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Noel Pearson: Don't disempower blacks

28 April 2003 - Philip Ruddock's decision to remove the power to make decisions about grants and loans from the elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission board and Liberal backbencher Christopher Pyne's more radical proposals show the determination of the Coalition to reform ATSIC.

It is therefore important to look at the Coalition's underlying ideology in indigenous affairs.

My analysis of our problems is that, on top of indigenous people's traumatic history, we had 35 years of failure to stop the introduction of factors that inevitably led to further social disintegration: passive welfare, addictive substances, gambling, and a mistaken belief in "social engineering", at the expense of consciously upheld social norms.

After the disaster of dispossession, people such as my grandparents and parents built the beginnings of a new social and economic functionality. The opportunity they and their contemporaries in other communities created for us was squandered.

Liberal politicians often unthinkingly repeat the Left-liberal conventional thinking about the nature and causes of Aboriginal dysfunction, including the obligatory reference to the diversion "deaths in custody".

In his criticism of ATSIC last month, Pyne said: "In some Aboriginal communities alcoholism and petrol sniffing are prosthetics for hope. Aboriginal families have been overrun by the symptoms and by-products of poverty - social decay, substance abuse, poor literacy and numeracy skills, chronic unemployment and deaths in custody."

But the main problem is not our relative "poverty". And substance abuse and dysfunction are today not "symptoms" of poverty and trauma. Many communities are dominated by people caught up in passivity, addiction and abuse. These states are today primary causal factors.

Pyne and others in the Coalition blame Labor's "symbolic" and "separatist" policies for the present problems. I agree that our goal should be full command of the English language, economic integration and geographic mobility for indigenous people.

But "self-determination" is not exclusively a product of leftist folly. Australia is the home of two peoples. It will only cause pain and loss not to plan our future with this insuppressible reality in mind.

I come from a Guugu Yimithirr speaking community and what I fight for is not only skills that will allow us individual self-determination and economic empowerment. I fight for the future of the language in which my father spoke to me. The driving force behind our struggle for a real economy in indigenous Australia is our desire to take our rightful place as one of the two peoples of this nation.

Prime Minister John Howard has said that "one of the accepted cornerstones of our immigration policy has always been that you shouldn't allow ghettoes or enclaves to develop. Yet . . . that is exactly what has happened and it is one of the difficulties we have." I agree that increased mobility is necessary for indigenous people, but I am concerned that assimilation of immigrants was the comparison that came to the Prime Minister's mind when he thought about indigenous policy.

The Coalition's "practical reconciliation" strategy seems to be to improve the outcomes of service delivery until indigenous people can take their place in the mainstream. Indigenous-specific institutions and programs are seen as something that is necessary during a transitional period. According to Pyne's plan, all funding responsibility should be transferred from ATSIC to commonwealth and state government departments, and government departments should deal directly with indigenous communities. ATSIC should be reduced to a strategic advocacy body.

Certainly, strategic advice and fresh thinking is the area of ATSIC's greatest failure. But diminishing the power of ATSIC won't improve the quality of advice. And insightful assistance to communities from government bureaucracies cannot be taken for granted.

One example: harm reduction as a response to substance abuse is the prevailing ideology among the political class and in the bureaucracies. Conservative leaders are unable to stop the growing acceptance of addiction to an increasing number of substances as an endemic problem that can only be managed, not cured. Harm reduction is inadequate when it comes to curbing the substance abuse epidemics in indigenous Australia.

Another example: we suggested rewarding community members who save money for business investment. The commonwealth Government changed this to a loans scheme because "indigenous people on income support have no surplus to save". The same year a small remote community spent $4 million on alcohol. Government departments are not free from low expectations of indigenous people.

Indeed, the single biggest threat to our enterprise in Cape York Peninsula is the struggle for responsibility between us and the Queensland government bureaucracy. Instead of understanding that government must relinquish responsibility in order for there to be a restoration of responsibility in our society, the bureaucracy still sees progress through the prism of "government service delivery".

Vast problems surround each individual in many communities. Fighting dysfunction by dealing directly with communities and introducing ongoing reviews of funding based on performance will be problematic if the group still fighting for social order, often women and elders, is too weak in a community.

Community members who are determined to fight dysfunction must be given the chance to unite regionally with the support of regional indigenous organisations. More of ATSIC's power to make decisions about grants should be shifted to the ATSIC regions. The action on substance abuse and partnerships in Cape York, for example, is the result of regional indigenous leadership, innovation and intervention in a situation where there was no capacity or preparedness to tackle the problems at the community level alone.

The solutions to our problems will turn out to be very different to what bureaucracies would be inclined to do. For that reason we need many tax-funded agencies to forge partnerships with state government, federal government and ATSIC as well as private and philanthropic partners.

Our failure over the last decades to encourage the growth of a strong and able regional indigenous culture of political, social and economic leadership in most parts of Australia has caused the lack of progress in indigenous Australia - not the structure of ATSIC. ATSIC reform is necessary, but removing the funding power from agencies led by elected indigenous representatives will give a false impression of having attacked the core problem.

Noel Pearson is a lawyer and a Cape York Aboriginal leader. This is an edited extract from his article in the latest issue of Options, a policy journal published by federal Liberal MP Christopher Pyne.

This article is from The Australian

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