Australia is yearning for real leadership and direction, but who will fill this vacuum?

I’m not a big fan of the new format of Q & A on the ABC, nor its new host, but it was the appearances of Stan Grant (last week) and Nova Peris (this week) that has brought home to me a disturbing phenomenon in Australian Politics. Both Stan and Nova were very clear about what that phenomenon is, and why it is holding Australia back. Clearly, it is the underlying dis-respect this nation has for its First Nation’s Peoples.

Nova put it succinctly and unambiguously exactly what confronts our nation and people:

“When you're an Aboriginal person in this country and speak out and start calling racism out, you get attacked, because for so long this country has had this thought process.

"Racism is about inferior races. White is up here. Black is down there. That's how this country has been built.

"1993 was when the Eddie Mabo High Court decision was made. It knocked out the notion of terra nullius.

"They had inherited mentally that the country belonged to 'no man'. So it meant our lives as Aboriginal people, we were nothing.”

She highlighted the first major decision of the High Court in Mabo which totally demolished terra nullius more than 27 years ago, but the High Court again only last week in Love v Commonwealth & Thoms v Commonwealth held that Aboriginal Australians could not be classified as aliens under section 51(xix) of the Australian Constitution. That these two individuals had to plead their Aboriginality to defend their very status as First Australians, by a government that see’s fit to export its ‘unwanted criminals’ to foreign nations to which these people have no actual connection or affinity is absolutely reprehensible.

Like many in our community I have watched and listened to our First Nations Peoples for a long time. I have read the Uluru Statement From the Heart. It’s powerful opening preamble is truthful, erudite and necessary to be acknowledged and respected by ALL this nations peoples. Many of you may not have read it or only presume its contents, I reproduce just the opening words to remind us all of our ancestral past:

“Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.”

To continue reading the whole document click here…

And herein lies the vacuum that I speak about. Our Aboriginal sisters and brothers come together in a constitutional convention to deliver a ‘message from the heart’ and our government and PM of the day Malcolm Turnbull (AKA The Great Pretender) totally ignores it and obfuscates any attempt to have it put to the Australian people, his successor has proven no better.

The Australian people are yearning for REAL political leadership, leadership that takes seriously the issues confronting us a nation. It is abundantly clear that our current parliament is devoid of anyone that can do exactly that.

Australia is in need of a new generation of politicians, people who will ground public policy in conscience driven outcomes and not party political ones beholden to certain corporate political donors.

Maybe its time to sit and listen more carefully, with the ear of our heart, to our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. The recent firestorms that enveloped our nation highlighted the intrinsic link that Aboriginal People have to the land and our utter necessity to listen to their wise advice.

It all starts with constitutional recognition of their status as The First Australians and that is something that ALL Australians MUST accede to, if we are to move forward as ‘one people’.