For the first time Australia has recognized the legal existence of Aborigines prior to white settlement. The case is a moral victory as well as having great significance for land rights.
When the High Court handed down its Marbo decision, a cracked opened the legal fiction at the heart of the nation. Terr nullius was gone.
European settlement of Australia was based on the premise of terror nullius, which basically means no person's land.
Now, more than two.
Centuries later, the High Court has recognized there were people here and their descendants have rights.
For John Howard, then in opposition, it provided an opportunity. He framed the moment not as a correction but as a threat. A story was spun to suburban and regional Australia. Your backyard, your lease, your livelihood was suddenly all under threat.
Today the High Court in Canberra ruled the Merryan people are entitled to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the island, effectively recognizing their native title.
Then came Wick, a ruling that said native title who coexists with past releases, not override them, not seize them, but sit alongside them. It was legally cautious but politically explosive, and Howard stepped into that space.
Good evening tonight, I'd like to talk to you about striking a bare and decent balance in this very difficult debate about Wick or native title.
You all know, author and political commentator Amy Rymkus has spent months tracing the threads of Howard's legacy, not just the policies, but the narratives that made them possible.
So he used the Marbo decision to essentially say that white Australia, your rights are under attack. And then there was a High Court decision known as Wick and this did not change the dial so you know, Indigenous scholars and people who custodians of the land. For them, it was quite a conservative ruling because it was the status quo.
It was something they'd known all along.
Yeah, absolutely that you know that their native title existed, but it was essentially powerless in the eyes of the law.
You can't interfere with or bit what would be regarded by farmers as a normal day to day operation and development of their problem.
And John Howard took that in the place that Australia was at at that particular point with Pauline Hanson running around claiming Indigenous people were getting free houses and free education and more in Center Link benefits and all of this other bullshit. He took that around that same time to say that the wik decision essentially meant that about seventy percent of Australia was now up for grad apps.
Let me just show to show your viewers that this shows seventy eight percent of the land mass of Australia colored brown on this map.
And he went on national television and he held up a map that had been shaded and said, all of this is now potentially in doubt.
Now the Labor Party and the Democrats are effectively saying that the Aboriginal people of Australia should have the potential right of veto over further development of seventy eight percent of the land mass of Australia.
And it was a huge flash point for Australian cultural relations because suddenly people were scared that Indigenous people could come and claim their backyard. And it was never true. It's not what the High Court said. There was no element of truth or respectability in it. But John Howard used the resulting Scare campaign, which he was inflaming to essentially try to crack down on any type of Indigenous reconciliation or growing Indigenous rights beyond what he.
Was comfortable with.
For John Howard, the real battle was over the nation's conscience. He dismissed what he called the black arm Band view of history and described the violence and dispossession of the past as mere blemishes on an otherwise proud national story, who refused to apologize to the stolen generations, rejecting the idea that the nation owed a moral debt. In its place, he chose pride over reckoning and ideology over truth. I'm
Daniel James and you're listening to seven Am. This is The Howard Effect, a three part series from seven AM marking thirty years since John Howard's assent The Power Episode three, Who Belongs?
So About a year after John Howard's election, he went to the Reconciliation Convention, which had been put in place while Paul Keating was still Prime Minister.
Can I introduce to you the Prime Minister of Australia, the Honorable John.
Howard, And he wanted them to know that there was a new leader in town, and that this new leader had a very different idea about Australia's history and what reconciliation actually meant, and what he believed it to mean was that white Australia did not have anything to reconcile.
In facing the realities of the past. However, we must not join those who would portray Australia's history since seventeen eighty eight as little more than a disgraceful record thought of imperialism, exploitation and racism.
And as the speech went on, Howard began feeding off the reaction from his audience and he became even more belligerent.
Such a portrayal is a gross distortion, and it deliberately neglects the overall story of great Australian achievement that is there in our history to be told. And such an approach will be repudiated by the overwhelming majority of Australians who are proud of what this country has achieved, although inevitably acknowledging the blemishes in its past history.
So he essentially described you know, murder, displacement, the forced removal of Indigenous people, enslavement as a blemish, and at least one hundred delegates in the room for that convention turned their backs on John Howard in what was another
famous moment from that particular period. And John Howard probably could not have been happier that they did that, because to him, he immediately knew how he could weaponize this and show White Australia all of these battlers that he had panicked into thinking that their backyards and their homes were now at risk of being you know, taken from Native title, that Indigenous Australians were being so unreasonable by this very common sense approach of just getting on with it and just moving on.
