Radical Heart by Shireen Morris

Author:Shireen Morris [Morris, Shireen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522873573
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2018-07-02T07:00:00+00:00

On 11 September, Noel launched his Quarterly Essay, A Rightful Place, at the Sydney Opera House and floated publicly, for the first time, his shift in position. It was big news. Noel Pearson no longer advocated a racial non-discrimination clause, which we had pushed since 2011. He was now advocating an Indigenous constitutional voice, in the form of a constitutionally guaranteed advisory body to Parliament. The landmark essay described his engagement with the ‘con cons’ and the noble compromise position that had been reached.

There was an immediate negative response—not from the public, but from government. Indigenous Liberal MP Ken Wyatt, who was by now chairing a parliamentary joint select committee on the issue, didn’t appreciate Noel’s intervention and told the press Noel should make a submission to the committee ‘like everybody else’.3 Don’t step out of line and propose new ideas was the clear message. Once again, we were being told to submit.

It was an oddly authoritarian response from Wyatt. Since when did politicians reprimand civilians for expressing ideas? As Noel commented later in The Australian, it was ‘as though blackfellas can’t write an essay without permission. Did Wyatt want to proofread my essay to ensure it was aligned with his Liberal Party line?’4

Stranger still was the fact that when a white lawyer, Father Frank Brennan, later promoted his book, No Small Change, which argued only for minimalism—it opposed a racial non-discrimination clause and an Indigenous constitutional body—government representatives did not complain. Nor did they tell him to make a submission ‘like everybody else’. It seemed odd that an Indigenous leader’s public ideas were chastised, yet a white man’s were not. Either Wyatt had a personal issue with Noel particularly speaking up, or it was starting to seem as if the government had a predetermined outcome in mind (despite the fact the committee was still taking submissions) and that outcome didn’t include the ideas we were proposing.

We sent every committee member a copy of Noel’s essay, and Noel instructed me to write a submission explaining the proposed reforms. In the end we made three submissions to Wyatt’s committee, including a report on the New Zealand research trip.

The day after the essay launch, our broader ‘con con’ group co-signed the letter to Tony Abbott to inform him of the newly forged consensus and ask for a meeting.

Noel also spoke to Abbott on the phone and explained the proposal. Strangely, Abbott expressed a preference for Indigenous reserved seats instead, like they have in New Zealand. He thought that would be a simpler solution than a constitutional advisory body. A day later, as Noel would subsequently describe, The Australian reporter Dennis Shanahan ‘floated the anonymous balloon and exploded it himself, in the same article’.5 Abbott’s reserved-seats brainwave, which I assume was leaked deliberately by the prime minister’s office, died the same day.

It at least showed that Abbott was not closed-minded about substantive constitutional reform, however. Though he’d indicated preferences for minimalism previously, it seemed he was now grappling with how substantive reform might be achievable.

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