 Thank you very much for that generous introduction. And thank you to Reconciliation Australia, the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence, and to the Australian National University, the National Centre for Indigenous Studies for inviting me to give this lecture. It's a tremendous honour. I'm aware of the people who preceded me, and I feel very touched that I received this invitation. So thank you, Mick, and all other people involved. I'd like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodians of the land in which we meet. And I'd like to express the hope that the constitutional changes which are currently being considered will, in fact, amount to a nationwide acknowledgement of country permanently enshrined in our constitution. And I think it's one way of thinking about the issue of recognition that we could in our founding document, our foundational document, have that same acknowledgement which is such an important part of public protocol in Australia today. This is a long-standing invitation, and it's caused me to grieve nervousness over a period of some 10 months. And I was asked in February to give a topic, and I probably did it, although I loathe predicting what I might want to say and the issue of reconciliation so far in advance. Then a month ago, I got a communication from the university saying, well, what are you going to talk about? I resurrected the topic, and it's the topic that you've been invited to hear is Australia big enough for reconciliation because it was an issue that was troubling me at the beginning of the year and troubles me still. Now, it might, on the other hand, seem a strange question. Some of you may have been here when, to my eternal shame, I was called the senior Australian of the year. It's my shame because I like to think myself as a young buck, actually, out and about and generally being youthful, and my cover is completely blown now. But the situation is that I got up before the Prime Minister and I thought very carefully about what I would say in the 90 seconds I was allowed. And one of the things that I said was that this was the most hopeful period of my life. And I was talking, of course, in the context of reconciliation and Aboriginal affairs. And so I want to say something about that. I'm asking the question, are we big enough for reconciliation? And yet, that is what I had to say. So let me explain my hopefulness. It's based on a 50-year perspective. And if you have a long perspective, then I think it's clear that we as a country have made considerable progress. Unlike in the past, and this is the really important change, there are so many people and so many institutions that now see themselves as part of the move to end Aboriginal disadvantage. There are so many people who see it as something for all of us, as against something for governments and eccentrics. I want to have something to say tonight about where I believe we've made progress and go into more detail about community involvement, some of which you've seen up on the screen. But my questioning in this title arises from our response to the determination of so many Indigenous people to achieve something much more than social and economic equality, the closing of the gap. They have great concern to maintain their collective identities and their cultures. Now, one very well-known representation of those identities is the Tyndale map of Australia, and I'm not going to get into a detailed discussion about whether it's accurate or not that map is, but it does actually present a wonderful picture of the diversity of first nations that exist in this country and existed at the time of settlement. I think this is a difficult issue because however sympathetic we are to ending Aboriginal disadvantage, in our hearts most of us are by instinct assimilationist. As part of the success of the closing the gap campaign, success in bringing so many people to the table as a spur to engagement, we Australians are strongly attracted to equality and allowing Aboriginal and Island Australians to be equal is what was overwhelmingly supported in the 1967 referendum. Of course we want them to be equal and of course we want them to be just like us. So I want to say something about what is good today, about how we moved from segregation which is what I found as a young, as a student really when I started taking interest in this matter, we were a segregated society and how we moved from there to an equality of citizenship. And then I want to address the challenge of leaving room in this great and blessed country for the world's oldest living cultures to survive. I started this long journey with a rather shallow engagement with an Aboriginal person. I was holidaying on a farm where there was an Aboriginal domestic servant. I saw no unkindness in the way she was treated but as a 14 year old, I sensed that she didn't fit into my understanding of Australia and how Australians relate to each other. As a still quite immature university student two years later, I was aware that I was living in a segregated society where the first Australians were in the main, denied the vote, not counted in the census, interfered with by officials on a regular basis, segregated from each other as a price of citizenship and with a subject of child removal for other than welfare grounds. They were comprehensively left out of the luck in the lucky country. I visited the native reserves in the South West of Western Australia and engaged with some of the fringe dwellers in the Swan Valley. I saw the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women in rural towns. There were people living on reserves at the edge of these towns housed in tin sheds. There was no protection or acknowledgement of Indigenous rights to land. The segregation was both in fact