Pearson tells Aborigines to follow Jewish lead
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Savaged Native Title: Noel Pearson (AAP Image: Alan Porritt)
Prominent Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has called on Aborigines to draw on the experience of Jewish people in never forgetting their history, while striving to overcome injustice and racism.
Speaking to members of the American Bar Association in Sydney, Mr Pearson also gave a damning assessment of Native Title, labelling the laws a travesty and a quagmire.
And he accused the judicial system of failing to serve Indigenous Australians.
Mr Pearson told his audience that the Aboriginal community could learn from the experience of the Jewish people, who he said "fight staunchly in defence of the truth."
"They are a community who have never forgotten history and they never allow anybody else to forget history," he said.
"They fight staunchly in defence of the truth. They fight relentlessly against discrimination. But what they have worked out as a people is that they never make their history a burden for the future.
"It is also an example about how we might maintain a community and a sense of peoplehood, religion, tradition, culture, history over millennia and yet at the same time engage at the cutting edge of whatever the world has to offer."
During the 1990s, Mr Pearson had a hand in drafting Australia's Native Title Act, which he had hoped would prove a cornerstone for reconciliation.
Almost two decades on he has savaged that same law, saying it has failed to empower Aborigines.
"Native title in this country is the sum total of whatever berry-picking rights Indigenous claimants might be able to prove by reference to their traditional laws and customs as they existed in 1788," he said.
"So in the Australian law, the Indigenous hardly own the economic property on the lands they successfully claim."
Mr Pearson lashed out at those Australians charged with interpreting and implementing Native Title.
"The Australian law on Native Title, since the original 1992 decision, has been an absolute travesty of misconception and intellectual shortcoming by the academics who contributed to the misconceptions, [and] the advocates who provided poor guidance to our federal and high courts in relation to these questions," he said.
He also critiqued government efforts to remedy the social and economic problems besetting Indigenous communities.
In solving these problems he wants governments to pull back.
"Part of the challenge of Indigenous recovery will be for the state to retreat while we build Indigenous responsibility and rebuild Indigenous people taking charge of their own lives," he said.
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