Alan Kirkland
Alan Kirkland has been involved in social justice since the age of 15, when he helped organise student strikes against cuts to public education funding in NSW. Alan has been active in non-government advocacy organisations in the areas of youth affairs, community welfare, criminal justice and gay and lesbian rights. He is currently Chair of the Board of the Welfare Rights Centre, Sydney, and Treasurer of the Australian Council of Social Service. Alan has also held statutory appointments to bodies including the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (Cth), the Administrative Decisions Tribunal (NSW) and the Sustainability Advisory Council (NSW). Alan has been Executive Director of the Australian Law Reform Commission since September 2004.
What a reconciled Australia looks like to me.
Reconciliation for me involves a bit of built-in redundancy. The word itself implies an end point, where we've completed the process of dealing with the past, and feel confident about moving on as a diverse but less divided nation.
And when it comes to 'practical' reconciliation, that is probably what we all want - we want to reach a stage where we feel like the job is done. But what does that mean?
It means being born into a family that has had equality, flexible health care before and through the birthing process. It means having effective family support when needed, particularly through the early years of life. It means having access to affordable childcare that is flexible enough to cope with family circumstances including study, work and carer responsibilities.
It means being part of a family where parents and grandparents have enjoyed paid employment when they've needed it, which also means that they will have had a good experience of education from early childhood to post-school vocational or university education.
It means experiencing safe, affordable housing that's of a standard that most Australians would consider acceptable.
It means having little contact with the criminal justice system - or if you do have contact with it, experiencing fair treatment that takes account of cultural factors.
While none of these are things that we should wish for indigenous children or families alone, the reality is that we need to focus on opportunities for indigenous communities if we want to have any real impact on inequality.
But no matter how soon we achieve this goal of 'practical' equality, we should never seek to abandon the other, symbolic aspects of reconciliation. We should always speak - especially to our children - of the long history of our indigenous peoples and their experience of European invasion. We should always remember and acknowledge that we live and move about on land that was in indigenous hands for thousands of years before European arrival.
A few years ago I thought the reconciliation movement was dead - or at least entering a long hibernation. Now I sense a reawakening.
If I'm right, the challenge for us this time around is to make sure that the community's emotional will for reconciliation results in big, practical changes at all levels of government, supported by big, practical spending. Unless we make sure it does, we'll all feel good about spending a few weeks celebrating the anniversary of the referendum but by the time of the next anniversary not much will have changed.
Alan Kirkland