and in law. Later as a young lawyer, I saw the child removal for social rather than welfare reasons and blatant abuses of the processes of the law. And these early experiences drove my interest in reconciliation, although that wasn't a current term. I really want to make clear that I think we've made really great progress as a nation. At a number of times during the course of this year, I've described what I see as the progression out of segregation into equal citizenship. And no matter how bad things are now, they were much worse then. And let me quickly list what to me are some of the markers of our direction of travel as a country over the last 50 years. The direction of travel, which I think is generally positive, but with some pretty significant blips. We got voting rights legislated for in 1962, not in 67 as is commonly thought in 1962. There was an unprecedented level of support for the 1967 referendum. 90% of us coalesced around a proposition in a way we've never done before and perhaps never will do again as a nation. There was the Gove Land Rights case in 1971, which, although it denied recognition of native title, set the intellectual framework for recognition of land rights. And it's an indication of our direction of travel that the judge recommended to the government that this decision should be changed by legislation. Ted Woodward, of course, did the Woodward inquiry subsequently. He was counsel for the applicants in that case or for the plaintiffs. And when I mentioned this to the defence, to the council for the Commonwealth, my old friend and colleague, Bob Ellicott, he said, well, I wrote to the government, too, and said it should be fixed by legislation. And he pulled out of his drawer the memorandum he wrote in 1972 or 73 saying that this should be fixed by statute. So you then had the Woodward reports on the implementation of land rights in the Northern Territory in 1973 and 74, and those reports were supported across the parliamentary divide. You had all party support for the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, unless my memory serves me false, we voted for it unanimously. There was all party support for the establishment of land rights in the Northern Territory, culminating in the Land Rights Act of 1976. There was subsequent establishment of land rights regimes in the majority of Australian states during the 70s and 80s. There was the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991. And then, of course, the clincher. The greatest thing in my view that happened post-1788 was the High Court's Marble Judgment in 1992, the one thing that shifted the balance of power, the balance of power between Indigenous people and the settlers. You had Keating's Redfern speech in the same year, and let me mention, isn't it marvellous that the present Prime Minister, whatever you might think of his other attitudes, has embraced the Redfern speech publicly and in the parliament, as he's embraced the right apology, another one of the great steps in this process. The Native Title Act of 1993, the Bridgewalks for Reconciliation in 2000, the establishment of reconciliation in Australia in 2001, the National Apology I've mentioned, and current all-party support for constitutional recognition, and the widespread engagements across the community with Indigenous people exemplified by the RAP program. Now, if we don't celebrate those things, why would we keep trying? The point about acknowledging the fact that things have changed in a positive way is that it's a reminder that the things which still need to be changed can be. And you could add to my list endless expressions of good intentions over that period by governments of all stripes, Commonwealth and state. Now, I don't want to appear before this critical audience as a Pollyanna. To report progress is not to be blind to continuing disadvantage and failure. This audience doesn't need to be informed how far we have to go in terms of closing the gap in social and economic circumstances. This is documented annually in the Prime Minister's report to Parliament. It's also documented in the report's Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage, issued by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, the most recent of which was published last week. Progress is reported but it's spotty and slow. And the rates of imprisonment of Indigenous Australians alone are a clear indicator of continuing shameful failure to meet our aspirations in practical reconciliation. I turn briefly to the RAP program. Reconciliation Australia, and you've seen something of that and perhaps I can be even briefer, it's been inviting business and other organisations to enter into reconciliation action plan since 2007. You saw the broad statistics up there on the screen. The take-up of RAPs has experienced record growth over the past 12 months, growing by 126 organisations to a total of 563 with an endorsed RAP. And of four of the 488 organisations are scoping or developing their first RAP with about 190 of these making first contact with Reconciliation Australia over the past 12 months. The problem for Reconciliation Australia is not an enthusiasm, a lack of enthusiasm for this, but in meeting the demand for assistance in developing a RAP within our constrained budget. And this problem has been partially met by providing a range of RAP categories and so on, but I do say that I hope that governments will see the force of really allowing greater resources to be available for this amazing work. But quite apart from that sort of formal process, there are endless other community engagements, endless scholarship programs, all sorts of things that indicate strong private sector support for doing this job. And the breadth of this engagement is why I feel good about 2014, because