Racial Integration in Australia and New Zealand

▪ 1998

by A.R.G. Griffiths

      By 1997 public opinion in Australia and New Zealand was demanding that a solution be found to the great gap in the standards of living between the indigenous people of each nation and those who arrived later. The governments of Australia and New Zealand and the Aboriginal and Maori people all agreed that as the new millennium approached, reconciliation was vital. For two centuries a variety of programs had been tried, including assimilation, benevolent neglect, integration, and a small amount of self-determination, but they all failed. Driving the reconciliation process were decisions by the High Court in Australia to allow Aboriginals to claim the titles of their traditional lands.

      Until 1992 Australia had been regarded by an 18th-century legal concept as an empty continent where the indigenous inhabitants had no rights to ownership. But a High Court ruling overturned two centuries of legal practice by deciding that Eddie Mabo and other residents of the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait, who brought a case against the commonwealth, owned customary title to their land. This sensational and unexpected judgment, known as the Mabo decision, established that Aboriginals had the right to claim title to traditional lands. When Prime Minister Paul Keating's Australian Labor Party passed the act of Parliament in 1993 and turned the High Court ruling into law, however, the government excluded pastoral leases (very large tracts of land leased to farmers and ranchers) from native claims. The legislation led to a crisis of confidence in the mining and resource industries. Uncertain about the ownership of land, investors were inhibited in their prospecting and exploitation of minerals, oil, and gas. The Queensland premier, Rob Borbidge, called for an emergency premiers' conference; the National Farmers Federation asked for action to overrule the decision; and many Australians believed that every backyard in Australia was under threat from an Aboriginal land claim.

      Keating's Labor government fell in 1996, and the new conservative administration under Prime Minister John Howard set out to rewrite the statute book as far as Aboriginal land rights were concerned. Howard moved quickly as soon as the High Court had ruled on a second watershed case brought by the Wik people. The High Court ruled on Dec. 23, 1996, that pastoral leases and native title could coexist. Howard was aghast to find that potentially 78% of Australia's land was claimable by Aboriginals under the Wik judgment. The National Party (the junior partner in the government) led the chorus of outrage against the High Court judgment. Howard made several visits to outback Australia, where pastoralists held title to properties as large as small European nations, and after a divisive and abusive period of negotiation devised a 10-point plan. The Howard government eliminated many of the Keating reforms. Claims dealing with water and offshore resources were to be wiped out, as were claims in which government infrastructure was involved. Aboriginals would be able to enter land to hold ceremonies, visit sacred sites, obtain water, and gather food, but they would not be permitted to interfere with crops, livestock, pastures, or fences.

      The complex new legislation, 400 pages long, contained, according to the jubilant deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, "bucket loads of extinguishment." Native title was to be abolished on pastoral leases when it would interfere with the rights of the pastoralist. The Aboriginals in return ominously promised payback in the form of "bucket loads of litigation," which, they threatened, would ultimately cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

      Whereas the debate in Australia centred on the Mabo and Wik cases, in New Zealand the largest and oldest land claim in the nation's history neared settlement. The New Zealand government and the Ngai Tahu, a South Island Maori tribe, agreed to bury the hatchet in a dispute that had begun with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Although it might have appeared to them that they were slightly better off under the Treaty of Waitangi than under the legal concept by which the Australian Aboriginals were dispossessed, the Maori still considered that they had been forced to sell 14 million ha (34.5 million ac) for the pitiful sum of £14,750. In September 1997 the New Zealand Parliament agreed with their long-standing complaints and made a compensation settlement of $NZ 170 million. This paled into insignificance compared with the Maori claim that their economic losses from the government land purchases were over $NZ 20 billion. The New Zealand government expressed profound regret and apologized unreservedly for the past suffering and grave injustices that had significantly impaired the Ngai Tahu economic, social, and cultural development.

      Some influential Australians tried to learn from Maori experiences the best ways to achieve reconciliation, and at a community level the clouds over New Zealand and Australia contained fewer thunderstorms than had been predicted by such controversial political figures as Winston Peters and Pauline Hanson. (See) (Hanson, Pauline Lee ) For every Peters and Hanson, however, there were many in each country who were striving to achieve close racial harmony.

      Nevertheless, whereas New Zealand took every opportunity to apologize, Australia flew in the face of public opinion. At a special staged reconciliation meeting with Aboriginals in Melbourne, Howard said only that he was sorry for the hurt and trauma many continued to experience as a consequence of past practices and that he himself felt a deep sorrow for those of his fellow Australians who suffered injustice under the practices of past generations toward indigenous people. Howard insisted, however, that "in facing the realities of the past we must not join those who would portray Australia's history since 1788 as little more than a disgraceful record of imperialism, exploitation, and racism."

A.R.G. Griffiths is Associate Professor in History at Flinders University of South Australia and author of Contemporary Australia.

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