Interviewed by Dwayne Jeffries of Hope Media on behalf of Better Balanced Futures, representing the faith communities in Australia which HCA is a part of.
DWAYNE:
Noel Pearson, thank you for taking the time to speak with me, and the various faith communities around Australia.
NOEL PEARSON:
Thank you for the opportunity.
DWAYNE:
Faith communities represent not just a significant part of Australia but are also committed to doing what is best for our First Nations peoples. As a leader in your community, what are the biggest issues facing Indigenous Australians today, and has that list changed over your time in public service?
NOEL PEARSON:
OK, there are problems that we share with other disadvantaged peoples, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and their problems of poverty and disadvantage, intergenerational welfare dependency, and all of the problems that come with that. But there are also issues that we face that arise from our history as Indigenous peoples in this country, and our experience through 230 years of British colonisation of Australia, commencing in 1788 – the dispossession of our people from our homelands, the removal of people and children from families, our various experiences on the frontier, and in the aftermath of the frontier. All of these things represent a legacy in the present, that historical treatment, and we are trying to tackle the legacy of both.
DWAYNE:
Is there anything specifically that faith communities can do, that isn’t being done yet?
NOEL PEARSON:
Well, I was actually born in the Lutheran mission, in Cape York Peninsula, as was my father, and my grandfather had been removed to a mission, to the mission in Cape Bedford, in 1899, and the mission had begun with the Lutherans, a young 19-year old missionary came out from Bavaria, and, had he not established the mission, we would have been done for, I think, historically. He found our people in pretty dire straits, there’d been a gold rush at Cooktown that had been quite devastating for the Aboriginal people of the region, and he established a mission to which he committed himself for 50 years. And, without him, my historical assessment would be that we would have been, in a, you know, we wouldn’t have been able to rebuild families inside the mission, we wouldn’t have kept our languages, we wouldn’t have kept our cultures, even though the experiences they had, you know, being drawn in from multiple places around Queensland, far-flung places, removed from their homelands and their families… Nevertheless, they reconstructed a new community at Cape Bedford Mission and that’s been my home ever since.
DWAYNE:
As combined faith communities we also have constituents with heavily invested members from the Hindu community, Islamic communities Buddhist communities and many others what invitation would you like to offer or encouragement as we re considering our role as believers in supporting First Nations Australians?
NOEL PEARSON:
Oh, it’s the empowerment of our people. I think this is the number one problem in our communities. We are severely disempowered. We were locked out of opportunity for a long time. Throughout the 20th century, you know, we were locked out of opportunities for better education. My father went to grade three, in the mission, when he had the intelligence to do better. It’s just, unlike America, we just didn’t offer many educational opportunities beyond a rudimentary primary education, until the 1960s, and then the Lutheran Church opened up access to its colleges, in southeast Queensland which is where I ended up going to high school, at a boarding school run by the Lutherans in Brisbane, and it opened up all of the world of opportunity to me that my family could not provide for me. And then as a result of that I completed year 12 in Brisbane, as did my brother, and so many other children from the remote communities, and I went on to university in Sydney to become a lawyer. But it was all because the church was the first mover in this, long before the government provided scholarships actually, the churches were providing opportunities for Aboriginal children. But I really contrast it with the United States and North America, where black colleges were established you know in the early part of the 20th century, in fact, in the late 19th century, there were making provision for schools for African Americans and so on. Whereas in Australia it was very, very late 1960s, and 1970s when education became available, and the churches were at the forefront of it.
DWAYNE:
Let us go to the voice, specifically. Your proposition is that the voice, in its current form, is the best way forward to address that disadvantage you have already spoken of. Why is this voice the answer?
NOEL PEARSON:
Firstly I would say it is crucial to the empowerment process that we be able to make representations and give good advice so that we get better policies. And, if we get better policies and better responses from the government, we’ll get better outcomes. So the idea of an advisory committee, do you think that’s really beyond the capacity of Australians to understand and support? I don’t understand how there could be a scare campaign around an advisory committee. The MPs that we elect to the parliament are still the ones that decide what the policies are, and what the laws are, all we’re doing with the voice is empowering Indigenous people to make representations of those bodies.
DWAYNE:
Critics of the voice of course challenged the idea on the grounds that one group of people can’t possibly represent the combined nations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around the country what is your view on that?
