The Guardian 17 October, 2007
Editorial
Howard’s preamble to dispossession
In 1999 during the lead up to the referendum to make Australia a republic with an Australian head of state, John Howard put forward proposed changes to the preamble to the Constitution. The changes he put forward were not only inadequate, but implicitly racist, failing to recognise Australia as a multicultural and secular society, and on the question of Indigenous Australians ignoring the prior ownership of the land and resources by the Indigenous people.
It was voted down by a large majority in the referendum. At the time Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, in his Vincent Lingiari lecture stated, "All Australians should reject outright any preamble to our national Constitution that rejects the true status of Indigenous Australians as the custodians and owners of the land, and suggests that we are nothing more than gardeners at the station homestead".
In his proposed changes then, Howard spoke of Indigenous Australians as having a "kinship with their land", a hollow but insidious reference that deliberately exempted recognition of their prior ownership of and traditional relationship with their lands. Its objective was to eliminate any concept of land rights. The complete dispossession of Indigenous Australians — a dispossession Howard has believed in and worked toward all his political life -- would have been officially stamped in the Constitution.
Now, just prior to the announcement of the date for the federal election, which will take place on November 24, Howard has floated a proposed referendum for changes to the preamble in the guise of recognising the rights of Indigenous Australians that are as equally hollow and insidious as those of 1999.
Said Howard, in his speech to the right wing think tank, the Sydney Institute when raising the proposed changes last week; "This new reconciliation I’m talking about starts from the premise that individual rights and national sovereignty prevail over group rights." So, he has dismissed the most disadvantaged Australians as a "group" along with their 60,000 years of history and culture.
He continued, "This is reconciliation based on a new paradigm of positive affirmation, of unified Australian citizenship, and of balance …" This is the language of the fascist-minded One Nation party, whose policies Howard has been running with: his agenda is assimilation and obliteration of culture i.e. genocide.
He claims there has been "a rights agenda that led ultimately and inexorably toward welfare dependency and on a philosophy of separateness rather than a shared destiny". John Howard’s politics have been based on "separateness"; social division along racial and religious lines. Divide and rule is his guiding premise.
A bit further on we are given another example of the One Nation mantra — "We are not a federation of tribes. We are one great tribe; one Australia".
Howard’s spin doctors have recognised that there is widespread public support for reconciliation, hence a statement about recognising Indigenous rights that is no recognition at all. He refuses still to utter that one simple word — "Sorry". And experts have pointed out that a change to the Constitution preamble would have little or no impact on the legal rights of Indigenous Australians.
Howard says of the remarks in the speech: "In reality they are little more than affirmation of well-worn liberal conservative ideas." He goes on to make a puerile appeal to nationalism — "In the end my appeal to the broader Australian community [read voters] on this is simpler and far less eloquent. It goes to love of country and a fair go."
A fair go? Part of a report card of the Howard record for the past 11 years would go like this: after his election in 1996 he begins his attack on hard-won indigenous gains by cutting funding to indigenous legal services, followed by a litany of destruction and land grabs, including the dismantling of the democratically elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission; mutual obligation in welfare — failed; stolen generations report — ignored; deaths in custody royal commission recommendations — not implemented; Northern Territory intervention — a massive land grab; health services — decimated, with rates of HIV AIDS and diabetes in Indigenous communities at epidemic proportions.
In addition life expectancy and infant mortality rates in Indigenous communities are at third world levels at best because of his government’s policies. As the saying goes, "A man forced to change his will, holds the same opinion still".