FOR THE FEEDBACK FORM AND DISCUSSION PAPER MENTIONED IN THE INTERVIEW WITH UNCLE GLENN LOUGHREY (SEE FURTHER DOWN), CLICK HERE

Charles Pakana (Victorian Aboriginal News):
Cultural Safety, Cultural Awareness, Cultural Load, the terms that are being heard increasingly in organisations, businesses and communities right across the country. To get an idea of what they actually mean and how organisations can address them effectively.

I’m speaking today with two people from the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation VACCHO, who are at the very sharp end of Cultural Safety education, Djab Wurrung and Gunditjmara woman Sheree Lowe and Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung and Gamilaroi woman Madison Connors.

Sheree, thanks for joining us on the program today.

Sheree:
Thanks for having me

Charles:
And Maddie, you as well. Great to catch up with you again after all these years and welcome to VAN Talks.

Madison:
It’s nice to see you, Unc.

Charles:
Sheree, we’ll go straight to you. If we’re going to be talking about Cultural Safety, then let’s get an understanding of what it actually means. Give us an elevator pitch.

Sheree:
I think the important thing around Cultural Safety that it actually means different things for different people. So and it’s important to understand that the person feeling culturally unsafe is the person who defines what safety is for them and it looks different, for different people.

So what might make you feel culturally unsafe, It could be very different to what makes me feel culturally unsafe. But for me, when I talk about and when I teach around Cultural Safety, it’s very much about people having an understanding that if you can’t bring your whole self to work as an Aboriginal person, then there’s probably elements there that are making you feel unsafe.

So when you’re feeling safe, you can be yourself. You can celebrate. You’re mob. You don’t have to feel shamed about different family settings. You know you, how you’ve been brought up, all of that kind of stuff. You’re in a space where you can be your authentic self. When you can’t be that, and when you feel like you’re holding back, then there probably is elements of aspects within your workplace that doesn’t allow you to bring your whole self to work.

Charles:
Maddie, what do you think some of the typical examples might be of mob feeling culturally unsafe in, if you can have a standard work environment, what are some of the common complaints or issues that you might hear?

Madison:
When you’re looking at a workplace, if a workplace only has one Aboriginal staff member that they feel siloed and alone and they’re working completely on their own, that can be culturally unsafe for mob. Other things would be if people are talking about, say, for example, Jan 26, really openly about what they’re going to do on the floor.

I’ve been in workplaces where staff members do talk about celebrating January 26 in a different way than what I would celebrate or I guess mourn that day. I guess it’s those conversations, not just in the work itself, but the conversations that people have in the staff room when they’re at their desks. If we’ve got open desks, that type of thing. I think you have to be really mindful of other people.

Charles:
We’re not talking just outright racism here. We’re just talking about plain common sense in many cases.

Madison:

Yeah, definitely.

Charles:
I would imagine then Sheree, that in going into an organisation, just as you said before, that Cultural Safety might mean different things to different people. Embarking on a culturally safe at work environment project, it’s got to be different from organisation to organisation. What are some of the big challenges that organisations face?

Sheree:
I think the biggest challenge is particularly like, you know, we’re lucky we’re working in an Aboriginal community controlled organisation, so how our work structure looks a lot different and the conversations that we have are a lot different.

Charles:
Well, let’s say a local government, a local council.

Sheree:
Yeah. So I think that when we think about different organisations outside of that kind of black space, the biggest question that that organisation has to answer is why are we doing this? Like why do we, why are we going down the diversity inclusion kind of pathway? Why are we developing our Reconciliation Action Plan?

And once they answer that question truthfully, then the next steps after that kind of roll into place, it removes the barriers because you need that leadership and guidance about change and role modelling that change within. So it’s like any kind of system change within an organization. It’s no different the process.

You need people on board, but you need to understand to have that change from a cultural perspective, you need to be working on your people, but you also need to be working on your practice. And you can’t have that unbalanced because if you invest wholly and solely in your people, you’ve got people with the knowledge that they’re going back into the same environment.

