A new anthem that energises reconciliation is one legacy that a conservative like Scott Morrison could pull off.
A one-word change to Australia’s national anthem, announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Australia Day, is a symbol of progress towards reconciliation. A new anthem that recognises prior Indigenous occupation of the continent would be worthy in its own right while also starting the engine to take us to more fulsome reconciliation.
Credit should be given where it is due: Morrison’s initiative is welcome because it ends the fiction in Advance Australia Fair that ours is a young country when Indigenous people were here at least 60,000 years ago.
Progress has been a long time coming. Thirty-three years ago, along with the late Bob Sorby and Minister Gerry Hand, I was on the tarmac at Alice Springs with Prime Minister Bob Hawke, following the 1987 election. We had flown there on the official jet to announce that the third-term Hawke government would begin consultation on an agreement with Indigenous people for signing in 1988, the Bicentenary of European settlement.
Bob had written a note he gave me that I still have: “The government believes it is essential as we come to the Bicentenary year to recognise that two hundred years of European settlement comes after forty thousand years of Aboriginal history. The government will explore how best to reflect that recognition and the obligations which this involves for the whole community.”
The agreement – whether a compact or a treaty – never got airborne; but perhaps the Morrison initiative is a flickering light signifying that there is hope yet.
In his dying days, Hawke lamented to me several times that his greatest disappointment was his lack of success in achieving reconciliation.
Bob’s interest in land rights was mugged by the reality of West Australian politics. Labor premier Brian Burke had counselled Bob that if he were to move on land rights, the mining industry would launch a well-funded campaign, warning city people that their backyards were at risk of land claims.
In 1988, we attended the Barunga Festival where elders presented Bob with the Barunga Statement. Further to a national system of land rights, it called for a national, elected Aboriginal and Islander organisation to oversee Indigenous affairs.
The Hawke government, through Gerry Hand, delivered the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) but it was abolished by the Howard government in 2004 after a series of controversies.
The Keating government erected a beacon of hope on the tarmac through the Native Title Act of 1993 that gave legislative force to the High Court’s Mabo decision. Keating faced fierce opposition from outside the Parliamentary Labor Party and from within, but resolutely pushed the legislation through the Senate – with the support of Queensland premier Wayne Goss as advised by a young Kevin Rudd.
In 2008, Prime Minister Rudd issued a parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generation.
Now, processes are underway to advance the positions stated in the Uluru Statement of the Heart released in 2017, which would require constitutional and legislative change. These processes are being overseen by a senior advisory group co-chaired by Professors Tom Calma and the irrepressible Marcia Langton.
A new national anthem need not detract from these processes. Twenty years ago, as a parliamentary backbencher, I launched a campaign to replace Advance Australia Fair with an adaptation of I Am Australian written by former member of the Seekers, Bruce Woodley.
A new anthem could help energise non-Indigenous Australians in favour of reconciliation, the goals of the Statement of the Heart and constitutional recognition of prior occupation by Indigenous people.
I Am Australian has been sung by schoolchildren for more than two decades. As adults, these young people would take little convincing of its superiority over an anthem that recognises not prior Indigenous occupation but that we live on an island that is “girt by sea.”
An alternative, written by another former Seekers member, Judith Durham, in collaboration with Indigenous people, retains the music of Advance Australia Fair while replacing the lyrics with delightful words replete with sentiments of reconciliation.
My proposal is for a plebiscite, like the one that led to the Hawke government in 1984 to replace God Save the Queen with Advance Australia Fair. Australians could be asked to choose from three candidates: the present anthem, the Judith Durham version and an adaptation of I Am Australian.
Realistically, Australia’s gun laws could have been enacted only by a conservative government. They were John Howard’s greatest achievement. Every prime minister wants a legacy. Reconciliation could be Scott Morrison’s.
A new anthem wouldn’t fix Indigenous disadvantage or achieve the goals of the Statement of the Heart, but it might get the plane, stalled on the tarmac at Alice Springs, its taillight flickering, moving along the runway. Anything, anything at all, would be better than mindlessly observing that our island home is girt by sea.
Craig Emerson is a distinguished fellow at the ANU, director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.