It is very important
when policy is at the point of an historic shift, as I believe
Aboriginal policy is, to set out clearly the new program, including
possible winners and losers. It is important so that those who
resist change do not blame old ills on new policy. It is also
important to overturn some of the accepted truths upon which old
policy was built.
Economic
integration
The
shift in Aboriginal policy and Aboriginal practice is from self-determination
(including land rights and separate administration of public programs)
to the economic integration of Aboriginal people. The reason for
the policy shift is that self-determination has failed too many
Aboriginal people. It is also true that integration has been taking
place; after all, no Aborigines live a traditional lifestyle,
many Aborigines are fully engaged in the economy and live in cities
and towns, and indeed, are intermarried with non-Aborigines.1
For
at least thirty years, however, policy has been sympathetic to
the idea that Aborigines would remain in another economy. There
were two mutually reinforcing sources for this, from very different
sides of politics. The first was the mainly southern intellectuals'
romance with the "culture cult" (a cult that holds that
primitive culture is not inferior to modern civilization).2
The second was the mainly northern settlers practice of "not-in-my-backyard"
(Aborigines are best kept away from the city). Each was ignorant
and prejudicial to the interests of Aborigines. In hindsight,
the period 1970-2006 will be viewed as an interruption to the
long-run process of absorption and integration of the Aboriginal
people, which commenced at European settlement.
Self-determination
harms the prospects of economic integration because it prevents
Aborigines from moving to where opportunities exist. These same
people are also welfare dependent and therefore are unable to
take advantage of the few opportunities that exist where they
live. The problems of integration are thus the problems of transition.
The
magnitude of the task of integrating Aborigines is best illustrated
in demographic and geographic terms. In the State capitals, 87
per cent of couples with an Aboriginal member are intermixed.
Outside the State capitals, 60 per cent of all couples with an
Aboriginal member are intermixed. Within the Northern Territory
(other than Darwin), the great majority of families---86 per cent---are
purely Aboriginal. But these couples amount to just 10 per cent
of all "Aboriginal couples" in Australia. What one may
regard as an "Aboriginal couple" is a very small minority
of all couples with an Aboriginal member. There are fewer than
50,000 Aboriginal couples in the whole of Australia living outside
of the capital cities, and many of these couples may be part-Aboriginal.3
There
are 1,216 discrete Aboriginal communities with a total population
of 108,085. Of these, 889 communities contain fewer than 50 persons
and 327 more than 50 persons (of which, 145 reported a usual population
of 200 or more).4 The settlements over 100 are the
mission and government settlements, of which there are 225, and
the remainder are the outstations or homelands. The problems of
each vary: for example, there are considerable problems of inter-group
rivalry in the larger settlements, as is observable at present
in Wadeye in the Northern Territory, and there are the abiding
problems of drug abuse and what Karl Marx would call the "idiocy
of rural life"5 in the smaller (if not all) of
the settlements.
The
purpose of economic integration is not to demand Aborigines leave
their land, but rather to be economically independent. In becoming
independent, they may remain or they may move. Many, however,
are experiencing a range of problems that may not be solvable
in situ. For example, there may never be sufficient
suitable employment, both for adults and for children who, if
education policy is successful, will have higher expectations
than their parents. Consequently, the transition to an integrated
Aboriginal community will have its casualties, particularly among
those who cannot learn sufficient skills to survive.
In
this category are tens of thousands of Aboriginal men. They live
in remote communities, in fringe town camps, and to a lesser extent
in urban ghettoes. They will find it difficult to cope, for example,
with the removal of remote area exemptions that make receipt of
welfare payments conditional on entering training or job search
or Community Development Employment Programs (CDEP). The winners
will be women, if they can escape the violence of remote settlements
and fringe dwellings, and children if they can attend schools
regularly, probably away from their communities. The front line
troops in the transition will be Centrelink offices and officers,
who will be under enormous pressure to let applicants move on
to disability or other such pensions. The front line places will
be regional centres in the far north and west, including the Alice
Springs camps, about which much has been written in recent days.
As
an aside, the European Union has designated 2006 as The Year
of Workers' Mobility.
The last thirty years of Aboriginal policy could be designated
The Years of Staying Put and
Ignoring Work.
Resistance
The
path to economic integration will not be smooth or unchallenged;
indeed, the struggle for intellectual dominance over Aboriginal
policy and public opinion continues. Media debate in the last
week provides a number of reminders.