So policies, procedures, ways of work that don’t necessarily kind of foster and enable Cultural Safety and vice versa. You can change all your systems and, you know, have cultural leave and the presence within your workplace, you know, celebration of events, all of those types of things that kind of help create safety within the space. But if you’ve got a whole heap of people that don’t understand why you’re doing it and how that connects and their role within that, then it’s kind of misplaced. So you need to be doing both at the same time. So I think that that’s really important starting block.

Charles:
From what I’ve seen over the years in so many different organisations is that there’s a willingness within the organisation to implement either a Reconciliation Action Plan or Cultural Awareness or Cultural Safety. But without that top level, and we’re talking tippy top the CEO level, buy in and support, it’s doomed to failure, almost always. Would you say that that applies just as much to Cultural Awareness and Cultural Safety?

Sheree:
Yeah, I think so, like, I think that there needs to be an understanding of the why we’re doing it. Like we would have people coming into our sessions. The real resistance. I don’t want to be here. I already know this is a waste of my time. How does this apply to my role? I don’t work with Aboriginal people, I don’t engage with Aboriginal stakeholders.

But you know, you’re a citizen in Australia and what you do outside of your workplace is just as important as what you do inside your workplace in creating spaces for people, but internal or external to what you’re doing. And I think that people kind of forget that they have their in work mode, their outside work mode, and sometimes people want to have them completely separate.

But when we’re talking about things like Cultural Safety and that kind of stuff, for me that’s just been a good citizen and it’s been a good corporate citizen as well, like in your workspace when you think about all the different expectations. And I think we’re in an interesting time in society where there’s more pressure now on organisations to be good corporate citizens, whether that’s environmentally, socially and those types of things. So we’ve got a starting point to have these conversations that were never there, you know, 10-15 years ago.

Charles:
Madison, you look like you wanted to add something on to what Sheree was saying.

Madison:

Yeah, in reference to what Cherie was saying, I was thinking about the education space and when I used to deliver Cultural Safety within schools, particularly to the staff, when there was no Aboriginal students at the school, there was some resistance because they said why do we have to do this? There’s no Aboriginal students are.

Charles:
You talking about the schools themselves, the hierarchy or the teachers?

Madison:
Teachers, admin staff, all the staff of a school. So they would do the training and one of the, you know, a couple of times we would get why do we have to do this? We don’t have any Aboriginal students here and our answer was very similar to what Sheree said.

It’s about creating that space and that learning environment for your students who are going to be future citizens and future people outside of school and also even now being outside of school. You know, they have to have some level of understanding about the culture of, I guess Australia, in a sense, because our history and our culture is as much other people’s history and culture, something they should be proud of to look at and say, wow, you know, we have the oldest living culture in the world. That’s something to be really proud of.

Charles:

Shared history

Madison:

It is a shared history, yeah

Charles:
And I’ll stay with you, Madison, if you don’t mind, because I know you’ve done a lot of this in the schools, as you mentioned. I know where you come from and I know a lot of the schools where you’ve done the work. And we’re not going to mention the area or the schools, but there’s a lot of ethnicity, especially African students in those schools. Do you see that the Cultural Awareness training and the Cultural Safety training you’re giving to schools and to even organisations nowadays, that it can also translate to other ethnicities and other peoples who’ve come into Australia?

Madison:
Definitely. Sheree and I were having this conversation the other day about equality versus equity. Yeah, when teachers say, Oh well, I treat all students the same, it’s like, well, you shouldn’t be treating all students the same because everyone’s coming from a different level and talking to my 7 year old, he saw the slides that I was working with and he saw the picture of, you know, there’s three people looking over the fence, watching the baseball.

It’s a very generic slide. And he was like, why can’t the little person see? They need to be able to allow that one to see. And I asked him, would you give everybody the same pair of shoes? And he said, no, mum, why would we do that? Because they’re not going to fit everybody if we gave them all the same pair of shoes. And I just thought that.

Charles:
If a 7 year old gets.

