More even than Margaret Thatcher was, John Howard is an ideologically driven prime minister. At the 2006 dinner celebrating Quadrant’s fiftieth birthday, he spoke admiringly of the magazine’s campaign against black-armband history, against the political correctness it expressed, and against the (allegedly) empty gestures that constituted much of what was called reconciliation.

Though his ideological agenda may not have been part of his (I suspect complex) motives for the recent national emergency, Howard must have hoped that it would advance that agenda. His fellow combatants had no doubt that it had. Writing in The Australian and other places, they proclaimed that the need for such a ‘draconian’ intervention in Aboriginal communities marked the decisive defeat of more than
thirty years of left-liberal policies on Aboriginal matters, policies that had focused on Aborigines’ calls for self-determination. Worse than merely failing, those policies, they claimed, had played a significant role
in creating radically ‘dysfunctional’ Aboriginal communities. (I put ‘dysfunctional’ in inverted commas because though its use is almost ubiquitous, it is devoid of even human, let alone humane, resonance. If
responses to the humiliation, alienation, despair, cruelty and worse to which it refers are humane, then that must be despite its use rather than because of it.)

To an important extent the intellectual Right has been right about the fact of policy failure and, right too I think, in its claim that Howard’s intervention made many people finally accept the fact. I imagine I am not
alone in being glad of that. For too long defences of existing policies were half-hearted. Reluctance to admit openly that they were exhausted generated despondency. Little energy could be found to develop new ones. That encouraged the Right to suggest that any policy that expressed a sense of collective responsibility for past wrongs done to the Aborigines would cause them to suffer a debilitating sense of ‘victimhood’. But there are no general psychological or moral laws connecting the pain of having been wronged and the demand that it be acknowledged with atrophy of initiative and the destruction of a sense of responsibility. It is pointless, therefore, to look for evidence of them.

As one would expect, when it exists, the connection depends on complex circumstances that are unfriendly to careless generalisation. Did progressive policies play a significant part in causing the terrible things revealed in the Little Children are Sacred report and its many predecessors? Suppose for the sake of argument that they did. That concession would not satisfy the combative Right. Its case was not merely an empirical one about the effect of this or that policy. It was about the underlying political values that informed progressive policy.

Those values were the ones that defined reconciliation, as it was called before John Howard and his then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, John Herron, distinguished it from ‘practical reconciliation’. At the core of
those values was a sense of collective responsibility for the wrongs committed against the Aborigines by our political ancestors. The call for an apology was its most publicised but perhaps least important expression. Far more important was the acceptance of the justified desire of many Aborigines for self-determination. With what in retrospect looks like impressive political savvy, Howard and his supporters among the intelligentsia undermined the considerable public support for an apology by undermining the values underlying reconciliation itself. Howard denied that Australians had any reason to assume collective responsibility for wrongs done by their political ancestors (you cannot be responsible for things you did not do, he said), and therefore denied there is any reason for apology.

He described the demand for an apology and much of what it implied as merely symbolic — when it was not dangerously divisive — and contrasted it with practical measures to ameliorate the misery evident in many Aboriginal communities. Adopting such hard-headed practical measures, he said, was the ‘truly moral’ response to that misery. Yet — and this showed his cunning — by calling the implementation of those measures ‘practical reconciliation’, he made it look like a form of reconciliation, even though his denial of collective responsibility made nonsense of that description. If there is no need for an apology, then there is no need for reconciliation, which is a form of political atonement if it is anything. Howard managed to exploit much of the goodwill associated with reconciliation, while eroding its conceptual basis. The real target of ‘practical reconciliation’ was not impractical, symbolic gestures: it was reconciliation itself.

The unintended consequences of Howard’s incursion into the Northern Territory will be many and some will be severe, but perhaps the most surprising and far-reaching of them will be the exposure and defeat of this deliberate attempt to create moral and political confusion. It is obvious that there need be no tension between the defining values of reconciliation and anything properly called practical reconciliation, obvious that if one can feel proud of one’s country then one can also feel ashamed of it, and obvious that love of country is not only consistent with, but can find expression in, the pained acknowledgment of its crimes. The refusal to acknowledge such morally obvious points is surely an attempt to disguise the means to advance a political project.

Published by Arena Publications, Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia is a series of essays edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson and is the first book to cover the Northern Territory Intervention. Crikey will be publishing a series of extracts of the book, due to hit bookshelves on the 1st of October, over the next week.