The inability to deliver the changes Indigenous Australians need is no longer just a moral failure but a civilisational one
The Uluru statement from the heart was our prayer to the Australian people.
There was hope in its words.
The statement was written with love. It stands as probably the most beautiful unrequited letter of love in Australian political history.
For those of us who urged faith, hope and love, there is an account to be given for the hopes raised, the faith urged and the love lost in the referendum.
I must account for that. So, three years later, I stand here with great reluctance.
What right has anyone to raise hopes when those hopes were so badly misplaced?
What right has anyone to offer a vision that turns out to be a mirage?
That is the source of my hesitation to speak of these things. But I cannot allow the failure of the referendum to excuse me from my responsibility to the communities who voted yes.
What we sought was to secure their future. This is how the statement spoke of their predicament:
Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
That is why these communities wanted the voice.
Because from the very beginning of my public life, it was, and still is, the future of those communities – not least my own – that has been the central focus of my wakeful dreams.
Our present is not good. Nor is our future assured.
When I started my advocacy, grog was the main problem. It took 15 years before governments were forced by us to act.
When they finally implemented the alcohol management plans we advocated, the results were fundamental. Royal Flying Doctor injury retrievals fell by more than half.
That should have taught us something. Instead, governments repeated the same mistake. Cannabis, previously unknown to our communities, spread unhindered. Now ice is the neglected crisis.
Whatever progress we made with alcohol has since been undone by governments of both persuasions, conservative and Labor. Alcohol supply has expanded, and women and children are experiencing the worst recorded violence in more than 20 years.
In 2025 alone, more than 1,100 women and children were recorded as victims of assault across Cape York’s communities. So far this year, 513 women and children have been victims of assault.
Until political parties sever ties with vice industries − grog and gambling − little will change. The poor are a goldmine, said the economist Thomas Sowell. The CLP, LNP and ALP, when in power, believe it is the divine right of the vice industries to make a profit from the immiseration of our people.
Child protection tells the same story.
Queensland is a serial inquirer yet children entering out-of-home care has continued to rise.
Under the Beattie government, Queensland spent a decade building an outsourced industry around the management of child and family crisis. They turned our children into fodder for a parasitic industry.
By the time that disaster was obvious, there was another inquiry. More than a decade after the Carmody inquiry, the government this week announced its response to the third child-safety commission of inquiry in less than 30 years.
In 1998, around one in five children in out-of-home care was Indigenous. Today, it is one in two.
Queensland thinks it can remove its way out of this crisis. It has created a billion-dollar system that waits for harm to be done to children, instead of investing in strengthening families before harm escalates and confronting the grog that causes the dysfunction in the first place. Protecting the publicans and gambling outlets are their abiding concern.
In 10 years I predict there will be more children in that system, and an even greater proportion will be Indigenous.
Child protection will worsen. Youth justice will worsen. Adult incarceration will worsen.
Not because we do not know what to do but because our governments won’t let us do it.
After nearly 10 years of the Palaszczuk government, Cape York made no sustained progress towards Closing the Gap – and, in critical areas, the gap widened.
In the lead-up to the 2024 Queensland election, I wrote to the then premier, Steven Miles, and the leader of the opposition, David Crisafulli:
What we have seen is that if you pursue ‘progressive’ policies unable to deliver results, you end up having to resort to regressive policies anyway. Regressive ‘tough on crime’ law and order style approaches alone, however, also do not work. In combination, the progressive focus on more and more ineffective services and programs, and the regressive focus on tough on crime policies, can result in nothing more than entrenching disadvantage for young people, their families, and communities even further.
But we have no chance under the current arrangements. Our children are caught between the Scylla of the soft bigotry of low expectations of Labor governments and the Charybdis of the hard bigotry of the Liberal Nationals.
The inability of governments to deliver the reforms our people need is no longer only a moral failure but a civilisational one. The destruction of the communities of remote Australia is truly at stake.
Consider what is called Indigenous expenditure. In 2010-11, governments attributed $25.4bn in direct expenditure to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. By 2015-16, that figure had risen to $33.4bn. The figure is no longer officially updated.
Australians heard these numbers and imagined that vast sums are being handed to Indigenous communities. That is not what the figures mean.
In 2015-16, 82% of the expenditure attributed to Indigenous Australians was expenditure through mainstream government services. Only a fraction is Indigenous-specific expenditure.
Much of this is expended through mainstream state and territory systems. It includes Medicare, schools and hospitals. But it also includes policing, courts, out-of-home-care, youth detention and prisons.
The commonwealth provides much of the funding, while the states and territories control many of the systems through which it is spent. What can you do if your state chooses to spend it on detention over education?
So we have an agenda.
Our plan may fall into the abyss of federalism. There simply is no precedent to change the institutional architecture required to ensure these foundational obligations: work for the parents, education for the children.
These foundational obligations are owed to the future of our children.
But none of this will happen under our present arrangements.
The 1967 referendum gave the commonwealth parliament jurisdiction over Aboriginal affairs, which it had lacked since federation. Just 10 years later, the first crisis of federalism in Aboriginal affairs under the new power occurred in the Queensland communities of Aurukun and Mornington Island.
A dispute erupted over bauxite mining in Aurukun between the then premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the community. The Uniting church supported a legal challenge in the Queensland supreme court and the privy council, leading to retribution by Bjelke-Petersen.
The church was ousted. The mission became a government settlement. This was the infamous Aurukun takeover.
The leaders of Aurukun implored the commonwealth through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to assume responsibility for the community. They wanted to be free from the jurisdiction of Bjelke-Petersen’s government.
The then Liberal minister for Aboriginal affairs, Ian Viner, with prime minister Malcolm Fraser’s support, legislated to enable Aurukun and Mornington Island, and other communities that so desired, to come under the jurisdiction of the commonwealth.
This was the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act of 1978, the precursor to Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders) Act 2006. The people of Aurukun were hopeful that the Fraser government would bring their community under the jurisdiction of the commonwealth.
Since the 1978 betrayal by Fraser and Viner, many Indigenous organisations were formed under the association provisions of the 1978 act but the council provisions – developed specifically for Aurukun and Mornington Island – never were.
The parlous history of Aurukun began then. A canteen was forced upon the community in 1985 and the destruction has continued unabated since.
In the 41 years since the Aurukun takeover I have often wondered what Aurukun would have been like today had the desire to be free from the jurisdiction of the Queensland government and instead have a direct relationship with the commonwealth been honoured by Fraser.
The Fraser-Viner policy from 1978 that was legislated but not acted upon must now be revisited. The communities of remote Australia must come under the jurisdiction of the commonwealth. These communities and their lands would still come under the shared jurisdiction of the relevant states and territories for most functions governed by the state’s constitutional responsibilities but the administrative relationship for Aboriginal affairs would lie with the commonwealth.
There should be no need for Aboriginal affairs departments in the states and territories.
This would rationalise duplicated systems and institutions. It would stop Indigenous affairs being the black hole for state and territory government budgets.
A direct funding relationship between the commonwealth and the organisations representing and serving these communities would enable development agendas such as the personal responsibility and opportunity act of Cape York Peninsula to receive the budgetary support it needs to close the gap.
After the rejection of the voice, the conversation about structural reform of the federal arrangements governing Indigenous affairs must resume. If not a voice, then let us ask the question Dr Martin Luther King asked two years after US civil rights laws were passed and one year before his assassination.
Where do we go from here?
Noel Pearson is a director of Cape York Partnership and Good to Great Schools Australia. This is an edited version of his keynote address to the Garma festival on Saturday
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
