Bridging the gap

Australia’s states and territories still conform to the notion that government knows best. Elias Jarvis (pictured), a Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung student currently studying his Bachelor of Arts while living at Trinity College, says policies and initiatives are most successful when First Nations peoples are given room, and funding, to solve creatively their own problems.  

‘Indigenous people have the answers, but they aren’t resourced to enact solutions,’ says Elias, who also works as a junior consultant for ABSTARR Consulting, which provides advice to government bodies and other agencies on how to align their practices more culturally with First Nations peoples.

Elias points to examples across Victoria that demonstrate how problem-solving in First Nation hands leads to better outcomes for the community.

For instance, a childcare centre in Melbourne’s inner north is taking a holistic approach to care, supporting parents and extended family members – as well as the child – using a model that is foreign to the way such centres typically operate. The problem is the government’s rigid idea of what childcare should look like, and an unwillingness to fund initiatives that don’t align with Western thinking.

‘The childcare centre is providing excellent care, and they know what their community needs, but they’re not supported financially,’ says Elias. Instead, the centre is left to fund programs on its own, usually through donations.

Funding was also identified as a policy shortcoming by the Productivity Commission, which noted that government money intended to support First Nations communities was in many cases being siphoned to outsider NGOs and government service providers instead of organisations controlled by First Nations communities.

In the 1980s, when Trinity College visiting professor and Caldwell lecturer Justice Joe Williams was a wide-eyed law student studying at Victoria University of Wellington, a committee like Kumergaii Yunlendji was just a pipe dream. The idea, too, that the official Māori language te reo would one day become the preferred way to sing New Zealand’s national anthem – as it is today – seemed implausible.  

Now a New Zealand Supreme Court judge, the first Māori judicial appointment in the nation’s history, Justice Williams says governments and universities are taking baby steps towards First Nation recognition.

Where ATAR scores, admission exams and course fees once worked to exclude minorities from professions such as law, which were homogenously non-Indigenous, efforts are being made to open up these spaces. The New Zealand Council of Legal Education has decreed that it will be compulsory for students to study Māori law as part of their degree from 2025.

The decree follows a series of small changes in New Zealand’s legal system: court sessions open and close in the Māori language, and First Nation understanding of sovereignty and land rights is being woven into legislation and court judgments. In 2017, a sacred mountain on the country’s North Island was granted legal personhood in an accord between the Māori community and the New Zealand government.  

‘As a symbol of recognition, it’s an incredible affirmation of identity and values for people who have been suppressed for so long,’ says Justice Williams. ‘If you’re a young Māori these days, you’ll feel less negatively viewed than when I was in high school because of these important symbolic acceptances.’

Far from just being tokens, such symbols – whether legal, political or cultural – carry status and have an important role to play in bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Justice Williams says when the wider community starts to recognise and respectfully adopt First Nations symbols – including art, music and stories – it enriches its social fabric and provides a platform for reconciliation.

At the start of the Olympic Games in Paris, social media was set ablaze when Eliza McCartney, a non-Indigenous New Zealand pole vaulter, spoke te reo at a formal welcome event. It was a searing moment of First Nation recognition on the world stage.  

For Justice Williams, that unexpected event demonstrated there is hope and optimism in Māori culture being seen by New Zealanders as something essential to their national identity. ‘It creates space to hope for a shared nationhood where Māori identity isn’t a threat but, instead, taken up by all,’ he says.  

New Zealand’s demographics are fundamentally different to those of Australia, which has a much smaller Indigenous population, so lessons are not easily imported from across the Tasman. However, the experience of New Zealand offers a road map of sorts for how Australia renegotiates its relationship with First Nations communities and works to bridge the gap.

‘We can’t really be a country at peace with ourselves if we are built on the original sin of colonialism,’ says Justice Williams.

‘If you recognise that First Nation peoples’ resources and autonomy were taken from them wrongly without their consent, you have to give some of it back. The question is: how much is enough if we are to have a shared future together?’