The
future of Wadeye in the Northern Territory, where gangs of Aboriginal
youths have run amok, has the national broadcaster ABC, specifically
Tony Jones of Lateline and Kerry O'Brien
of The 7.30 Report
as ready as ever to blame government for not doing enough for
Aborigines. In his interview with the Northern Territory public
prosecutor Nanette Rogers on child sexual abuse, Jones worried
that the revelations might be used by "rednecks" to
diminish Aboriginal people. By this we may interpret that he meant
that no blame could attach to Aborigines as responsible and autonomous
people, only that they should be free of white society and its
ills! Kerry O'Brien was at pains to convince the Minister for
Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough that cuts to the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Budget in 1997, especially
funding for women's refuges, was a cause of the violence in the
Northern Territory in recent times.6 The same mind
set as Jones.
Jones
followed up the Rogers' interview and reports of the strife in
Wadeye with an interview with Archbishop Barry Hickey, the chairman
of the Catholic Bishops Commission for Aborigines and Torres Strait
Islanders. Jones was angling to reintroduce the notion of a government
apology to Aborigines, and asked Archbishop Hickey about recent
comments made by the Pope "asking for forgiveness and granting
forgiveness". Jones seized his chance:
"The
issue of an apology---there's no doubt in your mind I take it
that the Pope is literally calling on the government to deliver
an apology?".
But
the Bishop disappointed:
"He
[the Pope] is not getting political, he's not buying into the
fight as to whether this Prime Minister should say sorry or not.
He's just talking about the principles of reconciliation ...".
Jones
had stumbled into unfamiliar ground. He asked:
"It's
clear there's not going to be that kind of apology, though, isn't
it already clear from the Prime Minister's response and also from
the Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey today in your own State?
"Hickey:
Oh Wilson, yes, well he thanked the sisters [of Mercy], and I'm
very grateful that he did ... The comment about the sisters was
a good one.
"Jones:
Can I just interrupt you just to point out to those who didn't
hear what he said or read what he said, he said, 'If there's any
apology, it should be to the Catholic nuns who took in the so-called',
as he says, 'so-called stolen generation with utmost compassion
...'. Do you have sympathy with that sort of statement?
"Hickey:
Oh I certainly do. The sisters and the priests and the brothers
didn't steal any children. They opened their doors to accept children
because they believed that they had nowhere to go. The government
made them all wards of the state and they shouldn't have done
that, but they did, they're still doing it, and they asked their
missions to take the children in, which they did, in a spirit
of compassion".7
As
delicious was the shock expressed by Phillip Adams on Late
Night Live when he interviewed
Dr Sue Gordon, Chair of the National Indigenous Council. Adams
worried about accusations of another "Stolen Generations"
were children to be taken for their protection. He wondered if
the current violence and abuse was "a legacy of a stolen
generation". Gordon answered, "Often it's used as an
excuse, we can't blame the stolen generations for what's happening
now". The atheist Adams also tried to invoke the Pope's remarks
as per Jones above, but Gordon was having none of the "Sorry"
business, suggesting it was irrelevant. Gordon was able to call
on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
that the "best interests of the child [are] served by taking
them out of home". Adams was aghast at the affront to Aboriginal
mothers, to which Gordon answered, "Half the mothers are
so drunk they would not know". 8
Patrick
Dodson, chairman of the Lingiari Foundation wrote recently:
"The
1997 report Bringing Them Home highlighted the infringement of the UN definition
of genocide and called for a national apology and compensation
to those Aborigines who had suffered under laws that destroyed
indigenous societies and sanctioned the biogenetic modification
of Australian people".9
The
worry with this is that our children at university are being fed
this nonsense, and forced to toe the ideologically correct line.
Other
pockets of resistance appear in the legal fraternity. A Melbourne-based
"public interest" law partner with the firm Arnold Bloch
was last week reportedly headed to the community of Wadeye to
investigate whether under-funding of basic services is racially
discriminatory. He says that if he finds the Territory government
has breached the Racial Discrimination Act, he will lodge a case
with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.10
Tom Calma, the ATSI Social Justice Rights Commissioner was also
touting for business, trying to find a discrimination issue to
"solve" the problem at Wadeye. Heaven save the Aboriginal
people from the human rights lawyers.
And
of course, there were the infamous Chief Justice Brian Martin's
sentencing remarks at Yarralin, Northern Territory on Thursday,
11 August, 2005 in The Queen and GJ. The case concerned the
deprivation of liberty, rape and beating of a 14 year-old girl
by her 55 year-old grandfather. The result was a conviction for
one month of assault and unlawful sexual intercourse. The Chief
Justice had this to say to the guilty man:
"The accused and the child's grandmother
decided that you would take the child to your outstation. The
grandmother told you to take the child and the grandmother told
the child that she had to go with you. The child did not want
to go with you and told you she did not want to go. The child
also asked her grandmother if she could stay. Rather than help
the child, the grandmother packed personal belongings for her,
including her school bag, and insisted that the child go with
you. The child was forced to get into your car, where she sat
with your first wife and two other persons. The child was crying
and shaking.