NOEL PEARSON:
OK, I come from a community, right? I am ex-mission. And Hope Vale would need to speak at the local level, would need a voice at the local level, so we can sort out the local issues to do with children, education, health, infrastructure, housing, and everything else at the local level. We will have the opportunity to work with the parliament, following a successful referendum and we’ll have an opportunity to make sure the local footprint of the voice at the Hope Vale level, at the Yuendumu level, at the Wilcannia level at the La Perouse level, we will have a mechanism to make sure that those local communities that actually have to do the on the ground change, you know if you are going to close the gap, you can’t close it in Canberra, you gotta close it in La Perouse, you gotta close it in Dubbo… I can tell you after 20-plus years of advocating specific programs, and specific initiatives, to help families. We have a Family Responsibilities Commission, because of the collapse of responsibility caused by welfare, we actually have a Commission that says the elders can step in and oblige parents to send their kids to school, to look after their house, to ensure that you know parents and adult are abiding by the law, and ensuring that the housing tenancy is properly looked after. We have to do that, because that is combating the problems of welfare, and you know it took me and my colleagues in Cape York to fight for this reform, and it was so hard, it took a long time, and we got a response, and we are really happy with what is happening. But you know that is just one community, not everybody has the ability to force the change, and force the reform, and when we have the voice we are going to be in a position to ask ourselves the question: ‘What impact… does that empower people, or does it just empower the people providing the programme?’. And this is going to be a great thing. We are going to save money, and we are going to use money more purposefully because I believe if you support the family to rebuild, you will get better results. But the one thing you can’t avoid doing is you have to put some responsibility back into their hands.
DWAYNE:
OK let us go to October 15, the day after the referendum. The nation has voted ‘yes’. What is the timeline, what happens next?
NOEL PEARSON:
Oh, I am sure we will then need to work on the legislation. The parliament will have to develop the legislation, and pass legislation, and we will need to work with them on the creation of a bill, to design it as best possible, and that will take some time. But once we implement the structure, I think this whole thing will play out, and we’ll start to see the benefit of having programmes, having policies, not just that are better designed, but that have got our skin in the game. One of the problems at the moment is that the government does everything, the government takes responsibility for everything, they have to account for everything, and we just sit back and judge, we criticise. Whereas the future will be: oh, it’s the government and the community that are now in this, and we’re both jointly responsible, and you can jointly blame us. I heard a young leader from Kimberley say this three weeks ago, and it really really, really struck me, he said “you can blame us, but first give us the responsibility, first give us the voice”. And I think that will be the change after we do this referendum. You know this is a time for faith. Have faith in us. We are a good people. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, my people, we’re a good people. Don’t be fearful of us. Have to believe in us, that is the one thing we need from our fellow Australians – some faith, hope, and belief in our capacity to finally tackle our problems.
DWAYNE:
If it is a ‘no’, how do we go about solving the disadvantage, that we are still dealing with today, before the referendum?
NOEL PEARSON:
Well ‘no’ will be a continuation of the present. A situation where every year the Prime Minister goes into the parliament and tells us ‘Oh we haven’t made progress on closing this gap, we haven’t made progress on closing this gap, and we haven’t made progress on closing this gap’… we’ll have a continuation of that.
DWAYNE:
You don’t see any other future?
NOEL PEARSON:
Well, what future have we had over the last say 26 years – 21 of which have been, well we have had a coalition government? 21 years. If the status quo was ever going to produce the right results, we have had 21 years to prove it, and it hasn’t happened. So those who say ‘Oh keep it as it is, keep the status quo’, where is their evidence that that is ever gonna change anything because it hasn’t so far?
DWAYNE:
Noel, we are coming to the end of our time together, thank you for it. The conversation over the last weeks and months hasn’t always been healthy. Come October 15, a fork in the road, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the 15th, how do we come together as a nation after all of that, and form a
straight line together?
NOEL PEARSON:
You know where the first fork in the road was? In 1901, we were excluded from the constitution, the constitution of our own country. That was the source of the problem. We are going to fix it now, we are going to close the gap, we are going to put that one missing piece back into the constitution, that recognises – these are the words: “In recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as the first peoples of Australia”. That is the kind of keystone of the Commonwealth that is missing, and in 2023 we are going to do something we didn’t do in 1901. In 1901 we were excluded from the constitution, we now have an opportunity with this referendum to put that keystone back into our constitution and complete a united Australia.
DWAYNE:
Noel Pearson, thank you so much for chatting with us.
NOEL PEARSON:
Thank you for having me.
