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The Labor Party needs to return to its commitments to class, so that more creative futures are possible for that majority of Indigenous people, and minority of Non-Indigenous Australians, currently on a journey in the under-class carriage holding a one way ticket to nowhere.

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Taking Reconciliation Forward

Abstract

The dominant discourse understates the variety of Reconciliation viewpoints as well as the social complexity and diversity of Indigenous Australia. Three directions are suggested:

1. initiatives to be driven from a deep understanding of particular Indigenous social contexts;
2. self-determination to be more clearly defined and applied around both a rights and a responsibilities agenda attuned to local nuances; and,
3. a greater emphasis by the Reconciliation movement on the shared crisis faced by the under-class. Indigneous and non-Indigenous.

Defining Reconciliation

Robert Tickner constructed the concept of Aboriginal Reconciliation as a process with three objectives - to:

1. educate Australians about Indigenous history, culture and disadvantage;
2. explore ideas about an agreement or treaty to be put in place by 2001; and
3. establish a people’s movement to underpin social change.

Robert Tickner

The process was to last ten years. The majority would gain new understanding of Indigenous Australians, leading to an adjusted, legally binding, relationship. This agreement was to become the catalyst for Indigenous control of Indigenous lives and futures (Tickner 2001, pp.27-29). Derailed by Howard’s election in 1996, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) recognised its failure in meeting these objectives by producing in 2000 a Final Declaration 'towards’, rather than 'for’, Reconciliation. Its successor Reconciliation Australia (RA) has used the term 'True Reconciliation', to describe an ideal future where Indigenous children have the same life expectancy and opportunities as other children (Reconciliation Australia 2002, p.5).

It is this True Reconciliation that I address. The key question is how do we support the aspirations of Indigenous people?

Ten Viewpoints

To identify how Reconciliation can be best advanced it is useful to analyse various perspectives. I have categorised into ten perspectives. Key variables include:

• origins of the persepctive in Indigenous or Non-Indigenous worlds;
• whether it is reliant on borrowings from western philosophy or metatheory;
• whether the objective is self-determination or assimilation;
• emphasis on national unity or acceptance of patchworked nation;
• the relative priority of legal, cultural and socio-economic issues;
• its assessment of the potential effectiveness of Indigenous society;
• whether cultural change is required of Indigenous and/or Non-Indigenous people;
• whether capitalism should be embraced, accommodated or rejected;
• the relative roles and responsibilities of governments, business, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people; and
• national, local, community, family or individual focus;

Viewpoint 1: Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR)

CAR’s focus was to promote racial harmony by developing shared understanding of history and culture through education, the people’s movement, and community activities. The final recommendations of the Report can be summarised as:

• benchmarking to overcoming disadvantage;
• legislation of Reconciliation principles;
• recognition of First Peoples in the Constitution;
• government and business backing to continue the process;
• treaty or agreement negotiation; and,
• legislating an agreement to resolve unfinished business (CAR 2000).

These recommendations house three agendas:

1. The Healing Agenda
   Driven by white guilt, this is about building inter-racial relationships through recognising historical wrongs. It moved to the forefront of Reconciliation following the Bringing Them Home Report and the Sorry campaign, culminating in the Bridge Walk in 2000. The Healing Agenda is also an Indigenous agenda focused on dealing with the traumatic impact of post-invasion history.
2. The Rights Agenda
   Emerging from the heart of Indigenous political aspirations, it’s about recognition of the special relationship with land, human rights guarantees and self-governance.
3. The Socio-Economic Agenda
   The focus is on overcoming disadvantage, by delivering improved outcomes in education, health, housing and employment.

Viewpoint 2: Assimilation

The Howard Government’s Practical Reconciliation encompasses only the socio-economic agenda. It is about Indigenous people having equal paper rights (and equal responsibilities). The issue is ameliorating problematic socio-economic indicators. The method is largely government-driven delivery of mainstreamed services.

John Howard

Assimilation presents self-determination as a failed philosophy promoting disunity. It is the dominant response of the intellectual right to Reconciliation. Authors such as Windschuttle (2001), Brunton (2000), Howson (2002), and Johns (2001), are pre-occupied with the maintenance of national unity and in identifying persistence of Indigenous culture as the prime barrier to improvement. Reconciliation will come about through individual choices, including inter-marriage, urban living, and decisions about education and employment (2000). The Indigenous will simply meld into the mainstream

Larissa Behrendt has identified a recent government turn to a more intensively assimilationist Practical Reconciliation with:

• a shift towards individuals and families and away from Indigenous organisations;
• an emphasis on jobs and education;
• partnerships with the government, underlining Indigenous responsibilities;
• emphasis on substance abuse; and
• Indigenous needs accommodated through mainstream services (Behrendt 2002b).