"In these circumstances, while I might
have misgivings about your state of mind, I do not have before
me proof that the objections by the child made you realise that
she was not consenting. At the least, it is a reasonable possibility
that your fundamental beliefs, based on your traditional laws,
prevailed in your thinking and prevented you from realising that
the child was not consenting. In these circumstances I have no
choice but to sentence you on that basis. I must sentence you
for unlawful sexual intercourse. I am not sentencing you for the
crime of rape.
"During the evening you took the child
by the leg and dragged her into the first bedroom. Your first
wife took the children and went to another room. The child kicked
and screamed and resisted you. You lay [sic] her on a bed in the
room and asked her for sexual intercourse. She told you that she
was only 14 years old. You hit her on the back. You then lay next
to the child and remained there throughout the night. No act of
sexual intercourse occurred.
"The child spent the next day in the
company of your first wife. That night you told her to go into
the bedroom. She obeyed and you followed her into the bedroom,
where you removed all your clothes except your T-shirt. You then
pushed the child onto the mattress. The child was lying on her
stomach. She told the police that you had a boomerang in your
hand and that you were threatening her with it .....
"While the child was laying [sic] on
her stomach you had anal intercourse with her. During intercourse
the child was frightened and crying. She was in pain. You injured
the child .....
"Mr
GJ, I have a great deal of sympathy for you and the difficulties
attached to transition from traditional Aboriginal culture and
laws as you understood them to be, to obeying the Northern Territory
Law.
"Mr GJ, that means that you must go
to gaol for one month and I hope that you will be able to come
out of gaol after one month and return to your community and to
your family".11
These
views are not isolated to a few in the profession. The recent
report of the Western Australian Law Reform Commission is a concern.
For example, it recommended that the relevant criteria for an
application for an extraordinary driver's licence as set out in
s. 76 of the Road Traffic Act 1976 (WA) be amended
to include:
"That
where there are no other feasible transport options, Aboriginal
customary law obligations be taken into account when determining
the degree of hardship and inconvenience which would otherwise
result to the applicant, the applicant's family or a member of
the applicant's community.
"In
making its decision whether to grant an extraordinary driver's
licence the court should be required to consider the cultural
obligations under Aboriginal customary law to attend funerals
and the need to assist others to travel to and from a court as
required by a bail undertaking or other order of the court.
"That
the Fines, Penalties and Infringement Notices Enforcement Act
1994 (WA) be amended
to provide that an Aboriginal person may apply to the registrar
of the Fines Enforcement Registry for the cancellation of a licence
suspension order on the additional grounds that it would deprive
the person or a member of his or her Aboriginal community of the
means of obtaining urgent medical attention, travelling to a funeral
or travelling to court".12
The
effect of these recommendations, apparently favourably received
by the WA Attorney-General Jim McGinty, would be to cause more
deaths through traffic accidents as unlicensed drivers attend
funerals associated with deaths from traffic accidents.
The
public response to the plight of Aborigines has been overwhelmingly
sympathetic and generous. In 1975, the Commonwealth government
spent $200 million on Aboriginal people, rising each year until
this year 2006-07, when it will spend more than $3.3 billion.13
The reason why policy is at the turn though is because the public
expected a bit more for its money than rape unpunished, declining
levels of literacy and numeracy, the wilful destruction of property,
and the creation of a generation who will never work, and may
have to be cared for until the day they die.
Overturning
truths
Added
to the overwhelming evidence of the damage done by the self-determination
policies of the last thirty years, and to the intellectual denials,
is the damage done by some major propaganda exercises of the last
decade, the legacy of which may be to prevent the economic integration
of Aborigines.
Between
1991 and 2000 three major episodes added weight to the separatist
agenda. These were The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths
in Custody Report (1991), The Human
Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Bringing Them
Home (1997) (and its court
sequel Cubillo), and The Hindmarsh
Island Royal Commission
(1997) (and its court sequel Chapman). The first two are especially important because
they may well constrain the hands of policy-makers and public
servants in the new policy era.
The
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established
in 1987 in response to a growing public concern that Aboriginal
deaths in custody were too common, and that public explanations
were too evasive, to discount the possibility that foul play was
a factor in many of them. Between 1980 and 1989, 99 Aborigines
and Torres Strait Islanders died in the custody of prison, police,
or juvenile detention institutions. Many members of the Aboriginal
community assumed that many of the deaths would have been murder
committed by officers of the state.
