'There are certain threshold issues that you get to and it causes you to confront who you are and what you are and I suppose the McArthur River issue was one that did cause a lot of anxiety within myself. As a Government Minister, what are some of the things that I should have been doing a bit more proactively? I’ve never hidden that fact from my caucus colleagues or others about what that had done on a personal level and it was my time to get away and to think about it. I am fully committed to the Labor party and our Government. There are times when we do, each one of us, it is a hard job. I don’t walk out of Parliament House or anywhere else and go home and wash my skin and the aboriginality disappears, that stays with me 24/7...I'm only human.'
Marion Scrymgour, Member for Arafura, Minister for Environment in the Northern Territory Government, proud Aboriginal woman, great human being, on radio this afternoon (ABC 105.7 FM, 23 May 2007).
Marion has been under fire from all sides since she declined to vote on the Macarthur River mine issue.
Rather than vote against the Bill - which woud have meant breaching the concept of Cabinet solidarity - she absented herself from the Chamber and took two weeks leave to think things through.
She's stood by what she did, in spite of Opposition attempts to try and wedge her.
And in doing so, she's highlighted a continuing dilemma for Aboriginal people who step across into mainstream politics: how do you reconcile being an Aboriginal person with the possibility that you may be called on to take a position that may be against the interests of either a specific group of Aboriginal people or against Aboriginal people generally?
We've created that dilemma with our narrow political systems, of course.
It's in the interests of a political party to have elected Aboriginal members and Labor has milked all it can from the fact that it has had the first ever Aboriginal Minister of the Crown (John Ah Kit) and the greatest number of elected Aboriginal members ever elected to an Australian parliament (six, of whom two are Ministers).
But we don't seem to be able to recognise Aboriginal politicians as first and foremost Aboriginal people.
First in the eyes of the government is Labor Party membership.
It's as if these Aboriginal members are divorced from the bulk of their constituency - which in all but one of these members is a majority Aboriginal constituency
So there's a continuing tension between the demands of the party and party system (conventions of Cabinet solidarity for one; party discipline for another) and people's identity - as there is for anyone of integrity who enters the political arena at this level.
It's especially tense for Aboriginal people, who are held to be role models/spokespeople for their people in whatever field they may succeed.
And that's because we apply our measures of success to the status they have won.
And if they become Members of Parliament, then we think they can't be - as they normally would be - bound by family and cultural ties to question decisions a government makes that may well be against the interests of their people.
We think they simply have to abide by the party platform and/or the fiat of the leader.
Which means in effect that, whenever it comes to the crunch and the interests of Aboriginal people are going to be subsumed by the needs of the majority - which means they are discarded - the Aboriginal members have to compromise their Aboriginality
People think Barbara McCarthy is flaky because she stood up for her relatives in the face of huge pressure from a multinational mining company and the party of government of which she is a member.
And the same goes for Alison Anderson and Karl Hampton, who stood by her and voted against the legislation.
Others think Marion Scrymgour is flaky because she was honest enough to admit to a deep-seated angst about the pressures on her to accept decisions that she knew - deep in her bones - were against the interests of her people.
The pressure we put on Aboriginal politicians who enter mainstream politics is the pressure to collude in their own opppression.
Thanks be to the Great Spirit that some of them - the truly human ones - have the guts to tell us that it's too much too bear, at least some of the time.
Thank you Marion, Barbara, Alison and Karl for the reality check.
If our system of government - particularly one that operates in Aboriginal country and relies on Aboriginal voters for its success - is to be truly inclusive, then we have to develop a new realpolitik that truly recognises and acts on the imperatives of other cultures.
If we can't do it, we don't belong in the 21 st century and we certainly don't deserve to govern.
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