Unfinished Business: Pat Dodson on Why Reconciliation is a Shared Responsibility

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Yawuru Elder Pat Dodson is optimistic about reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, despite the spectre of the failed referendum on a First Nations Voice to Parliament.

Dodson, a former Labor senator who retired to deal with serious health issues in 2023, was the inaugural chair of the Reconciliation Council (now Reconciliation Australia), in the 1990s.

“The reconciliation process is bigger than a referendum,” he told NITV on the eve of National Reconciliation Week.

“We’ve got to start treating the First Peoples as the unique peoples that they are, the sovereign peoples that they are – we can’t just continue treating them as some wayward citizens entitled to the largesse we’re prepared to dispense.”

Sometimes called ‘the father of reconciliation’, Dodson believes that, with a returned federal Labor Government, there’s a great opportunity to pursue the three pillars set out in the Uluru Statement: Voice, Treaty and truth-telling.

“It’s up to us, we need to put pressure on and to be smart about and but we can’t afford to let this opportunity pass us by and let down the legitimate and just claims of the First Peoples of this country to be recognised as the unique First peoples and to enable us, as a nation, to go forward,” he said.

“You’ve actually got to ring up the politicians and talk to them and say, ‘Listen brother, there’s a need for you to actually meet the commitments that were made in the past’.

“Not only when the Labor Party was elected, but there are other occasions like when the Prime Minister visited Yirrkala (at Garma), when Yunupingu was alive and talked to him about holding the campfire stick and keeping it alive.

“Now, to a Labor party person that’s akin to the light on the hill (Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s famous speech) – you don’t snuff it out just because you have adversity.”

The Federal Government should begin exploring ways of setting up a Makarrata commission, to begin the process of investigating truth-telling and treaty, Dodson said.

“It’s a time for courage and for the exercise of will and for constructive investigation of possibilities,” he said.

Dodson believes that the issues and ideas raised in the Langton-Calma report; the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and the Council of Australian Governments agreement with First Nations peak bodies on Closing the Gap are all areas that need attention.

Dodson says that it’s time for Labor to build on the momentum from the recent federal election and send a message to the many Australians who have supported reconciliation over a long period of time.

“And then those that voted recently, who said ‘we’re not supporting the Dutton approach to Indigenous Affairs, we want to see unity in this country, we want to see national pride restored, and we want to see hatred taken out of our interactions with people of different races and cultures as Australians’,” he said.

“We’ve got a great opportunity here, not to linger, not to to be dwelling in the disappointment and the hurt, but to get on with it and put the challenge back to the to the parliamentarians.

“But they’re not the only people responsible, we, the public, are responsible for how we go forward as much as the politicians.

“We, the public, can’t allow the Government to just walk away and and forget the promises that they’ve made in the past and the need for this nation still to deal with the unfinished business.”