Sorry

Kevin Rudd got it absolutely right today.
His measured and genuine 'Sorry' to the Stolen Generations hit the spot and resonated throughout the land.
People I know who live with the legacy of those times are walking tall today and they're smiling from ear to ear after all the tears have been shed and shed again.
They've been waiting for this day for a long time, however hopeless it may often have seemed, particularly in the decade of obduracy and mean-spiritedness that characterised the Howard years.
Today's tears are tears of joy and pride and I think we all shed them.
I have to say I had my doubts about whether Kevin07 could pull it off.
Not any more.
Using no frills and no bullshit language - he spoke the language of the people, not politics or the bureaucracy - he told the story like it was, said the word 'sorry' and built the beginnings of a way out of the mess we've found ourselves in.
In contrast, Brendan Nelson and those of his Parliamentary colleagues who actually stayed away from the event showed very clearly that they still didn't get it.
Nelson pursued an ideological battle or two by clinging to the idea that somehow home ownership and mutual responsibility would bring change.
It just wasn't the day for it: his remarks were as inappropriate as his ideology is irrelevant to the task in hand.
Today was a beginning.
And what a beginning!

Who's including whom?

Australia now has a Minister for Social Inclusion.
And what, pray, does that mean?
Good question.
To talk about social inclusion and what it means, I'm told you first need to think about social exclusion.
It's pretty clear who gets excluded from taking a full part in our society - the poor and the otherwise marginalised (Aboriginal people, refugees, people who have first languages other than English, the illiterate, the disabled and so on, who may also be impoverished anyway).
So SI is sort of about making sure they're all in and getting their share of the cake.
We hear the UK and Eire, among other EU countries, have been pursuing Social Inclusion policies and actually cutting the numbers of people below the poverty line, raising literacy levels an d generally doing a loaves and fishes act on social ills.
I don't want to condemn out of hand what is obviously a worthy goal.
But, to mix my metaphors, I still smell the odd rat in the woodpile.
I think it's a positive that we've chucked the patronising and exclusivist term 'tolerance' out the window.
It did, after all, smack of cultural supremacy.
But I think there's an inherent tension - and one that's very, very difficult to resolve - between a government's neurotic need to control the agenda and its desire to embrace social inclusion.
Can they resist the urge to be gatekeepers?
Can they stop being anally retentive?
And if inclusion is truly inclusive, are they able to learn from other people, other cultures and other ways of doing things?
There's another fundamental difficulty and that's the apparent inability of politicians and bureaucrats to talk about anything in simple terms that we can all understand.
Politicians favour windy and evasive language, while bureaucrats go for the impenetrable and the pompous every time.
I'd like to be charitable and propose that they may not realise it, but their use of language is nothing more than a form of exclusion.
Most of us don't talk, write or apparently even think in quite the same way as they do and we're in danger of being left out of the discourse entirely if we can't decipher what they're on about.
There's a classic case of this in the Territory recently.
The Department of Local Government sent out a Q and A several pages long on the impacts of amalgamating local councils.
I defy anyone of moderate educational ability to make sense of it.
It rates about 22 on a Gunning Fog Index test of reading comprehensibility, as against an ease of understanding score of NINE.
And it doesn't A the Qs it proposes anyway.
There's a long and honourable lineage of writers and thinkers - George Orwell and Don Watson spring readily to mind - who've tried vainly to point out the need to use Plain English if you want to communicate with the greatest number of people.
And it's in true Plain English that the clarity or otherwise and the intent of your message should come across loud and clear.
But perhaps telling people exactly what you mean is geting a bit too inclusive.
And yes, I understand that social inclusion ain't quite as simple as framing our messages to get to the greatest number.
But opening up the language of our daily discourse is as good a place as any to start, isn't it?

A New Year

One of the nicest things I did last year was take a trip out bush, visiting some remote community schools. This is taken from 4000ft, out of the window of a little single-engined Cessna on the way to Galiwin'ku. It's one of the rivers that flow into Arnhem Bay and it's pretty typical coastal country in this part of the world - mangroves, mudflats, muddy great rivers and coastlines dribbling away into the sea.

I've been quiet for six months because it's been a funny sort of year.

The Intervention knocked me and a lot of other people for six. What can you say about a juggernaut that refuses to stop even though both of its creators have been dumped by the voters? Labor will have to come up with a different way of dealing with Aboriginal people; if it doesn't, it's condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. 'Intervention' is a term that should pass out of the language. It's too butch, too condescending and decidedly not inclusive. I'd like to see people talking about 'support' instead. The premises on which it was based - allegations of widespread child abuse - have not been sustained and the net effect is that Aboriginal people have been damned as dysfunctional because the Australian media did not bother to question Howard's and Brough's assertions.

But back to the year which, like most years, was a curate's egg.

Highpoints:

1. The political demise of the mean-spirited and devious John Howard in a near-landslide election result. Not only did the little weasel lose power, he lost his seat. Good riddance to his negativity, his racism and his pathetic assertion that the Liberals were the only safe pair of hands for the future of Australia. At the same time the pathologically fixated Mal Brough - the White Knight of the Intervention - also lost his seat and faces a wonderful career selling hair products again. Instant Karma!

2. The unedifying spectacle of the Liberals publicly eviscerating each other as the putative leadership strutted their stuff in a grubby little pissing contest.

3. My resignation from working directly in the political sphere. While I was very happy with the change of government, I couldn't see myself continuing to work under the Labor Party's version of Mission Control. They're the sort of people who give anal retentives a bad name (an oldie but a goodie!). And political work is hardly family-friendly anyway, even when you do work from home.

4. Being present at the funeral celebrations for George Rrurambu Burrarrwanga, late of the Warumpi Band. It was moving, funny, humbling and edifying all at once. The very best of Yolngu showbiz in a melange of ceremony, rock and roll and Christian ritual. Ted Egan, our then Administrator, gave a short speech in Yolngu Matha and then sang one of George's songs, also in Yolngu Matha.

5. Pulling off Welcome to Country, a community identity building event at our school where Larrakia people welcomed all of us and the Arnhem Land clan we're named after - Wangurri people. We have a sister school relationship with Dhalinybuy School, the homeland school the Wangurri kids go to. Our kids talk to their kids via computer, using interactive distance learning technology. We broadcast the event - kids performing, speeches etc - into the Dhalinybuy using the same technology.

6. Becoming a freelance contractor again. My first gig is to work with remote community schools and build up skills among the parents in school governance and getting them working with teachers. I hope we can extend the Sister School concept as part of this project.

7. Going to two family weddings - one son, one daughter - in the one year and having a ball at both. Seeing all my kids together (five, count them, five!) and my two grandchildren, Otis and Inez, makes me feel really proud. They're a wonderful mob.

8. Getting to see Al - my oldest friend in Australia - twice in the one year, which is most unusual.

9. Discarding some negative stuff and speaking to my brother for the first time in nearly 10 years.

10. Continuing to negotiate a positive and loving relationship with my lovely Ellie.

11. Yoga.

12. Getting new CDs by Richard Thompson, Paul Kelly and Krishna Das.

13. Watching the little lads grow up and being fascinated with their articulateness, their literacy and the ingenuity of their explanations of the world around them.

14. The beginning of this year's Wet - 112mm of rain in one 24 hour stretch - and more on the way.

15. Reinventing my cooking thanks to Ellie, the new Weber and cookbooks from CSIRO and Jill Dupleix.

16. My continuing and growing friendship with a close schoolmate who I lost touch with for 40-odd years and with whomj I've now been yarning for seven years. Alan Vickers, here's to you!

And with a year like that, who wants to think about low points?