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!
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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?
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?
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