Current debates about an advisory voice, treaty and truth are emblematic of subtle yet familiar underlying sociopolitical patterns in Australia. These deeply flawed, repetitive patterns dictate whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are included or not in the Australian colonial body-politic. They belie a deeper national yearning for collective belonging.
I aim to expose some of these patterns, highlight how they are playing out in the current debates about an advisory voice to parliament, and lift our attention from predictable short-termism to potential solutions that are more structural, strategic and long-term. We need a better vision, a more effective dreaming. I aim to outline the legitimate concerns and thoughts of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, who ironically feel voiceless in current debates about ‘their’ advisory voice for fear of being tagged with the rabid right wing.
Patterns
There are a number of well-worn colonial techniques of power and governance hiding in plain sight in the Australian body-politic. The most obvious is divide and rule. Native title and the industry it spawns is a great example of divide and rule masquerading as inclusion and social justice. As Gary Foley (1997) famously stated, ‘Native title is not land rights, and reconciliation is not justice’.
Native title legislation is deeply flawed. It puts the onus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples to prove an unbroken connection to country and culture (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2015), as opposed to the invaders having to prove their rights to land. Further, the process of assessing native title claims by the Federal Court and Native Title Tribunal is weighted in favour of corporate and government interests. The process effectively means the first 80% of the time it takes to determine a claim is spent assuring the rights and interests of pastoralists, miners, governments and other individual ‘landholders’—and some claims can take fifteen to twenty years to be determined. The remaining 20% of this time is spent clarifying a connection report, where mostly white anthropologists finalise their evidence (using evidence from mostly other white anthropologists) about which Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander families own or can speak for which tracts of land and water.
This weighting of time and resources means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples—who are sometimes still in the laborious process of recovering their languages, stories and identities as a result of genocide and intergenerational trauma—are effectively set up to fight each other (a distraction), while whitefullas ensure they maintain their power and money. If native title claims are ‘successful’, it means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups get to have a limited say about what happens on their land, but never actually own or gain much material benefit from it (Webb, 2016).
Native title highlights a pattern of not only divide and rule but also inclusion masquerading as justice. Michel Foucault (1982) described a nation-state’s power in relation to its ‘citizens’ as its ability to set and enforce parameters (control) apparently allowing citizens to be ‘free’ within these limitations, but which actually mean citizens self-control themselves—the ‘free’ citizens controlling themselves for the state. Václav Havel (1978) has described this social control as a collective lie, a dream most citizens maintain out of fear but which is not actually effective governance. Mitchell Dean (2009) describes these techniques of power as a shift from government to governmentality, where the nation-state’s motivation becomes the preservation of the state itself rather than necessarily the good of its citizens.
In trying to grasp the momentousness of the Mabo v Queensland 1992 High Court decision, I presume the architects of native title meant well. Former prime minister Paul Keating tried to embed his narrative (dream) of Australia’s place in the world through global and domestic policies that spoke of a stronger and more resolved national identity. He was rushing to have legislation passed before Christmas of 1992 because he knew he would call the next federal election soon after and was unsure if he would win. It was reportedly heady and exciting for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander negotiators to be dealing directly with an Australian prime minister for the first time, but in effect, they were trying to change 200 years of colonisation within two weeks.
Unfortunately, in this rush, perhaps the architects of native title believed the only way Mabo’s prior ownership and governance of land and waters could be ‘recognised’ would be to ‘enable’ this in white legislation. In doing so, the architects fell for the subtle and yet fatally flawed, normalised pattern of assuming state control is impossible to change—a defining technique of state control. In effect, they assumed the benevolence of the state, accepting its authority and that white parliamentary parameters were the only form of power under which Black ownership and governance could stand. In ‘including’ Black ownership and governance into white rules, they allowed white people to continue controlling Black land. The rubric of ‘reconciliation’ allowed white rules to appear inclusive while reinscribing white power. Was it a good thing to be ‘included’? (Fredericks, 2009) On whose terms? For what ends? The architects of native title dropped big Black dreaming into small white rules.