The
Commission produced 110 volumes, totalling over 12,000 pages at
a cost of almost $30 million. At the time, it was the most expensive
inquiry in Commonwealth history.14 For all this, the
Commission stated:
"The
conclusions reached in this report will not accord with the expectations
of those who anticipated that findings of foul play would be inevitable
... Commissioners did not find that the deaths were the product
of deliberate violence or brutality by police or prison officers".15
It
also found that while Aboriginal people were in custody overwhelmingly
more frequently than the general community, "Aboriginal people
in custody do not die at a greater rate than non-Aboriginal people
in custody".16 Indeed, the Commission noted that,
at least for those Aborigines who had encountered the law, "the
death rate of those Aboriginal people on non-custodial orders
is approximately twice that of Aboriginal prisoners";17
in other words, the risk of death might actually be greater outside
custody.
Further
analysis of the Commission data and published later reconfirmed
the conclusions, although using slightly amended terms:
"Young
adult Aboriginal males have almost exactly the same probability
of dying when they are in the community as when they are in prison.
The risks of death in custody experienced by Aboriginal people
and non-Aboriginal people are similar ... The finding that both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have risks of death in police
custody that are far higher than they have in the community would
not be surprising to many, but the finding that, in both groups,
the risk of prison death is similar to that in the community is
perhaps more novel".18
There
are at least three disturbing aspects of the Commission. First,
the Commissioner and the Commonwealth government were made aware
of the primary conclusion, that Aboriginal people in custody do
not die at a greater rate than non-Aboriginal people in custody,
just six weeks into the Inquiry. My parliamentary
colleague Senator Bob Collins of the Northern Territory conveyed
this to me some short time after. The fact was confirmed in 1992
by the author of the research, who wrote:
"The hostility towards the work of
the Criminology Unit reached a climax only a few months after
the work started, when it became clear that the research showed
that Aboriginal persons in either police or prison custody were
no more likely to die than were non-Aboriginal people. This general
finding was interpreted by some significant elements of the staff
as undermining the very foundations of the Royal Commission. To
even hint that such a conclusion was possible was seen as disloyal,
misguided and obviously wrong. At one stage the very existence
of the Criminology Unit within the Royal Commission was threatened.
It was able to continue its work, however, albeit with a smaller
staff".19
The
response by the government was not to reveal this fact, but to
set the Commissioner another, altogether different task. The initial
task was to inquire into the deaths and into "the conduct
of coronial, police and other inquiries". The new task declared
"you are authorised to take account of social and cultural
and legal factors which, in your judgment, appear to have a bearing
on those deaths".
The
Commission turned from a "super" coronial inquiry into
a grand social science exercise into the causes of Aboriginal
disadvantage. Much of this exercise was not at all new to the
policy community. For example:
"Of
the ninety-nine, eighty-three were unemployed at the date of last
detention; they were uneducated ... only two had completed secondary
level; forty-three of them experienced childhood separation from
their natural families through intervention by the State authorities,
missions or other institutions; forty-three had been charged with
an offence at or before aged fifteen and seventy-four at or before
aged nineteen; forty-three had been taken into last custody directly
for reasons related to alcohol, and it can safely be said that
overwhelmingly in the remaining cases the reason for last custody
was directly alcohol related".20
The Commission started on a narrow inquiry for which it was well qualified. When its terms of reference expanded, it embarked on a study for which it was not well qualified. It simply jumped from evidence of deaths to preventive social policy. In so doing, it took up the policy fashion of self-determination in the hope that this would stem the flow of incarceration and deaths in custody. Moreover, it made great claims of the impact of children's removal from their parents, and this stimulated a second grand inquiry.
The second disturbing aspect was the interpretation of the evidence that led to the Inquiry. The graph above, Deaths in Custody Australia 1980-1989, shows two trends. The first is a spike in the number of deaths in custody in 1987; the second is that the spike occurred for non-Aborigines as well as Aborigines. There was no inquiry into non-Aboriginal deaths in custody following the rise in those deaths. Clearly, the government was discriminating based on race. Deaths in custody are a matter of great concern, but on the evidence before the government, there was no basis for an inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody alone.
The third disturbing aspect of the Inquiry was its impact on deaths in custody, not in terms of its recommendations, but in terms of the possibility that the massive publicity associated with the Inquiry could have caused deaths in custody. The graph opposite, Prison Custody Deaths by Indigenous Status 1982-2004 shows a major lift in the rate of prison deaths in custody for Aborigines in 1993 to 1995, shortly following the Inquiry. Indeed, apart from a sharp drop in 1992, the trend was increasing for Aborigines, although more stable for non-Aborigines, for the entire period 1989 to 2005. That is, from the commencement of the Inquiry into Aboriginal deaths and a period which was largely filled with public discussion of the Inquiry, its recommendations and the political battles over their implementation, Aboriginal prison deaths alone rose substantially.
What caused the jump in Aboriginal prison deaths in the period 1992-1995? The research indicates that "self-inflicted deaths and deaths due to natural causes have consistently been the two most common manners of death since 1980".22 These causes were apparent in the spike of 1992-1995. No explanation for the spike has been provided. The figures for the rate of death are likely to be more stable than the crude number of deaths, and the figure for Aboriginal deaths may be more volatile because the numbers of Aboriginal prisoners are fewer, but in the various reports following the Inquiry there is no accounting for the significant lift in the rate of Aboriginal deaths in prison custody, many of which are suicide. Is it possible that the enormous media coverage given to the Commission and the reports of the implementation of its findings could have had a social contagion effect---labelled the Werther effect?23 (The sociologist David Phillips coined the term "the Werther effect" to describe imitative suicidal behaviour operating as contagion transmitted via the mass media). The copycat explanation never rated a mention in reports by the Australian Institue of Criminology
The graph, Trends in Deaths by Custodial Authority 1990-2004
reinforces the trend in the rise in prison deaths following the
Inquiry, and the relative lack of change in deaths in police custody.
(Figures were not available by rate). Fortunately, the rate of
prison deaths has declined for Aborigines and non-Aborigines,
which may have been as a result of the implementation of the recomendations
of the Royal Commission. The decline in the rate of deaths in
police custody, however, has been heralded as a triumph
of the Royal Commission and self-determination, but it could not
explain the increase in the rate of deaths in prison other than
by absence of implementation of Commission recommendations.
Of course, an absence of change would not cause a rise in deaths
in custody.
The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and produced the report called Bringing Them Home. It was commonly referred to as "The Stolen Generations" report for reasons that will become clear.
The Inquiry arose from the observation in the Report of the Deaths in Custody Inquiry that a number of the dead were "taken" into care as children. That Report also mentioned that all 99 people who died had very little education, but more of that later. The National Inquiry commenced in 1995 aiming to "trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies".26 It was a most serious topic, and there was little doubt that many Aborigines had been removed from their families in earlier generations, in some cases with devastating results. Unfortunately, the report was seriously flawed. It was, as a colleague described it, "one of the most intellectually and morally irresponsible reports to be presented to an Australian government in recent years".27
A
crucial fallacy of the report was that it treated all separations
as forced, including those that were voluntary or where there
was a clear need for the sake of the welfare of the child to be
taken. Such all-encompassing definitions enabled the Inquiry to
conclude that, "between one in three and one in ten Indigenous
children were forcibly removed from their families and communities
in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970".28
This, despite evidence that many removals were in the interests
of the child and in many instances, children were fostered with
Aboriginal families, thus undermining the charge of assimilation
as the purpose of removals.29 It also failed to give
the context of removals, for example, the considerable pressure
exerted on unmarried mothers, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, to
give up their children for adoption. Further, the method of the
Inquiry was seriously flawed, as it did not test any allegations,
but simply accepted all stories as valid.
The
most offensive aspect of the Inquiry was its finding that the
forcible removal policy constituted "genocide" and "a
crime against humanity" in the terms of the United Nations
Convention on Genocide.30 In the
view of the Commission, even assimilation, that is, an attempt
to give people a choice to escape poor circumstances, could be
genocidal:
"The
Commission maintained this view despite the fact that, post WWII,
the International Labour Organisation considered bringing indigenous
people into the modern world to be 'desirable and just'. ILO Convention
107 on The Protection and Integration of Indigenous and other
Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations
suggests that at the end of the period of the so-called stolen
generations in Australia, the most 'enlightened' international
policy was assimilation".31
Take
as an example this evidence before the Commission:
"In
a letter to the West Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs
in November 1943, Inspector Bisley of Port Hedland wrote, 'I recommend
that this child [4 years of age] be removed when she is old enough
as she will be probably handed over to some aged blackfellow at
an early age'. With respect to the same child, Inspector Neill
in Broome wrote to the Commissioner in December 1944, '[t]here
may perhaps be an objection to the children being removed from
the Hospital without first returning to the Station from which
they came as it means breaking faith with the mothers".32
Judged
by contemporary standards this behaviour was appalling, but there
was an interest in saving the child from a then widely known practice
among tribal Aborigines of giving young females to older men.
Nevertheless, the child was not reported to be in actual danger
and the mother's permission for removal was not sought.
