Yet Another Failed Howard Government Experiment In Indigenous Affairs?
J.C. Altman
Director, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian
National University, Canberra; e-mail: jon.altman@anu.edu.au
First published in Crikey, 22 June 2007
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Topical Issue No. 7/2007
An electronic publication downloaded from
http://www.anu.edu.au/caepr/.
In 2004, the Howard government invested considerable public funds to
attempt to discredit 'Monitoring practical reconciliation'1, a paper by
Boyd Hunter and myself highlighting that official census statistics
raised doubts that 'practical reconciliation' was working.
Compared with the period 1991-96, data for the early Howard years of
1996-2001indicated that in relative terms Indigenous socioeconomic
status-as measured by health, housing, education and employment
indicators -was declining. Later this year, we will have 2006 census
data that will provide evidence about how the Howard government has
fared in its later, perhaps last, years. The 'national emergency'
declared yesterday suggests that the Howard government itself is not
confident that it has delivered to Indigenous Australians in the period
since 2001.
In the meantime the national Indigenous representative organisation,
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) has been
abolished. According to Minister Brough it is to blame for not fixing
the Aboriginal 'problem', even though its functional mandate did not
include education or health or mainstream employment, three of the
Howard government's four practical reconciliation planks.
The demise of ATSIC, a Senate majority, constitutional powers conferred
in 1967, and a record run of budget surpluses have all given the Howard
government an unprecedented three-year opportunity to address
Indigenous disadvantage unhampered by its imagined barriers of the
previous eight years.
It has chosen not to make significant investments in addressing
Indigenous backlogs and historical legacy in practical ways, in part
because it has focused on the more 'symbolic' issues of mutual
obligation, arguing repeatedly that more state intervention will just
result in greater problematic dependence.
It has sought moral solace from Noel Pearson's concerns about passive
welfare 'poison' on Cape York. Howard's 'neoliberalism' recognises no
tension between equality and equity: it is all about assimilation,
mainstreaming, integration and normalisation, there is little room for
cultural diversity and difference or for engagement with
democratically-elected Indigenous voices.
1. CAEPR Discussion Paper No. 254, 'Monitoring 'practical'
reconciliation: Evidence from the reconciliation decade, 1991-2001' by
J.C. Altman & B. H. Hunter, 2003, available at:
http://www.anu.edu.au/caepr/discussion.php.
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
* Altman
Indeed, 'culture' is demonised as the source from which so much
dysfunction springs forth. Again symbolically it is Sue Gordon, head of
the appointed, not elected, National Indigenous Council that will head
the government's latest Taskforce, with its full membership still to be
announced.
For a government that regularly bleats the mantra of practicality,
there is something very knee-jerk, opportunistic and impractical about
the latest suite of measures, and little that appears sustainable. For
example, will alcohol prohibition for six months on Aboriginal
communities merely result in problem drinkers moving to urban centres?
If there is concern about expenditure of welfare dollars on non-food
items, why choose to channel only 50% of social security income to food?
And what about privately-earned income, will the state also determine
how this is spent? Will two types of dollars be issued as a regulatory
measure?
If more police are to be placed in Aboriginal communities, from where
will they be recruited and will they have requisite cross-cultural
capacities to work in communities where English is often spoken as a
fourth or fifth language? Where will police be accommodated? And if
they are effective, and the outcome is greater Indigenous incarceration
for whatever felony, where will Indigenous prisoners that already make
up 75% of the NT's crowded prisons be locked up?
Has a link between the permit system and child abuse been demonstrated,
or is this just an opportunity to implement ideologically-predetermined
vendettas? Will withholding of welfare payments from parents who do not
enforce school attendance really help their children's welfare? And so
on.
The Pat Anderson/Rex Wild Report Little Children are Sacred made many
considered recommendations, but starts by stressing that consultation
with Indigenous people was the first essential. Among its many
observations was a call, yet again, for equitable needs-based funding
to address systemic problems that are exacerbating Indigenous anomie in
remote communities. Just last week, the admirably independent
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom
Calma was highly critical of the absence of an overarching policy
framework in Indigenous affairs and an absence of any monitoring to test if the 'new'
arrangements were working, let alone better than earlier arrangements
pre-2004, or pre-1996 for that matter.
The Howard government's heavily interventionist and paternalistic 'new'
approach, based on a whole six days of policy reinvention (without
consultation with the Northern Territory government or Indigenous
communities), smacks of political expediency dressed up as moral
indignation. Recent history suggests a similar rapid and apparently
unsuccessful policy-on-the-run after the opportunistic abolition of
ATSIC in April 2004.
While there is much detail still to be provided, there is nothing that
seems either empowering or workable about this, the latest of a series
of Howard government failed experiments in Indigenous affairs.
Indigenous Australians are yet again being subjected to experimental,
poorly considered and clearly flawed public policy.
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