Another recurring colonial pattern is the very naming and framing of ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs’. In this conceptualisation of their lives and dreams, the body-politic routinely casts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as ‘the problem’—to be blamed for health and social outcomes (e.g. ‘naughty’ Aboriginal people drinking too much in Alice Springs) while conveniently ignoring the systems and industries that produce them. For example, there are white people in various industries—liquor, jails, health, police and so on—making millions off our misery. White systems and society feign outrage at Indigenous youth suicide. We are problematised as ‘mad, bad and sad’ Aboriginal individuals, but these systems do nothing to address systemic contributing factors, such as daily police brutality and harassment of Indigenous youth, white gangs who attack and apparently run over Aboriginal people with no consequence (Bucci, 2022), triage nurses who can’t say the word ‘Aboriginal’, white teachers with zero skills in working with Aboriginal learning styles, and white curricula with no Aboriginal content other than cutesy dot paintings and boomerangs. In this re-occurring pattern, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are blamed for ‘poor educational outcomes’ and seen as in need of ‘capacity building’, while the re-inscription of white power through police violence, and the apparent supremacy of white values through curricula and public discourse, goes unchecked.
Regarding the referendum for an advisory voice to parliament, whether the yes or no vote prevails—and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have a diversity of views on this—a serious underlying pattern remains covered and maintained. This is a pattern of whiteness (Phillips, 2015) and abuse, and it is the third pattern I want to highlight.
Whiteness is a precursor to, and hangover from, colonisation. Whiteness is assuming that ‘white is right’, that only white science can be supreme or correct, that only white people can manage money, that only white governance can be correct. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s (1980) habitus—a normalised and habitual way of thinking and doing—whiteness is the habitus or modus operandi within race relations in Australia. White people set the rules of debate, on their own terms and using their own values, and Black people are expected only to operate within those predetermined parameters.
Of course, one doesn’t have to be ethnically white to experience or proffer whiteness—consider Jacinta Price’s and Warren Mundine’s parroting of the ‘Blacks are lazy’ narrative. Most people agree that Aboriginal people’s participation in the economy is important, or that addressing addiction is important (in white communities too!), but the crucial questions are: ‘On whose terms?’ and ‘For what ends?’ Should Aboriginal people become miners and dig up our country, just like white people, just for the money? I’m assuming there might be better value matches found in Aboriginal people investing in solar, wind and other renewables.
By this description in Australia, whiteness is a form of domestic violence. In most domestic violence situations, the victim is abused by a more physically powerful perpetrator. Using coercion, control and torture, the perpetrator makes the victim believe they are responsible for the perpetrator’s violence, as a way to cover their own shame and insecurities. The victim may or may not have experience of similar violence and abuse. Either way, if they do not have accessible support, they may come to believe they don’t deserve better, that it is their fault, or that there is no way out. In this seemingly closed toxic environment, the victim may have no choice but to adopt coping mechanisms like minimisation, manipulation or lying to try to distract the perpetrator to reduce the abuse. Unfortunately, in this toxic environment, they can both become sick. The perpetrator is sick because of their abuse; the victim can become sick because of their coping mechanisms.
This dynamic is the same as can be seen in ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs’. Governments and white institutions are the abusers, appearing benevolent while ensuring they remain in control of our land and wealth. They keep their power and wield it over us, blame us for our predicaments, hide their role in the production of our outcomes, ‘give’ us distractions to make it seem like we are getting somewhere (native title, reconciliation, platitudes), and gaslight us if we dare question the legitimacy of white rules.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are the abused, coming to believe we have no other options but to depend on the abuser’s ‘treats’ like funding and promises of minimal reductions in violence—Reconciliation Action Plans, anyone? Some of us learn toxic coping mechanisms, like building media profiles as a form of false leadership legitimacy, currying favour with government ministers and elites to prove how influential we are, or even adopting a staunch, ‘never-say-yes-to-anything-the-white-man-says’ position because that’s how one proves their cultural strength.