Unfortunately,
the tendency to replay the past as if later policy had not adjusted
to earlier excesses makes the problem of the need to enforce standards
of care just as difficult today. The contemporary difficulty is
that the state is too reluctant to intervene in Aboriginal families
for fear of allegations of racism being levelled. An Aboriginal
advocate for Aboriginal children and women recently stated:
"Departments
of community services don't want to create another stolen generation
so we find a lot of Aboriginal children are left in a dangerous
situation because some white or black worker doesn't want to be
called racist".33
The
sequel to the Stolen Generations report and its attempt to press
a genocidal claim has been severely dented by the Federal Court
of Australia. The Aboriginal leadership ran a test case34
on the Stolen Generations, which was comprehensively dismissed.
For future cases to succeed there will have to be proof that Commonwealth
actions were not in the best interests of the child. The question
of judging a concept like "best interest", not by contemporary
standards, but in the light of the policy and custom of the day
was raised:
"[T]he
events that I am being asked to judge and evaluate commenced in
1942 and finished in 1960. Thus in 1999 I am asked to judge that
which took place 39 to 57 years ago ... these are events that
occurred in a different Australia, a society with different knowledge,
and with different moral values and standards".35
The
judge noted that the Bringing Them Home Report did not inquire into separations
that were effected with the consent of a child's family. "Nor
did they require a consideration of cases where a neglected, destitute,
sick or orphaned child might have been removed without the consent
of the child's parents or guardian". HREOC, and the federal
Government that set the terms of reference, left out the crucial
matter of the context within which children were removed. The
judge in this case did not make that mistake; he remarked that
alcoholism and violence became larger social problems for part-Aboriginal
people after they achieved drinking rights, and that it often
had welfare implications for their children.
The two major
Inquiries of the last decade in Aboriginal affairs reinforced
an ideology that cried out for retribution and compensation, for
separate rules for Aborigines and a different contract between
an Aboriginal citizen and the state and any other citizen. The
damage done to policy by these Inquiries is not just their inaccuracies,
but in their blinding policy makers to the root cause of Aboriginal
strife---the lack of economy in remote Aboriginal communities
and the lack of education among their children.
The
turn of events in recent months is that the Australian Government
in particular is beginning to understand that Aboriginal people
are not much different from others. They have been behaving badly
for good reason. They have responded to perverse economic incentives
and an ideology of payback. They learned to gain a living by not
working, and by insisting on living on land on which their ancestors
may have walked and asking for rent---a not overly intelligent
or noble basis for deriving an income.
To
help turn the corner I have a research proposal, the object of
which is to impress upon all concerned that there is a new direction
in Aboriginal policy---Aboriginal people must search for the real
economy, it will not come to them. The proposal aims to generate
a scenario of Aboriginal society in the next twenty-five years,
with particular emphasis on the post-land rights, post-welfare
era and the impact on Aboriginal communities.
As
remote area exemptions for welfare benefits are being abolished,
and CDEP is being wound down or converted to training and job
brokering, Australia will witness, as it did until the 1960s,
a movement into town. There is ample evidence already that the
movement has started and is growing. The scenario will make the
event more concrete, so that when the difficult issues of the
abandonment of remote settlements and the growth of town camps
arise, policy-makers will be able to remain focused on the principal
job, which is adjustment.
Government
policy has been biased towards remote settlements. The contention
is that the incentive to remain in remote locations will change
substantially. The Commonwealth and the States/Northern Territory
have provided income and infrastructure support as if permanent
settlements could be made on the foundation of government expenditure
alone, that is, in the absence of a real economy. Even when there
was real economic activity, such as a mine, local Aborigines did
not necessarily have the skills to apply, nor could these skills
necessarily be acquired in situ. In short, there is limited scope for most remote settlements
to thrive.
Because
of the removal of the bias in policy towards remote communities,
there will be enhanced internal migration: greater numbers of
Aboriginal people will move into town. Others may not, but their
circumstances will change because of family members leaving. In
either case, the consequences for policy will be significant.
Who will require assistance, and where they will require it, as
well as the nature of the assistance, will change.
Adjustment
and mobility are, once again, fast becoming the dominant themes
in Aboriginal policy. Periods of resistance to adjustment---the
protection era and the land rights era---had some positive elements,
but ultimately they were destructive and costly for many Aboriginal
people. Land rights was always a minor story, and yet it has taken
up much of the intellectual energy and too many of the resources.
It is expensive because it is artificial. When the props of the
artificial economy are kicked away, adjustment will once again
become the dominant theme, and the dominant reality.
The
Minister should prepare the rhetorical and policy ground for the
next 25 years, and a scenario would be one tool in the policy
arsenal. The scenario would consist of two sets of data:
· A map
of Aboriginal communities, with likely internal migration destinations
and magnitudes; and
· A map
of places where internal migration is likely to have most impact.
There
will be a discussion of the options for places experiencing loss
of population and for places experiencing gains in population.