Assimilation adopts conservatism’s focus on the individual, affirming those who dared to progress’ beyond the ties of kin and community (Rowse 2002a, p.230). In contrast self-determination affirms collective solidarity.

Rejecting self-determination is rejecting Indigenous influence and knowledge. Practical Reconciliation is centred on government-controlled service delivery. It is based on bad philosophy leading to policies that will fail because they address whitefella’s aspirations for blackfellas. It is also reactionary, in that is responds lineally to manifestations of problems, rather than laterally to causes. The frustration of worsening socio-economic figures has intensified assimilation and resulted in attacks on the victims and their representatives (Behrendt 2002b, Jobson 2003).

Viewpoint 3: Rights Agenda

If the assimilationist turn is a response to the perceived failure of self-determination, the alternate view is to consider rights as the prerequisite for successful self-determination. Self-determination without rights, and thus without power, is not self-determination. This agenda is about the rights of Indigenous people to have power over their own affairs. It is at the core of the aspirations of Indigenous leaders, and can include the right to:

Larissa Behrendt

• not be discriminated against,
• enjoy language, culture and heritage,
• land, seas, waters and natural resources,
• be economically self sufficient,
• be involved in decision-making processes that impact upon Indigenous lives,
• govern and manage Indigenous affairs and communities,
• work,
• education, and
• to a family (Behrendt 2001)

The agenda is necessitated by so-called equal rights having failed Indigenous people; a continuation of non-Western relationships to Land; its utility in providing the framework for self-determination; and governments’ failure to protect Indigenous interests.

Pat Dodson

The demand is for rights embedded within the Australian Constitution. Only this will enable the politically partisan games to stop - allowing the consideration of the real issues between us (Dodson 1999).

Behrendt illustrates through three recent events why legislation alone is insufficient protection: the partial repeal of the Racial Discrimination Act in paring back Native Title legislation; the Cubillo-Gunner Stolen Generations Case denying basic rights to religion, family and freedom of movement, and, The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (NSW 2001, pp.68-69).

The Royal Commission showed that in practice citizenship rights and neutral’ laws did not protect basic human rights such as an economic role, access to supposedly universal services and social justice. Thus special rights are needed. First people status, land rights, explicit exclusion from the 1901 Constitution, and the contested persistence of Indigenous sovereignty have all driven the agenda.

Geoff Clark

While ATSIC (Clark 2000b) and Pat Dodson (Dodson 1999) stress a treaty, Behrendt calls for a Constitutional Bill of Rights (Behrendt 2001) - the advantage being that it can be sold as of benefit for all Australians. However history has shown bipartisanship, which has now been abandoned in Indigenous matters, to be essential for Constitutional change. Further, a Bill of Rights shifting power from politicians to lawyers would be fiercely resisted. Witness Bob Carr’s response:

Some of the most abusive and oppressive regimes have had extensive bills of rights. In reality, it is not a bill of rights which protects rights. Nor can the courts alone adequately protect rights. The protection of rights lies in the good sense, tolerance and fairness of the community. If we have this, then rights will be respected. […]. A bill of rights will only have the effect of turning community values into legal battlefields.(NSW 2001, p.86)

Most Australians probably require some reciprocation for the granting of rights. Thus to be politically palatable the rights agenda needs to address responsibilities. Noel Pearson has cleverly introduced the concept of the right to be responsible (Pearson 1999) embracing both the importance of self-determination and of reciprocity. Rights advocates have not yet adopted Pearson’s pitch to the Realpolitik.

A legislated rights agreement also faces considerable obstacles, including: Determining who represents Indigenous people in the agreement. Geoff Clark (Clark 2000a) proposes a national framework followed by numerous local treaties. The CAR/Saulwick poll (Saulwick 2000) showed widespread concern that a treaty is motivated by a reparations grab. It would be hard to sell the benefits of a treaty to Non-Indigenous Australians - What’s in it for me?

However Marcia Langton (Langton 2001) and the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT 2002) point to more than a thousand agreements already enacted in regional Australia, often with mining companies.

