home | news l

Ladder of obligation

By Noel Pearson

4 August 2005 - In an interview in The Age last Saturday, ("Clash of Cultures", Insight, 30/7), Lowitja O'Donoghue said that the ideas and policies dominating indigenous affairs are patronising and counterproductive - and that I am a principal architect of those policies.

The most telling statement in the interview was O'Donoghue's reported comment on my suggestion that the most responsible members of an extended family (for example grandmothers) be given some control over the welfare benefits paid to dysfunctional parents: "(O'Donoghue) is equally opposed to other Pearson policies, like the removal of welfare payments from dysfunctional families who squander money on alcohol and gambling and don't send their children to school. People are starving now, she says. You don't put kids in another situation where their parents haven't got welfare payments."

Yes, some children are starving now. But the reason they starve is that their parents malnourish and neglect both themselves and their children.

We know from experience that dysfunctional people are difficult to co-operate with and that many of them will use unconditional social and material support to facilitate their lifestyle. Some compulsion is necessary for the sake of the children.

O'Donoghue has rushed to the conclusion that I advocate a policy that would risk creating a situation where children starve because parents haven't got welfare payments. But I do not suggest policies in which the amounts intended for the welfare and development of a child are decreased. Nor would I advocate a policy that would risk leading to a decrease in the amounts actually spent on education and proper food and housing for any individual or household.

I believe that the reason for O'Donoghue's misapprehensions is that in left-liberal and progressive discourse the words "patronising" and "paternalistic" have become hot buttons that stifle thought. Once a policy has been branded patronising and paternalistic, debaters such as O'Donoghue feel no need to examine facts or try to understand the rationale and the intentions of the policy so branded.

The words 'patronising' and 'paternalistic' have become hot buttons that stifle thought. Most income management and similar assistance with financial services to Aboriginal people would happen voluntarily. With the support of the Government, we have shown in Cape York Peninsula that individuals and families with low incomes can save for investment in education, businesses and household commodities. But I argue that in some situations, not only in indigenous communities, there is a clear conflict between two rights: the rights of children and the rights of parents to have discretion over their income.

The right of individuals to spend their welfare benefits at their discretion is treated as absolute. I have suggested a limitation in some parents' rights to secure the rights of their children.

If the public agrees with me that we need to strike a better balance, we would need to be cautious. For historic reasons still in living memory, Aboriginal people hate paternalism and patronising attitudes. The question is: what amount of compulsion would be acceptable?

O'Donoghue's answer is extreme. Her position would rule out compulsory income management even for the most dysfunctional households, with drug-taking and drinking pregnant mothers and violent fathers.

It is illogical that society has the right to enforce the ultimate paternalistic policy - namely, to remove a child - when the situation has become so bad so that it might be too late to give the child a normal future. But society is powerless to stop at an early stage one of the greatest threats to child and family welfare: namely, misuse of the family income.

Misuse of money might initially be due just to thoughtlessness and lack of purpose. But after some years of destructive spending, an indigenous couple may have damaged their health, their ability to become socially and economically integrated, and their children's life prospects.

I regret that O'Donoghue is so trapped in her cynical interpretation of the political situation - that the Government is implementing patronising policies designed by me. Because of this distorted perspective, she perceives conflicts between us where there may not be substance.

O'Donoghue objects to an attempt to lure children to school through the incentive of swimming in a pool, arguing it entrenches the helplessness and irresponsibility of the families and takes them further down the road to powerlessness. She also objects to breakfast programs in schools because she sees intervention such as this as absolving from responsibility the parents who have been drinking and gambling all night and not getting their children to school. She says the approach should be one of individual case management by education departments, as it would be if the family was white. Education departments have truancy policies and they are just not implementing them, she says.

O'Donoghue said that when working as a nurse, she did for a short time do the rounds of the camps, picking up children and taking them to town to wash and feed them before school. However, she soon said to the families: "I'm not doing this any more; this is your job."

Contrary to what O'Donoghue believes, I agree with her that policies such as breakfast programs to which parents contribute no work or money are counterproductive. I have advised against such programs for the same reasons as O'Donoghue. I also agree that government agencies should enforce the laws about child welfare.