These apparent extremes of abused peoples’ behaviour—‘yes’ people at all costs, and ‘no’ people at all costs—are two sides of the same coin: toxic and ‘normal’ human reactions to abnormal circumstances, vis-à-vis the colonial state. ‘Yes’ people tend to believe in and subscribe to government and corporate parameters as normal. They often believe in incrementalism—changing the system from the inside. This sometimes brings reform, and is sometimes effective, but has not made a dent in structural issues such as, say, admitting theft of the land, paying rent, or stopping police from murdering us. ‘No’ people do not believe anything anyone says, and their only modus operandi is to be oppositional, perhaps with reason, because of a deep mistrust of government motivation. Sometimes marching on the streets is entirely effective, and sometimes incrementalism is effective, yet both positions are predicated on reacting to white theft and abuse. Apparently, we can only ever dream or act within, or react against, white parameters. Neither position, by itself, is effective.
These repetitive, unchecked patterns of white colonial techniques of governance keep the field of play and public imagination focused on white dreams, paradigms and rules. If Black people just learned white rules properly, we could ‘beat them at their own game’, apparently. But in playing only within these white rules, we limit our own dreams and dreaming. In our efforts to be included in the white man’s systems and society on the white man’s terms, we forfeit not only our thinking and identities, but our sovereignty.
The proposal for an advisory voice
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have a diversity of views on the proposal for an advisory voice to parliament. Some believe in the advisory proposal because they think ‘something is better than nothing’, also known as incrementalism. Some conflate an advisory voice with self-determination; a fatal mistake. Other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have many questions and concerns, and the number of these communities and concerns are many more than polls might suggest. Those polls have been conducted by white companies with extremely limited skill in translating the lived experience of our communities into realistic polling methodologies. I question their veracity.
Further, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples feel ambivalent and genuinely snookered—they don’t want to raise their legitimate questions or concerns in public for fear of appearing to support the political puppetry of Peter Dutton, Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price, or neo-Nazis. Ironically, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices have been silenced in a public debate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices.
Viewed through the lens of these patterns, the proposal for an advisory voice could be seen as merely another example of state power appearing benevolent while maintaining white power and abuse. This is the definition of poverty, thinking and acting with deprivation: ‘We’ll only ever get the crumbs off their table. Please, master, we won’t ask for too much, can we please, please just advise you on what we think?’
Whatever one’s position, it is important to ensure the colonial patterns and techniques of governance are considered. A Yes vote will not fix Australia of its guilt about ‘the Aboriginal problem’. A No vote will not be the end of Aboriginal movements for reform—in fact, it might wake Australia from its stupor. Regardless of the outcome, we owe it to future generations to ensure we plan for fundamental and mutually beneficial changes to the sovereign basis of power, not merely incrementalism within existing colonial structures.
Yet given Australia will vote soon, here I outline some specific reasons for why I am ambivalent about the proposal for an advisory voice to parliament.
Process
The proposal for a voice has been flawed on process. Like the ‘Recognise’ campaign before it, the advisory voice campaign has made the critical mistake of engaging white Australia before Black Australia. Trusting white pollsters and apparatchiks, the campaigners appear to have made the strategic calculation that engaging 97% of the population—non-Indigenous people—is more important than engaging the 3% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, given the weight of the numbers. Yet what we see now is white Australia asking Black Australia for clarity. In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, there is limited clarity, and this strategy has left many feeling taken for granted or ignored.
Before the meeting at Uluru that issued the Statement from the Heart, Noel Pearson and former Minister for Indigenous Australians Julian Leeser were meeting; allegedly to negotiate what would be put to the Australian people (Collins, 2015). Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sensed they had allegedly negotiated a political path forward; a form of constitutional recognition that was a path of least resistance. They have never been open about the precise nature and terms of their dealings, never mind the legitimate questions on what terms they might have been negotiating about all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ lives.