In assessing the rights agenda: It doesn’t threaten Australian unity, but can be simply recognition of first peoples - as acknowledged in New Zealand and Canada.

Citizenship rights are insufficient. Specific rights as first peoples are appropriate. However Reconciliation has yet to move most Australians to this view (Saulwick 2000).

Rights are a necessary foundation to ameliorate disadvantage. However I agree with Bob Carr that rights without a protective political culture are diminished. Both are required.

In the face of Commonwealth inaction it is likely that locally legislated Bills of Rights or agreements may provide the foundation for a gradual implementation of a rights agenda. The proposed Australian Capital Territory Bill of Rights (ACT 2003) and the Cape York Partnership Agreement (QLD 2002) are current examples.

Viewpoint 4: Persistence of Sovereignty

Standing outside the Indigenous mainstream is Michael Mansell and the Aboriginal Provisional Government (APG). Representing continuing resistance to illegal invasion and occupation, the APG only supports a treaty recognising continuation of sovereignty and the right to be separate. The APG believes Aborigines must regain sufficient territory of Australia - the crown lands as a start - and be allowed to build or re-build the authority of Aboriginal people over themselves and those territories (Mansell 2002). Indigenous sovereignty claims would not be recognised by any Australian court, and as Pearson argues, persistence of sovereignty faces unsurmountable political problems (Pearson 1993, p.15).

Viewpoint 5: Continued Activism

Gary Foley

Civil rights activists regard their struggles, undertaken without mainstream white support, as what has provided the political breakthroughs. For activist Gary Foley Reconciliation has been a white-controlled process pointedly excluding activists and designed to divert attention from government failure. Worse, it distracts Indigenous leaders from the important unresolved political issues and fails to address the deep underlying trauma experienced by so many. For Foley, CAR/RA and ATSIC are not representative of Indigenous people. It is the role of activists to continue the struggle until Aboriginal and Islander people are able to deal with white Australia on equal terms, economically, socially and politically. Thus Reconciliation can only come about after the political struggles have been won (Foley 1999).

Activists like Foley are highly respected on the left and in Indigenous circles. However the focus has necessarily moved to representational bodies and the implementation of programs, requiring cooperation with politicians and bureaucrats to ensure the activist’s gains are delivered on the ground.

Viewpoint 6: Socialist Solidarity

Historically most of the labour movement has ignored Indigenous aspirations. The Communist Party is the unflagging exception. Involved for many decades - including a crucial role in the watershed Gurindji campaign - Communists and other socialists are cynical of a process where corporations position Reconciliation as part of sensible business practice. Like Foley some socialists see creation of a middle class of Indigenous bureaucrats, as resulting merely in class polarisation, with the vast majority of Indigenous people continuing to be exploited. The answer is the mass mobilisation of the working class (Tenenbaum 2000).

Noel’s Pearson’s assertion that Indigenous people have been, are, and will continue to need to exist in, a capitalist economy and thus need to work with business for mutual advantage seems more realistic (if less romantic).

Viewpoint 7: The Cape York Partnerships (CYP)

Many in Cape York used to work as stockmen. When through union solidarity they received equal pay, the Aboriginal men were sacked. They descended into welfare dependency.

Noel Pearson

While the above-mentioned viewpoints originate from Australia’s settled south, Noel Pearson has lobbied for a strategy attuned to the specific needs of traditionally oriented northern communities. The social destruction left by welfare dependency is the focus. A new approach to self-determination is intrinsic, introducing responsibility in the form of recipient reciprocity, and developing real economy commercial partnerships. It is about no longer seeing ourselves as victims. He calls for disciplined local community development (Pearson 2000).

The CYP strategy amounts to rationalisation of government and a power shift to local Indigenous bodies. The role of joined up government is to provide a holistic and coordinated effort to support communities with their development plans (Pearson 2000). Like assimilation it calls for social change in Indigenous communities. Like the rights agenda it is centred on self-determination. Its vision is what everybody wants positive socio-economic outcomes.

The liberal and individualist values are replaced by an authoritarian set of obligations more familiar to non-western communalism. The focus of decision-making falls not to individuals but to families and clan groups (Pearson 2000).

