Can Liberal States Accommodate Indigenous Peoples?. Duncan Ivison

It refers to two parties coming together, after a struggle, to heal the wounds of the past and to work towards establishing just relations for the future. There are two crucial elements to this concept that the Council highlights. The first is the need to establish an agreement-making process between First Nations and federal and state governments – a treaty process. The second is the need for truth-telling. A Makarrata Commission would provide a mechanism and public space for ‘truth telling about our history’. It’s important to note how closely the call for truth-telling is linked to the proposed treaty process: it’s not only about reckoning with the past, but also informing and shaping the future.² The renowned Australian anthropologist W. H. Stanner once said that the persistent absence of Aboriginal peoples from Australia’s history constituted a ‘cult of forgetfulness’.³ The Uluru Statement demands that we abandon that cult once and for all.

      What kind of statement is the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’? Philosophers talk of statements being ‘performative’ when they do something in being said, as opposed to merely saying it. Political theorists, in turn, often focus on performative statements that create or found political things: for example, the force of the utterance ‘We the people …’ in the preamble to the American constitution, or ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident …’ in the Declaration of Independence.

      All founding statements contain structural gaps between their intended meaning and the effects they seek to bring about in the world. There is no better example of this than the deep incongruity between the substance of the claims in the American Declaration of Independence and their co-existence with settler colonialism and slavery. These gaps must be filled by politics – a continual work on the world, by citizens, that returns to the promise (as yet unfulfilled) of that founding.

I believe that the Uluru Statement prefigures a possible re-founding of Australia in this sense. However, nothing is guaranteed. The initial response from the government of the day was to reject it outright. The referendum required to implement the Voice would need to be passed by a majority of the Australian people, as well as a majority of people in a majority of states. But the reaction amongst the general public has been generous, and a joint select parliamentary committee, made up of members from all sides of politics, has called for the Voice to become a reality (though there remains disagreement about how exactly that could be achieved). The Statement has thus set in motion a series of possibilities that could yet bring into being new forms of political relations between First Nations and the Australian state.

      Another opportunity that has emerged is to rethink some of the normative foundations of liberal democracy in light of the Uluru Statement. Its core conceptual elements – of voice, history, truth-telling, agreement-making, legitimacy and justice – prefigure a potential normative foundation for First Nation and liberal state relations. My goal in this book is to try to develop this idea more fully, and to use the opportunity to respond to the challenge I believe Indigenous peoples present to liberal political theory more generally.

I need to make one thing clear before we begin. I am not an Aboriginal person. I grew up in Québec, Canada; was educated there and in the United Kingdom; and have now lived and worked in Australia for almost two decades. Although I draw extensively from Aboriginal political and legal philosophy, I am writing very much from a non-Aboriginal perspective, and as someone deeply interested in the history and future of liberal political thought. But I am also writing as a citizen; as someone trying to understand these issues more fully – to try to respond to what I see as a profound challenge to the future of liberal democracy. The Uluru Statement is an outstretched hand from the Indigenous peoples of Australia to all of us – tentatively and perhaps wearily so. This short book is a modest attempt to grab hold and begin the conversation.

Notes

1 ‘Officially, there is no centre of Australia. This is because there are many complex but equally valid methods that can determine possible centres of a large, irregularly-shaped area – especially one that is curved by the earth’s surface.’ http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/centre-of-australia-states-territories. 2 For an important discussion of the Regional Dialogue process see Appleby & Davis 2018. 3 Stanner 1968.