Madison:
Mentality, that mentality like my 7 year old understood that you can’t give everyone the same pair of shoes and it applies to you can’t treat everyone the exact same. People are starting at different points.

Charles:
Well, let me ask you now, Sheree. You’re talking about providing Cultural Awareness and Cultural Safety training to people who may be thinking, well, it doesn’t really apply to me all that much. Either we don’t have Aboriginal people or I’m not engaged with Aboriginal people. What are the challenges you’ve got and how do you manage to deal with those challenges? Because you’re just butting heads, surely?

Sheree:
I think you’re butting heads. I think that there’s often people who come into the training that we provide with that resistance but come out with a bit of a deeper understanding because if not anything counts, whether it’s improving your skills or knowledge to do your role better, which the training provides, that there are deeper things that we need to address as a nation and that is our shared history as you mentioned before.

But what hasn’t come to surface well enough is the hidden histories that we don’t talk about. So we do have a shared history, but we don’t. There’s all these hidden things that we haven’t been able to really talk about as a part of that shared history.

Charles:
So you’re talking about post colonial. So the massacres. The black birding.

Sheree:
All of that kind of stuff and everybody, regardless of who you are, where you work, should know that.

Charles:
So, well, OK, let me challenge you a bit more then, if a business owner would have come to you and say, OK, look, we’ve got one or two Aboriginal people. We don’t need to really fit in with them. They’re OK, what’s going to benefit my organisation on the bottom line? What are the business benefits? Because people will ask that question.

Sheree:
It kind of goes back to that comment before when we talk about ESG’s right, the economic, social, environmental kind of benefits of what we do. And I think that often in business we kind of talk about profit, we talk about like efficiencies and all of those types of things which kind of dominate those conversations.

But I think that when you talk about going right back to my point to the start of being authentic and bringing your whole self and what does it mean to be Australian means a lot different to different people that there is benefit, whether it’s two people or not, collectively we all have a responsibility to improve the outcomes for this nation.

And so I think that when you’re thinking in that mindset that you need to go on that journey to kind of change that because the practice of Cultural Safety benefits outweigh an economic value that you’ve got to be able to open, be open minded to be able to engage in the conversation to start with. So I kind of think and I think maybe a little bit differently is that that 97% of this population needs to do a little bit more heavy lifting in race relations.

So when people kind of come at me with conversations or, that’s not relevant to me, I don’t work in that space. I start off gently with those people because their minds are just so closed. But there are hooks for people and you just got to kind of build those relationships. And I think once you start to build those relationships and then the walls kind of start to come down, you can really start to have those conversations.

Because it’s not really about those two people or that one Aboriginal employee. And this is just my kind of philosophy others may share that. But if you get it right for us, mob like Aboriginal people, the most marginalised, disadvantaged people in this country, our own country, if we get things right for us, like in being able to engage, involve, include, all of that kind of stuff, everyone benefits from that.

Charles:
Well, that Cultural Load and we’re nearing the end of the time we have allocated for this. And I do want to get on to Cultural Load because it’s something that Aboriginal people themselves experience within an organisation quite often. We’re talking about an example of a local government that prior to recording this interview. But Maddie, what is cultural load?

Madison:
Cultural Load is those things that you don’t see. So when you think about Cultural Load in a visual representation, it’s almost like that cultural iceberg. When you’re looking at an iceberg, you see that only the tip of the iceberg and underneath the water is all the other things that an aboriginal person carries.

Charles:
What’s an example of Cultural Load?

Madison:
So that could be things like your responsibilities in your family are different, your kinship is larger, you don’t just have a brother and a sister and a mum and a dad, it extends beyond that. So if your caring responsibilities could be that you’re looking after different family members outside of your normal quote-un-quote, kinship systems, other things could be in a work setting, everyone turning to you as the Aboriginal person, with the knowledge you’re the only Aboriginal person in a workplace for example. And then something comes up, like Reconciliation Week.

Charles:
That’s always them. It’s always them.