In relation to incentives and mutual obligation generally, I agree with O'Donoghue about the potential problems of many mutual obligation progams implemented so far. About the petrol-for-face-washing program, Pat Dodson and I wrote in The Age last year ("The dangers of mutual obligation", 15/12/04) that it does not make sense to reward parents for doing something for which they normally need not be rewarded.

So there is much common ground between O'Donoghue and me. There is one real difference: Pat Dodson and I did give qualified support in our article to the important principle of mutual obligation.

The difference in opinion about mutual obligation hardly constitutes an unbridgeable gulf between O'Donoghue and me.

I believe that it is the (understandable) indigenous sensitivity about paternalism and patronising attitudes that makes O'Donoghue attribute opinions to me that I do not hold, exaggerate differences between us, and dismiss without proper reflection reforms that might be necessary to enable us to reach families and children in great trouble.

Noel Pearson is the director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.

Source: The Age

Clash of cultures

by Insight, The Age

30 July 2005 - Aboriginal elder spokeswoman Lowitja O'Donoghue believes Noel Pearson's ideas to improve indigenous lives are patronising and unworkable. She spoke to Penelope Debelle about her vision for her people.

On the second day of the Reconciliation Australia Conference in Canberra in May, Noel Pearson, the radical new voice of indigenous policy, walked into a meeting of the black caucus. According to Lowitja O'Donoghue, inaugural head of ATSIC and elder stateswoman of indigenous affairs, Pearson turned on them all.

You're not up to it, she remembers him saying. He chided them over the "stolen generation", saying if he wanted to, he could have brought along his mother to cry. He turned on his mentor, Melbourne academic Professor Marcia Langton, saying he was disappointed in her, and told the younger Aboriginal leaders they were all in too much of a hurry. People were stunned, O'Donoghue says, but only she was willing to speak out. "Noel, all I want to say to you is, 'Will you be a team player?' " she asked him. "He didn't answer. Nobody else said anything. He is just carried away with himself."

The clash of personalities - O'Donoghue says Pearson came from nowhere in the early 1990s and tried to model himself on then prime minister Paul Keating, right down to his taste in sharp suits - represents a crossroads in thinking.

Lines are being drawn in the red desert sands of Aboriginal policy. On one side is Pearson, a Federal Government adviser with the ear of Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello, talking up harsh intervention and incentives to break the indigenous welfare dependence cycle.

On the other stands an increasingly grumpy O'Donoghue, who could not be more opposed in her views. After a lifetime of involvement in black politics, O'Donoghue, who turns 73 on Monday, says Pearson lacks her life experience and does not understand where his policies would lead. Pearson could not be contacted this week for a response.

In O'Donoghue's own country, the socially devastated Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in South Australia's Far North, the State and Federal governments last month announced the third swimming pool under the joint "no school, no pool" program. She angrily objects to what seems a commonsense attempt to lure children to school through the incentive of swimming in a pool, arguing it entrenches the helplessness and irresponsibility of the families and takes them further down the road to powerlessness.

"It's just patronising," O'Donoghue says. "Every community has got to accept its own dysfunction. It's got to understand it's a dysfunctional community, make a decision about accepting that and then decide what it's going to do about it."

She is equally opposed to other Pearson policies, like the removal of welfare payments from dysfunctional families who squander money on alcohol and gambling and don't send their children to school. "People are starving now," she says. "You don't put kids in another situation where their parents haven't got welfare payments."

She says this is her life experience speaking. In the early 1960s, a young Lois O'Donoghue took a job with Aboriginal Affairs as a nurse near Coober Pedy. Having fought racial discrimination to become South Australia's first qualified Aboriginal nurse, she worked for two years doing remote nursing in India, then travelled across the country by train. She returned to Australia committed to helping her people and deliberately took a job where she could look for her mother. The daughter of an Irish stockman and an Aboriginal woman, Lowitja was surrendered by her mother as a baby and grew up in a series of institutions. On her first day in Coober Pedy, she walked past some women sitting in a circle, passing the flagon around: "Lowitja, they said - first time I'd heard it - Lowitja, Lily's daughter."

