“Symbolism, Separatism, and Perpetual Guilt”: Politicians Debating the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, 1987–1990

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Aboriginal Affairs was a volatile portfolio. Gough Whitlam signalled a reorientation of policy with self-determination in 1973. However, in the succeeding decade, policy slipped back to self-management and self-sufficiency that were the default of the Coalition. The proposals for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission by Labor in the late 1980s brought self-determination back into the equation and sparked much heated debate. This article focusses on the parliamentary debates around Labor's proposed legislation to establish the Commission, between 1987 and November 1989, when the debates concluded and a severely reduced Act came into being. I argue that the Coalition's hostility to the proposal demonstrated an implacable resistance to self-determination and an agenda that sought to derail its possibility. Furthermore, I argue that the resonances between arguments for and against an Indigenous voice then and now demonstrate the radical nature of Labor's agenda in the late 1980s and suggest that arguments against the Voice to Parliament now might be conceived as unfinished business by conservative Coalition forces.