Madison:
You’re the one who has to organise it all. Make sure you organise that. Welcome to Country or, you know you’ve got all those connections. Go and organise that and go and do this. Kind of like putting all that pressure onto that one person, but that one person has other responsibilities within the workplace as well. So on top of there already full schedule, they’re also doing other things that could be shared across the organisation.

Charles:
So this is obviously something, Sheree, that organisations need to take into consideration when they’re looking to establish a Culturally Safe environment that they’re not saying, well, that’s a black issue, so, well, Sheree, you’re the only black employee here, so it’s all up to you. This has just got to stop. This is a mentality that we’ve seen all over the place. Is it rife within organisations that you’ve seen?

Sheree:
100% It would be rare to find an employee who one or two within an organisation that don’t feel the burn of the Cultural Load. And until it gets to a point where that person may not start to come to work, that kind of absenteeism, you know, even retention, disengagement into those kind of group activities, kind of trying that avoidance. Like I don’t want to go into that conversation because I’ll have to answer all the questions. Everybody will be on me. I didn’t sign up for this. My role’s not identified. It’s kind of like the de facto kind of information.

And I think for me personally, I think that organisations that do that, they don’t even know that they do it because I think they get a little bit confused between trying to be culturally inclusive and respectful but not realising they’re just overburdening.

Charles:

Yeah, exactly.

Sheree:

But it’s a little bit lazy.

Charles:
Now, where can people find out a bit more about Cultural Safety and Cultural Awareness? Where’s the one spot on the web that you would point them to 1st and Madison’s putting up her hand, so.

Madison:
I was just going to say come and do our training.

Shree:
Come and do it.

Charles:
We’re not going to pitch outright for that, but is there resources? Well, obviously lots of organisations do, but it does have online resources that people can come in and have a look at. At least start to have internal discussions.

Sheree:
We’ve got some, so that’s a good starting point. But I think that rightfully like what you’re saying Uncle is that it’s not a one stop shop and it’s not a one tick and quick fix kind of thing. So what? I would really encourage people to, yes, come to VACCHO as a starting point on the website. Those types of things. There’s some resources on the human rights around racism and those types of things. Lots of free resources to start the conversation and to start your thinking in that process.

But I also would encourage people to be, you know, branching out yarning with Aboriginal people, building those relationships. Do your work, like do the work or do some research, do your own stuff, because that’s a part of the Cultural Load as well. Like kind of like outsourcing it. I’m going to go and yarn with this person and then they will solve our problems. That doesn’t work either.

Charles:
Well, what we’ll do is for our audience, we’ll make sure that we put some links on the website to that show and a few other resources as well. So you too can start your journey along with establishing a Culturally Safe and aware environment. Ladies, thank you so much indeed. Sheree, thanks again for coming on. Thank you. And Maddie, thanks again. Great to see you again.

Madison:
Thank you.

Sheree:

Thank you

—

Charles Pakana (Victorian Aboriginal News)
During the lead up to the October 2023 referendum for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, we spoke on this podcast to numerous advocates who were committing themselves to the campaign. Among them was the Reverend Uncle Glenn Loughrey, Wiradjuri man, who over the course of the campaign travelled across the country and spoke to thousands of people.

Now just over 100 days since the referendum, he joins me again. Glenn, thanks so much indeed for coming onto the podcast once again. This is, I think, your third time on the podcast.

Uncle Glenn:
Yes, Charles, do I get a frequent interviewer prize at the moment?

Charles:
If you’ve got your loyalty card, we’ll punch it as you exit the premises

Uncle Glenn:
Oh. Good. Thank you.

Charles:
We’ve yarned a couple of times just on the phone since the referendum, and I’ve got to admit I’ve been waiting for a lot of the anger in you and a lot of other people just to ease off a little bit. It hasn’t done that with you. If anything, your fire is well and truly lit. So, Reverend Glenn Loughrey, where are you at right now? Because the fire’s flaming away.

Uncle Glenn:
I think I’m still looking at the process that led up to the referendum, the kind of rhetoric that came out in that process and the rhetoric that has followed the result which has placed a more extreme experience for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It has allowed people to behave in ways that previously they may have muted in how they spoke to you, how they reacted to you

Charles:
For example.

