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Aboriginal policy raises storm

By Alan Goodall

18 December 2004 - Aborigines in the remote Australian Outback are going blind amid filthy conditions while white Australians luxuriate in some of the world's most sophisticated cities. It's a disaster waiting to happen, and that day looks close.

Fresh from a stunning electoral victory and vowing to push through reforms long denied by a Labor-dominated Senate, conservative Prime Minister John Howard is starting with arguably the most controversial of all -- how to get equality of opportunity for all citizens. For the minority Aborigines, the Howard way forward targets policies stressing mutual obligation and an end to passive welfare.

"Shared responsibility." The new buzz words sound sweet, but putting it into practice is going to be more difficult.

Government response to the Aborigines mentioned above shows how progress might work. In Mulan, a tiny community in the remote Kimberley corner of Western Australia, Canberra agrees to install fuel tanks and pumps costing A$170,000. These will save the locals driving through rugged country to get gasoline. In return, local children must avoid the widespread addiction of sniffing gasoline. The kids must shower every day, get to school on time and keep their homes rubbish free.

But all hell breaks loose among Canberra's vocal Aboriginal lobby groups in response to these proposals. Forcing kids to wash in return for gasoline pumps is racially oppressive, declares Labor spokesman Sen. Kim Carr. The government is "washing its hands" of responsibility, he says. Carr's party chief, opposition leader Mark Latham, is more circumspect. Mutual responsibility is a left-of-center agenda, Latham intones in political speak.

But Sue Gordon, chairwoman of the newly installed National Indigenous Council, welcomed such deals if local communities are behind them: "I don't view anything to benefit Aboriginal people, things they themselves put up, as being paternalistic. It's Aboriginal people saying this is what they want to do as a shared responsibility."

Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson attacked the Mulan deal as neither fair nor mutual: "It's racially discriminatory. What are they going to do about petrol sniffing? They have no plan for that."

Outspoken Sen. Amanda Vanstone flew at the naysayers. "What do you expect the government to do?" demanded the minister for indigenous affairs. "Have people washing faces, making sure the kids shower daily, making sure they go to school? Governments can't be in everybody's pocket. That goes to the very core of what has been the problem."

Indeed, experience at the tiny Mulan community suggests Vanstone and the reformers may well be on the right track. There, each morning before class and after lunch, the 44 students at Mulan Catholic school wash their faces and eyes, then pat them dry with paper towels.

Health workers were thrilled to find recently that after 18 months of the daily routine the incidence of trachoma eye disease among students had fallen to a seven-year low of 16 percent. The incidence of trachomatis bacteria-infected children used to be four out of five.

Trachoma is a chronic eye infection resembling severe conjunctivitis. It is usually associated with dry tropical regions and Third World countries where people have poor access to water and health care. Spread by hands and flies, it responds well to antibiotics but remains the biggest single cause of blindness worldwide.

Pioneering Australian optics humanitarian Dr. Fred Hollows traveled the Outback, operating on thousands of near-blind Aborigines before taking his unique treatment to Africa where he repeated the sight-saving success. But personal hygiene is still the best preventative.

Mark Sewell, Mulan's community administrator, backs the gas pumps-for-hygiene incentive: "This is an example of a community, our extended family, taking control of itself and government departments supporting us."

A quietly confident Howard, avoiding the slanging match, is ready to go further with what he calls "a more entrepreneurial" approach to helping indigenous culture help itself. He told Parliament he would respond positively to a call from the new indigenous council -- the body replacing the disgraced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Council -- for changes to enable Aborigines to gain benefits from communal land.

Howard has grabbed statements by Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine, often seen as following Labor's welfare-state policies, on the benefits to be had from private Aboriginal land ownership. Howard sees this as an advance on the tradition of "everything being owned by the community and not enough encouragement given to individuals and families to own their own properties. This represents a break from past attitudes which have acted as a brake on progress and solutions."

This break with failed traditional policies echoes what progressive North Queensland activist Noel Pearson has been saying. Two years ago the articulate Pearson warned that Aborigines had to end their alliance with leftists because it is destroying their lives. Pearson urged: "We have to see the Howard prime ministership as an opportunity rather than as a threat to indigenous Australians."

Queensland, the so-called Deep North, is a state where past and present racial tensions persist in confounding everyone's best intentions. In the state-run Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg, community leaders have long agonized over the devastating results of alcoholism and child abuse. Now local women have demanded and received alcohol-free zones. This is the 18th Aboriginal community in that state to introduce "dry place" safety areas.

Farther north, on Palm Island, off Townsville, tensions are inflamed over a riot. An Aboriginal man is dead, allegedly killed by police. Thugs attack the island's police station, burning it to the ground. Police arrest 19 men, accusing them of riotous behavior. Just as Canberra is thinking it has the right answer to a 200-year-old problem, 2,000 black and white protesters march. "Legal genocide" reads one sign. The man accused of leading the island riot raises his fist. Anger still burns.

White reaction remains muted. The majority's wish for fairness may not, however, remain silent for long.

Alan Goodall is former Tokyo bureau chief for The Australian newspaper.

Source: The Japan Times

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