What was he so resistant to the idea of an apology to the stolen generations and the overall use of language when it came to reconciliation.
Part of the reason he was so resistant to an apology was because he was worried about legal consequences that if he had said sorry on behalf of the nation, that that would open up the nation to compensation claims. And John Howard did not believe that, you know, anyone deserved compensation for what had happened with previous generations, so
he didn't want to say sorry for that. But he also didn't want to say sorry because he did not believe that modern Australians had to accept responsibility for something that the settlers and colonalist did, even if they had benefited from that, even if it was their direct ancestors, Even if it meant that white Australians were ahead in almost every measure of a success, you know, from health
to monetary to education. That was not the fault of a relaxed and comfortable Australia, and so they should be able to just move on.
This black armband view of our past reflects a belief, but most Australian history since seventeen eighty eight has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.
When delegates turned their backs on Ing at the Reconciliation Convention, it became a defining image, but politically it worked in his favor. He cast himself as the voice of common sense and stability and his critics as unreasonable and divisive. In doing so, he reframed reconciliation as excess and resistance to it as patriotism.
National identity very much became white identity, and we saw that, you know, not just in how we treated indigenous Australians, but also multiculturalism. He started building the Anzac legacy, the White and Zach legacy as being part of Australia's national identity.
And Zach evokes the individual spirit that is such a deep path of our national character, the freedom and individuality we were prepared to fight for then and are prepared to fight for still.
He really framed Australia's identity around cultural sporting moments like the Australian cricket team and Don Bradman.
His contribution to Australian sport and Australia in life was math. Even my own dealings with him were memorable and the ones that I regarded as a real privilege.
He made Australia Day a celebration of our colonial history. So previous to nineteen ninety four, Australia Day wasn't a national holiday. There were different holidays in the States, but it was usually the Monday or the Friday closest to
the twenty sixth. But Howard is the reason why suddenly everybody had flags waving from their cars and it was like this big we go and have a barbecue by the beach and we drape ourselves in the Australian flag and we talk about how bloody great it is to be an Australian, and what he meant by that was a white Australian.
Listen, Australia, is your chance to say thanks for beaches, Lamington, Drives, Kylie and our democratic right to give.
You dead arms.
And the idea was that if you wanted to partake.
As being an Australian, no matter what color or ethnicity you were, that that is how you celebrated being an Australian. You could not acknowledge what was happening for Indigenous Australia, You could not acknowledge different cultures. There was one way to be an Australian, and Howard made sure that it was the dominant way in terms of how Conservatives discussed this particular culture.
War coming up. How nine to eleven supercharged the politics of division and reinvigorated or flailing John Howard. Two months out from the two thousand and one election, the Coalition was trailing in the polls and John Howard was in Washington when the plane struck on nine to eleven.
This justin you were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there that is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning.
That a plane has crashed into one of the towers.
From his hotel near the White House, he watched the towers fall and television and saw smoke rising from the Pentagon affet was he a mere five kilometers away. Associated prasses reporting that a plane It was a plane that crashed out the Pentagon and the Pentagon is being evacuated. There is a line in that moment of global shock. Howard found the frame that would define the campaign security, borders, strength, and the politics of who Australians could trust and who they should fear.
The terrible events of the eleventh of September have cast a paul over the civilized world. They've forced all of us to think about what we believe in and what we stand for, and they oblige in nations such as Australia with a great tradition of freedom and commitment to the rights of men and women to work with other like minded nations.
Howard used nine to eleven to really turbocharged xenophobia in Australia, to really set up border control. All of the terror laws that were put in place essentially about controlling people and protest and all the rest of it, and he essentially used it to start being like Australia is going to be strong on its borders.
National security is therefore about a proper response to terrorism. It's also about having a far sighted, strong, well thought out defense policy. It is also about having an uncompromising view about the fundamental right of this country to protect its borders.
Around the same time came the Tampa.
When the Tampa first sailed into Australian waters after rescuing more than four hundred Muslim asylum seekers, no one could have predicted the dramatic sea change ahead.
How It set the essays to board the Norwegian freighter carrying the rescued asylum seekers and stop at docking, and the images of armed soldiers storming the deck were beamed into Australian lound rooms.
A diplomatic standoff is continuing over the fate of four hundred and thirty eight asylum seekers stranded off Christmas Island, both Australia and Indonesia refusing to take them in.
