Bad old Australia

First among these voices was that of Pauline Hanson, a fish and chip shop owner and mother of four, who after being expelled from Howard's own Liberal Party was elected as the independent member for Oxley, a predominantly white working class seat to the south of Brisbane. In her maiden speech to parliament, Hanson denounced what she labeled the Aboriginal industry: "Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, money and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged."(5) While [John Howard] did not directly endorse these sentiments, he made no effort to counter them. In its first year of office, the Howard government cut a massive $400 million from the Aboriginal affairs budget. By April 1997, Hanson's anti-Aboriginal crusade, which was significantly articulated to anti-Asian sentiment and an anti-global economic agenda, had attracted sufficient support to warrant the founding of a new party, Pauline Hanson's One Nation. This third political force permanently altered the face of Australian public life, capturing up to twenty percent of the vote in subsequent state and national elections. More than any other event since the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, [Cathy Freeman]'s victory was imagined to have driven the nation toward an overarching synthesis of black and white. Geoff Clark, Chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, proclaimed: "If she's running for justice and she's running for us, I think we're winning."(14) Similarly, Kim Beazley, then leader of the opposition Labor Party, which only weeks before had crossed Aboriginal leaders on a Native Title deal with the Queensland government, declared: "For me, that was four hundred meters of national reconciliation."(15) Amid the chorus of praise, the activist [Ray Jackson] offered one of the few dissenting voices: "Reconciliation in this country has a hell of a long way to go. OK, it was great that we had a bit in the opening ceremony; we had a bit on the closing ceremony; Cathy done us proud, as did our others. But I didn't see it actually advanced reconciliation one millimeter...What about Cathy's grandmother being taken? There's still no apology. We're still being spat on, we're still being slapped in the eye." Over the course of the following year, the focus of white Australian racial preoccupation would shift from indigenous people to refugees -- "boat people" detained in privately run prison camps and denied all juridical status. But the saga of Australia's reconciliation debacle is worth recalling as it demonstrates the discrepant political valences such a concept can acquire in different parts of the world. Certainly in Australia the reconciliation process has not supplied the basis for a Renaissance, for the New Australia that [Paul Keating] once proclaimed it would deliver. To what extent South Africa's experience of reconciliation can undergird a program of continent-wide renewal remains to be seen. But whether the prospect of an African Renaissance is rhetoric or reality, it contrasts neatly the unsorry plight of Australia's confrontation with its racial present and past.