On the human right to misery, mass incarceration and early death: the Charles Perkins memorial oration. (Australia).(Noel Pearson address)(Transcript)

CHARLES PERKINS was for me, and for generations of Aboriginal people across this country, a since-childhood inspiration. I was in the middle of primary school at Hope Vale Lutheran Mission (as it then was known) in the mid-1970s when I was galvanised by the book cover shown to our class by the school principal: A Bastard Like Me by Charles Perkins. The shock and the pride that I felt in his Aboriginal defiance has stayed with me through my life.

I was glad to make his friendship late in his life. He was a source of support and guidance to me in my hardest times. There was a lot of laughter too.

I remember wandering around the corridors during my bachelor studies here in the 1980s and thinking about my more illustrious and infinitely more dynamic predecessor at this university in the 1960s. These corridors of opportunity were for me miserable, lonely and anonymous and a far cry from the history of student political activism and leadership of Charles Perkins.

Of the contribution that Charles Perkins made to Australian society and history in the late twentieth century, I take his political fearlessness most to heart. It is his example of fearlessness that I aspire to follow tonight, because I believe that Australian policies concerning the life expectancy of Aboriginal people are grievously wrong. The life expectancy deficit of Aboriginal Australians as compared to the wider community--which is currently more than two decades--will not decrease with our current policies, and is likely to increase.

Neither of the political parties contending for office at the forthcoming election has made the changes in thinking that are necessary for Aboriginal people to turn around our social disaster. Both contenders continue to be half right in the policies that they are prepared to advocate. To simplify the policy contrast: the Australian Labor Party will be strong and correct in their policies in favour of the rights of Aboriginal people--particularly land rights and native title--and they will be wear and wrong in relation to the breakdown of responsibility in Aboriginal society occasioned by passive welfare dependency, substance abuse and our resulting criminal justice predicaments. The Coalition will better understand the problems of responsibility but will be antipathetic and wrong in relation to the rights of Aboriginal people: they advocate further diminution of the native title property rights of Aboriginal Australians.

I marvel that neither side of this indulgent political divide in Australian politics can see that what is needed is for the rights favoured by the ALP to be added to the responsibilities that are understood by the Coalition. But the major parties will insist on their indulgences despite the fact that the cost of their policy and political failure will be disproportionately borne by the black vulnerable: the children, the women and the elderly.

In my critique of prevalent Aboriginal policies over the past thirty years, I of course do not discredit or disavow the great achievements that have been made in the area of Aboriginal rights and recognition in this period. There have been many great achievements, not the least in the fight against formal discrimination, a fight in which Charles Perkins made a decisive contribution. So let me not be misunderstood: the struggle for these rights was heroic and correct and their achievements were great advances for Aboriginal people and for the nation.