When Gough Whitlam's ALP government came to power in December 1972, Coombs, Dexter and Stanner at last found themselves working with a sympathetic Cabinet. Yet Labor ministers could also be refractory, as was soon to be found out. The CAA and the new Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Gordon Bryant, held rather different views about the machinery of government and, by implication, about the formation of an indigenous intelligentsia.

The CAA and the indigenous constituency

It was ‘crucial’, said Coombs, Dexter and Stanner, in their last policy statement before the election of the Whitlam government, that there be ‘programs designed to develop and strengthen the capacity of Aboriginal people to manage their own affairs.’ Though it was not long before others began to call this ‘self-determination’, Coombs and his colleagues still eschewed any tag, because they considered it ‘generally presumptuous and futile to fix long-term goals in areas of social policy like this’. They were concerned ‘less [with] ultimate aims than [with] methods’. Their quest was not so much to discredit the word assimilation as to contest the administrative authority which ‘assimilation’ rhetoric had legitimated. The failures of the US ‘War on Poverty’ had taught them that program expertise was insufficient if ‘client communities of the poor were not actively involved in developing the plans and carrying out the programs.’ Government policy should be about process, and good process required programs ‘to develop Aboriginal independence’.

Aboriginal independence had been thwarted by missions and settlements.