Former Labor senator Pat Dodson, sometimes called ‘the Father of Reconciliation’, has emerged from a self-imposed silence to urge the prime minister to take up the cause once more with vigour, pointing out that Labor’s second term and huge Lower House majority gives them the opportunity to make better, effective policy for First Nations people.
In the wake of the failure of the Voice referendum, there appears to be very little will to do anything to work towards Indigenous reconciliation in Australia. The federal Coalition opposition campaigned actively against the Voice, using right-wing Trump supporter Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as their spokesperson. What policies it has are piece-meal responses to the symptoms of larger underlying inequities, with many proposals seemingly aimed at cuts to government programs. Treaty, truth-telling and reconciliation are not mentioned, even in passing.
Meanwhile, the Labor Federal Government seems to have lost their taste for taking any action; Prime Minister Albanese seems to feel once-burned, twice-shy: having unsuccessfully pushed the Yes vote in the referendum, he seems unwilling to risk any further political capital on Indigenous issues.
The reconciliation process is bigger than a referendum
On the eve of National Reconciliation Week (27 May-3 June, 2025) Dodson spoke to SBS’s NITV, pointing out, “The reconciliation process is bigger than a referendum.”
“We’ve got to start treating the First Peoples as the unique peoples that they are, [as] the sovereign peoples that they are. We can’t just continue treating them as some wayward citizens entitled to the largesse we’re prepared to dispense,” he said.
There were three pillars set out in the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017. They were the Voice, a treaty between the First Nations and the Australian Government, and truth-telling laid out in a proposed Makarrata Commission, which would facilitate treaty-making and truth-telling between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. With the battle for one of these lost, the other two processes have become all the more crucial.
“It’s up to us, ” Dodson explained to NITV. “We need to put pressure on and to be smart about that, but we can’t afford to let this opportunity pass us by and let down the legitimate and just claims of the First Peoples of this country to be recognised […] and to enable us, as a nation, to go forward,” he said. “You’ve actually got to ring up the politicians and talk to them and say, ‘Listen brother, there’s a need for you to actually meet the commitments that were made in the past’.”
Dodson said that Federal Government should begin exploring ways of setting up a Makarrata commission, to begin the process of investigating truth-telling and treaty, Dodson said. He also made the point that Aboriginal people need to be a central part of every step of the process.
“If you don’t participate, you’ll end up being the subject and the property of the assimilationists. That’s what the new assimilation is about, completing the obliteration of Aboriginal people from the landscape,” Dodson told the ABC’s 7.30.
“We’ve got to build now, start now, the time has come; we can’t keep kicking it down the road.”
Dodson was disappointed that the Prime Minister began to neglect Indigenous affairs after Australian people voted against the Voice, but he also understood it from a political point of view. “We saw a response at the poll that I think shocked many of us, many people felt gutted,” he told the ABC.
That’s what the new assimilation is about, completing the obliteration of Aboriginal people from the landscape…
Selfishness and envy also played a part. “I thought time would heal this, but we don’t know how to recognise Aboriginal peoples as sovereign peoples, because we fear this will undermine our own sovereignty. [Non-Indigenous people] think this is something about [Indigenous people] getting something better or more than they might be getting.”
Dodson, along with other prominent First Nations Australians, including Thomas Mayo and Tom Calma, expressed hope that the new Labor government would use its huge majority in parliament to begin a truth-telling process.
Dodson has also condemned Australia’s continuing removal of young Aboriginal people from their families, and the increasingly strict youth bail and incarceration rates, as “an assault on the Aboriginal people.”
Speaking to the Guardian, he said, “I don’t say that lightly. but if you want to eradicate a people from the landscape, you start taking them away, you start destroying the landscape of their cultural heritage, you attack their children or remove their children. This is a way to get rid of a people. It’s to destroy any semblance of any representation, manifestation in our nation that there’s a unique people in this country who are called the First Peoples.”
And as for Senator Price’s demonstrably false claims that “there are no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation”? Mr Dodson said of any Indigenous person holding this view, “One would have to question their loyalties. I don’t know how that view could be sustained in the light of the historical truth. If it’s so great and so good to have been colonised, why are we seeing the awful manifestations we see now? Poverty, drug abuse, violence.”
Read more about Reconciliation Week here.
Posted 2 June 2025
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