Uncle Glenn:
For example, when you go to an event, people don’t just walk up and say, hey, how are you? You know, like come up to you and the first thing they’ll say is, well, you asked the wrong question, so that’s why you got the answer or..

Charles:
Should have been legislated

Uncle Glenn:
Right. Should be legislated and there is none of this very previously you may have got to that process, but there would have been some gentle nice talk and you’d have had some kind of connection to the person. But now it’s just boom. And I think people have forgotten about us very quickly, governments and institutions and people in general. The attitude that I’ve got from some high-ranking people has been, well, you know, we all get disappointments, so we’ll just have to move on and you go, well, yeah, really, you know, it might be disappointing to you, but it’s catastrophic for our people who now go out and go out of the 10 people in this room, which are the six that didn’t want me to have a voice. Yeah.

Which are the six that I, people who want to keep me and our people in a deficit position. Who always still want to go back to the idea that. But I look, I want to close the gap. But I said, well, you had the opportunity and you said no, so don’t tell me you now want to close the gap because you have no intention to.

Charles:
And these were people who before were definitely sort of advocating for Yes, they were marching along with the crowd shoulder to shoulder.

Uncle Glenn:
Yep. Some of them were. Some of them weren’t. Yeah. Some of them are gloating because they won.

Charles:
We see that in the conservative side of the media and politics, absolutely.

Uncle Glenn:
Happened on Sunday when, which is Aboriginal Sunday from William Cooper saying let’s have a Sunday in solidarity with Aboriginal people. So up pops the Liberals and Nationals and says nah, we’re not going to have a Treaty in Melbourne.

Charles:
Appropriately timed, wasn’t it?

Uncle Glenn:
It was appropriately timed, yeah. It wasn’t unforeseen but and it’s this kind of cynical stuff and you say that I’m still lit up a little about it. It’s the cynical things that I respond to. I went to an event the week after the referendum in the cathedral, multi faith event, praying for peace in the Middle East. And I said to the Bishop that was running and I said this is a bit ironic. You know, a week ago our Synod sat in here and said no to Aboriginal people having a voice in the Melbourne church. And then the next day Australia said no to peace in Australia. Now you’re sitting here running an event that is praying for peace in the Middle East.

Charles:
Where have all the supporters gone, and because we were having a word before about this and so many of those supporters that we had with us pre referendum have just disappeared like smoke in the wind.

Uncle Glenn:
As both of us were saying prior to the referendum, if I put a post up on Facebook or LinkedIn, it got really good traction. People came and looked at it and made comments and got involved.

Charles:
Nowadays though.

Uncle Glenn:
Nowadays it’s wee they’re off in the wind, they’re flying away, they’re not there. We just don’t have them and we don’t hear from them now whether that’s part of their own pain because they were in in favour of it and then they were devastated at the end, the day after the referendum on the referendum Saturday, I went around to the local polling booths and thanked all the Yes people for supporting us.

And then the next day, we had a gathering here at 10:00 on the Sunday morning, and we had 40 or 50 people turn up. And we’re maintaining contact with those because they were devastated too. They didn’t know where to go and what to do, and they had a set of pain that was really difficult to deal with. But I do think that there is this attitude.

Well, oh, well, that’s done and dusted. And then and that comes back to the way it was handled by the Federal Government and to a degree by the campaign itself. It was handled as if it was a federal election between the Liberals and Labour. They lined up in that political position. Therefore everybody sees it as one wins, one loses and life goes on.

Charles:
But let’s be really frank about it. That was just as much the fault as the media as it was the government and the Yes campaign.

Uncle Glenn:
Look I think the media in general behaved deplorably in how we’d handle converservative discussions. This idea that of equal time meant that people who had nothing to say could say nothing for a long time and get equal time to people who had something to say.

So you could get up and make the most ridiculous statements and nobody in the mainstream media, not talking about Sky, mainstream media really took those people to task and said show us some evidence, you know, where’s your academic basis for making those kind of statements like colonisation was good for Aboriginal people.

