Reform solutions will come from the radical centre

Both left and right bear responsibility for this inertia.

Contemporary politics struggles to secure broad consensus for ambitious and sustainable reform. We usually can’t even conduct meaningful consensus-building conversations.

Negotiated agreement that transcends tribal divides and the culture wars is key to finding the radical centre, and creating a stronger, fairer, more united Australia. The productive hunt for the radical centre is evident in ongoing work on Indigenous constitutional recognition, which has benefitted from engagement between Indigenous leaders and constitutional conservatives.

The concept of a constitutionally guaranteed Indigenous advisory body germinated in 2014 through collaboration between Indigenous leaders like Noel Pearson, and conservative opponents who lambasted the Expert Panel’s push for a racial non-discrimination clause – a proposal Pearson championed.

Engagement with constitutional conservatives was initially difficult. They didn’t understand why Indigenous leaders were pushing a racial non-discrimination guarantee. At Cape York Institute, we didn’t understand why they didn’t understand, given the history. We explained that Indigenous people wanted a constitutional guarantee that the future would be fairer than the past, because the Constitution had presided over deep injustice for them.

After much vigorous discussion, eventually the parties began to understand each other’s perspectives. Constitutional conservatives acknowledged that Indigenous concerns were justified: the Constitution should ensure Indigenous people are treated in fairer way – just not through an amendment that would empower the High Court, undermine parliamentary supremacy and create legal uncertainty. In turn, Pearson and others came to understand the importance to conservatives of upholding the Constitution, respecting parliamentary supremacy and eliminating legal uncertainty.

This dialogue uncovered a radical centre solution that addressed conservative concerns, while implementing Indigenous aspirations for substantive reform. The idea of a constitutionally guaranteed Indigenous advisory body was constitutionally conservative, yet empowering. Professor Greg Craven called it ‘modest yet profound’.

Consensus slowly grew. A First Nations constitutional voice won Indigenous endorsement through the Uluru Statement in 2017. This extraordinary achievement was led by Professor Megan Davis, Pat Anderson and Pearson, and was unprecedented as a national dialogue of self determination.

The idea later inspired Kevin Rudd and Alan Jones to declare a ‘unity ticket’ of support on the ABC’s QandA – as far as I’m aware, another unprecedented moment. To his credit, even Barnaby Joyce now admits it was never a ‘third chamber’. This radical centre reform is inspiring the consensus necessary for a successful referendum.

Many advocates learned important lessons from that process. It is a political reality that to progress nation-building reform, we need policy forged in the ‘radical centre’. Climate change is no exception.

This week Andrew Charlton, former adviser to former prime minister Kevin Rudd, shared a “horrifying reflection”. Admitting errors in Labor’s long term climate change strategy, Charlton relayed a concession to his tribe’s arch enemies. “Barnaby Joyce is right,” Charlton wrote, at least “about one thing”: Australia needs to solve climate change “for the regions first.” This led to regretful reminiscence. If only Labor had made “affected workers and regional communities our first priority from the start”, Charlton ruminated, things might have been different.

Charlton expressed a radical centre style acknowledgement that his ideological opponents were partially correct. Such realisations should be reciprocal, and could bring productive insight to many political impasses.

Charlton’s recollections of how developing nations resisted climate pressure from developed nations could describe analogous domestic tensions regarding Indigenous economic development. Take the 2004 Wild Rivers controversy in Cape York: after decades of dispossession and discrimination which locked them out of the prosperity the rest of Australia enjoyed, Indigenous communities were expected to temper their ambitions for belated economic development on their returned land to help Australia fulfil national environmental targets. But why should the poorest pay more for Australia’s national progress, especially when our prosperity was built on Indigenous losses? And what about their local and regional aspirations? A better approach would involve governments partnering with Indigenous communities to negotiate plans for environmentally sustainable economic development – in future, through the locally anchored structures of a First Nations voice.

Beyond Indigenous affairs, governments should collaborate with regional communities and industries to develop plans that realise shared sustainable development aspirations. Such a process must secure stakeholder buy-in, and it should happen nationally.

In this spirit, Jenny Macklin argues for a national Emissions and Employment Accord – a redo of Keating and Hawke’s Accord. Pearson advocates a similar idea. At minimum, this new national settlement must secure just employment transitions for those bearing the greatest costs of climate action. We should be ambitious: it could entail a federal job guarantee, as Pearson contends, because every Australian has the right to a real job and a sustainable environment.

Empathetic collaboration across political, ideological and cultural divides is key to forging broad consensus for ambitious reform. We need more radical centre thinking in Australia.