Opinion & Commentary
Our state of disgrace
Queensland, with a quarter of Australia's Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, has some of their most dysfunctional settlements.
Partnerships Queensland 2005-2010, the long-awaited Queensland Government paper that was to set the state's program for Aboriginal improvement, admits that "by almost every indicator of well-being Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Queenslanders are significantly more disadvantaged than other Queenslanders".
Yet Partnerships Queensland says nothing in its 110-page five-year program about changing policies to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander welfare.
Poor health, poor education, overcrowded and derelict communal housing, joblessness and consequent welfare dependence, alcoholism and violence against women and children, are mainly documented from Commonwealth sourced statistics. Queensland has done little to collect the data needed to improve policies, notably on the lack of educational achievements that is its responsibility.
Partnerships Queensland 2005-2010 does not explain that the deprivation of Aborigines is not the result of their ethnicity. Australia-wide, about a third of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders work in mainstream jobs, own their homes and live like other Australians. But only a small proportion of these are in Queensland. The problem is that more than 200 years of separatist policies have treated Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as being different from other Australians.
Well-intentioned hunter-gatherer living museums in remote "homelands" have damaged the fabric of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander society. Aboriginal 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.
Aboriginal maternal, infant and child health lags far behind mainstream standards. Aborigines live 17 years fewer than other Australians. Not only are diseases such as diabetes rampant in Aboriginal settlements, but they are untreated, leading to kidney collapse, the need for dialysis and early death.
Most Queensland Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are jobless and hence welfare dependent. Like welfare dependent societies worldwide they suffer family and social dysfunction. To be able to move to real jobs instead of being mired in welfare and Community Development Employment Project "sit-down" money, labour supply and demand issues have to be addressed.
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have to have good primary education, move on to mainstream secondary education and further training. At present many indigenous youngsters are unemployable.
Some mining corporations have begun to address labour demand issues, by finding youngsters who want to work, providing them with remedial literacy and numeracy so that they can go on to training for skilled jobs.
Fruit growers in marked contrast, ignoring potential Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers, have been agitating for schemes to import seasonal workers from the Pacific islands; job-search organisations have failed to recruit Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders for fruit picking.
Perverse incentives enable them to persist in such "training" for potential indigenous workers as preparing for interviews, instead of providing the support needed for indigenous youngsters to move successfully into horticultural jobs.
Queensland's tourist industry also relies on backpackers rather than local indigenous workers.
Aborigines are denied private property rights in land so that they cannot own their own houses. In Palm Island "houses face toward the hills, away from the sun". Well-designed houses for home owners "would offer light, open areas facing the north with a generous veranda, shaded by wide roof eaves and overlooking a tropical garden, with shade trees planted on the western side".
Aborigines in Queensland would be able to benefit from a domestic architecture that has made Australia a world leader if the Queensland Government introduced 99-year leases on native title land. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, like other Australians, could then benefit from real estate value rises.
The Commonwealth Government's policy of "practical reconciliation" has ended CDEP outside remote "homelands". Ninety-nine year leases on native title land have been introduced in the Northern Territory to enable housing to be privatised.
Shared Responsibility and Regional Partnership Agreements have been introduced to enable settlements to improve their living standards. But these cannot be effective without underlying Queensland educational reforms and effective labour market measures.
Emeritus Professor Helen Hughes is a senior fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies ( www.cis.org.au ) which published her new book, Lands of Shame
