Foreword: Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Student and University Experience) at the Australian National University and Palawa man

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

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.

(Referendum Council 2017)

So began the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This consensus statement, made in May 2017 at a gathering of Indigenous leaders at Uluru, was the culmination of thirteen regional deliberative dialogues conducted by the Referendum Council. This council had been established in 2015 by then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten to develop options for constitutional reform. The Uluru Statement from the Heart called for the creation both of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament and of a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians had been pursued since 1999 when then-Prime Minister John Howard came up with the idea of amending the preamble to the Constitution to recognize Australia’s First Peoples (Stone 2017). It took until 2010 for then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard to establish the Expert Panel on the Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians. This panel brought down its report in 2012. In the year of three prime ministers, 2013, Parliament established a Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, co-chaired by the Hon. Ken Wyatt MP and Senator Nova Peris, which finally reported in June 2015.

The Referendum Council considered all this earlier policy work, along with Yolngu leader and lawman Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s call in October 2007 for constitutional reform, which he declared to be ‘serious business’. In a speech that framed Indigenous advocacy for constitutional reform for the next decade he stated:

A Prime Minister (Howard) has said that he will now do what was not done before. He will recognise the special place of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation. He will sit down and talk with us, consult with us, listen to us and learn from us in the process of formulating questions for the whole of Australia to vote on.…doing this properly and honesty is the most serious business that we face as a nation. And it is not just a matter of a preamble. It is a matter of achieving balance, if there is to be a settlement at all. The constitution must not just recognise us—it must recognise what was ours and what has been taken from us.

(Yunupingu, 2007)

Over the last thirteen years several options to bring about constitutional reform have been considered. A symbolic insertion into the Australian Constitution was rejected both by constitutional conservatives—because of the risk of interpretative bleed among other reasons—and Indigenous Australians during the deliberative dialogues. Further amendments to the race clauses in the constitution were also rejected by constitutional conservatives as this might risk inferring ‘a bill of rights’ in the courts. The settled view that seems to have enjoined both the constitutional conservatives and Indigenous Australia was one advocated for by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson and the Cape York Land Council (Cape York Institute, 2014). They popularized the idea of a constitutional amendment that would require the Australian Government to establish a mechanism for consulting with Indigenous Australia. This became known as the First Nations’ Voice to Parliament.

However, in 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart’s call for a Voice to Parliament was rejected by the Turnbull Coalition government despite the weight of legal opinion that now appears to have supported it. This support includes a landmark speech by former High Court Chief Justice Murray Gleeson, who had been appointed as Chief Justice to the Australian High Court in 1998 during the Howard government (Gleeson 2019). In his 2019 speech, Gleeson explains why he believes proposals to implement the First Nations’ Voice to Parliament are both a worthwhile project and consistent with the nature of the Australian Constitution and the values that underpin it.

The Parliament instead established a Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples to consider further the recommendations of the Referendum Council (Commonwealth of Australia 2018). The committee recommended that the government initiate a process to co-design a Voice to Parliament while remaining silent on its constitutional enshrinement. The co-design process was subsequently initiated by the Morrison Coalition government following its election in 2019 (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet 2019). However, political conservatives, including many members of the Morrison government, have failed to embrace the constitutional enshrinement of the Voice to Parliament. Indeed, for some, the actual proposition of having a Voice to Parliament at all remains a contested political idea.

The journey for constitutional reform has, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and many of their supporters, been frustratingly difficult. At times, it seems as if the process has been kicked down the road through any number of well-conceived policy processes, all of which plays to my more pessimistic view of Australian politics.

More recently, however, a historic agreement was made by the National Cabinet (the refreshed Council of Australian Governments) to a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap. This is evidence of the structural reform capability that does exist within governmental systems (National Cabinet 2020).

Its genesis comes from the Close the Gap campaign which started in 2006 as a grassroots movement for health equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Supported by Indigenous and non-Indigenous human rights campaigners and health professionals, non-government organizations and the Australian Human Rights Commission the campaign drove a national government response. The Closing the Gap agenda was a set of intergovernmental reform agreements in Indigenous affairs that had been agreed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) over the period 2007–2008. They included the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA), which set out overarching reform objectives, outcomes, outputs, performance measures, and benchmarks that governments committed to achieve through their various national agreements and partnerships with the federal government. Closing the Gap provided the framework by which a national commitment was made and guided to set transparent measures to address the significant disadvantage and inequality in social markers which Indigenous Australians experienced.

