Don Woolford: On closing the gap, speeches from the heart

Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. Photo / Getty Images

This was personal, this was visceral.

Tony Abbott, on a matter that transcends conventional politics, becomes an interesting politician.

Yesterday the Australian Prime Minister delivered his first Closing the Gap statement. This annual report on progress in reaching educational, health and employment targets was started by Kevin Rudd and continued by Julia Gillard. In the old days, that history would have pretty much guaranteed an incoming Liberal Government would junk it, or at least change it beyond recognition.

But there's long been a sort of bipartisanship on goodwill; now there's an emerging bipartisanship on policy. Labor leader Bill Shorten, when his turn to speak came, reinforced this.

Abbott had a text, but only occasionally glanced at it. Like most political leaders, he's more effective when he's speaking from the heart.

His dedication to bettering indigenous lives that extends beyond the intellectual, his time spent labouring in remote Aboriginal communities, is well known.

His "watershed moment" when Aboriginal policy became personal rather than political, he said, came with Paul Keating's famous 1992 Redfern speech.

As an opposition staffer, Abbott said, he was supposed to disagree with it all. But he couldn't disagree with its central point - that Aboriginal disadvantage was "a stain on our soul".

Abbott chose to focus on education, from which all else should flow. A good education was fundamental to a good start in life. "A fair go for Aborigines is too important to wait for the judgment of history."

Shorten said the old symbolic-practical dichotomy was over and the two were flipsides of the same coin. He pushed the case for constitutional recognition of Aborigines and warned against yielding the field to the "shameful great Australian silence". He said: "Whenever an Aboriginal mother loses a beautiful child to a treatable, preventable disease, we are all diminished."

- AAP