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Jason Glanville

Biography:

Jason Glanville is a member of the Wiradjuri peoples from south-western New South Wales. He is the Director of Programs and Strategy at Reconciliation Australia, a non-Government, not-for-profit organisation building innovative partnerships for change between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Jason has worked in a range of positions in community-based Indigenous organisations and as a senior policy adviser in Commonwealth and State government departments, including the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Positions he has held include Indigenous Project Manager at the Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition, Regional Manager of the Qld Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and policy officer for the Law and Justice Program in ATSIC.

Jason is on the board of the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre and co-director of the Ngiya Institute of Indigenous Policy, Law and Practice.

Statement:

It's challenging to be asked to come up with a vision of Australia's future. I only come up with idealistic, last-thing-before-you-fall-asleep pictures in my head because, like most people, I find there are so few hours in the day when you have the space to think big like that.

But more challenging than that, I don't understand how to talk about what we're going to look like as a nation in 15 years without taking a hard look at who we are right now.

When some people are asked to come up with a vision for Australia, the economists can talk about the three steps to economic growth. The environmentalists can talk about evidence around climate change and population growth, and the politicians can talk about civil society arrangements.

They can talk about vision in a logical, clinical way. But the things that are really important to me about tackling Australia's future can't be outlined clinically - they're too human.

In considering what Australia should be thinking about in the next 15 years, of course we should be talking about the environment, climate change, water and sustainable economic growth. But for me it's actually to do with addressing a dishonesty about who we are as a nation today.

We are a lucky country but I don't understand how we can sit so comfortably in our luck and not choose to share it with the people whose knowledge and history and suffering are so central to our story as Australians.

I've read statements from other participants here and it seems that it's easier for people to contemplate a discourse on race that revolves around the experience of newcomers to Australia. But how can we tackle new racism until we tackle the entrenched, learned, generational racism that is still killing Indigenous babies.

Australia is an incredibly intelligent country - you only have to look at the numbers of Australians occupying extraordinarily senior positions all around the world. But when we come to these fundamental issues about our humanity we just stop being smart.

I suppose it's much easier when you're talking about rights for Indigenous Australians to start using phrases like special treatment. And I'd like people here to understand that it's not about that. It's about people who have been treated exponentially worse than any other group in society over two centuries, babies dieing at three and four times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians, men and women dieing 20 years younger.

That is not fair or lucky.

I can't believe that every Australian doesn't want this country to be as healthy as it can be but it can't be while this core piece of our nation's humanity is still being treated so badly.

I'm not saying that some versions of racism don't seep into Aboriginal people ourselves. The kind of ignorant racism that says I don't have black enough skin to be a real Aboriginal.

We deal with all the subsets of racism. My concern is about lack of honesty among ourselves and the racism that sits at the heart of that.

I'm really proud to be an Australian. I'm incredibly proud to be an Indigenous Australian. We have to build a more sustainable environment for our luck as a country to mean anything in 15 years. That's why the place of young people is so closely linked to issues around race - their education, their sense of who they are and what Australia is.

Any Australian who doesn't aspire for their kids to have a better future than they do, based on open, honest relationships between fellow Australians and a true understanding of who we are and where we've come from, has no aspiration for this country at all.