In terms of the Statement from the Heart, with the benefit of hindsight, there are a number of legitimate concerns. At the time of the Statement, worn down by years of oppressive Coalition/Labor ‘intervention’-style politics, there appeared to be almost national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander agreement on the three sentinel objectives of voice, treaty and truth. However—just as the 2008 National Apology appeared to enjoy uniform praise, but is now questioned after both the Coalition and Labor allowed the Northern Territory Intervention to continue and fail—legitimate questions have emerged in the years since the Statement from the Heart. First, there are questions about the nature of participation in the meeting: there was a limited selection process that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have said was not open enough. There were no open calls or means for those not specifically invited to contribute. Second, the Uluru meeting did not decide on an order of voice, treaty and truth. That ordering came afterwards from campaigners and spin doctors. Last, fundamentally, those gathered at Uluru asked for a voice, not necessarily an advisory voice to parliament.
Substance
On the substantive issue of the form of the proposed advisory voice to parliament and whether it will be effective, there are numerous concerns. First, despite what some claim (Langton & Stanley, 2023), an advisory voice does not equate to self-determination. International evidence from other Indigenous Peoples demonstrates that where genuine self-determination is enabled and implemented (that is, where Indigenous Peoples make decisions for themselves on their own terms), life expectancy and health and social outcomes improve (Behrendt et al., 2016; Kalt & Cornell: 1998). There is no evidence to prove that advisory bodies like the proposed voice to parliament work for the simple reason they have no power and authority—they are not self-determining or independent. While excellent advice might be given, the government of the day can simply dismiss it—and routinely does.
On the issue of constitutional recognition, why would we want to be included in the colonial state apparatus if our own sovereignty is not recognised, guaranteed or accepted? Our sovereignty (vis-à-vis the power and authority to govern) is equal to the Crown of England and/or the Australian Parliament. Sovereignty to us is not merely a spiritual or cultural notion. Ignoring one’s own sovereignty and asking to be included in someone else’s sovereignty (based on theft of the land, no less!) is the very definition of giving our power away.
Even if one accepts the need for constitutional recognition in someone else’s colonial state, a constitutionally protected advisory voice still means the government of the day can ignore it, or defund it, or change its enabling legislation (powers and functions) to suit its needs. Why wouldn’t we aim for constitutional recognition of a treaty umpire, or another independent body with actual teeth?
There is also the substantive point that we’ve always had our own voices, they’ve just rarely been listened to. Since the Day of Mourning in 1938, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1987, the Bringing Them Home report in 1997, and countless other forms of advocacy and resistance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices are routinely ignored, unless it suits the abuser’s objectives. In terms of formal national representation, after the dissolution of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2005, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples formed the independent National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples in 2009. It was in operation for ten years and was defunded in 2013 because of its independence. Why not aim, then, to constitutionally protect an independent voice?
Allowing governments to determine the parameters and substance of an advisory voice, or any voice, is absurd. It is the very definition of giving our power away. When did our dreams become so small?
Strategy
On pure political strategy, even if one believes in the advisory voice to parliament because ‘something is better than nothing’, the tactics and communications strategies being employed are concerning. Despite the campaigners investing significant amounts of time and energy into ‘engagements’ with some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities are still reporting that they do not having enough information, or that they feel left out of the process. Why leave it to six months before the referendum vote to engage more meaningfully with the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?
Further, despite Marcia Langton and Tom Calma’s (2021) report canvassing co-design principles and options for an advisory voice, the report does not land on a final model. There remains no substantive or practical detail about the final form and function of the proposed advisory voice. While the Coalition and others are busy exposing this flaw and obfuscating debate for political gain, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and the rest of the Australian public, have a right to know what they are voting for. The campaigners are seemingly wedged between not giving too much detail for fear of being further attacked, and the genuine need for clarity.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the ‘Yes’ campaign’s public messaging appears sclerotic, disunified and opaque. Questions about the voice’s form, function, potential and impact are met with answers more aspirational than substantive. And the debates are all framed on white terms, territory and timing. Labor and the campaigners appear to be giving the message: ‘Just trust us.’
