Crikey

The last fifteen years have seen rapid growth in the Australian economy that has thrown into stark relief the relative poverty and fundamentally different living conditions of many Indigenous Australians.
Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in the Northern Territory, where over 80 per cent of the Indigenous population of 66, 600 live in remote situations, primarily on Aboriginal-owned land. While the NT emergency intervention is ostensibly about child protection, many of the measures announced on 21 June, and given statutory recognition on 17 August 2007, aim at fundamentally altering the economy and culture of Aboriginal people living in prescribed communities, as well as in over 500 associated small communities called outstations.

This radical plan is based on what may be a well intentioned, but unrealistic, belief that the affluence of mainstream Australia can be replicated for remote Indigenous Australia. This radical plan fundamentally to transform kin-based societies to market-based ones is based on some highly contentious notions that
have become so dominant in powerful policy circles in Canberra that they are no longer debated and are used in everyday parlance as if completely unproblematic.

One is the notion of the ‘real’ economy that has arisen from the influential writings of Noel Pearson and the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. Another is the idea that full access to citizenship entitlements for Aboriginal people in the last three decades has had extremely detrimental impacts. This idea, often captured by the term ‘welfare poison’ or ‘passive’ welfare, is again attributable to the writings of Pearson. A third is the notion that group ownership of land inhibits individual incentive to be entrepreneurial, to work, and to aspire to material accumulation and home ownership…

…The Howard Government’s Indigenous affairs policy framework is in disarray. The reasons for this are complex and can only be briefly examined here. In 1996, when first elected, the new conservative
government had preconceptions about many of the key constructs of Indigenous Australia, including land rights, native title, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and reconciliation, all
encompassed in what the Prime Minister disparagingly referred to as the ‘rights agenda’ and ‘symbolic reconciliation’.

In his election victory speech in October 1998, John Howard made a personal commitment to pursue vigorously the goal of reconciliation, but a particular brand of reconciliation, ‘practical reconciliation’, with which he felt comfortable. This policy approach sought to match Indigenous socio-economic status
in the key areas of health, housing, education and employment with Australian statistical norms. However, this goal was hardly new; it has been a central plank of Indigenous policy of all Australian governments
since the early 1970s.

Then, as now, the Howard Government lacked a policy framework to address Indigenous disadvantage in all its diversity. This was primarily because it was unwilling to acknowledge the true extent of the
historical legacy and challenges of cultural difference. Instead of giving ATSIC general directions and adequate budgets as the elected government of the day, successive Howard governments, rather
cynically, left it to ATSIC to implement the ‘practical agenda’.

This was destined to fail for two key reasons. Firstly, ATSIC was just one statutory authority among a plethora of Federal (as well as State and Territory) agencies that delivered both Indigenous-specific and mainstream programs Australia wide: it played no role in the delivery of education and health services and only a partial role in the delivery of housing and employment programs. Secondly, ATSIC, as an Indigenous representative organisation, was unwilling to acquiesce to the government’s narrow definition of reconciliation: it remained committed to the Indigenous rights agenda that reflected its constituents’ aspirations, but which was anathema to the Howard Government. ATSIC supported a broader notion of liberalism that encompassed equality and equity, the practical and the symbolic, unlike the government, which only recognised the practical.

With the abolition of ATSIC in 2004, the absence of an overarching policy framework was exposed and all too rapidly filled by a ‘new’ experiment based on connecting up different agencies of government.
The new central terms of policy became ‘mutual obligation’, ‘shared responsibility’ and ‘mainstreaming’. At the same time, more and more statistical analysis of 2001 Census data was suggesting that the gap
between Indigenous and other Australians was at best stagnant, at worst expanding. Significantly, the mainstream departments that had participated in eight Indigenous Communities Coordination Pilots
around the nation, endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments, seemed incapable of doing any better than the demonised ATSIC.

There are some who argue that in parts of remote Australia we see situations akin to failed states. There are others who argue that contemporary circumstances are attributable to state failure. What is
certainly very clear is that there has been state failure in the hard grind of policy needed to address the deeply entrenched problem of Indigenous marginality within affluent Australia.

Coercive Reconciliation — Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, will be launched at Readings Melbourne by Muriel Bamblett and Ron Merkel QC  this evening at 6.30pm.