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Aborigines trapped by dole scheme: professor

By Debra Jopson

Professor Marcia Langton addressing a reconciliation conference, Birmingham, September 1998 (conference organised by ANTaR and 8020 Educating and Working for a Better World). ENIAR representatives were invited guests.

5 October 2002 - The Aboriginal "work-for-the-dole" scheme is widely regarded by indigenous leaders as the principal poverty trap for their families and communities, leading anthropologist and activist Marcia Langton said last night.

Speaking in Sydney last night, Professor Langton said the scheme, known as the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), was a "statistical sleight of hand" which reduced indigenous joblessness figures by removing participating Aborigines from the unemployment statistics, "disguising the extent of the problem".

It was a form of "labour apartheid" when it was introduced in the 1970s. With 268 communities and 30,133 individuals participating by 1997, it had since entrenched passive welfare, she told her audience at the Dr Charles Perkins Memorial Oration at Sydney University.

"I urge that comprehensive changes to the CDEP scheme, linked to large-scale, long-term capital injection to the Aboriginal sector, be considered so that there is an end in sight to the old Australian habit of indentured labour for blacks," she said.

She said a new deal was needed to tackle the impending socio- economic crisis in indigenous communities caused by a predicted Aboriginal population boom and inadequate government responses. The CDEP required "radical transformation into a genuine labour market strategy that brings Aboriginal people into the workforce in sufficient numbers to enable them to escape the poverty trap".

A generous investment "at least several times the annual budget in Aboriginal affairs, targeted towards industry research and development, genuine labour market strategies, employment, education and training initiatives and infrastructure development" would transform that trap, she said.

Committed capitalists like the Federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Abbott, "ought to be thinking about injecting capital into the incipient entrepreneurship in the Aboriginal community".

The "hard Right", which argued that capital flows should not be channelled away from the market into artificially sustained enterprise, "should explain the extraordinary level of subsidy to Australian agriculture and the present influx of financial assistance" to the drought-stricken bush.

"While the farmer's plight and complaint is heard with sympathy and subsidies, the Aboriginal grievance and protest is held in contempt. This double standard is usually called racism," she said.

Professor Langton praised Mr Abbott, who in a recent speech said that "too much Aboriginal employment has an element of 'make work"'.

"It's too common to find very high unemployment in remote Aboriginal communities even when there's a mine with high staff turnover just down the road," she quoted Mr Abbott as saying.

"He also admits that in many remote areas, the challenge is to create an economy rather than place Aboriginal people on existing jobs," she said.

"Despite the breakthrough he has achieved, Abbott insists on old Right dogma and targets Aboriginal demons much as he always has in public life, with statements such as 'Aboriginal communities are still largely socialist enclaves in a free society'.

"Far from being 'socialist enclaves', Aboriginal communities are post- colonial prisons where the incarcerated would surely enjoy a famous Kafka novel. Free the prisoners!" she said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

related links :

• A New Deal? Indigenous development and the politics of recovery
  4th October 2002 - Dr Charles Perkins Memorial Oration. Delivered By Marcia Langton
• Stolen wages, missing Trust funds : The fight for justice in Queensland
• Speech by Federal Employment Minister Tony Abbott to Corporate Leaders for Indigenous Employment Conference
  25 September, 2002 - We have to acknowledge the history but we can’t undo it. We need to open our hearts to indigenous Australians but also to understand how helping people can turn into controlling them, no less now than in mission times. As a society, we have been guilty of a collective failure of imaginative sympathy towards some of our own. For much of our post-contact history, we have been more conscious of the wrongs of Ireland and the passions of the Middle East than the pain of Australian indigenous people. It’s important to recognise this and to make amends but not to become trapped in the past and its failed “solutions”.
• Aboriginal leader warns that Australia is on the brink
  October 2, 1998 - ENIAR - Leading Aboriginal spokesperson Marcia Langton has told Britons that tomorrow's Australian elections could have a catastrophic impact on Australian race relations.
• A Treaty Between Our Nations?
  11 July, 2000 - Inaugural professorial lecture by Professor Marcia Langton, Inaugural Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies, University of Melbourne - At the end of the Twentieth Century, the public culture of Australia remains, as it has for the previous two centuries, riven by disputes as to the status of indigenous people in Australian civil society. I argue here that it remains the case that the Australia polity is devoid of a clear and just status for indigenous people within its ambit. Further, this continuing dispute is a loose hanging thread in the web of our civil society.
• Money that's black and white and spent all over
  The dollars may appear black, but there are plenty of "grey" areas. Not all native title dollars are being used to Aboriginal advantage. They are being used to help those opposing native title claims. They are being used to help other landholders and the nation deal with the fallout of a High Court decision - the landmark Mabo finding in 1992 that native title exists.
• Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
  The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) is a multi-disciplinary social sciences research centre at the Australian National University (ANU) with a primary focus on Indigenous Australian economic policy and economic development issues, including native title and land rights, social justice, and the socioeconomic status of Indigenous Australians.

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