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One country, two standards

19 May 2007 - A referendum in 1967 was supposed to be the turning point for indigenous people, but that hope proved false, writes Russell Skelton.

could be another country. In the Alice Springs youth court four indigenous teenage boys and a pregnant girl face committal proceedings over the murder of a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl. There is much that is remarkable about the proceedings, despite the drab surrounds. Many of the witnesses, young men and women, require an interpreter to understand what is being put to them. Even then their evidence is faltering and barely coherent.

A father in his 30s described how he, his sons and nephews consumed five, five-litre casks of wine the weekend the girl was fatally bashed. He said he drank until he passed out, woke up the next day and started drinking again. He could not remember much.

A female witness, detained on unrelated charges, pleaded to give her evidence by video link because she was terrified relatives of the accused would target her for payback. Witness after witness, both indigenous and non-indigenous, said they saw the unconscious girl lying in a gutter as her life slipped away over 10 hours but did nothing. As they watched, three boys who happened by raped the girl.

Alice Springs is "ground zero" for indigenous people. It may be four decades since the Australian people voted overwhelmingly (more than 90 per cent) to give the Federal Government the power to legislate for Aboriginal people and to count them as citizens, but in central Australia indigenous communities remain overwhelmed by tragedy, violence, poor health and dysfunction and mostly isolated from the education system.

Alice Springs has the highest serious crime rate in Australia and brutal clashes on suburban streets between indigenous mobs are common. The violence is mostly black on black. For the estimated floating town camp population of 2500, it is hard to imagine what has improved in their lives since 1967. Most camp children spend their formative years roaming the streets.

A scan of the Centralian Advocate newspaper through the 1970s reveals a similar pattern of alcohol-related stabbings, beatings and rape. There are now plans to clean up the camps with a $70 million program, but this comes after decades of ignoring the problem.

Last year the nation's most senior bureaucrat, Dr Peter Shergold, admitted in a confronting speech that many indigenous communities were imploding, their social structures in collapse, respect for the law rock bottom and notions of responsibility and authority in disrepair. "Too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have become trapped in a cycle of dependency, relying on welfare for their income and government payments for their livelihoods, unmotivated to take advantage of even the limited opportunities that have been available," he said.

It was a frank admission of policy failure by the head of the most powerful arm of government: the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. "I am aware that, for some 15 years as a public administrator, too much of what I have done on behalf of government for the very best of motives has had the very worst of outcomes."

Shergold said it had been unrealistic to expect communities to run themselves in the name of self-determination. He should know; he once headed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC, created by the Hawke government), which has been disbanded and was often called the Black Parliament.

There seems little to celebrate on the anniversary of the May 27 referendum, a national plebiscite universally regarded as the turning point in the treatment and status of indigenous people. Aborigines had had the vote since 1962, but it was hoped that by giving the federal government power to legislate on their behalf the wretched conditions in which they lived would be reversed.

Shergold's bleak assessment of the lost years and countless billions wasted on a plethora of programs and schemes is shared by many influential indigenous leaders. Warren Mundine, the former ALP president and perhaps the most effective indigenous politician today, is one. Noel Pearson, the Cape York lawyer of Mabo fame who has the ear of the Prime Minister and most of cabinet, is another. They represent a new, contentious wave of thinking in the leadership that places the emphasis as much on responsibilities and mutual obligation as it does on the traditional campaign for rights. As they put it: indigenous Australia needs a hand up, not a hand out.

Mundine says it is time for Australia to stop treating Aborigines as sacred people. "We are the same as everybody else: our problems are poverty and poor governance. We are living in isolation. We are isolated from the education system, from employment. Our health problems are related to lifestyle, our communities are imploding and we have to face up to that. We have to face the problem of domestic violence. We have to take responsibility for our own lives, we have to find ways to join the booming mainstream economy."

Pearson, speaking after launching the controversial Hope Vale agreement (a federally funded program offering $15 million in funding for welfare and housing, on condition beneficiaries adhere to a strict set of fiscal and social criteria such as sending children to school, reducing alcohol consumption and restricting house guests) says his approach was a matter of getting the balance right between rights and responsibilities.

"The recognition of land rights and human rights is unequivocally good. The hopes and dreams of those people who fought for the referendum were realised. The land rights that the Whitlam government introduced, that the Fraser government kept to, were very important achievements," he says.

