T wo days after the great Aboriginal Embassy Massacree, a number of older Aboriginal activists sat about worrying whether it - the affair - had caused a number of prominent (if predictable) Aborigines to repudiate the embassy and those associated with the demonstration. At this stage - before any question of whether Gillard's office had played provocateur had arisen - the images had brought sympathy to the Prime Minister, and, possibly, given bad impression of Aborigines generally. Should people be hanging their heads about their misjudgments? Had they gone too far? Was all of this going to evaporate good will and cause a backlash or a blacklash, some were wondering.
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Others were not that worried, if for quite pragmatic reasons. The Friday and the Saturday newspapers had images of the demonstration, and reports of what occurred on the front pages. The same images - most stripped of some of the adverbial shock and horror - had gone around the world, again drawing attention to the second-class citizenship of which Aborigines were complaining.
Saturday saw some reaction, some of which was critical of embassy protesters. But other reports discussed grievances. There were many letters to editors.
Most newspapers, including The Canberra Times, also published editorials focused on the protest. Most were critical, thinking protesters had probably done themselves more harm than good by being loud, noisy, and obnoxious to Gillard. But most went on to discuss Aboriginal affairs generally, to admit that progress was slow or stalled, and to accept that many Aborigines had every right to be frustrated. For most of the acid, in short, there was quite a bit of sugar. A balance sheet involved more than a measure of whether the publicity was, on balance, positive or negative. It was a plus that there was any discussion, positive or negative at all. For most Aboriginal causes, the struggle is simply to get on the agenda.
Likewise, the tone of even critical letters to the editor, or finger-pointing from the more respectable, comfortable and government-patronised Aboriginal statespeople, admitted at least a germ of genuine grievance, before the lecture about letting the side down.
The embassy activists had been quite effective in putting Aboriginal affairs on the agenda, and on a day - as it happened Australia Day when the rest of us commemorate our dispossession of Aborigines - when it had been unlikely that any other event involving indigenous Australians would get attention. That was two days after the affair, long before it was given a fresh rush of oxygen by the discovery that, somehow, Gillard's office had been trying to make trouble, and that Gillard had, as it were, kicked yet another own goal, this time with a bare foot.
The Government had already made its hostility to the embassy commemoration clear. A week before Australia Day, minders had sent a strong message to Aboriginal folk planning the mid-year National Aboriginal and Islander Day. The Government was said to be angry that the committee was planning to make the theme this year the 40th anniversary of the embassy. An impression was given that the Commonwealth was going to be less generous than usual in funding activities on the day, because it thought that saying anything positive about the embassy was ''sending the wrong message''.
The right message, apparently, is that thanks to the grim determination of the Government, and new programs of tough love, encapsulated by Northern Territory intervention measures, the tide was now turning, albeit agonisingly slowly in Aboriginal affairs.
Backward, lingering, nostalgic or wistful looks at the past, at the long legacy of failed policies, or implicit reproach of ministers or prime ministers is ''not helpful''. Not helpful to the Government. But also not helpful to the carefully prepared and sanitised Aboriginal causes and projects on the approved and official agenda.
Why, only a week before, for example, distinguished Australians, including Aboriginal professionals, were over at the National Gallery for the launch of just such a matter. There was the Secretary of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Fin Pratt, playing diminutive master of ceremonies in the best Paddy Killoran fashion, starting off with a welcome to country, then some cute Aboriginal dancers performing before a beaming Prime Minister (with chequebook) and Jenny Macklin, the relevant minister. Hundreds of the middle class, white and black, were there, scoffing cakes and quaffing tea, and, generally having a good time, if not one much devoted to the issues agitating people preparing to come to the embassy a week later.
This event also got publicity - a few photos up front, thanks to the cute dancers - and articles in the opinion pages cogitating whether a few words mentioning Aborigines in the constitution would make any difference to Aboriginal lives. Ultimately newspapers wrote leaders bloodlessly weighing and measuring the arguments. No one got too excited; few fingers were pointed.
Jenny Macklin, and Julia Gillard can, of course, reason with the comfy folk at the National Gallery, even if someone critical slips in. Many of the people who gathered a week later at the embassy seemed to them, by contrast, to be beyond reason, trapped, locked in, hostile and unable to move on. They might represent that large part of Aboriginal Australia still clearly at the bottom of every heap going - the most poor, the most sick, the most over-crowded, with the worst education, income and prospects - and the most angry about it.
The embassy, in short, is a monument to continuing failure by government, and to those caught at the bottom of the heap.
But the Government has to a considerable degree ''moved on'' from automatic empathy, sympathy or pity for such people - or more particularly their leaders. Increasingly, privately, it blames that leadership for failing to mobilise communities. Welfare, unemployment, discrimination, drugs, alcohol and community dysfunction has, the new critics think, created a culture of whingeing and complaint, of inaction, neurosis and hopelessness, and ''inability to move on''. A sort of collective post-traumatic stress which, in effect, authorises us all to make decisions in their best interests without reference to their wishes.
Confident apologists for the new continental order remind you that these protesters are mouthing the same slogans as 40 years ago, acting as if nothing has changed. The fact that nothing much has changed for them, or that no one has ever much heard them, as opposed to listened, to them does not seem to occur.
This new perception of Aborigines extends to a wider underclass - the reason government can pretend that its new income management schemes are not racially discriminatory. Perhaps 5 per cent of Australians - 10 per cent in some regions - are in this underclass of what some Australians call ''no-hopers''. Members of it make up 95 per cent of the jail population, 90 per cent of the homeless and, probably, 80 per cent of the manifestly mentally ill. Aborigines are about three per cent of the population, but form about 50 per cent of this underclass, the reason they figure so disproportionately in the more shameful sets of statistics.
Meanwhile, as something of an unremarked achievement, many Aborigines do escape such circumstances, although, for many, this involves separating themselves from their families and communities, and, for some, criticising those who won't, don't or can't cross the bridge.
Some Aboriginal thinkers believe that Aborigines cannot advance collectively, and can scarcely advance individually, until a culture of complaint, rights, entitlement and welfare is scrapped for a new culture rewarding effort, work and coming to terms with the modern economy, and punishing failure and bad behaviour. Increasingly government agrees; it is doling out more and more money to test their theories. We await independent assessments of these own theories in action.
Government is increasingly substituting ''tough love'' for sympathy, bureaucratic discretion for rights (if only with the underclass) and coercion and punishment for failure to conform. Witness for example, the policy of starving parents who do not force their kids to go to school.
There are some observers who agree, and more who, at the least, understand. There are even some with the capacity - so manifest in the glossy, hopeful but not very persuasive ''closing the gap'' report this week - to discern glimmers of improvement in the dreary statistics of Aboriginal disadvantage.
Macklin, moreover, believes a silent majority of physically and psychically abused Aboriginal women is willing her on - the reason why she can so regularly and confidently ignore facts which do not suit, and the necessary ''teething pain'' of putting underclass Aborigines, yet again, in the hands of bureaucrats, social workers and cops.
Julia Gillard and Jenny Macklin might prefer the company of suits and cute dancers, and fancy functions at the gallery, but the angry faces of the underclass are also with us. Publicity about them, good or bad, will never be able to be ''managed'' by their ''friends'' in the ministerial suites.
