Opinion & Commentary
Breaking the cycle
Are Australians racist? This is the question that New Zealanders were asking last month after the Australian Government sent the army in to Aboriginal communities to help combat shocking rates of child abuse.
The Northern Territory intervention had strong critics on both sides of the Tasman, with Maori Party MP Hone Harawira calling Prime Minister John Howard ‘‘a racist bastard’’.
Now the fatal abuse of Nia Glassie, on top of the deaths of the Kahui twins last year, has Harawira and others calling for strong and immediate action.
He wants Maori MPs to work out how to ‘‘break this spiralling cycle of violence and mindless destruction that is killing our kids and brutalising our society’’.
The reality is that the need for action in failing communities—at least in Australia—is now so urgent that radical action is required.
Since 1999, some 40 reports have detailed high levels of sexual abuse and neglect in Australia’s indigenous communities. For too long, the accusation of racism and the fear of promoting negative stereotypes have kept indigenous and non-indigenous alike from speaking up about child abuse and domestic violence.
Warren Mundine, a former Australian Labor Party president and himself indigenous, rejected this sort of kneejerk response earlier this year. ‘‘A lot of people use the word racist too easily,’’ he told a public forum. ‘‘I don’t think that calling someone a racist will wash away the issues. Anyone who thinks that Aboriginal communities don’t have domestic violence or child abuse problems is kidding themselves.’’
Indigenous leader Noel Pearson, too, expressed horror that people should be so quick to dismiss the intervention out of hand,‘‘particularly when those children are subject to imminent abuse, abuse that takes place on a regular basis’’.
The issues facing the Northern Territory’s remote indigenous communities are complex. The vast majority have fewer than 100 inhabitants, are situated hours by road from major towns, are often cut off for around five months in the wet season and have scant access to education, policing and health services. Communities often have high rates of chronic disease, diabetes, foetal alcohol syndrome and low birth weights. Average indigenous life expectancy is some 17 years below the Australian average, often more than a dozen people cram into overcrowded publicly supplied houses, and few earn a living despite 14 years ofAustralia’s uninterrupted economic boom.
Currently in Northern Territory communities, many children attend school irregularly—in the second largest community of Maningrida, average attendance is a staggeringly low 32 per cent—and most drop out of the school system entirely by their early teenage years.
In the name of self determination and the indigenous rights agenda over the last three decades, Australia has tolerated Third World conditions in remote communities. Land rights were hailed as the panacea for indigenous community issues after the Australian High Court recognised ‘‘native title’’ in 1992. They weren’t. Some 44% of the Northern Territory is already Aboriginal land and a further 10% is under claim, yet the disadvantage on the range of social and economic indicators persists.
Of course, the Northern Territory intervention is not without its flaws. The Government had to pull back from its heavy-handed compulsory health checks on children, and it continues to be too guarded with the details of its plan.
It is time to open up debate, not close it down. We need to put our minds together on how to achieve systemic change in the Northern Territory’s remote indigenous communities and to break the cycle of disadvantage and dysfunction.
Fixing school education in remote communities will be critical. Without the skills and discipline of a robust school education, indigenous children in remote communities will not have choices and opportunities inside or outside their communities.
We stand to lose another generation of indigenous children, some to abuse and others to simple neglect. The intervention is drastic, but so is the situation.
Kirsten Storry is a policy analyst at the Sydney-based The Centre for Independent Studies.
