Getting ahead

In Republica australis, this is what we mean by getting ahead:

becoming the best we can be, refining our intelligence, emotional capacities and physical capacities so that we can be of service to the good that benefits all; so that we can be useful, enduring and happy.

In this place getting ahead does not mean stealing an advantage over others, working to assert one's superiority over others, or trying to unduly influence others.

It is Reconciliation Week in Australia.

In Western Australia for the first time WA Police has developed a reconciliation action plan.

Indigenous staffing levels will be increased, and other measures implemented to improve understanding and relations between police and Aboriginal people. 

The Aboriginal flag will fly permanently at all police stations in WA. This is a powerfully symbolic act of recognising the true history of Australia and honouring our First Peoples.

Any genuine and productive reconciliation has to examine the past and has to come to terms with it fully. What has been lost cannot be fully recovered, what has been destroyed cannot be fully reclaimed, but the memory can be honoured and there can be restoration of the possible.

Law that is deeply embedded in Country is an aching imperative now.

This week the ministers for the new government were sworn in. The 46^th Parliament will begin in July.

Of particular significance is that WA Liberal MP Ken Wyatt became the first Aboriginal cabinet minister.

For the ceremony Mr Wyatt wore a booka (traditional kangaroo skin) which had been given to him by the Noongar people.

Tokens and symbols are reminders, but let them be more, let them be living and dynamic enactments of values that run much deeper than the white colonial impositions.

“... to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity - and our own humanity.” 1992 speech by former Prime Minister Paul Keating at Redfern.

Redfern in Sydney is not far from where the miserable contents of the First Fleet were first disgorged onto the pristine land of the South; Georgian Britain's unwanted transported to establish a penal colony.

Yesterday Prime Minister Scott Morrison told his cabinet that they should focus on the “aspirations of all Australians”.

But what does he mean? Those on the streets, their aspirations to have a home, which is the most basic human need? The children who do not have enough to eat and go to school hungry, who aspire to live in a warm home, is he talking of the need to address their aspirations? Then he talks of the “curse” of youth suicide. People don't choose to die when they feel their life is worth living. What is the “curse” that makes them turn from life? Perhaps it is when aspirations are only about acquisitions and money being of more value than anything else; when homes become property in a greed-fuelled market. What will he and his cabinet do about busting that curse?