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, the idea of allowing a white parliament (one that is uniformly toxic) to decide the form of an advisory voice, not even an independent one, is the antithesis of self-determination. Is this the best we can do?
Impact
In May 2019, I visited Winnipeg in Canada as part of research for the Ebony Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Institute’s Truth, Justice and Healing project.1 Ovide Mercredi, former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s national voice for Indigenous Peoples, looked me in the eye and said:
Look, we First Nations peoples in Canada have had a national voice for 40 years, we’ve had treaties—both historic and contemporary—for hundreds of years, and we’ve had the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so you might think our problems would be solved. And yet we still have out-of-home care rates through the roof, intractable poverty, trauma and addictions, and still massive amounts of government disinterest and racism. And also, you can never trust governments. If you have any treaties, you must have an independent umpire to keep them honest.
This highlights serious concerns about similar debates here in Australia. Even if the advisory voice to parliament referendum passes, even if we have treaties, and even if we have a national truth and justice commission, the question remains: So what?
What will the advisory voice, or treaty or truth-telling, do to materially improve outcomes, particularly things like police brutality and harassment? Royal commissions haven’t stopped Don Dale or Black deaths in custody. Will they eliminate racism in healthcare settings and prevent more children being taken away? What will they do to ensure teachers are trained to understand Indigenous learning styles? Will they include reparations and land rights? The current organisational apparatus that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have built over the past 50 years regularly advises governments, universities and corporations on how to change and stop and improve these things. They are rarely listened to.
Remaking ‘Australia’
Regardless of one’s position on the advisory voice to parliament, we must break the mould of the underlying patterns of colonial governance. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are so distracted by the everyday violence of state abuse, we rarely find space to proactively dream, think and act from Black knowledges. The only way to break out of this toxic dynamic for a victim or perpetrator, or for Blackfullas or whitefullas, is for the abused to walk away and start again on our own terms.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander liberation will be born from coming back to our roots as ‘and’ people, not ‘or’ people. That is, not being caught up in binary logic (Watson & Graham, 2020). Both Western and Eastern ‘modern’ techniques of governance and power rely on the binary logic of winner or loser, and autonomy/individualism/capitalism or collective/socialism.
By contrast, Aboriginal Terms of Reference (ATR) are how Dr Aunty Lilla Watson (2020) describes Aboriginal philosophies and knowledges—our own paradigm or worldviews. ATR are based on a relationalist ethos, a system of autonomous regard (Brigg & Graham, 2021), which is the perfect balance between individual autonomy and the collective good. This sophisticated system of managing the land and its peoples in sustainable balance allowed us to thrive for more than sixty millennia, through ice ages and genocide itself. In this governance system, our diplomacy is win-win, and there are multi-positional and multipolar geographic and political realities (note the rainbow multiplicity of countries and languages on the AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia, 1996).
Using this Aboriginal multi-positional logic, debates about Aboriginal participation in the real economy or the welfare state, for example, are exposed as merely debates within the parameters of whiteness—white power being reinscribed while appearing to be benevolent to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe it is great for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples to get world-class education and top salaries, so long as the reason for doing so is relational (win-win diplomacy), not merely survivalist or capitalist (win-lose diplomacy). In other words, using ATRs and multi-positional logic, the answers to Black liberation and better lives cannot be reduced to individual autonomy or collective good, for they encompass both and many other possibilities. We cannot allow ourselves to be cast as ‘Yes’ people’ or ‘No’ people, or as using only white knowledges and paradigms or Black knowledges and paradigms, but both—and many more. We must think and act like Black people in a white man’s system—while challenging, decolonising and remaking that system for the benefit of all—not merely trusting that our freedom will come from thinking and acting like white men in a white man’s system.
To improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples—purportedly what the advisory voice to parliament is about—we will need to reform the whole of Australia. Australia is confused about its ‘national’ identity. It is fearful of facing its genocide. It is guilt-ridden, ignorant of sixty millennia worth of knowledges in the landscape, clinging on for dear life to the ghosts of England, hiding under the USA’s skirt, fearful of bushfires and floods, and scared of all our brown neighbours. Australia is still trying to get its needs met for psychological belonging and material safety from the English Crown, and from a declining American superpower in a shifting global hegemonic order. Mining iron ore will not save us.
What do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander outcomes and foreign policy dilemmas have to do with each other? They are representative of the deep soul wounds we collectively ignore and the resulting toxic, merry-go-round mess of ‘politics as usual’. The proposed referendums on the voice to parliament and the republic do not represent two separate issues and should not be prosecuted separately. They are both intimately related because they are both about who owns the land, who we are as ‘Australia’, where we come from, and what kind of future we wish to inhabit. Preparing for these two issues together presents an opportunity to face and resolve our wounds, heal, make things right, write a new chapter of who we are, and effectively deploy Aboriginal win-win diplomacy to find a more grounded and safer sense of belonging at home.2
Thus, for the improvement of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander outcomes, and for the political, economic and environmental sustainability of the whole ‘nation’, we need to walk away from toxicity, start again and dream an entirely different strategic approach—a new dream of dual sovereignty (Phillips, 2014).
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, we need nation-building, truth, healing and justice. Nation-building is about rebuilding our own governance and power, on our own terms. It means recovering pre-colonisation governance principles and techniques and applying them in our current situation. Dr Mary Graham (2023) refers to this as ‘simply replacing their [ineffective] systems with the old ways [of decision-making and independence]’. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples do not need truth commissions and memorialisation for the same reasons non-Aboriginal peoples might need it. We need truth-telling for healing, validation and justice; New Australians (everyone since 1770) need truth-telling for education, for dealing with their guilt, shame of convict histories, and disconnection from this landscape, and for humility and atonement. All of us need it for belonging. And there is no use telling the truth if it is ignored or nothing changes. The justice ‘Australia’ needs is to face itself.
If ‘Australia’ faces its soul wounds, atones, heals, rewrites its story and dreams a new chapter, then we could begin framing place and power more effectively, for the benefit of all. We could frame our sense of belonging through dual sovereignty using Aboriginal style win-win diplomacy. I don’t want an advisory voice because it is not independent and it is predicated on white power. I don’t want a republic if it means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples are simply re-colonised under another rubric. But I do want an independent Aboriginal voice and a republic if we predicate them both on dual sovereignty. We could share land, power and wealth because this is in our mutual interest. If we are sovereign, we should act like it. That goes for Black and White. Let’s start dreaming that dream.
…
Gregory Phillips is a Waanyi and Jaru medical anthropologist. He is a Professor of First Peoples Health in the School of Medicine at Griffith University, and CEO of ABSTARR Consulting.
Footnotes
1. The Ebony Aboriginal and Torres Strait Institute (2020) has conducted a global review of evidence on what works and doesn’t work for truth-telling, and takes instructive examples, particularly from South Africa, Germany and Canada. In conjunction with the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney, it shared the results of that research with key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander thinkers. That research informed the development of a National Truth, Justice and Healing Framework to assist communities and governments thinking about truth-telling (Ebony Institute & Jumbunna, 2023).
2. On the basis of two previous pieces of research about truth-telling, the Ebony Institute’s Truth, Justice and Healing Project has now partnered with Adam Kahane (2021), a key international expert in transformational scenario planning (TSP). TSP is a methodology used to assist warring factions in any political or social situation to work together, despite their differences. Kahane has used this to remarkable effect in South Africa, Columbia, Thailand and Canada, for example. The Ebony Institute has worked with Kahane to develop an Aboriginalised TSP. They are about to trial its application in ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs’ to make more strategic sense out of voice, treaty and truth, and to answer the grand question of ‘So what?’ They then plan to work with a group of New Australians (everyone since 1770) to assist them to sort out white Australia’s toxicity. Then, the Ebony Institute plans to bring these two groups together to dream a new dreaming and remake ‘Australia’.
References
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