Alison Anderson, NT Minister for Aboriginal Advancement and member for Namatjira Source: The Australian
WHEN Tony Abbott told an audience including many party faithful at a dinner in Alice Springs on Saturday that Australia's first federal indigenous MP, Ken Wyatt, a Liberal, was "not a man of culture", he did not intend to cause offence.
He meant, according to a later clarification by his office, that Wyatt was indeed a man of culture, but not in the same way as high-profile Aboriginal woman and Northern Territory minister Alison Anderson.
"She's fully steeped in the traditional cultures of central Australia; she's fluent in all the ancient languages of the central desert," Abbott subsequently said.
"She is alive to all the challenges and promise of life in central Australia, and we need people like that in the national parliament if we are fair dinkum about honouring the Aboriginal contribution to the life of our country."
Although he did not say so explicitly in his speech, he was trying to set up Anderson for preselection in the vast federal seat of Lingiari, held by Labor's Warren Snowdon and covering more than 99 per cent of the Territory. Abbott wanted Anderson to become the first indigenous woman to enter federal parliament.
His failed bid the following day ended in embarrassment for him and the Country Liberal Party, and weakened the leadership of the Territory's new Chief Minister, Terry Mills, Abbott's friend and ally. But the speech, no matter its intention, did upset some people and complaints quickly emerged.
"In my experience, the one thing you never question is a person's culture," says one aggrieved attendee.
Asked about the culture remark, reported by The Australian on Tuesday, Abbott said while he was "very proud" of Wyatt, it would be terrific if, as well as having an "urban Aboriginal", federal parliament also gained an "authentic representative of the ancient cultures of central Australia".
The term "urban Aboriginal" sparked outrage, as did the notion that one Aborigine could be more "authentic" than another.
This chimed neatly with a debate emanating out of Canberra this week about a Ngambri elder, Shane Mortimer, who has launched a $6 million lawsuit against Canberra academic Don Aitkin over comments on a blog that Mortimer "looked about as Aboriginal as I do" while performing a welcome to country ceremony in August.
But in raising the question of Aboriginal identity -- and possibly giving Labor an opportunity at next year's federal election to mop up indigenous and indigenous-friendly votes -- Abbott seems to have belled a cat. His comments point to an awkward truth in Australia about the dire need for more traditional indigenous representatives at all levels of politics, an issue that was central to the conservative Territory election win in August.
The issue of who speaks for bush Aborigines taps into another recent debate in indigenous communities: who decides grog policy in remote communities?
Abbott's comments to the mostly CLP dinner audience -- a party that swept a three-term Labor government from power on the back of gains in the bush -- reveal his desire to replicate some of that success at a federal level.
In 2010, Snowdon narrowly clung on in Lingiari after the CLP's candidate became embroiled in a domestic violence scandal; if he had not, Abbott would likely be prime minister.
Labor's strategy of scare tactics at the election over public service job cuts and threats to economic growth essentially worked: the CLP failed to pick up any of the suburban Darwin seats it had targeted.
Where Labor dropped the ball was among Aborigines.
In each of the four seats where the CLP fielded traditional, cultural and, above all, locally born and reared candidates, it won against less traditional-seeming Aboriginal Labor candidates or members, often without indigenous language. The nascent Aboriginal First Nations party gained support but lacked the weight to affect the election outcome significantly.
In the Top End seat of Arafura, covering the Tiwi Islands and part of Arnhem Land, the CLP's Francis Xavier Maralampuwi, a traditional Tiwi man, beat Labor's Dean Rioli, a former AFL star.
In the seat of Arnhem, Larisa Lee, daughter of land rights activist Robert Lee, deposed the sitting Labor minister and former ABC news reader Malarndirri McCarthy.
Bess Nungarrayi Price, a traditional Warlpiri woman, born in a humpy, unseated then Labor minister Karl Hampton from the desert electorate of Stuart.
And in the red centre, Anderson, a traditional owner of Haasts Bluff and speaker of six native languages, fought off a challenge from Labor's Des Rogers, a figure with far fewer local ties, in her seat of Namatjira.
The significance of tradition, culture, language and local origins in each of these results cannot be underestimated. Nor can the decision by indigenous people to become swing voters en masse for the first time, to the extent that they determined the outcome of a major election. Asked why he won his seat, Maralampuwi says simply: "I'm a cultural man who is prominent and respected in the community.
"I direct and correct people in ceremonies -- that's why people see me as an elder. I've held many jobs on Tiwi boards and I've lived here for many, many years."
The significance of tradition and culture can be obscure to non-indigenous people because so many ceremonies and practices are secret.
Unlike Aboriginality, which is defined on genealogical lines, tradition and culture have to be learned.
