Revelations about Guilt, Owing and Treaty
This is exactly why I like writing: to have revelations as you attempt to explain something to a fictional other.
While reading Yes articles, I was making notes. At the start the notes were quite critical, but as I began to understand what was happening, and as I found articles that made more sense, my notes became more sympathetic to the Yes case. The Guilt and Owing notes are from near the start and the Treaty notes are from the middle.
This is exactly why I like writing: to have revelations as you attempt to explain something to a fictional other.
Guilt and Owing
Maybe a core question I answer differently to Yes folks is: do you think we need to make up for what we did to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander when we arrived? I’ve loaded that question to seem to a Yes person impossible to answer in the negative. Because the way I see the question is: do you think current Australians need to make up for what a bunch of people did to another bunch of people 200 years ago? I’m not an emotional lad, but I cried a bunch of times reading Truganini based on the pure horror that was wrought on the unique people living here. It was layers deep, the destruction so much more than physical. We lost something that we need now more than ever. But I don’t carry the sins of my forebears. That’s an insane way to see the world and understand causality. It’s not my fault and I don’t feel guilty. I totally feel like I should help if I can, but if I can help different people a lot more with the same resources (eg. by donating to Givewell’s Top Charities), then I’ll choose that.
If my grandfather once stole $10,000 from someone, invested it, then gave it to me, I’m not guilty of anything, right? But hang on, I would totally feel like I owe the grandkid of the other person. Hmm. That seems pretty cut and dry. No guilt but an obligation to repay. My brain is now racing to find meaningful reasons this is different to the Australian invasion situation - which is interesting in itself. The fuzziness is certainly different: it’s more like my great-great-grandfather stole $10,000 from someone and they each have 45 grandkids and in the interim the money was used to the benefit of everyone (though some much more than others), and now we need to work out what to do. Money here is me trying to concretely represent land, murdered, raped and tortured relatives, lost culture, enslavement, injustice and a bunch of other things money can never represent. There’s also the point that we’re kind of saying “Aboriginals had literally everything before Europeans settled, so if we’re paying them back now, does that mean we give them literally everything?” So in the simple cash example, it’s like $10,000 was stolen which turned into $10,000,000,000 in today’s money, but if it weren’t stolen it would still only be worth $10,000, so how much do we pay back? So maybe it’s more like my great-great-grandfather steals a watch, sells it for $10,000 then invests it in a startup, then the founders use that money and other money and a lot of work to build something huge like cities and supply chains. What’s owed now? If the original owner wasn't going to sell the watch and invest the proceeds, just a watch? Seems unlikely. Either way, I guess something feels owed, and in this case the watch is the entire country. And this ignores a bunch of more recent stuff that was also really bad. So yes, I have always confused the lack of guilt where others felt it with a lack of owing anything, and that was a mistake.
When thinking about altruism, I definitely think I don’t deserve everything I get paid, because there’s so much which has benefitted me that I had no part in creating. Through childhood into adulthood I was healed when I was sick, I was educated, I was lucky, I was forgiven, good jobs were available, university was effectively free, I was able to travel to other places where good jobs were available, I returned and good jobs were available. I did nothing for any of these things. Some people have none of them. So when I make money working a good job I didn’t create in a system I didn’t create, when others in different systems with bad jobs or no jobs have nothing, how could I possibly deserve having earned the money. Sure, I did the work but the opportunity itself was created by others. Old Waleed Ali (Minefield Waleed Ali, not the other Waleed Alis) told me about this as a Muslim idea known as Zakat Al Maal or alms-giving, which views income as tainted until some of it is given away to the less fortunate. Anyway, the point here is that we all owe something by benefitting from a system we didn’t create and the new bit for me is the choice between giving away the money to help the people who lost as a result of the creation of the system and giving it away to those who would benefit from it most.
I know the point here isn’t giving money, money’s just a really concrete way of thinking about abstract things like “owing”.
I guess I’m so consequentialist that it becomes totally about future repercussions and not at all about backwards looking justice. Here’s a thought experiment that might help: the morality pill. Jenny flies into a rage and kills Janet. She’s convicted. Science has given us a pill that makes someone totally moral and unable to commit, say, murder. If she takes the pill - so she is totally rehabilitated and no longer a danger to society, in fact can contribute to society - should she do time in prison? That is to say, what do we care about more, rehabilitation or punishment? Scandinavian justice focuses on rehabilitation, in the US it’s punishment - which system do you think is better? If someone killed my kids, I definitely would not like to see them out on the street the next day, so having them do no time at all doesn’t seem right. But locking them up when they’re effectively not the same person any more seems wrong too. The point is that we are directing help to “the people that need it most” and we can choose to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders a bit more than the others. My previous position was to totally be governed by “who needs it most”, but I think I’ve shifted to “maybe help the people who lost out from everyone else prospering”.