it stands in such stark contrast with the segregated Australia of my youth, where these matters were left to a few religious bodies and to governments. In my earliest years, I would have excused any Indigenous person for saying the world was against them. And in 2014, they had many allies. It's this broad community engagement, which appears to me to be based on a broad community desire to settle these matters, which led me to proclaim this is the most hopeful period of my life. Now, the current determination to close the gap is also evidenced by a lot of good intentions at the political level. We have a Prime Minister who's described himself as a Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs. He has a Minister for Indigenous Affairs in Cabinet and a Parliamentary Secretary for Indigenous Affairs. The government has in train the wholesale reorganisation of programs and their administration. 150 programs that will be converted into five streams, enhancing the capacity to work flexibly at the local level, and to escape the program and depart metal silos which have hindered sensible local action. These changes are, in my view, in the right direction, but they're immensely ambitious. And I've detailed elsewhere my concerns not about Commonwealth intentions but its capacity to deliver. The announcement a week ago of the delay in making decisions on the current funding round was inevitable. Too much is trying to be done too soon. The risk is that a desirable move towards more flexible and localised approach, more bottom-up, more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander engagement in the design and delivery programs, may be discredited by implementation failure. I've dealt with this in some detail in a number of other lectures. As I said in the John Button oration earlier this year, and I'm quoting myself because nobody else ever does, and it makes me feel better. And I understand if I'm ever to get an appointment at this university, I must be sited, so make a note, please, I'm siding myself here. I said there's much to like about some of the ideas behind this restructuring. Whole of government approaches, local solution brokering, the possibility of pooled funding, how to be welcome. But I ask you to hold in your minds the administrative complexity of what the government is undertaking and the management challenge it faces. In the space of a year it is to take 150 programs which involve some 1,400 organisations and redirect expenditure into five broad streams while at the same time changing the geographic and hence jurisdictional basis of the administrative framework. I also ask you to consider the skills that are required to work in this different way. To carry out these admirable intentions, to engage with communities, to negotiate and implement tailored local solutions, providing as the government says elsewhere opportunities for communities to contribute to the design and delivery of local solutions to local issues. This is very skilled work and the skills are largely absent from the Australian public servant and there is no training for people to develop these skills. That's the end of my quote. To go back to quoting myself directly from this paper, it will be capacity to deliver on its ambitious promises that counts. The decisions on the current round of grant funding last week are a reminder that the execution of these changes within a limited time frame will be extremely difficult. There is a risk there will be unintended destruction of value in current programs unless decisions are finally tailored to on-the-ground realities. We're reminded that the Commonwealth does not have a good record in this regard. You only have to remember recent government's abolition of the Community Development Employment Program in remote communities and its replacement by totally ineffective job arrangements. In the communities I know best and work with, this has been very damaging. A new set of proposals being developed, yet another fresh start in the land of the perpetual fresh start. In addition, the receptiveness of Indigenous communities to this new approach and their preparedness to engage will be affected by current issues like proposals to close down remote communities, the demand for 99-year leases under the Land Rights Act and whether a constitutional amendment for recognition around which all Australians can coalesce can in fact be devised. One thing that's predictable is that missteps on any of these issues by government could unite Indigenous opinion against government measures generally and further set back the cause of reconciliation. I turn now to what is a phrase much parroted and I suspect little understood, the world's oldest living cultures. Australia's colonial history is distinctive in its failure to recognise Indigenous polities with which the settlers were required to deal. I have on my wall at home the Batman Treaty, the one attempt to negotiate with Aboriginal people cast aside by the colonial authorities as meaningless. Not for us in Australia, the treaties of North America and New Zealand. Over time, we have learned to recognise distinct tribal and language groups. I did ask for that map to go up because it is the most well-known pictorial representation of that reality. But it wasn't until the seismic shift of Marbo that these collectives were afforded a legal status with membership and internal rules defined by Indigenous law and custom. Native title determinations reflect recognition by Australian law of collective rather than individual rights. The numerous agreements between native title holders and mining companies are not agreements made with Indigenous people as individuals, but with traditionally defined and authorised collectives. The land settlement agreement being negotiated by the