In addition to the NIRA, a series of national partnership funding agreements were made in 2008 for $4.6 billion across early childhood development, health, housing, economic development and remote service delivery. These agreements included the following targets:

That the Closing the Gap agenda emerged following political advocacy by those in the Indigenous and non-Indigenous health, education, and welfare sectors appeals to my youthful activism. However, although Indigenous leaders were consulted and engaged in these processes, they ultimately did not have a decision-making role in their outcomes. In December 2016, COAG leaders agreed to rectify this situation and work together with Indigenous leaders, organizations, and communities to renew the Closing the Gap agreements with an emphasis on ‘collaborative effort, evaluation, and building on what works’.

Yet even then COAG did not establish a mechanism that enabled Indigenous Australians, outside the formal government sector, to play a decision-making role in these agreements. This was not achieved until March 2019, when it resolved to finalize a partnership agreement with the Coalition of Peaks on Closing the Gap, a group of approximately fifty Indigenous peak bodies representing a range of sectors including health, education, justice and land rights/native title (Council of Australian Governments 2018).

In 2020, the National Cabinet (rather than COAG) agreed to a ten-year partnership for Indigenous services reform with, for the first time in the history of the Australian Federation, Indigenous Australians as signatories to this agreement and with a decision-making role in its oversight. Although this does not represent Indigenous peoples’ ambition for real constitutional reform—that is, a constitutionally enshrined First Nations’ Voice to the Australian Parliament—it does show that such structural reform is possible and that a deal can be brokered which has Indigenous interests at its core.

Over my working life I have had many opportunities to engage in public policy and Australian political processes. For me, there is an ethical imperative to create opportunities for a more inclusive and equitable Australia, one that represents its many diverse voices and interests. It has been at times a frustrating and difficult journey, but the rewards are in those moments when change happens. I am no longer the angry and sceptical outsider of my youth, neither am I a hopelessly naïve Pollyanna. I remain impatient for change and for the reforms needed in the Australian political system to make it happen.

My close engagement with formulating public policy and with the political processes that carry its implementation have led me to develop a somewhat cynical and critical view of Australian politics, a perspective that seems to coexist uneasily with a more optimistic and engaged personal disposition towards life.

On the one hand I have always been impatient for change. The impetus for a lifetime of forays into public policy has been framed by a desire to see an inclusive political system that creates conditions for sharing wealth and opportunity and in which participation is not conditional on privilege or social status. Much of my work as a policy practitioner has been focused on Indigenous health and education policy, but what I have learned can be applied in all challenging areas of policy. This has led me to the view, along with many Indigenous activists, that the relationship between Australia’s Indigenous peoples and our governments and political system is unfinished business.

As to my sunnier view of Australian politics, our democratic institutions have managed to roll back decades of exclusion from universal suffrage and government policy based on race, wealth, and gender—and I have witnessed many of the most significant changes for Indigenous Australians in my lifetime. In 1966, the year after I was born, the first legislation for Aboriginal land rights was introduced in South Australia, and Vincent Linigari led the Gurindji to walk off Wave Hill Cattle Station starting a seven-year protest for land rights. The 1967 referendum saw race clauses removed from the Australian Constitution, with Indigenous Australians becoming eligible to vote in Federal elections on the same basis as other Australians from 1984 (Chesterman and Galligan 1997). The reform of social welfare legislation occurred over a number of years, in 1966 ‘references to “Aboriginal natives” were removed from the Social Services Act but benefits could still be paid to a third party and remote Aborigines did not qualify for unemployment benefits’ (Dow and Gardiner-Garden 2011).

Despite this it has been difficult to sustain serious reform to our public policy and political systems that accommodates Indigenous interests. For example, in 2005 the Howard Coalition government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) (Anderson 2007), which the Hawke Labor government had created in 1991 to provide a formal mechanism for elected Indigenous governance. Although there were well-documented criticisms both of ATSIC’s design and governance, fifteen years later there is still no enduring structure to replace it. For more than a decade, Australia has been unable to land an approach to constitutional reform that is supported by both political parties and Indigenous stakeholders. Thus, at the centre of the current debate is a structural reform proposition that provides a constitutional guarantee of Indigenous decision-making.

