After the 2001 expiry of the Commonwealth-appointed Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, a new body, Reconciliation Australia, took over the reconciliation cause at a somewhat greater distance from government. In May 2005, Reconciliation Australia organised a National Reconciliation Planning Workshop, in an attempt to re-invigorate the idea of reconciliation between Indigenous and settler Australians in the lead up to the 40th anniversary of the famous 1967 Aborigines constitutional alteration referendum. Reconciliation had, in their view, become somewhat stalled under the Howard government’s focus on ‘practical’ measures in Indigenous affairs and its hesitancy both about endorsing Indigenous rights and about revisiting past wrongs. Prime Minister Howard was invited to speak fairly early in the May 2005 Workshop and there was a strong reaction among his audience when he uttered the following words:

After the Prime Minister had left the workshop, Noel Pearson reminded others of those words. He encouraged a strategy among those assembled of accepting these words in good faith, repeating them back to the Prime Minister and trying to hold him to them. Others, however, were more sceptical, focusing on some of the surrounding words which suggested more continuity in the Howard government’s approach to reconciliation. A difference of opinion developed among the Indigenous delegates, in which Pearson occupied something of a minority position. The majority distrusted Howard and were inclined to continue doing so, despite his words.

In retrospect this was, perhaps, just one of many instances in which Pearson was advocating the adoption of an ‘insider’ strategy — in which the best possible construction is put on what people currently say, or what is currently written in official documents, and then using this to push as hard as possible for people to deliver on that best possible construction of their words. The ‘outsider’ strategy, by contrast, is to hold onto previous events which suggest less empathy and opportunity and to distrust new, more sympathetic words and actions until they are built on and proven.

Another instance of Pearson advocating an ‘insider’ strategy can be seen right back at the beginning of his public leadership career in his 1993 Boyer Lecture. Native Title had just been recognised by the Australian High Court as a common law right and the Commonwealth government was in the throws of developing legislation to statutorily recognise and deal with it. Pearson concluded his lecture as follows:

Again we see Pearson encouraging his fellow Indigenous leaders to engage with and put a positive construction on emerging political circumstances in order to extract the best opportunities from them for Aboriginal interests. And again we see him judging quite harshly his Aboriginal leadership colleagues who find more comfort in ‘outsider’ stances of principle.

Among Indigenous societal leaders perhaps one of the most well known takers of ‘outsider’ stances over the last three decades has been Tasmanian Aboriginal, Michael Mansell, who is a lawyer working for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and a long time Secretary of the self-proclaimed Aboriginal Provisional Government. Mansell has long maintained that Aboriginal people have never recognised the sovereignty of the settler state and, hence, have maintained their own sovereignty. His Provisional Government once produced passports for Aboriginal people and in 1987 he and some colleagues doubly confronted Australian authorities by attempting to use these passports while travelling to and from the then pariah state of Libya. In the 1990s Mansell refused to participate in elections for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission because doing so required Indigenous people to be on the Commonwealth Electoral Roll and hence, as Mansell saw it, to recognise settler sovereignty. Effectively, this also stopped Mansell, and others who followed him, from participating in other elections as well.

In more recent times, Mansell has also explicitly criticised Noel Pearson for his more insider approach to government. In a recent article in a book focused on the Howard government’s intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities from mid-2007, Mansell wistfully recalled the more enlightened days of the 1970s and 1980s, before lambasting the Howard government and those who have worked with it. He criticised Pearson both for being ‘too close’ to the Keating Labor government in the Native Title negotiations of 1993, and of ‘courting the conservatives’ and ‘slamming the left’ after Howard came to power in 1996. He suggested that Pearson had ‘replaced a national Aboriginal political voice’ with his own, and that while most Aboriginal leaders had been ‘sacked’ or ‘went home’ after the election of the Howard Government, Pearson had regrouped and courted ‘the new, extreme conservatism’. Mansell also argued that there was a ‘contradiction’ in Pearson’s position, in that ‘relying on the coercive powers of government’ to implement his desired welfare reform agenda, Pearson was denying Aboriginal ‘people the right to choose’ (Mansell 2007: 79-80).

These are harsh words, to which, Noel Pearson has not, to my knowledge, responded directly. However, Pearson has at times made some more general comments about Aboriginal leadership, which could be seen as indirectly critical of Mansell, and others of his strategic inclinations. In a more substantial article published in 2007, Pearson wrote the following: