In yesterday’s Crikey I depicted, statistically, the life of an “average Aborigine“. Some might find that a depressing approach. 

I don’t find the statistics on Indigenous affairs paralysing simply because I’ve never found reality paralysing. It’s just reality, ugly though it may be. Australians, it’s true, might find the statistics disheartening. But guess what? They’re also the facts. We can hide from them (as we have done for the last 40 years) or we can confront them and try and fix them.

I challenge any and every non-Aboriginal Australian to spend one night in Wadeye (or Redfern, or any of the countless other Aboriginal communities) and then find something to celebrate.

The question that I keep asking is what, exactly, are we celebrating? The intent of the referendum was to enable the government to make laws for the benefit of Aboriginal people. Yet, as demonstrated in the Hindmarsh Islands court case, what that ultimately translated to was that the government could also make laws to the detriment of Aboriginal people. And there’s been plenty of those, not least of all the Native Title Act amendments in 1998, and the recent amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory).

I think the footage of Sunday’s events sums it up best – Howard makes a speech, gets heckled and then the heckler gets thunderous applause.

It seems to me the people ‘celebrating’ the 1967 referendum are whitefellas, politicians and the media. It’s an event aimed primarily at easing white middle class guilt, just as the referendum itself was aimed at doing precisely the same thing. Aboriginal people, overwhelmingly, are commemorating this event, not celebrating it. There’s a vast difference.

The Aboriginal leaders who are calling for celebrations are, overwhelmingly, appointed leaders. Lowitja O’Donoghue? Appointed. Jackie Huggins? Appointed. John Moriarty? Appointed. Warren Mundine? Appointed. That’s not to say some of them have not contributed enormously. But to pretend they are representative of the ‘Aboriginal view’ is ludicrous.

The campaigners who got the referendum up, of course, deserve congratulations. Their efforts were massive. But the failings by white Australia that followed were also massive. If blackfellas want to celebrate the ’67 referendum (and most don’t), then that’s their choice. But white Australians should be hanging their heads in shame.

Australians have never been serious about Indigenous equality — if we were, then Aboriginal Australia wouldn’t be in the parlous state it is today. Either that or white Australia is a hopeless race that can’t achieve parity for just two percent of the population. It’s one or the other – we can’t have it both ways.

We can’t pretend that the fact Aboriginal children born today have a life expectancy worse than a child from Bangladesh doesn’t say something deeper about us as a nation.