Indigenous policy has not been the only example of the failure of Australian governments to progress policy renewal over recent years. Another spectacular failure over the same period has been our inability to land a coherent national energy policy regardless of one’s political take on climate change. This issue has contributed to significant instability in political leadership and contributed to the dispatch of four sitting prime ministers at the hands of their own party. On a more positive note, after a long and acrimonious debate Australia did finally resolve the issue of same-sex marriage with Australians voting for its introduction in 2017. However, much of my experience in Indigenous policy reflects some broader challenges and opportunities for the Australian political system.

The Australian political system has, however, generally responded effectively to national crises as is evident in the early response to the global pandemic of COVID-19. In some respects, our democratic institutions have proven thus far to be relatively robust compared with other international jurisdictions. This is despite declining public trust in all levels of government and persistent fault lines in social cohesion. And from a global perspective Australian populism has not been as corrosive as in other social democracies such as the United States of America or the United Kingdom and parts of Europe.

Part of my attitude to Australian politics has its genesis in my personal story, which serves to illustrate some of the political dimensions of contemporary Australia. I was born on the north-west coast of Tasmania, with both sides of my family from ‘up the coast’. Mum’s family has Aboriginal traditional ties to the north-east Tasmanian coast and ancestral connections to the Pairrebeenee and Trawlwoolway clans of that area. My father was a rural labourer with significant convict ancestry (also the case on my mother’s side). Mum’s family was Protestant and Dad’s was Catholic, a religion in which I was nominally raised before the entire family was passionately converted in my early teens to a fundamentalist evangelical Baptist faith. I imagine my parents voted in state and federal elections, but we never really discussed politics in our household. They never shared with us so we had only a vague idea at the time of their political allegiances.

I was among the first in my family to finish high school, and the first to go on to a sandstone university where I completed my undergraduate degree and became a medical doctor. As a student I was exposed, for the first time, to the Aboriginal rights movement that was then focused on land rights and the Aboriginal community control movement. I was deeply influenced by this activism and by the friendships I formed with other Aboriginal students, and both influenced my thinking about health systems reform and my professional path into public health. It was also the genesis of my republican beliefs, and about the time I ‘came out’, encouraged to do so by the burgeoning gay and lesbian movement and the threat of the HIV–AIDs epidemic.

Despite coming of age in the midst of all these major political movements, I never really developed a political identity in my early years other than that I saw myself as a vague outsider. Perhaps more anarchist in inclination, I was never interested in dogma or political rhetoric nor did I really want to belong to anything. This was perhaps a reaction to my teenage years growing up in a dogmatic, all-encompassing religious milieu. In fact, for a long time I managed to slip off the Australian electoral roll. I’m sure that, in my mind, I thought I would slip back on when we had an Australian head of state. That was, as it turns out, quite a naïve position, and one that left me sceptical and angry.

My professional world, however, provided a clearer path that led me towards a more engaged approach to public policy. Even while my technical skillset was being developed, so too were my political attitudes. I started out expressing these views in public forums but soon found myself with the responsibility of formulating and implementing health policy. Somewhere along that path I developed an ethical view that I could no longer be the grumpy, disengaged outsider. Rather, I felt compelled to use the opportunity I had been given to make a difference.

My personal story and professional career illustrate many of the touchpoints relevant to Australian politics—from growing up in regional Australia through to class, Indigeneity, religion, sexuality, medical politics, and social services reform. Many of these issues are explored in detail in this Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics.

Professor Ian Anderson is a Palawa man from the northwest coast of Tasmania with traditional ties to country known as Tebrakunna. He has worked for two decades on the development of pathways and academic support for Indigenous students in higher education across a range of disciplines but especially medicine. He graduated as a medical doctor in 1989 and was awarded his PhD in 2006.

Prior to his current position at the Australian National University, he was Deputy Secretary of Indigenous Affairs in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2017 to 2020, and Deputy Chief Executive of the National Indigenous Australians Agency. He previously held successive leadership roles at the University of Melbourne including the Foundation Chair, Indigenous Higher Education and as Pro Vice-Chancellor (Engagement).

Ian’s professional background also includes over two decades association with the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service as an Aboriginal health worker, doctor, Chief Executive Officer and board member, and a period as Medical Adviser to the Office for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health in the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care. Professor Anderson has chaired ministerial councils such as the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Equality Council and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Council.

Ian became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2017 and was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, both in 2018.