Opinion & Commentary
An extract from Lands of Shame
About a third of Australia's 500,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders work in mainstream jobs, own their houses and live like other Australians, mainly in the southern states. About 250,000 live in major city ghettos and on the outskirts of regional towns. Some 90,000 live in the remote homelands in the Top End in conditions of acute deprivation.
They have appalling health conditions, live about 20 years less than other Australians, and many are largely non- numerate and illiterate, and speak poor English. The numbers who work in mainstream jobs are negligible: most are welfare-dependent.
Communal land ownership and the consequent absence of private housing, communal health services, indigenous education and ''customary law'' support for assailants against their weak victims have led to the stultification and degradation of traditional culture so that it has not moved from sorcery to the rule of reason, from polygamy to the equality of women with men and from ''pay-back'' to the rule of law. Welfare dependence has led to widespread alcoholism and violence, particularly against women and children.
Ethnicity is not the cause of Aboriginal deprivation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men are not inherently more violent than other men. Nor is violence against women and children sanctioned by traditional Aboriginal culture. If today's dysfunctional practices had prevailed in hunter-gatherer times, whole tribes would have been wiped out.
The conditions in the ''homelands'' have been created by well- meaning exceptionalist philosophies and separatist policies that have continued the more than 200-year tradition of treating indigenous Australians as being different from other Australians. As the pernicious ''permit'' system that controls access to the homelands has been partially penetrated, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deprivation is being documented.
The Commonwealth Government has responded to widespread embarrassment that any Australians should be living in shocking Third World conditions by a policy of ''practical reconciliation''. Lands of Shame seeks to assess the progress of reform. The Commonwealth, recognising Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as Australia's oldest immigrants and the centrality of their cultural contributions, has taken the revolutionary stance that they are entitled to the same choices and opportunities and hence to the same treatment as other Australians.
The implicit racism of the Community Development Employment Projects judgment that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are not capable of competing in mainstream jobs has thus been abandoned outside the homelands where the absence of economic rationale and mainstream employment opportunities, and the weakness of local governance, has necessitated its retention for the time being. Ninety-nine year leases, following the Canberra precedent, have been introduced in the Northern Territory to enable Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to own their houses so as to make inroads into overcrowded and derelict public housing. Indigenous entrepreneurs will be able to use land as collateral to start businesses.
Shared Responsibility and Regional Partnership Agreements are funding remote settlement reforms. Funds are flowing to health, education and policing. The Commonwealth Government deserves an A for effort, not least for questioning major icons of well-meaning philosophies that have led to such devastating unintended results. But there are two reasons why progress is extremely slow. Critical policies that have to be reformed are the responsibility of the Northern Territory and state governments, and these governments have been extremely resistant to reform.
Education is the key sector with perhaps five primary schools working to mainstream standards for some 45,000 children. Resistance is only partly associated with support for communitarian homelands philosophies. Much of it is practical. Most of the jobs associated with the $3.3billion that the Commonwealth spends on Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (much of it, for example in education and health, in addition to funding that other Australians receive) are held by non-indigenous bureaucrats, administrators, service providers and consultants.
A small indigenous elite also benefits from the present policies and structures. The opposition created by these vested interests makes it very difficult for Commonwealth bureaucrats, even when they have the knowledge and (sometimes when they have the will), to move ahead on reforms. There is a strong tendency for the Top End population to move to larger settlements such as Maningrida and Wadeye, but with no economic base, these have become woeful and violent slums.
There also appears to be leakage from the homelands to the outskirts of towns such as Alice Springs, Kalgoorlie and even Mt Isa, but with no education, they cannot access jobs and go from welfare in one place to welfare in another.
Focusing on say, 100 core centres with decent education, health services and civic propriety from which young people could access the jobs opening up in mining and other industries, would be realistic. Ninety- nine year leases would give families an opportunity to retain a home in their ''country'' to visit on holidays and to which to retire as they live normal Australian lives.
Australia can not afford to continue to be shamed by Aboriginal deprivation. The Commonwealth's ''practical reconciliation'' program must succeed for a ''fair go'' for all. Professor Helen Hughes is author of Lands of Shame, a new study of Aboriginal disadvantage published by the Centre for Independent Studies where she is a senior fellow.