While Pearson rarely addresses the rights agenda, CYP has received from Queensland and Commonwealth governments the green light to develop a new regional Indigenous political instrument for self-determination (Rowse 2002b). It is a bold experiment in Indigenous self-governance. For Pearson there is no choice, either embrace a capitalist economy or continue the descent from tradition to the under-class where ...limited resources are sucked into the vortex of grog and drug abuse that has established itself at the core of our society. (Pearson 2000)

The CYP strategy is too new to be evaluated. If successful it is unlikely to be readily transferable beyond self-contained Indigenous communities, which make up less than 20% of the population (Howson 2002, p.5). However it has the potential to profoundly influence the roadmap to Reconciliation.

Viewpoint 8: The Responsibilities Agenda

Reconciliation is everyone recognising and treating each other as equals, and everyone must be responsible for their own actions (Hanson 1998). The view that Indigenous people lack civic responsibility is widespread in places where black and white experience each other’s lives in the round. Theft, vandalism, drunkenness, child neglect, family violence, school problems and special services become topics of concern. Both sides position themselves as victims (Cowlishaw 2001). Located at the cultural borderlands many rural Non-Indigenous people consider their insights more informed than those of Canberra policymakers, service-providing blow-ins, the judiciary and rights-oriented commentators.

Drawing upon egalitarian mythologies, a distinction is made between good and bad blacks, with good blacks defined as those demonstrating a willingness to help themselves and act like white people.

The identification by Reconciliation supporters of mainly rural conservatives as Rednecks or racists, is simplistic and unhelpful. It also undervalues the close relations they often develop with some of the Indigenous community (Cowlishaw 2001). The challenge is to connect with those sympathetic to Hansonist ideas by engaging productivity in common boundary interests.

In Moree Dick Estens of the Aboriginal Employment Strategy (AES) explains one way to be inclusive: We do not ask people to change--instead, we create ways in which people will change. If employees help to choose which Aborigine they want to work with, then this builds personal commitment and enhances the chances for success (Estens 2001).

Viewpoint 9: Non-Indigenous Pragmatism

Dick Estens

An increasing realisation permeates rural Australia that Indigenous populations are growing, not fading away or returning to mission invisibility. For Moree cotton farmer Dick Estens the perception of Aboriginal crime created difficulty in attracting middle class residents demanded by the growing local economy. It perhaps could be easier to employ a local black than import a reluctant white (Estens 2001). The success of the AES seems to have flowed-on to improving race relations. Moree Plains Council promotes itself as a Reconciliation leader (Moree 2003). This win-win solution based on real economic inclusion, has halved the crime rate, and removed the security mesh from main street shops. Famous for past segregation, Moree is now being reinvented as a place of best practice.

Mining companies such as Normandy and Rio Tinto have embraced the Reconciliation mantra. In 1963 the Mapoon community’s homes were raised for refusing to relocate for mining at Weipa. Today Rio Tinto has a well-established employment strategy with the same community. At the Argyle Mine in Western Australia road works and vehicle maintenance businesses have taken Aboriginal workers from a no-skills base and have established, with DEETYA and ATSIC, what are claimed to be sustainable businesses (Harvey 2000). Ten percent of Normandy mining’s workforce is Indigenous (Normandy 2002).

Requiring certainty, damaged by disputes such as Noonkanbah and Jabiluka, and adjusted to a new environmental agenda, most miners operating in remote areas find it advantageous to negotiate agreements with Indigenous people. While these may be cynical exercises in buying off land titleholders and claimants, mutual benefits seem to flow.

The Moree and mining programs are characterised by tenacity for success. They realise that:

• intensive mentoring enables effective knowledge transfer;
• setbacks are to be expected, so dialogic structures need to be designed to readily identify and sort problems; and,
• decision-making power must be transferred to Indigenous people once sustainability is established.

Richie Ahmat

Richie Ahmat of CYP claims advantages in dealing directly with business. We have gained more in three months from a thinker from the Boston Consulting Group, or in one month from a Westpac financial adviser to our Family Income Management program, than we could ever get from the public service in years (Ahmat 2002).

Urban liberals would be advised to reach out not to just Indigenous Australia but also pragmatic conservatives and even those demanding more Aboriginal responsibility to facilitate real economy solutions where Indigenous people live.

Viewpoint 10: The View from Indigenous Grassroots

How do the potential beneficiaries view Reconciliation? According to Aden Ridgeway the majority of Aborigines fail to see its overall relevance (quoted in Peters-Little 2000, p20). For some: The concept of Reconciliation was just something to help white Australians feel a bit more informed and less unproductive (Peters-Little 2000, p20). Many Indigenous people seem deeply alienated from wider community processes such as voting or even completing census forms. The turnout in ATSIC elections is typically around 20% (Sanders, Taylor & Ross 2000).