A month later, asylum seekers were accused of throwing their children overboard, a claim later proven false. As Howard tightened the border, hardened the language and once again seized control of the national story. The dehumanization of those seeking asylum in this country has been a feature of our politics ever since.
This was the lie that asylum seekers were deliberately throwing their children into the ocean to have Australian authorities except them.
I don't want in Australian people who would throw their own children into the sea.
I didn't there's.
Something to mean compatible between somebody who claims to be a refugee and somebody who would throw their own child into the sea. It offends the natural instinct of protection.
And that was just told to the Australian people as fact. And then it came out after the two thousand and four election that the government knew that that wasn't true.
That the boat that they were.
On was sinking and taking on water and nobody was throwing their children into the ocean. It was the boat was sinking.
It was a claim that went largely unchallenged until the Minister for Defense, Peter Reese, sat down for an interview with ABC's Virginia Trioldi. He had pictures, he claimed, where proof parents were throwing their children overboard.
Mister Ruth, there's nothing in this photo that indicates these people either jumped or were thrown.
You're now questioning the veracity of what is being said. Those photos are produced as evidence of the fact that there were people in the water. These photos show, absolutely, without question whatsoever, that there were children in the water. Yes, let me, let me just answer one thing at a time, because people are making exaggerated and very unfair claims.
To moving a question onto something else.
The question was always answering.
Now I'm answering the question. I'm answering it fully.
And Howard was like, oh, look, I didn't know for sure that that was actually what was happening, so people kind of believed what they wanted to believe.
I was subsequently informed in writing that the incident had occurred without any qualifications. I had every reason to believe that. I still have every reason too, irrespective of what is on the video.
And I don't think people who don't know about it, or haven't read about it, or weren't there understand what a flashpoint Tampa was when Australia said no to asylum seekers wanting to come in on a freighter who had rescued them from almost certain death in the we.
Will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
And then they changed laws to mean that if they landed on Christmas Islands or other jurisdictions, that that was not Australia.
Under our interpretation of the international law applicable, it is appropriate that they be returned to Indonesia. It's certainly a message to the world that we are not a country of easy destination.
And then they created the offshore mandatory detention system where Australia turned its back on international obligations and essentially went, if you came here and you don't go through our proper processes, then we will lock you up indefinitely forever on an island that we're paying over a billion dollars for. Australia really started finding domestic political currency in turning away refuge gees, you know, migrants, asylum seekers in a way that they had not been able to do essentially since
the White Australia policy was put in place. And it became like, you know, we needed to question whether Muslims and Arab Australians had Australian values, whether they shared you know, our common national story and our common values. And it became the way that mainstream Australia would treat Muslims and anybody who was of Middle Eastern descent.
In that atmosphere, fear amplified, borders, calcified belonging became policed by the commentariat and political class. The national mood was brutal. Suspicion had been normalized, difference cast as a threat. It was the perfect storm in which something like Crenell look good at night. To protect this, those celebrities grievance stressed up as patriotism. Violence framed his defense of Australian values
in a way of life. Hill was he playing to when he rejected the notion that the Kronella riots were indeed racist.
He was playing to these battlers. He was playing to Howard's Middle Australia. He was playing to the white people he wanted to keep relaxed and comfortable. And he was playing to migrant communities who felt like they had assimilated into Australia and were suddenly watching people come in and not have to make the same sacrifices that they did.
And he was helped along by a labor party that was almost completely nobbled by that point in being able to push back against these culture wars that Howard was pushing along. That they also wouldn't talk about it being race related. You know, Howard focused on law and order.
I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country.
And Kim Beasley, the labor leader at the time, essentially echoed that, and then that became the narrative that this was not a race riot, just criminal behavior.
That's what this is.
Australian multiculturalism is alive and.
Will even though people were holding up signs that were absolutely racist, and text messages and flyers had gone out which which proved that there was racial intent for a bunch of people who turned up to Cronulla Beach on that day.
All stoked by people like Alan Jones as well.
Absolutely, and you know many many in the media.
At the time.
Talkback radio has been singled out for much of the blame, including Twogb's Alan Jones. By reading out on it some of the emails and text messages urging people to quote support the leb and wog bashing day.
I suggest you is to invite one of the biker gangs to be present in numbers at Cronella railway station. When the Lebanese thugs arrived. We worth the price of admision to watch these cowards scurry back onto the train for the return trip to their lairs.
