Editorial: Jubilee and the Referendum

The Christian tradition cannot tell us whether Australia ought to remain a constitutional monarchy or become a republic, but that tradition can shed some light on some of the issues involved in that debate. The issue voters face in answering the Referendum questions on 6 November 1999 is whether they want to definitively assert Australian sovereignty over this land by removing from their Constitution the last symbols of British sovereignty.

It is altogether appropriate, but more than a little embarrassing to non-indigenous citizens, that the second Referendum question reminds us of how our sovereignty over this land was first acquired. The Draft Declaration for Reconciliation acknowledges that Aboriginal people had their sovereignty over the land removed ‘without their consent’. The second question does not ask us whether we are now ready to allow the Aboriginal people the right of self-determination, a right enshrined in international law and proclaimed in the Draft Document for Reconciliation. Rather the question asks us only whether, nearly 100 years after seizing sovereignty over it from the indigenous peoples, we are prepared to acknowledge their ‘prior occupation of’, and continuing ‘kinship’ with, the land, and even this in a Preamble to the Constitution with only symbolic, not legal, force.

Considering that this nation denied citizenship to Aboriginal peoples until the 1967 Referendum, it is perhaps not surprising that we are not yet ready to recognise Aboriginal claims to this land in more than a symbolic and tokenistic way. There are, however, elements of the Judaeo-Christian tradition that should caution us against resting content with this position.

In Jubilee years, of which the year 2000 is one, the biblical peoples were called upon to return all lands to their original owners. A literal observance of that requirement is no longer possible, but the religious insight underlying the ancient law is of some relevance to us today. Leviticus (25:23) has the Lord saying, ‘Land must not be sold in perpetuity, for the land belongs to me, and to me you are only strangers and guests’. For followers of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, nobody has an absolute right to land, for all land is held in stewardship from the Lord, to be used justly to meet the needs of all his people.

To limit the Aboriginal right to this land to symbols and tokens would seriously violate the spirit of Jubilee by denying one group in the community something they need to meet their material and spiritual needs. Worse still, acknowledgment of Aboriginal rights in symbolic terms, but denial of the same rights in legal terms, exposes non-Aboriginal Australians to the charge of hypocrisy. The sincerity of the Declaration’s confession that ‘this land was colonised without the consent of the original inhabitants’, and that the original inhabitants therefore have a right of ‘self-determination’, depends upon our willingness to give it legal, and preferably constitutional, force. The spirit of Jubilee should inspire Christians to support efforts for such legal and constitutional reform in this country.

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