Information Scientist Elfreda Chatman found that new knowledge enters the world of the information poor only under certain conditions and particularly in response to everyday problems and concerns. Outside information needs endorsement by trusted insiders or gatekeepers (Chatman 1996). For many grassroots people the rights agenda is likely to be just talk - too remote from everyday matters. Eddie Mabo Junior said: How can we explore a treaty when our communities are themselves not able to govern themselves efficiently, economically, and politically? He identifies with the `grassroots people', contrasting them with those working inside the bowels of government' (Rowse 2002c). Indigenous representatives and bureaucrats are often identified as distanced outsiders (eg., coconuts and uptown blacks).

The focus of the Reconciliation debate should be more on understanding the difficult decisions which face Indigenous people on the ground in everyday life, and developing ways for people to seek their own local solutions and make their own local black and white Reconciliation frameworks.

The Outlook

My argument so far is that the current government’s assimilation viewpoint will take us backwards and downhill, the rights agenda is still somewhat utopian, and the healing agenda has impacted strongest amongst the urban middle class and not where it really counts.

There are promising local developments in places like Cape York, Moree and some mining towns. But, the heyday of public and government attention to the issue seems to have come and gone with the latter years of CAR (Sanders 2002, p12.). Now the burning issues are those of economic underdevelopment, chronic disease, terrible social services, addiction and domestic violence (da Costa 2002). Treaty discussions are now largely mothballed, although global corporations are bypassing governments - making agreements directly with local stakeholders (Behrendt 2001).

The Wik Ten-point Plan and endless litigation has diminished the horizon for land rights. With Yorta Yorta The tide of history has washed away native title in the settled south (NNTT 2002, p5). White people don’t, and perhaps never will, accept land rights within agricultural or urbanised lands. As Frances Peters-Little writes It was as if no one was prepared to accept a country where its Indigenous people literally lived on the land and dreamed’ of a culture they had lost. (Peters-Little 2000, p12).

The arguments over self-determination are still heated and confused. According to Behrendt, for Indigenous people self-determination describes a political vision (Behrendt 2002a). For the Commonwealth it is a failed policy of funds (mis-)management. This failure has led to two divergent paths - a return to assimilation and the call for a new strategy of Indigenous empowerment (Rowse 2002a, p2).

Reparations were included in Tickner’s agenda, but the issue has only intermittently risen to the surface. This is the potentially volatile issue of Reconciliation. It motivates Howard’s recalcitrance, and is a card Indigenous negotiators won’t play until they know they can win.

While there has been greater Indigenous participation in tertiary education, most socio-economic indicators continue worrying trends: life expectancy, real economy employment, imprisonment rates and health. This table below is evidence of shocking disadvantage across the country.

Table: Expectation of life at birth for Indigenous people and the total population, Australia and selected States, 1999-2001

(Health InfoNet (2003)

Reconciliation has provided the public space not just for a greater appreciation of post-invasion history, but also for the rise of the One Nation backlash and Howard’s cooption of Hansonism. I believe we have seen a considerable hardening of viewpoints, with urban liberals centred around the healing and rights agendas, and suburban and rural conservatives around assimiliation and responsibilities agendas.

Much of the interpretation behind these agendas remains simplistic, ignoring the complexity of Indigenous worlds.

The Under-Class

Saulwick found that the public could identify three categories of Aboriginal people: Real Aborigines living in remote places Urban Aborigines - not considered Real Aborigines. Fringe Dwellers problematic welfare recipients in and around rural towns (Saulwick 2000)

I see it a little differently:

• Assimilated people living wholly within the dominant society. They pay little if any attention to any Aboriginality and have no desire to differentiate themselves from mainstream Australian society.
• Acculturated or Integrated people with an Indigenous identity, who function effectively within mainstream society.
• People for whom traditional ways still dominate. They often see themselves as distanced from the above groups.
• An Under-class of people neither assimilated nor sufficiently acculturated to function effectively in either traditional or non-traditional society. It includes long-term welfare dependents, addicted and traumatised people, habitual criminals, and those with low self-esteem whose aspirations are stunted by fear of the world beyond a small protective network.