WA government with the Nungar Nations in the south-west of Western Australia will be made, if it's made, on it being agreed to by traditionally defined collectives, native title groups. Now, notwithstanding this apparent post-Marbo lock-in of collective status, what is troubling me is the ever-present, if now seldom overtly stated, pressure for assimilation. Writing recently in response to Noel Pearson's quarterly essay, A Rightful Place, I wrote, there is much in Australia today, see, quoting this off again, note this please, Professor, there is much in Australia today that we're not very interested in allowing room for Indigenous cultures to continue to be part of our national fabric. Whatever lip service we offer the world's oldest living cultures, the clear message from our actions is that our main concern is to bring Indigenous individuals into full enjoyment of their rights and duties as Australian citizens. There is no clear message that we understand and value these cultures as part of our nation. There is no indication from our actions that we will preserve sufficient space for the Yol New, the Noongar and so on to retain collective identities and distinct cultural spaces. In the case of remote communities that still observe practices close to those of pre-settlement cultures, the policies of successive governments seem designed to strangle them. And I say that with great seriousness. The pressure on those communities through the changes to municipal services funding and the changes to CDEP leave people struggling. In the few months since I wrote that bit I've just quoted, things have worsened. Current policies now threaten to close many communities down and to dump their populations on the fringe of towns to rot as they were left to rot as fringe dwellers in the 1960s following the Equal Wage case. Indigenous people were to choose to assimilate to forego any ongoing collective identity to simply join other ethnic or cultural groups as individual Australians with an acknowledgement of past identity presenting as equal Australian citizens and no more. That would be fine. But that's a matter for them. Were we to go down that path that would be the end of that. There would be no need for reconciliation. Instead we would simply deal with disadvantage wherever that lay within the whole community. Some people, for example Peter Coleman on the ABC's Q&A recently, suggested that is where we're heading. I suspect that many other Australians think the same thing. History suggests, however, that this is not what will happen. Our history and the history of like settler countries. And it's not a recent issue. I discussed these matters 34 years ago in an address in Queensland. In the address I described as contentious, again I'm quoting myself, the maintenance of a permanent Aboriginal element in the Australian community, preserving a community which is distinctive and recognisably Aboriginal in character with a lifestyle or lifestyles of the same nature. Commonwealth policy, and I'm talking about Commonwealth policy at that time, overtly recognises this possibility. As Liberals we quite properly would not prescribe it. In our 1975 election policy we said we were committed to those principles that all Aboriginals should be as free as other Australians to determine their own varied futures. And we also said, we recognise the fundamental right of Aboriginals to retain their racial identity and traditional lifestyle or where desired to adopt partially or wholly a European lifestyle. That's dated language of course and even mention of race is no longer seen as a very sensible contribution to any discussion or to the constitution. But I hope you get the drift. There was a view that there was some freedom within this country for people to determine their futures. I went on at that time to quote my predecessor as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ian Viner, as saying that our policy of self-management requires Aboriginals as individuals and communities to be in a position to make the same kinds of decisions about the future as other Australians customary make and to accept responsibility for the results flowing from those decisions. Ian spoke of Aboriginals exercising authority with responsibility offering a means of breaking up breaking out of the state of dependence which has for so long and chained them. And I mentioned these things in part as a reminder of how much recent debate reflects debates of decades ago. And we still haven't settled or dealt with these issues. In that same address I quoted from the distinguished Canadian judge, Berger, in part as follows. Problems of native people are not simply problems of poverty but of a people desperately trying, sorry, trying desperately to preserve their cultural identity. He said also, the culture and the values of native people amount to more than crafts and carvings. The tradition of decision-making by consensus, the respect for the wisdom of their elders, a concept of the extended family, their belief in a special relationship with the land, their regard for the environment, their willingness to share, all of these values persist in one form or another within their own culture even though they've been under unremitting pressure to abandon them. I find those passages almost eerie really in terms of their applicability to our own country. And then there's a passage which has forever remained in my mind. He said, yet through all the vagaries of government policy, sorry, throughout, through all the vagaries of government policy, the native people have endured. This is so because of their powerful sense of belonging to a group defined by distinctive social, economic and cultural traditions. What will decide the future of the native people in Canada if their own collective will