Since August's election, The Australian has travelled extensively in the Northern Territory, speaking to indigenous people. While issues differ between communities, the message is almost always the same: we have lost our voice, we have lost our power, we don't control enough of what happens in our lives.
Gibson Farmer Illortaminni, chairman of the Tiwi Land Council, says: "We need to get traditional indigenous people into the federal parliament because people in Canberra don't understand what's happening on the ground in indigenous communities. Those people aren't listening."
Bobby Nunggumajbarr, a senior figure in the remote community of Ngukurr, about 320km east of Katherine, says even Aborigines living away from remote communities are in danger of not understanding local issues.
"I think we feel that the traditional bush people in the Northern Territory parliament understand the cultural law and the white law. You can't mix them, but you can use the two side by side," Nunggumajbarr says.
And with that comment, the mystery deepens.
Illortaminni also points out that because white and traditional law and culture run side by side rather than in an integrated way, their lines of authority and areas of jurisdiction often do not match.
For instance, Maralampuwi, although he is the member for Arafura, can speak for Tiwi people, but must be careful what he says on behalf of those from Arnhem Land, Illortaminni says.
"If Maralampuwi starts talking too much about Arnhem Land mob, maybe Arnhem Land mob might not like it," he says.
The issue of indigenous representation, who speaks for Aborigines, cuts high and low, as illustrated in the grog rules debate.
When Mills followed Queensland Premier Campbell Newman in declaring remote communities should have more say, he was quickly lambasted for promoting "open slather" for drunks.
But Mills says that's not what he meant. The Chief Minister says he was responding to messages from the bush that local leaders want more control. "It's not to presume that they will decide to increase alcohol consumption, but it's to assume they will be making the decision," Mills tells The Australian. "We have to have faith that Aboriginal families care as much for their children as we do."
The moves by Newman and Mills prompted outrage, with senior indigenous leaders such as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine declaring grog rules should not be changed. However, and most interestingly perhaps, they also split the Right and the Left.
When Mal Brough, indigenous affairs minister in the Howard government, declared it was time to "normalise" grog rules introduced as part of the intervention, his comments soon appeared at odds with opposition indigenous affairs spokesman Nigel Scullion, who said he was extremely concerned by the proposal to let communities consider lifting alcohol bans on a case-by-case basis.
Some Aboriginal-run social justice organisations backed Mills, while others criticised him. Tomorrow, the delicacy of the issue will be revisited at an alcohol summit in Darwin called by the Territory's main Aboriginal organisations. Mills has suggested grog rules could be determined via plebiscite but provided few details; and it is far from clear his community "conversations" about alcohol policy will be as straightforward or democratic as he has planned.
Nevertheless, what is clear is that when national indigenous leaders spoke out against changes to rules governing access to alcohol in remote communities, their views were at odds with some locally elected traditional leaders.
Just days after the Territory election, Maralampuwi, a teetotaller, told The Australian: "We see on TV that alcohol and violence is a big problem in the cities, compared with remote communities, where it's not as bad. Having carefully managed clubs in communities means we can generate income that stays in communities rather than going outside."
Maralampuwi says he is responding to the views of his constituents, who want "the same rights as other Australians", and to bring home and protect young people who have gone to Darwin with the purpose of drinking.
In quiet conversations with bush people across the Territory, The Australian has encountered a lively debate about whether grog rules should be changed, and whether remote communities have the necessary structures of authority in place to handle decision-making themselves.
For Mills, the alcohol debate sparked a "chorus of commentary" that overshadowed the voices of traditional Aboriginal people.
"I feel desperately sorry for those traditional people who are trying to find a way into the argument. They seem to be blocked," he told The Australian recently.
Mills argues the new boundaries of debate surrounding indigenous affairs are no longer set by divisions between Right and Left but between paternalistic and grassroots approaches.
"I don't think we are going to make any progress until the nation undergoes a little shift in responding to the absence of voices from Aboriginal people in communities in reform," he says. "If we keep coming at it top down, we will not make any progress because the power to change is not in ideology, it's in people."
From the north, comments about the authenticity of Aboriginal people look different. Price understands and accepts the differences between Aboriginal people, for example in reference to her own "white" grandsons, and the importance of welcome to country ceremonies down south. She says bush people "know where we stand".
For Langton, professor of indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, Abbott's comments about authenticity and culture were clumsy, but his enthusiasm to get more indigenous representatives, particularly female ones, was right. "It's another case of outsiders making judgments about the 'authenticity' of Aboriginal cultural life," Langton says.
"The assumptions in this thinking about 'more cultural', 'less cultural' plays dangerously with old-fashioned, outdated ideas about race. Why not just say, as I think Tony Abbott should: 'I would love to see a speaker of an Aboriginal language, indeed a speaker of several Aboriginal languages, elected to the federal parliament'?"
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