There are compelling accounts of remote communities moving rapidly from a traditional world to the under-class (Sutton 2001, Etherington 2001, Pearson 1999). Etherington describes these people who have been dragged into the median strip of change and cannot go back….but they cannot go forward either.(Etherington 2001, p.76). >Problems include: the freedom to binge drink; the impossibility in effectively educating across epistemologies; needing rapid acculturation to handle the accountability of self-determination; and adapting to a real economy which values prostituted art more than the sacred. (Etherington 2001)

Etherington claims that treating all Aboriginal people as if they have the same needs has disadvantaged those in remote communities (Etherington 2001, p.93). Enduring low self-esteem, people cannot make the necessary cultural leap. Their fall into the under-class as they lose their culture is thus inevitable.

The central question then becomes is indigenous culture an ennobling tradition or a culture of poverty? (Rowse 2000a, p233). Unfortunately there is no simple answer. When it collides with western culture it can also be both or neither.

Most Indigenous people can probably be positioned today within the under-class, whether they live in the outback, country towns or cities. Resolving their issues is the too hard element of Reconciliation. At Moree Dick Estens says We try and concentrate on what we call the 'middle third' of the community. The bottom third are Aboriginal people with drug and alcohol problems, or next to no training, or bad attitudes (Estens 2001)

Kinship as Indigenous Social Capital

'Failure of policy is …usually a replication and imposition of non-Indigenous policy, programs or structures onto Indigenous people without thought of cultural conflict or impact on social, cultural and kin relationships' (Behrendt 2002a). The holistic approach to Reconciliation needs to go beyond healing, socio-economics and rights. We need to search for the deeper, potentially empowering knowledge of Indigenous people in their communities.

These can be complex worlds. Analysing her home town of Walgett, Frances Peters-Little writes:

Frances Peters-Little

Now not only are Aboriginal people unequal to the economic status of whites, they are further divided amongst themselves, with families against families or even family members against each other. […] Many Aboriginal community workers feel that they are being torn between their positions as community workers and the people they service. […] they are being placed in a position where they are actively participating in holding authority over their own families and friends, while relying upon the enemy’ (government) to fund local self-determination programs (Peters-Little 2000, p.14).

…successful community requires an unnatural suppression of family and this has not led to successful community. It has in fact turned family responsibility into family selfishness […..] The task was (and is) to recognise the layers of identification within our community… we need to recognise and strengthen families and smaller groupings, and thereby develop community (Pearson 2000).

The strength of kinship has enabled survival. It usually persists through the chaos of chronic substance abuse and domestic violence. It is critical that its social capital is harnessed, rather than being identified as the source of nepotism, corruption and internecine conflict.

Ways Forward

Real improvements are urgently needed on the ground. Below are three ideas:

Flexible Policies Attuned to Local Knowledge

Initiatives need to be driven from deep understanding of the dynamics at work in particular social contexts. The most exciting and transforming activities within the Indigenous community are not propelled by government policy but have been facilitated by Indigenous people themselves (Behrendt 2002). Government efforts should be geared more to identifying and making sustainable, community grounded local initiatives.

Practical Self-Determination

Local Rights Agreements. Self-determination needs to be more carefully defined and applied around a locally relevant rights and responsibilities agenda. Local Reconciliation agreements could provide roadmaps to increased employment and reduced disadvantage, with the Indigenous community members undertaking responsibility to (for instance) reduce crime.

Foster Local leadership. Initiatives such as the NSW Local Government mentoring program (NSW DLG 2001) and the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre (AILC 2001) seem promising.

Mentoring for Jobs. As Estens and Pearson emphasise progress starts with real jobs in the real economy. You have no hope of keeping Aboriginal kids in high school, if their parents, uncles and aunts do not have jobs--why bother going to high school if you know that you are not going to get a job? (Estens 2001)

Building from Kinship. A renewed focus on the family and kinship as the fundamental units for building social capital. Governments should work with people like Pearson and Peters-Little to work through issues of family and community to determine how to best leverage strong family ties for community development.

Focus on the Under-Class

A greater emphasis by the Reconciliation movement on the shared crisis faced by the cross-racial under-class. Pearson and others have argued for the concept of an enabling state, acting as a facilitator for local initiatives. This can promise to challenge the debilitating effects of welfare dependency (Botsman & Latham 2001). The Labor Party needs to return to its commitments to class, so that more creative futures are possible for that majority of Indigenous people, and minority of Non-Indigenous Australians, currently on a journey in the under-class carriage holding a one way ticket to nowhere (Ridgeway, 1980).

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