Introduction

Although in very different ways, reconciliation is a political/theological nexus of foundational significance to indigenous politics in all three of Australia, Fiji and New Zealand. Christian public theology extends reconciliation beyond its primary sacramental interest in relationships between God and penitent to the construction of ‘socially just’ public relationships for the settlement of intra-national conflict. Theologically, reconciliation brings public relationships into what Hally (1998) calls ‘the Christ narrative of passion, death and resurrection’ in which the perpetrators of injustice repent and seek forgiveness (p. 2). It is relevant to secular politics because it conceptualises unjust secular political decisions as the product of social sin, which occurs because political decisions, ‘whether they are good or bad, are the result of [hu]man's actions’ (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1984, IV, 15). Phillips’ (2005) observation for Australia is equally true of Fiji and New Zealand, that public reconciliation has ‘several distinctly Christian resonances and ambiguities, including the difficult relation of justice and forgiveness’ (p. 11).

This chapter demonstrates the role of Christian churches in reconciliation's development from a solely religious precept to one of secular political priority deeply intertwined with the politics of indigeneity as it is introduced in Chapter Two. The remaining chapters are then able to show that effective indigenous political expression in Australia and New Zealand has developed, partly, from that integration of theoretical precepts to provide a framework for expressing indigenous claims on the state.

Reconciliation: towards a politics of possibility

Prior to the 1990s, ‘general apathy, with intermittent stirrings of a troubled conscience’ (Stockton, 1988, p. 202) best describes Church responses to indigenous public policies of un-Christian intent. By the late twentieth century Australian churches were taking a more forthright interest in the religious implications of secular politics setting aside the rights of indigenous peoples. Their public advocacy for reconciliation was internationally supported by the World Council of Churches and the Holy See. In 1986, Pope John Paul II's (1996) address to Indigenous Australians in Alice Springs set the tone for subsequent Christian intellectual engagement with secular perspectives, particularly on indigenous land rights and apologies to the stolen generations.