Charles:
Thanks Jacinta

Uncle Glenn:
Yeah, because we at least got running water, we had running water before, it was clean rivers, you know. But there was nobody that really took to task at the time and equal time in the media has to be about the quality of comments, the quality of the information being given, not just allowing people to talk and…

Charles:
This is something we will be chatting about with some really reputable journalists in a in a future episode. So to the audience, stay tuned for that one, Glenn, just so our audience does understand. It’s probably a little bit late in the piece right now, but to paint a picture of Reverend Glenn Loughrey, in the lead up to the referendum, you were given a period of time off by the Synod or by the church to actively campaign. This is all you did. You went around and spoke and spoke and spoke for how long and how many presentations or did you lose count?

Uncle Glenn:
I started the second week in March and went right up to the day of the referendum. It was about 123 different presentations, not including talking to people like yourself and radio or being in newspapers and articles and that was about average of about 70 people at each one of those events. So there was over 7000 odd people over that period of time.

Charles:
And that wasn’t just Victoria

Uncle Glenn:
It was from Perth to Tweed Heads out to you know back in NSW, Tasmania, here, all over Australia.

Charles:
Seven day a week job

Uncle Glenn:
It was full on, yeah, seven days a week. And it was, you know, the presentation that I did takes up to an hour to present. And then you have question and answers afterwards. Well, mostly not questions and answers, people just telling you what they think you should be doing.

But that’s another question. It was amazing. People didn’t ask questions, they would go to talk and you’d go, but I just answered that. But I just told you about that and they’d go, you know, well, I think this is what we should do. This is what we did in South Africa. Yeah, well, that’s a bit different…

Charles:
Oh, yes, yes. I had a few of those. So what now? What do you see as the next logical step now? Because we’re not going to get another referendum. What do you want to see happening next?

Uncle Glenn:

I’ll tell you what I don’t want to see, OK?

Charles:
We’ll start with that

Uncle Glenn:
I don’t want to see your legislative voice

Charles:
Why?

Uncle Glenn:
Because if we’d have wanted a legislative Voice, we’d have gone for that in the first place.

Charles:
Devil’s advocate time, then wouldn’t it at least provide a voice?

Uncle Glenn:
No, it would provide a Voice on the terms of those who won the war, and that’s not what we need. And we’re seeing it in New Zealand right now. Yeah, it’s being wound back and it’ll continue to be wound back and it’ll disappear. I had discussions with leaders of the Liberal Party before Christmas and knew the decision that we’re going to make, which they announced on Sunday.

We don’t need a legislative Voice. We don’t need to allow the possessiveness of the white politicians to take control over how we need to live.

Charles:

All right, so we can rule that out. Loughrey doesn’t want a legislative voice. What else can we rule out before we say this is what really should be the next step from your perspective?

Uncle Glenn:
I think we have to rule out how do I say it, cosying up to people and doing what they want, to get outcomes … in a sort of a way. We have to stop going to the table as a guest, but going to the table as a sovereign. Whoops, that’s a bad word, but as a sovereign?

Charles:
[laughs] we can pursue that and we will. We will. You said it.

Uncle Glenn:
But as a sovereign unseeded, yeah, person of this country we need to go there on equal terms and not just because they want a policy that’s going to close the gap the issue with..

Charles:
But how does that look in real terms? It’s all good to say that, but I mean, that’s not hard fact. Let’s give the audience something that they can actually visualise, see and support.

Uncle Glenn:
The idea that I would like to see us doing as Aboriginal First Nations people is to disconnect from what we’ve been made into Aboriginal nation states.

Charles:
We’re getting a bit contentious, I’m liking that.

Uncle Glenn:
…and begin to think of ourselves of an Aboriginal whole made-up of individual groups of people who come together in a Federated style, which is how we used to do it. Where I come from there was a place call the hands on the rocks near the drip on the Goulburn River and that the part of Wiradjuri country was close to Camel Roy, then two Newcastle mobs and part of the upper Sydney kind of mobs and they used to come together at the hands on the rocks and do politics.

