertakings to ‘increase the number of First Nations employees at Treasury, strength its reputation as an inclusive employer, sharpen its focus on Aboriginal procurement and to contribute to self-determined social and economic prosperity for First Nations peoples and communities across New South Wales’.

Drawing up and achieving an Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan is not for the faint-hearted! The sponsors must specify the proposed fields of action divided into a number of deliverables, a timeline for completion or review, the position of the lead officer overseeing the work, and the more senior accountable officer.²⁵

For example, Treasury’s action 10 is to:

Task 10(1) is to:

The lead time for 10(1) is 2022 and 2023. The plan leader is the Executive Director, Strategic Policy, Education and Customer Service; and the accountable officer and responsible officer are the Deputy Secretary, Policy and Budget.

Treasury’s Innovate Plan contains 14 separate actions comprising 64 such deliverables.

Reconciliation now may be more important than ever.

The critics of Reconciliation may well applaud the achievements of the community-controlled Indigenous organisations: but no one should have to choose between one and the other, that is, between the separate visions of Reconciliation Australia and the Statement from the Heart.

There are several reasons. As noted, following the rejection of the Statement from the Heart, neither the prospects for a national Treaty nor a national Truth-Telling Commission look promising even in the medium term. Yet both are much more achievable through state governments or through even smaller administrative units. They are happening now. Indeed, Reconciliation Plans such as Treasury’s can be thought of an essentially state-based (small ‘t’) treaty, supervised by an umpire (Reconciliation Australia) uniting its ‘signatories’ through geographical reach and shared interests.

Secondly, agreements like the Reconciliation Action Plan allow the multitude of well-meaning non-Indigenous people, distressed by our history, strong in the desire to improve race relations, to meet and to participate in shared projects. Advancing towards a Treaty, which essentially does not involve non-Indigenous people, and the Reconciliation movement, which involves millions, surely can proceed side by side. Reconciliation Action Plans like Treasury’s direct the efforts of those who wish to share the country and its achievements towards a united Australia. It allows us all to participate.