So will anyone listen as to who speaks for The Aboriginals In this Nation ! Its not who you may want it to be !

["white cockatoo" The Herald]

Whatever you think of Pearson’s politics, it almost certainly doesn’t
match what Pearson thinks of Pearson’s politics.

Since his transformation in 2000, Pearson has been asserting that he’s
not a conservative. Again, from his ‘The Light on the Hill’ speech:
‘Much of my thinking will seem to many to indicate that I have merely
become conservative. But I propose the reform of welfare, not its
abolition.’ And he was still running the line seven years later.
Writing in the Australian in July 2007, Pearson says: ‘My aim has
been, as Dennis Glover wrote in The Australian yesterday, to “set
higher standards for the Left” by critically examining the outcomes of
ostensibly leftist policies.’

Pearson seems to be suggesting that he is above politics, that he
transcends it. He seems to be saying, ‘I’m not right-wing. I just
happen to support the Northern Territory intervention. And I agree
with compulsory income management. And I want to mine Cape York.’

It’s obviously pretty silly stuff, but Pearson gets away with it
because his politics and his process suits the missionary zeal of
governments and media. Most of all, Pearson tells white Australia what
they want to hear: we don’t want to know that Aboriginal people are
living short lives of misery and abject poverty, and that we’re
responsible for it. We want to hear that we’re doing our best to save
the unsaveables, and that the demise of Aboriginal people is really
their own fault.

It plays out well on ‘Struggle Street’, and Pearson’s political stocks
soar. But, of course, he doesn’t get away with it in the parts of our
nation that are really struggling – Aboriginal communities.

And therein lies his biggest problem.

While I don’t doubt for one second Pearson’s love of his people or his
genuine desire to save them from oblivion, I have major reservations
about his ability. The problem for Pearson is surprisingly simple: he
couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper bag.

Sarra, by contrast, is immensely popular among Aboriginal Australians.
He achieved his remarkable results in Cherbourg without vast rivers of
government funding, without media hype and without alienating the very
people he was trying help. He did it simply by engaging with the
community. By building pride. By leading.

Pearson has spent more than a decade trying to achieve the same thing
by bludgeoning and lecturing, bullying and bulldozing. Too much stick,
not enough carrot, one might say. His public pronouncements that lay
the blame at the feet of Aboriginal people, his lauding of a prime
minister who used race as a wedge, his support for atrocious human
rights abuses like the Northern Territory intervention have all
combined to leave Pearson out in the dark in Indigenous affairs.

He is, by quite some margin, the most loathed man in black affairs.
It’s a fact Pearson himself acknowledged in a recent interview,
describing the perception of him among black Australians as ‘the
antichrist’.

I think he’s being generous.

Pearson has, reportedly, learnt some valuable lessons about engaging
with communities in the course of the FRC trials. But a conservative
never changes his spots easily, and certainly not quickly.

In his ‘The Light on the Hill’ speech Pearson stated, ‘When I consider
the history of [white] people, I am struck by the ironies. Few
Australians today appreciate their history.’

Reading the speech, I was struck by ‘the ironies’ as well.

Pearson studied history at university. He’s well read on the vagaries
of the labour movement since Federation. He’s a scholar of American
and Australian political history and he can tell you all about
Siegfried Engelmann’s theories of Direct Instruction education.

But I wonder if he’s read Dr Rosalind Kidd’s The Way We Civilise, a
book which lays bare the horrendous brutality and wage theft levelled
against Aboriginal people on Queensland missions. I wonder if he’s
read Marjorie Woodrow’s Long Time Coming Home, which documents the
cruelty of the Cootamundra Girls Home in NSW.

The fact is Pearson is a student of history who knows very little
about his own. And if he understood it better, he wouldn’t be so
alienated from the people he wants to help.

Born black but raised Lutheran, Pearson will never lead Cape York out
of the darkness of welfare dependency until he learns to accept
personal responsibility for his own ‘grievous failing’: a complete
lack of authenticity in the eyes of his people.