It was a difficult reunion that did not take place for some time, because the young Lowitja was there to work. As part of her nursing duties she ran a breakfast program for children along the lines of those in favour today. Early in the morning she would do the rounds of the camps, picking up children and taking them to town to wash and feed them before school. Not for long, she says. "I said to them (the families), 'I'm not doing this any more, this is your job', but I'd work with them to do it. This stuff is not fair."

She sees interventions like this as absolving from responsibility the parents who have been drinking and gambling all night and not getting their children to school. She says the approach should be one of individual case management by education departments, as it would be if the family was white.

"Education departments have truancy policies and they are just not implementing them," she says. "I know kids who have not been to school for 12 months and the department has done nothing in relation to it, nor have school liaison officers. Why aren't they in fact dealing with these families and their children? They have a responsibility to do that."

O'Donoghue was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairwoman for six years from its inception in 1991. She sees this in some ways as a golden time, when Aboriginal people from around Australia were learning how to prepare budgets and work together. But she did not support ATSIC in its recent form, believing instead that Aboriginal people need an organisation to give them a voice without the onus of self-governance. The problem at the heart of it all, she says, is money and the cultural problems Aborigines have in managing whole communities. Aboriginal people look after their own, she says. Giving financial control to people from this background who were not trained in administration was a disaster.

"Money - that was the root of the evil at ATSIC," she says. "It was always a hard job keeping people on the straight and narrow. Even on the board level it was just really hard work."

O'Donoghue was appointed last year, along with Baptist minister Tim Costello, to continue the interrupted work of the former unofficial administrator of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, Bob Collins, who was seriously injured in a car accident. In her report, O'Donoghue recommended her lands - which suffered yet another suicide this week, one of a series of young deaths from either suicide or petrol sniffing - be placed in the care of World Vision, which Costello now heads. Part of the dysfunction was the bitter clan and family disputes that prevented services being passed down the line. O'Donoghue and Costello called for World Vision to be given the money and authority to build capacity on the lands, to go in as "the honest broker" and do what governments had never done.

After 24 years of self-governance, the lands are a sad mess because, O'Donoghue says, the Pitjantjatjara lands were handed over to people whose lives had been run for them by administrators or the church and who had no training or experience or ability to self-govern. The money was there, but there was no proper supervision of it. And it failed. "Then there are all these dirty old hippies that went up there, yes, they're still around and they initiated them all," O'Donoghue says angrily. "And the pedophiles."

O'Donoghue is furious with the Rann State Government, which she says has ignored her report. Meanwhile, the sorry business continues. Five girls from the area last year studied at the Wiltja Aboriginal study program at Adelaide's Woodville High School and completed year 12. All, she says, are back on the lands sniffing petrol.

She remains closely involved with her people. Last week she had talks with the teachers' union to try to understand what was going wrong with the education programs. In Adelaide she helps feed homeless people, many of whom are Aboriginal. They call her when fights break out, as they often do, between urban and remote-area Aborigines, who treat each other with hostility. "Well, I go down there and they listen to me, mostly," she says. "They cop it from me."

This is a critical time in Aboriginal politics and Aboriginal history. At the May Reconciliation Conference - leaving aside O'Donoghue's attack on the conference organisers for failing to tell her on the podium that Indigenous Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone would be jumping the speakers' queue - Senator Vanstone talked about the break with the past. "We are at a point in history when Australia is embarking on a new conversation in indigenous affairs," Vanstone said. "It is a conversation based on an almost universal belief that the approach of the past 30 or more years has not delivered the results that we would have hoped for."

O'Donoghue wants the break with the past to happen in a way that will take her people forward. She wants a national forum to talk about what self-determination should mean, to distinguish between Aboriginal policy and Aboriginal governance. And she wants Noel Pearson to put his policies into practice on the Cape York Peninsula and leave the rest of black Australia to work out a future for itself.

"This stuff he is talking about is just not fair," she says. "If Noel wants to prove it's right, let him do it in Cape York and show us that it works. The policies he is espousing to the Prime Minister and Peter Costello are being applied across the board, and one size does not fit all."

Source: The Age

Further information: social justice issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page