From enforceability to feel-good : notes on the pre-history of the recent treaty debate

On 26 April 1979, Dr H.C. Coombs called together a number of friends and colleagues in Canberra to discuss a new approach to the public debate about Indigenous affairs. Five months earlier, he had circulated a memo in which he observed a faltering in the pace of reform in Aboriginal affairs. What could he and his friends do to sustain and to entrench the reforms initiated in the 1970s? One of these friends, Judith Wright, later recalled that they agreed to form the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, whose objectives would include: (i) the establishment of exclusive Commonwealth responsibility for all Aboriginal matters; (ii) pressure for a treaty as providing a kind of constitutional basis for the relationship of Aboriginal Australians to the Commonwealth and Australian society generally; and (iii) providing a focus for white political support for the Aboriginal cause. In reviewing what the Aboriginal Treaty Committee did, I want to underline the first of these objectives" the assertion of Commonwealth power over the States.