The discussion will be based on evidence from regional centres
experiencing influx and those experiencing outmigration.
Some
work, based on the Census, is available, and suggests some drift.36
The studies, however, reflect flow to cities and regional centers
under present incentives. It is likely that flows will be greater
under the new incentives. The conclusions, therefore, understate
the situation, as the Census reflects movement in an historic
period of policy settings that privilege remote locations.
Policies
aimed at stabilising communities in situ will, all things being equal, lessen
the impact of the change drivers, but in the race between economic
development on Aboriginal lands and the incentives to search for
work and services away from those lands, the latter will win.
Change
drivers:
· The artificial
labour market will unravel, driven by the removal of Remote Area
Exemption on Centrelink programs, and the shift in CDEP to delivery
of employment services.
· Education
authorities are beginning to re-impose authority to ensure attendance
and the teaching of literacy and numeracy.
· Changes
to the Northern Territory Land Rights Act may encourage some people to sell their land and leave.
· Chronic
poor health is driving people to seek long-term medical attention,
which is available only in regional centres.
· Women
are seeking physical protection, and hostels are more likely to
be available in regional centres.
· Economic
development is unlikely to be realistic for more than a handful
of communities.
· Where
economic development has taken place the local population does
not necessarily have the skills to take advantage of it. Acquiring
the skills is unlikely to take place in the community.
Stabilising
programs:
· Alcohol
and substance abuse programs---e.g., dry communities.
· Service
agreements for utilities---telephone, sewerage.
· Shared
Responsibility Agreements---no school, no pool.
· Infrastructure
programs---housing.
· New settlements
that result from Native Title claims.
· The investment
in school facilities and staff.
· Investments
by the Indigenous Land Fund and Indigenous Business Australia.
· The investment
in law and order.
The
2006 Census will provide some guide to changes, in as much as
the changes between 1996 (and earlier Censuses) and 2001 indicate
growth and decline of numbers of people. They also indicate changes
in vital characteristics such as education levels. The Census
will not, however, be useful to demonstrate changes that are beginning
to show only very recently as a consequence of government policy
on welfare to work, and the failure of land rights to provide
a satisfying existence for other than a few in remote communities.
The
data most useful and most available will be from sources such
as Centrelink client lists, State/Territory housing department
lists, itinerant lists, and school records. For example, Aboriginal
families are progressively filling the Northern Territory Department
of Housing waiting lists in Darwin, and the Northern Territory
Department of Harmony notes an increase in the number of itinerants
in Darwin. Clearly, the camps at Alice Springs are growing. Experience
is a vital teacher in this exercise. There is a string of regional
centres in Australia that have experienced Aboriginal influx in
previous generations. These will suggest the likely direction
of change, the whereabouts, and the problems associated with the
change.
The
scenario will put some numbers on the changes. It will make estimates
of the magnitudes---for example, how many people will move, where
they are likely to go, and their educational/age/health profiles.
The characteristics of those who leave are often different from
those who stay. Depending on the reasons for leaving, the most
enterprising are most likely to leave, and the least enterprising
or least mobile are likely to stay. This change to the character
of communities will have profound implications for both receiving
and leaving communities.
This
is not to prejudge outcomes, but to realistically assess what
is likely when individuals and communities face changed incentives.
There will be three sorts of movement: short term "walkabout"
movement that is part of peoples' community activity; "orbiting"
in the sense in which Noel Pearson means, children who leave their
communities for education, and perhaps to return on graduation;
and internal migration.
Internal
migration will substantially transform Aboriginal society. More
Aborigines will live in regional towns or the cities. How people
will adjust and how their needs are to be met will be a challenge,
as will the management of the communities they leave behind. If
Aborigines are not to become, once again, refugees in their own
land, governments and citizens must prepare for the next chapter
in the Aboriginal story.
1.
In 2001 intermixed couples made up 69 per cent of couples
with an Aboriginal member: Birrell, R and J Hirst, 2002, Aboriginal
Couples at the 2001 Census, People and Place, 10(3): 27.
2.
Sandall, R, 2001, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism
and Other Essays. Boulder: Westview,
viii.
3.
Birrell, R and J Hirst, op. cit..
4.
Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics, 2001, Housing
and Infrastructure in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities,
Australia, Catalogue 4710.0.
5.
Marxists:
Marx &
Engels:
Library:
1848:
Manifesto of the
Communist Party:
Chapter 1 http://www.marxists.
org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01 .htm.
6.
O'Brien: "It was cuts of 20 per cent to the ATSIC
budget in 1997 by the Howard Government that led to 37 women's
refuges, nine family support and violence centres plus youth and
children's services and other crisis centres around Australia
being closed in Aboriginal communities. I guess we'll never know
what violence may have been prevented by those measures?",
The 7.30 Report transcript, May 23, 2006. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1645722.
htm.