The model in my head is that if there are two kids who need the same amount of help but have different Indigenous status, one of them had a great-great-grandfather who stole the other’s great-great-grandfather’s watch and yet is still in a bad position. Jeez, it’s tough because put that way I just think of how for those individuals, they have both been up against it for reasons totally outside of their control and sure, one’s ancestor stole from the other, but they are in the same position now so there’s some bad thing based on luck that balanced that out and why not just help them both equally? The Indigenous kid’s ancestors were massacred and stolen from and that comes through to the experience (which is the only thing that matters) of the Indigenous kid. The other kid has had other hardships which by definition (because they equally need help) equal the hardships of the Indigenous kid. So who am I to say one kid’s hardship is more valid than the other?
Let’s get back to the regular scheduled programming before my brain explodes.
Treaty
What actually is a treaty? What could it mean for Indigenous people?
I’m now getting into the treaty/sovereignty stuff and it’s pretty interesting. It’s a new day and I have replenished gumption. A treaty must satisfy three conditions:
Indigenous peoples are a distinct political community. This seems tricky because many people who identify as Indigenous also identify as Australian. Then it seems not tricky because like dual-citizenship is totally a thing. The reason it seems tricky therefore, is because I find it difficult to understand a dual-identity like that because I don’t have one. A bit of perspective-taking makes it easy. It’s also unnatural (for me) to understand what it would be like to be a Queenslander or to have kids that identified as Western Australian or something. Then it seems super not tricky because it’s not saying “distinct community”, it’s a distinct political community.
A treaty is a negotiation between equals. This seems impossible given the difference in resources and current power. The Yes campaign have a framework for it. I downloaded it, found it was 68 pages, then skimmed random parts of it. It seems reasonable, but I don’t know anywhere near enough to properly understand it. Considering it’s held up as something to say “this document will help us to negotiate as equals”, the inclusion of the sentence “the negotiation process will recognise and include mechanisms to address the imbalance of power between the State and the First Peoples’ Negotiating Parties” (Clause 24.1 (a) (iv)) without much more detail is somewhat worrying. Isn’t this document supposed to shed light on what those mechanisms might be?
Commitment to mutual obligation and shared responsibility. This would include self-government. One piece I don’t understand is regarding the finance of everything. Does the Australian Government fund the Indigenous Government? If a n Indigenous person is a lawyer in Melbourne, they would pay Australian tax surely, but if they worked on country in Arnhem Land, they surely wouldn’t. Where’s the line? These are details that obviously need to be worked out neither now, nor by me.
There are return-of-land things I find interesting. If someone said “you need to move out, this place is not yours any more”, I’d be pissed off, even if they offered to pay for it. If Indigenous people wanted to hang out in the bush from time to time or even live there, I think that would be fine, probably even great. I can imagine many people that would hate that though.
Formal recognition of historic wrongs seems a no-brainer. Uh, yeah, some bad stuff happened. Are the people against this just scared of the slippery slope argument that what starts with recognition ends with reparations and admission of guilt? Many facts of the history are established, kids learn about it in school now, so why are we (people who didn’t learn about it at school) scared to say it aloud?
Apologies. I think the type of apology referred to here is the “I’m sorry we did this” type, not the “I’m sorry that happened to you” type. A thing I find tricky is that “I’m sorry I did this” apologies make sense to me, and apologising on behalf of a group where I’m in the group and I feel sorry for my actions and I know the rest of the group feel the same about their actions also makes sense to me. But if I currently represent a group and they took actions before I represented them and I’m apologising for them, that’s always going to seem hollow, because you’re saying “I’m sorry for what they did”. Apologies work in part because there is genuine remorse for actions taken by the apologiser. You can’t have remorse for actions you didn’t take. I think Indigenous people truly want (yes, I know how that sounds, that’s a genuine “I think” at the start, I’m not telling people what they want, I’m hypothesising) is an apology from the people that committed the wrongs. Those people should be sorry. That’s not possible now. Personally, I think the best we can do now is “The current Australian Government is sorry for what a long dead Australian Government did to the Indigenous Peoples of this land. The Australian Government who perpetrated these wrongs should be sorry, and if we were them, we would be sorry (and distraught). If we could ask them now, they would likely not be sorry, without seeing the arc of history in the interim and updating their morals accordingly. Because they are dead, they will never be sorry. They will never admit what they did was wrong. But we’re saying it definitely was and insofar as it’s possible for us to be sorry for what they did, we are.” There’s also a whole thing about judging historic figures by today’s standards, and I’m very “you can’t judge historic figures by today’s standards.”
If you think judging historic figures by today’s standards is what we should do, consider for a while (like an hour) what people in 500 years are going to think of us. It ain’t pretty.
In summary of the treaty thing, I think I’d be in favour of a treaty, but I haven’t seen the counter-arguments, of which I am sure there are many. If that came to a referendum, I would probably dig into it, initially leaning pro treaty.