Charles:
Isn’t this what we’re seeing, in a way, with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria?

Uncle Glenn:
Let’s take that model and shift that model out of the place of political approval by the white fella and start to act on this as who We are the first peoples of this nation and have a Federated body that has members made-up of members from all of these different groups who begin to act as equal to the government of Australia, has an embassy in Canberra and in each of the States and works with them.

Charles:
This is all what I’ve read in your discussion paper. The First Peoples or the First Nation state. Yeah, all right. Now, for those of our audience who are interested in this, we’re not going to have time to get into it in great depth, but the copy of this one-page document will be on the Victorian Aboriginal News website. It will be downloadable from this particular interview, so get on there. Glenn, what you’re advocating here is, is a sovereign state who works to establish this. This is not something that you can just say, yep, we want this to happen. Just the sheer people politics of this would appear to be insurmountable.

Uncle Glenn:
This piece of paper, it builds on the work of such as Michael Mansell and others like him who have worked towards the idea of a spatial and not a geographical nation state for Australia. In other words wherever you are, you’re part of the Aboriginal state. He was developing the idea in terms of how do we get more, get an Aboriginal block into the Federal Parliament.

I’m seeing it as we’ve had 235 years, 5 legislative Voices, lost count of the number of petitions, statements, you know, sand through hands and all the other kind of stuff we’ve had. And the simplest form of inclusion that we gave to the Australian public on the 14th of October was knocked back. Now we’re finding that most states are rolling back the Treaty processes. We’re watching that happening around the world. We can’t wait for White Feather to catch up.

Charles:
Do you honestly think, though, that given the state that exists within Australia right now, that there would be any chance of a First Nation State actually gaining any degree of interest? I mean, look at what happened with the conservative side of politics and media and the cautious side of politics and media in response to a Voice. Can you imagine what their response would be if all of a sudden they saw Aboriginal people across the country working together? Yes, because it’s no longer divided we fall.

Uncle Glenn:
No.

Charles:
This is a case of united we stand that would really create problems, massive problems.

Uncle Glenn:
Look not for us.

Charles:
Well, I don’t know actually, no. We could get onto that. I think there’d be massive problems within the Aboriginal community

Uncle Glenn:
Look, I’m sure there would be. And I’m sure this is not meant to be one of those easy fixes and it’s not meant to be taken. So it’s meant to get people’s creative juices going and begin to think about an alternative to continually going to the white government and saying we want this and being knocked back and not getting any further forward and being continually locked into this idea that we need someone to help us close the gap. close the gap is a process of keeping us in our deficit. It is not a process of getting us out of it.

And we need to address those issues. And I don’t know what this would ever look like in its final form. All I’m doing is saying it’s time to think outside of the square. When I used to work as a business consultant and me looking at somebody’s businesses, I don’t have enough money to do that. I said forget about the money, put the money aside. That is of no relevance to this discussion. What I want you to do is what do you want to happen? And then let’s find how we make that work.

Charles:
Glenn, look, the reality is we have run out of time. The document that you’re talking about, as I’ve mentioned in the interview a bit earlier on, we’re putting that up on our website. You’re keen, as you’re an agitator, you’re keen for people to provide feedback.

Uncle Glenn:
Yes.

Charles:
OK. So what we’re going to do is for all our audience out there, if you would like to read the document and provide feedback, we will set the document up. We will set up a special response form and those responses will go direct to Glenn. We’re not going to collect all your details, so don’t worry about that. And that will then contribute to this discussion. Glenn, we will have you on maybe in, maybe five or six episodes talk about some of the responses and a realistic step forward.

Uncle Glenn:
Absolutely.

Charles:
Glenn Loughrey, thanks indeed for your time and coming onto the program again.

Uncle Glenn:
Thanks very much, Charles.

FOR THE FEEDBACK FORM AND DISCUSSION PAPER MENTIONED IN THE INTERVIEW WITH UNCLE GLENN LOUGHREY ABOVE, CLICK HERE