7.
Lateline transcript, May 24, 2006. http://www.abc.
net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1645758.htm.
8.
May 24, 2006 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive
/stories/2006/1646563.htm.
9.
The Australian, May
26, 2006, Why a Short-term Fix Demeans our Nation.
10.
As reported May 24, 2006. http://www.abc.net.au
/news/newsitems/200605/s1645846.htm.
11.
Transcript of proceedings at Yarralin
on Thursday, 11 August,
2005: The Supreme Court of
The Northern Territory, SCC
20418849, The
Queen and GJ (Sentence),
Martin CJ.
12.
Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2005 Discussion
Paper, Aboriginal Customary Laws Publications, 106.
13.
This does not account for expenditure by State and local
governments. http://www.atsia.gov.au/Budget/budget06/
PDF/media_release.pdf.
14.
Brunton, R, 1993. Black Suffering, White Guilt: Aboriginal
Disadvantage and the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody, Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, Current
Issues.
15.
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 1991.
National Report, Volume 1.2.2. http://www.
austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic/national/vol1/12.html.
16.
Op. cit.,
Volume 1.3.1.
17.
Op. cit.,
Volume 3, 60.
18.
David
Biles and David McDonald, Overview of the Research Program
and Abstracts of Research Papers, Research Paper No. 22, 631. http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/other
/dic1992/22.pdf.
19.
David
Biles and David McDonald (eds), Deaths in Custody Australia,
1980-1989 : The research papers of the Criminology Unit of the
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Canberra : Australian Institute
of Criminology, 1992, Foreword.
20.
Deaths in Custody,
op. cit.,
Volume 1.2.17.
21.
David
Biles and David McDonald, Overview of the Research Program
and Abstracts of Research Papers, op. cit.,
627.
22.
Jacqueline
Joudo and Marissa Veld, Deaths in Custody in Australia : National
Deaths in Custody Program Annual Report 2004, Australian Institute
of Criminology, 2005 Technical and Background Paper Series, no.
19. http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tbp/tbp019/05_prisonCustodyDeaths.html.
23.
In the mid-1770s a peculiar clothing
fashion swept across Europe. For no immediately apparent reason,
young men started dressing in yellow trousers, blue jackets and
open-necked shirts. This mildly eccentric fashion spread from
region to region in a manner strangely similar to the epidemics
that were continuing to plague the Old Continent. It turned out
that these 18th Century fashion victims all had one thing in common;
they had all been exposed to the
first novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young
Werther. Goethe's
novel recounted the desperate plight of Werther, a young man hopelessly
in love with a happily married woman called Charlotte. In this
intense and romantic tale, Goethe describes Werther's rather peculiar
penchant for wearing a colourful mélange of blue jackets,
yellow trousers and open-necked shirts, and for having shot himself.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/
MemePap/Marsden.html.
24.
Joudo and Veld, op. cit., 13.
25.
Ibid.,
9.
26.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC),
1997, Bringing Them Home, Report of the
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children from Their Families. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/stolen/part1.rtf.
27.
Brunton, R, 1998, Betraying the Victims: The Stolen
Generations' Report, IPA Backgrounder, Melbourne: Institute
of Public Affairs, 3.
28.
HREOC 1997, Part 2, 10.
29.
In a 1994 survey, over 10 per cent of Aboriginal persons
aged 25 years and over reported being taken away from their natural
family. Of these, 32 per cent were raised by non-Aboriginal or
Torres Strait Islander adoptive or foster parents, 31 per cent
by missions, and 28 per cent by orphanages or children's homes.
Year Book Australia 2002, Population Special Article---A Profile
of Australia's Indigenous People.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au.
30.
HREOC 1997, Part 4.
31.
Brunton, 1998, op. cit.,
11.
32.
HREOC, 1997, Part 1.
33.
Pamela Greer, quoted in The Weekend Australian, 3-4 May, 2003, 8.
34.
Cubillo v. Commonwealth
[2000] FCA 1084.
35.
O'Loughlin J in Cubillo,
quoting a fellow judge.
36. John Taylor, Population and Diversity: Policy Implications of Emerging Indigenous Demographic Trends, A Report to the Ministerial Council on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, March, 2006; Taylor J and N Biddle, Indigenous People in the Murray-Darling Basin: A Statistical Profile. Discussion Paper No. 264/2004, CAEPR, ANU; Sanders W, Indigenous People in the Alice Springs Town Camps: The 2001 Census Data, Discussion Paper No. 260/2004, CAEPR, ANU.