As Australia yesterday commemorated the historic referendum in 1967 that included Aborigines in the national census – putting them on a par with the white population – the Government admitted that many remote black communities were worse off now than 40 years ago.

“In remote communities, commonly known as the long grass – in other words, the fringes of towns – I believe there has been not just no progress but in some cases we have gone backwards,” Mal Brough, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister, said.

Later John Howard, the Prime Minister, was shouted down by hundreds of Aborigines when he addressed a function in Canberra, the capital, to commemorate the 1967 referendum, which also ended widespread discrimination, such as the exclusion of Aborigines from many public swimming pools, cinemas and hotels.

The Howard Government is now forcing the abandonment of small, remote communities so that it can better deliver services such as education. It is also reducing government handouts to encourage greater self-reliance. Mr Howard said that the continued rights of Aborigines to live in traditional remote communities were no rights at all if they were “accompanied by grinding poverty, overcrowding, poor health, violence and isolation from mainstream society”.

Linda Burney, 50, an Aboriginal woman, university graduate and a minister in the Labor government of New South Wales, recalls that it was Gough Whitlam, then the Labor Prime Minister, who returned limited land rights to Aboriginal people in 1975 when he poured desert soil into the hands of the Aboriginal campaigner Vincent Lingiari who said: “Thank you. We are all mates now.”

“But the truth is we are not all equal and we are not all mates,” Ms Burney said last week. In her eyes, despite the Aboriginal victories since the 1967 referendum – notably the High Court decision in the early 1990s to recognise Aborigines as the first occupants of Australia – her people remain largely impoverished because Australian leaders deny the truth of Aboriginal oppression upon white settlement.

There are other voices, notably that of Noel Pearson, an impressively articulate Aboriginal lawyer, who argues that his people’s long addiction to welfare payouts is the greater evil. He lamented two weeks ago: “There is almost no imagination that is free and ambitious about our social future as people.”

He contends that Aboriginal flowering in the late 1960s that came with the beginnings of assimilation with white society foundered because the wider world was a lot harder and colder than Aboriginal people had imagined. He believes that greater success would come if Aboriginal people had a multilingual engagement with the rest of Australia.

Mr Pearson has the ear of Mr Howard, who yesterday supported compulsory English lessons for all Aboriginal schoolchildren as the latest means for their rescue.

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