to survive is their own collective will to survive as a people? When the Noongars of the South West had a determination of native title in their favour over Perth, I was just so impressed about the people on whose land I live. Their history is reasonably well known to me. It's one of dispossession, dispersal, extraordinarily detailed bureaucratic interference with every aspect of their lives and families, including child removal for non-welfare reasons. Yet they've endured as peoples, as collectives, able to negotiate with the WA government on that basis. And in my view, their survival as peoples is a triumph of the human spirit. The survival of Indigenous Australians as peoples is what Noel Pearson spoke about at Gama this year, and again in the quarterly essay I've already referred to. With his customary eloquence and scholarship, he explains why the virulent but sometimes subtle antipathy of some Australians to our existential claims is the source of the Indigenous Australian anxiety. It reflects something that David Ross, that distinguished leader in Central Australia, said to me once. Some of our people don't want their quits, kids to go to school, Fred, because they don't want them to stop being Aboriginal. And that anxiety about continued existence. In Australia post-Marbo, it's hard to argue that Indigenous collectives, tribes, First Nations, call them what you will, are not part of the legal framework of Australia. But are they frameworks for what we hoped for in our optimism in the 1970s and 1980s, that opportunities for self-management would mean the Indigenous community would take responsibility for its own progress. Neil said to me in Yarrabar in 1980, and so many Indigenous people said elsewhere, give us back our land and our problems will be solved. It's not proved as easy as that. There are so many unanswered questions around this matter of enduring collectives. Will they be defined other than the highly technical way required by native title processes? What rules do they follow? How are those who speak for collectives appointed or identified? And what matters do they speak with authority for the collective? How is authority exercised in the collective? The difficult thing for someone like me talking about this is that these are matters for them to decide and not for governments or the rest of us. What's needed and is not generally available is the space and time for them to work through these issues. It's for us to understand, and by us I mean the majority community, that our role is to acknowledge their collective identities matter to the nation as to them, and for us to provide the space and the opportunities to have their own discussions on these critical questions. Many Indigenous people are under too much day-to-day pressure just to survive, let alone prosper and contemplate their futures. They need to be given the opportunity to develop collective visions and views for the future. Instead, we're always impatient, even if sometimes our impatience is well-meaning. We all want to see rapid improvements and political timetables trump workable timetables. Where does constitutional recognition fit into this? It's relevant to the past, present and the future. Where we started as a nation is in an age of racial discrimination. That's evident from the convention debates as it is from the text of the Constitution itself and from the words of our first and second prime ministers, as quoted in the report of the expert panel on constitutional recognition. These quotations explained to me better than anything else the Australia I was born into, an Australia where Indigenous people were non-citizens, legally and de facto segregated. As Barton argued in support of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are in comparison with white races. I think no one wants convincing of this fact unequal and inferior. Deakin, in the same debate, gave his version of the future for Aboriginal people. He said this, a little more than a hundred years ago, Australia was a dark continent in every sense of the term. There was not a white man within its borders. In another century, the probability is that Australia will be a white continent with not a black or even dark skin amongst its inhabitants. The Aboriginal race has died out in the South, is dying fast in the North and West, and here's the best bit of it, even where most gently treated. These attitudes of our first two prime ministers explain the Australia I knew in the 1950s. These 19th century attitudes were deeply ingrained in our national psyche. This is what underlay where we were when I started to think about these matters a little more than half a century ago. These deeply ingrained attitudes still inhibit our acceptance of our first nations, and hence inhibit our embrace of reconciliation beyond an attachment to undifferentiated equality. For those with whom we seek to reconcile Indigenous Australians, that is important, but it's not enough. In the wildly successful 1967 referendum, that wonderful expression of the Australian instinct for fairness and equality, we took out one objectionable provision and empowered the Commonwealth to legislate about Indigenous people. But as yet, there is nothing in the Constitution which acknowledges the 40,000 years of Indigenous occupation and sovereignty. Nothing which acknowledges what Marbeau acknowledges knows signal about the continuing presence of our first nations to which all of us can look. We will all feel better about ourselves and our country when our Constitution is completed by recognition of the layers of our unique Australian identity. The question, however, remains to be answered. Are we big enough, generous enough to provide room for the world's oldest living cultures to find their continuing futures? Thank you.