Opinion & Commentary
Aboriginal separatist policies must be dropped
The Academy of Social Science is holding its annual symposium on social issues on the geographic mobility that has enriched the lives of Australians. But though the population of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders has at last reached 500,000 - as high as it was at the time of white settlement - most Indigenous Australians are not mobile. The 120,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who live in the ‘remote homelands’ are the most static of all Australians. Most are stuck in shameful Third World conditions. A larger group who live on the fringes of country towns is more mobile, but most are moving from welfare to welfare and from deprivation to deprivation. Worryingly, the proportion of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in mainstream jobs with commensurate living standards – now perhaps a third - seems to be falling.
Appalling remote homelands living standards can no longer be tolerated. The attempted insulation of hunter-gatherer communities from economic opportunities has led to welfare dependence, ill health, empty and short lives and social dysfunction. Preserving a static Indigenous culture in this environment was doomed. Indigenous artists have not achieved world-wide recognition by painting on rocks or in sand. They express themselves on canvas and other materials and use ranges of paints as well as traditional ochres in developing an art that is not valued as a stone age anthropological artifact, but as a major component of modern art. Inter-marriage has contributed Anglo-Celtic, and more recently even more diverse, ancestries, enriching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. It has moved into the mainstream without deserting its Indigenous roots.
Separatist education, welfare, health and housing have been responsible for low Indigenous mobility.
Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been denied education. Most are not numerate, illiterate in English and have no computer skills. Only a handful of homelands primary schools teach to mainstream standards. The best students from the most successful schools need one or two years’ remedial teaching when selected to go to mainstream boarding schools. Most school leavers could not pass the English tests being suggested for Australian citizenship.
‘Head start’ pre schools are essential, followed by primary schools teaching to mainstream standards. Pushing children to attend school will then have some meaning. The most gifted children must attend mainstream boarding schools and go on to tertiary training to be able to choose professions and take over the management and servicing of Indigenous communities. They must be the future doctors, nurses, administrators and accountants. Semi-literate rangers must give way to tertiary trained Indigenous conservation managers for real land care that will get rid of feral animals, weeds and erosion. Most primary school graduates must go on to mainstream integrated regional secondary schools (with boarding facilities) so that they can take up apprenticeships and traineeships for skilled occupations and form the backbone of the skilled, mobile labour force that mining and other industries need. Adults who have been deprived of basic education must be helped to catch up to get jobs.
Welfare dependence is a major obstacle to mobility. Income support and CDEP payments are lower than entry earnings in mainstream jobs, but they are secure. The ‘sit down money’ of the CDEP system has created a fear of the intensity of effort required in mainstream jobs. The combination of having to overcome education deficits and welfare dependence is a formidable barrier to venturing into the mainstream labour market with its uncertainties and its need to adapt to new environments. The demands of low family and clan living standards on the incomes of those who move add to these difficulties.
Ill health, another obstacle to mobility, is closely linked to derelict and crowded public housing. Many homelands dwellers never overcome childhood diseases. Some have to have open heart surgery in their 20s as a result of untreated ‘strep’ throats followed by rheumatic fever. Diabetes runs at 30% in many homelands (compared to 5% in the rest of Australia) and is largely untreated until it leads to kidney failure. The absence of house ownership means that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders do not have housing equity like other Australians when they want to move. Moving to private housing blocks on 99 year leases is essential.
The separatist homelands’ policies that have condemned Indigenous Australians to isolation in dire conditions in remote Australia must be abandoned for mainstream education, jobs, health and private housing so that they too can be part of ‘Australia on the move’.
Emeritus Professor Hughes is a Senior Fellow at the Centre of Independent Studies in Sydney. She is writing a paper with Noel Pearson on ‘Indigenous Australians’ barriers to mobility’