The week before Cronulla, there was a violent incident at Sydney's Southern Beaches. Two volunteer surfly sabers were hospitalized after being attacked by a group of young men described as being of Middle Eastern appearance. The attack was serious, but was also isolated. In parts of the media and on talkback radio, it was recast as proof of a broader cultural threat, with race four grounded and grievance stoked.
Sitting there in your studio, I wish you could visualize North Cronolla Beach. It's not just a few Middle Eastern bastards of a weekend.
Its spous Cronulla's a very long.
Beach and it's taken to be taken over by these scum.
By the time crowds gathered at Cronulla, that grievance had become weaponized, so it just became.
A massive flashpoint, which Howard still still to this day, does not recognize as racial tensions in Australia don't.
Go back.
Even today he does not think that Australia has any problems with racism, while also openly saying that he has massive problems with multiculturalism, but he's never been comfortable with it.
Multiculturalism is a concept that I've always had a bit of trouble with. I take the view that if people were to immigrate with a country, it's on the basis that they adopt the values and the practices and the standards of that country, and in return, they're entitled to have the host citizenry respect.
His politics when it came to a solemn sech policy and immigration was very very successful for him. How did it shape our overall politics going forward?
Well, we're still talking about boat people, which is something that you know, John Howard absolutely created and pushed along. At the same time that John Howard was demonizing migrants, particularly asylum seekers and refugees, he had increased the number of temporary migrants to Australia and that's documented.
And he did that to fill labor shortages.
And because it's cheaper labor, it's not usually union labor, and it also increases consumers. So it ticked all of his you know, economic conservative boxes. But he had to find a way to still demonize that class, and the way that he did it was pointing to the most vulnerable in the cohort, refugees and asylum seekers and essentially just saying that these people are taking your houses, taking
your jobs, taking your welfare. And now we have a new opposition leader in Angus Taylor who's basing his entire premise on wanting to protect Australian values and protect Australia's way of life, which again is just a signal to people who are worried about migration that Angus Taylor is going to start cracking down in line with what Pauline Hanson is offering.
We need an immigration policy that raises the standards, reduces the numbers because the standards have been too low and the numbers have been too high, and importantly shuts the door to people who want to bring hate and violence to our shores from another place.
What Howard understood, perhaps better than any other Australian Prime minister, was that politics is about story, who belongs, who threatens, who works hard, who gets ahead. He didn't just win elections, he redrew the emotional map of the country. We are still speaking his language. We still reduce human lives to both people. Still treat borders has more urgent than belonging, still cast housing, welfare and migration as zero sum contest
between battlers and outsiders. Even when governments change, the Howard frame remains. The question is is there enough courage in our political system to move beyond the politics of fear, to move beyond the Howard effect.
It can be done.
It's just going to take bravery, you know, on behalf of Australia's politicians and on behalf of voters who need to look a little bit beyond the headlines or what they're being fed by politicians who want to try and keep them relaxed and comfortable and blaming others, so they're not actually looking at where the fault lies. And I think when you look at the modern Liberal Party you can see the result of John Howard's style of politics.
John Howard didn't only set the country onto the course it is now, he set the Liberal Party onto the course that it is now.
We didn't just lose, we got smashed.
This is a catastrophic defeat for the Liberal Party.
They're rough.
Liberal Party is in post water mode today after an extraordinary election.
Coalition supporters plunged to a record low, while Paul Enhanson's One Nation Party is streaming ahead in the post.
And voters are turning against the Liberal Party, but they're turning towards a bigger disruption in One Nation and a lot of that is because they feel failed by the political system and they're not being offered not only the hope but the material changes that would give them hope that the future is going to be better. So I think for it to change, we need to actually reconcile what John Howard did to Australia and then have politicians that are brave enough to break that mold.
And labor has the power to change all of that.
Voters have the power to change that by pushing their government on these very key basic necessities of housing, addressing inequality, addressing the fact that our public safety nets in health and education and social security have been completely destroyed by
the last thirty years of baked in Howard policies. But I think we're still afraid of that change and until we actually just go enough, there is another way, and our politicians are brave enough to push forward in that direction, I think we're going to be living with the consequences of John Howard's Australia for quite some time.
Amy, thanks for your time and thank you for having me. This special series from seven am hosted and written by Me Daniel James, and featured Amory Makus. It was produced by Chris Dangate, Zoltan Vecchio and Crystal Color. Mixing was by Travis Evans, with additional support from Atticus Basto and Ariel Richards. Original music was written and performed by zalt Vecho