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The road less fellow travelled

By PAUL KELLY

7 August 2002 - Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has called upon Aboriginal Australia to terminate its political alliance with the progressive Left and to work instead with Coalition as well as Labor forces to achieve its aims.

Pearson argues that the alignment Aboriginal Australia has sought with the Labor Party is exhausted and a new strategy is needed to address the Aboriginal "inferno of social disintegration". He offers the "reality-evading progressive Left" a choice – get real or get out of Aboriginal affairs.

Pearson's speech to the Centre for Independent Studies' Consilium dinner last weekend reflects his dismay with the progressive Left and Labor Party and his conviction that Aboriginal Australia must engage the conservative Right and the Howard Government in its quest for solutions.

Substance abuse was the template Pearson used to make his case. But its significance runs much deeper. It is a message from an Aboriginal leader to the entire Australian community that the ideology of social libertarianism advocated by the Left is destructive of the interests of deprived, under-privileged and welfare-dependent groups whose cause the Left purports to champion. It is an assault on the Left with vast implications for the ALP.

"I want to give you a different perspective on the Australian political landscape from an Aboriginal point of view," Pearson said. "In parliament we have the nominal Right and the nominal Left, the party machines. The Aboriginal political movement in a very broad sense has been an ally of the nominal Left. There are real differences between the two sides but this division is currently not useful for us Aboriginal people.

"Instead of thinking that we have to choose sides, Aboriginal people should recognise that there is a socially responsible faction in both the official Right and official Left. The party that we should seek support from is the combined forces of socially insightful politicians in both camps."

Pearson asked politicians of "social responsibility" on opposite sides to unite against the progressive Left "whenever possible for the sake of the most downtrodden".

Warning that passive welfare and addiction were destroying communities, Pearson said: "Those who do not understand what we say about substance abuse in Cape York Peninsula are not likely to be of any use to us in other areas such as welfare dependency, education, social order and economic development.

"Aboriginal affairs is dominated by what I call the intellectual middle stratum: journalists, academics, politicised clergy, politically active medical doctors, party careerists, writers, musicians, actors, cartoonists and other inner-city dwellers with socially suitable left-liberal opinions about everything.

"The question about substance abuse can be used by Aboriginal people to either help such people to get rid of their confusion and force them to come to their senses or, if they are irredeemable progressivists, alienate them so that they stop meddling with our affairs and our attempts at social recovery. I and my people have suffered the intellectual and cultural hegemony of the progressivist scribes for decades and that was not what we needed after the ending of state-sanctioned dispossession."

Pearson quoted Queensland Young Nationals president Martin Klibble being tough on hard drugs and said, "It is Martin Klibble [nominally on the far Right] who is truly socially progressive and the lower classes' political ally." For Pearson it is a cop-out on drugs to attack "the big bad guys and make the user untouchable". He called upon the right-wing not to make the same blunder as the Left by combining its economic conservatism with social progressivism.

To make his point, Pearson contrasted the views of two key Labor figures, the Right's Mark Latham and the Left's Anthony Albanese, during a debate before the last election on a criminal code bill affecting Aborigines.

"Mark Latham said that he saw problems similar to ours among the socially and economically marginalised in his own electorate and that the mainstream debate in Aboriginal affairs concentrated on second or third-order issues," Pearson said. "Latham had linked the right to receive welfare with a need for responsibility and he had talked about the need for enforced treatment for substance abusers."

Albanese's views, by contrast, were representative of "progressivist confusion". Pearson criticised Albanese who, at a later time, "spoke in favour of heroin trials and against the policy of zero tolerance". Pearson then closed his argument: "The leftist confusion about the issues most important to Aboriginal people creates an unbridgeable gulf between us and large sectors of the Left, even if we appreciate their strong sense of social justice and fairness."

Pearson admitted that his strategy is likely to help the Howard Government. It will infuriate the Left and much of the ALP. But Pearson has decided that the Left is clueless and, frankly, who can blame him?

The Left just doesn't get what's happening. It fills endless newspaper columns, essays and ABC radio with denunciations of John Howard that betray its own moral and intellectual arrogance. It still thinks Howard is playing wedge politics when Howard, in fact, is about the far more serious exercise of proving that the Left's social policies – from refugees and work-family to Aboriginal affairs – don't work and aren't wanted by the national majority. Howard is going to focus on social policy this term and set out to smash the post-Whitlam political alliance between the working class and the tertiary-educated Left that defines modern Labor.

The refugee issue severed this alliance at the 2001 poll and Howard will follow up with new campaigns. He senses that the 30-year-old core political alliance of the Australian Left is collapsing because of its fundamental contradictions – and Pearson's message will only confirm his judgment.

Source:The Australian

related links :

• Interview with Noel Pearson
  Noel Pearson is again making people feel uncomfortable. The Right, bitter because of his land rights activism, are unsettled because he now seems to agree with them on welfare. The Left are reeling, out of their comfort zone, because he points out their attitudes may have been simplistic, even wrong. Enigmatic, hard to categorise, Pearson is asking for a paradigm shift in approaches to welfare policy. Is he onto something?
• Aborigine sets sights on political heights
  December 28, 1997 - The Telegraph (UK) - Noel Pearson, an Aborigine who wears pin-striped suits, works for a City law firm and plays blues guitar, is being tipped to become Australia's first black prime minister.

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