phill Parsons
The size of a man is partly measured by his ability to apologise. It is a verity in Howard’s 1950 beliefs.
In his address to the Sydney Institute on the 11th of October Howard raise the right’s agenda, both his own philosophy and the ones that are intrinsic to a modern inclusive society.
Surprisingly was included a mea culpa over reconciling a long standing issue, that of the relationship between Aboriginal society and Australia’s along with an undertaking to enshrine recognition of the prior status of Aboriginies in the Australian Constitution, provided he is re-elected.
Howard defines rights as individual and that of the nation state.
Individual rights are indivisible, their existence is in the embodiment of each of us and cannot be dismembered, held for one and not another or denied.
Of course the nation state can, through its power, trample down those rights for all of society, as we see in Burma or Zimbabwe or for groups within a society as the BGLT community have experienced.
Still remaining for this group is the right to equal treatment before the law in respect to property relations between couples living in long term relationships, such a right with held by the Howard government under an arrangement with some exclusive group seeking special rights for some of its members.
Howard has attempted to claim the leadership on Reconciliation by stating that all his opposition to the symbols of recognition and reconciliation with Aboriginals has somehow created the conditions for the fulfillment of a recognition of prior ownership in the constitution.
The size of a man is partly measured by his ability to apologize. It is a verity in Howard’s 1950 beliefs.
White Australia has had his form of apology in recognition of his past delays and failures to the community who want to hear that apology but not the one word that cannot be said by him on our behalf.
Aboriginal Australia, asking for the sorry word to be said by the elected leader on the nation’s behalf is yet to hear this symbol, 11 years have passed and still no apology is to be made, core or non core post election
A failure of poll popularity has coincided with Howard’s conversion, Australians and even his own deputy having demonstrated their support for the sorry word by marching across bridges around the nation.
And where does this vast gulf between the individual and the nation, an extreme of rights come from.
Why is there the specific mention of an abhorrence of group rights.
It may seem impossible for such a thing to recur in the Australian context, but genocide is based on the removal of a groups rights as the many groups who suffered the wrath of Nazi fanaticism can attest. Ask their descendants living here.
And is Howard to deny that women as a group have rights. He would remember the inbuilt mechanisms denying women equal treatment in pay, in promotion and many other petty restrictions built in as controls over their lives. Has he moved on?.
And now that has changed significantly with women in many roles across the nation and thus the importance of the struggle for this groups rights has lessened.
And then there were the post WW2 migrant groups, sent into the ethnic ghetto by Australian’s unfamiliarity with difference, a fear and arrogance grown of isolation and imperialism.
Not completely dead here this phenomenon also still reigns in the home of Empire where older Brits bemoan the changed demographic that Empire has brought them.
Howard’s anathema to group rights has seen the demise of the multi-culturalism, although this is partly a maturing of the children and grand children of those post WW2 migrants who are imbued with values the same as those born to earlier migrants and those sent as convicts.
Howard, even after all the experience he has had with the Aboriginal community has still not seen that they view themselves as groups, community being important in part of their identity.
[Howard will laud community when it suits but ignore that is a group and when it asks for something for it in particular it is seeking a right.]
Family and extended kin relationships that held Aboriginal people together in their bond with nature and thus the land, assisting them in their survival through the hardship of a stone age life and their confrontation with a much more powerful group intent on taking the benefits of their prior ownership from them contrary to the colonizing powers instructions, is now to be denied in a belief that individual rights are paramount.
In bringing Aboriginal communities to modernity their world view will have to change,
but let’s not steal one of the last things left to them from a sorry history of colonization in some inane rush to make them just like us.
Sorry John, your individual cannot exist without the community, the community will always contain groups and those groups will find affinity and claim rights whilst they are excluded from the mainstream, regardless of the strength of the modern nation states identity. That is a modern reality.
It is not wrong to demand ‘rights’ for groups as they are the rights that individuals can or should enjoy but are denied to some groups.
Indeed it is the granting of the rights to a group that dissolves the group into the mainstream, all that is needed is time for those groups rights to be recognized by that mainstream.
Say sorry and become a human.
phill Parsons