Mundine believes the lesson of the past 40 years is that it is a waste of time waiting for governments to find the magic remedy to overcome disadvantage because they are incapable of delivering. Breaking the cycle of poverty requires Aborigines to forge their own initiatives to create jobs and further the education of their children. It is a view shared by Fred Chaney, a former Liberal Aboriginal affairs minister, who has known every minister to have held the post going back to Billy Hughes. "Central bureaucracies cannot deliver for Aboriginal communities, because they are fixed on the mainstream and Aboriginal communities are anything but mainstream. They all have their different needs and requirements." He describes bureaucrats as "birds of passage", who fly in and out of communities knowing little of local traditions and customs.

Chaney, a director of Reconciliation Australia, says mining companies are much better at dealing with communities than governments and cites the Argyle Diamond Mine Land Use agreement because it has delivered jobs and skills to the local community, something federal and state governments have been unable to do.

The lack of progress in eradicating disadvantage over the past four decades seems undeniable. As the recent Oxfam study revealed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders die nearly 20 years younger than non-indigenous Australians, a stark contrast to the US, Canada and New Zealand where life expectancy for indigenous people is seven years less. Indigenous infant mortality is three times the rate of non-indigenous Australians and more than 50 per cent higher than indigenous children in America and New Zealand. Indigenous Australians are far more likely to die of a stroke or heart attack, be jailed, die from diabetes, commit suicide or be attacked.

But statistics, and they are endless, are only part of the story and by their nature inconclusive because of mitigating factors such as isolation from medical services, inappropriate diet and lifestyle. More damning are the years of government inaction over petrol sniffing, the failure to support community self-management after its introduction in 1974 and unwillingness of most governments - state, federal and territory - to embrace a comprehensive set of initiatives to deal with domestic violence and child sex abuse.

When it comes to self-management, government inaction has bordered on wilful neglect. Almost a third of Northern Territory remote communities are governed by legislation introduced in the 1980s intended to regulate sporting clubs and voluntary societies, leaving them strangely exempt from the rigours of local government scrutiny. For decades the communities have been free to sack whom they please, ransack store funds to buy cars and to subvert the notion of self-rule through kinship patronage and corrupt dealings. Without any training or governance programs communities have been required to collect garbage, maintain power and water, supervise employment schemes and even manage health services.

Elliott McAdam, the territory's Minister for Local Government, believes the delivery of services to remote communities has gone backwards since the 1970s when the Department of Aboriginal Affairs field officers were withdrawn from communities.

"God only knows that we have to do something about the situation. It would be remiss of me as a minister to sit back and allow the high levels of dysfunction to continue," he says.

McAdam, one of six Labor Party indigenous MPs, is introducing sweeping reforms for a system of governance based on the NSW shires. Over six months, 22 councils (about 38 per cent of all councils), had advertised or readvertised for a chief executive officer, and his department had made 17 major interventions due to financial, administrative, and governance irregularities.

Then there is also the vexed and highly contentious issue of indigenous violence. The 2002 Gordon report and the 1999 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence chaired by Professor Boni Robertson laid out the scope of the crisis in stark terms, sufficient to have the issue declared a national emergency.

The Federal Government committed funds to the issue but there remains a dearth of effective programs, with the possible exception of Western Australia, and levels of abuse have continued, so much so that the Northern Territory Government of Clare Martin set up its own inquiry last year. Although the federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, has proposed a $100 million state and federally funded strategy, his department was unable to explain how the money would be spent - or if any money had been spent at all.

What then of the future? Can the legacy of policy failure be overcome with yet another range of strategies and programs? Will governments of all political persuasions be condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past? A central part of the Coalition's approach has been placed on home ownership and the lease of traditional land for commercial use.

Mundine, who runs the NSW Native Title Services and was a member of John Howard's National Indigenous Council, believes Aborigines must move to where the economic activity is. The disadvantage that exists in the territory and other remote parts in Western Australia and the Cape tells only part of the story. More indigenous people live in NSW - 135,000 or 29 per cent - than in the territory, which has less than half that number. Many also live in big urban centres such as Sydney's Redfern and Mount Druitt. "We know from history that people live where the economic activity is, there must be a reason to live somewhere."

Like the majority of indigenous leaders, Mundine sees education as the best way out of the poverty trap and he supports a scholarship program to put Aboriginal children into Sydney's better private schools. "Education has got to be relevant, the kids have to be able to compete in the wider world market, which takes a lot of auditing and looking after."

Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, believes the referendum of 1967 also reflected a national mood for equality, something missing from the spending decisions of all governments. "We have the minister saying that the present budget is the biggest in history, but when you analyse it closer the $200 million increase amounts to about an extra $200 or $300 a year for each man, woman and child."

He believes there has been an indecent rush to implement the new policies in an election year without the proper research and strategic thinking. He said there was only one senior Aboriginal bureaucrat working in the Office of Indigenous Policy Co-ordination and that most senior staff lacked experience. "They have no real knowledge of what is going on, they make flying visits to communities, coming in with their urban-based ideas. Local voices are being ignored. Changing policy does not mean the people will change, especially if they don't understand what is going on."

The indigenous leader Pat Dodson, another critic of the Pearson-Brough approach, sees mainstreaming of services, the policy pushed by the Howard Government following the abolition of ATSIC, as just another political theory that ignores individual community needs. "There is a lot of money that floats around, but it gets totally unco-ordinated and it gets wasted … because of the mish-mash of programs."

He sees the emphasis on home ownership as misplaced, and says a mortgage can turn a home into a prison for people who cannot afford to pay electricity bills or who want to live differently. As a driver of economic development he believes the scheme is misconceived.

"We don't need to be told by people that we have obligations. We understand those things. And we need to get away from the internal war that is going on in this country. To try and destroy and decimate the indigenous populations of this country in a mainstreaming fashion is not the solution."

There are those who do not see the past 40 years as wasted or as a monument to policy failure. Mick Gooda, who chairs the Co-operative Research Centre if Aboriginal Health in Darwin, says his children are living in much better conditions than he did growing up. The real tragedy, he says, is not that there has been no progress, but that progress has not been happening across the board. "In Alice Springs we now have babies being born with the same birth weight as non-indigenous babies. The other day I sat in a room full of academics (indigenous) that would not have happened 10 years ago. We have 100 indigenous doctors that were not there 30 years ago. People are making it through the system, but we need a lot more of them."

As for theories of emancipation through home ownership Gooda has his reservations. "It costs $300,000 to build a house in Wadeye. Tell me what lending institution will lend that sort of money to build a house there, because a house is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it. What we need is decision-making based on hard evidence, not political theory."

Ian Anderson, a professor of indigenous health at Melbourne University, also believes there has been progress since 1967 and that a recent study in the Utopia community shows that indigenous life expectancy may at last be improving. He notes also that some rates of cancer are falling and that the rate of increase for heart disease has slowed. "We know what we need to do to get there, but that does not necessarily mark out how we get there. You have to build capacity into the work force. We might have 100 doctors, but that is woefully inadequate."

Anderson, the first Aborigine to hold a chair in indigenous health, believes it may take a new generation of Aboriginal professionals, less ideologically driven, to deliver the next big gains. "The policy debate is not very sophisticated. We need to investigate the underlying issues, petrol sniffing, drugs, sex and alcohol abuse because they all take place in a context."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

More news items for the Sydney Morning Herald

Faith, hope … but no charity

19 May 2007 - Faith Bandler wanted action rather than sympathy, writes Malcolm Brown.

FAITH BANDLER, a driving force behind the 1967 referendum that made Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders citizens in their own country, well remembers the priorities of her adopted people when she led the campaign.

Citizenship, many of them said, was all well and good, "but what about our tucker".

"It was difficult to look too far ahead and to see what benefits the referendum would bring," she said. "They had to find money to send their kids to school and to get food onto the table. The Aborigines have always been at the bottom of the economic ladder and have been kept there for their free labour.

"Those people developed the cattle industry for absolutely nothing. As one said when he visited Sydney, 'We did it for salt and beef, and more salt than beef'.

"The colonisers could have treated them better. Their numbers were quite small and their demands were small. The superior attitudes I think were the hardest for Aboriginal people to cope with. If you are told long enough you are not worth anything, you will start to believe it yourself."

Ms Bandler, daughter of a South Sea Islander kidnapped to work on Queensland sugar plantations, was inspired in 1956 by the radical Jessie Street.

She became an activist and founded a group called the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, dedicated to bring about substantial change.

"We had a lot of well-meaning people at perhaps afternoon teas or something like that that raised funds to send clothes to reserves where Aboriginal people lived," she said. "The Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship was not a charity. It worked towards banishing the laws that controlled people's lives."

The Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship launched the "Vote yes" campaign for Aboriginal citizenship on April 2 1957. The following year, Ms Bandler was a founding member of what became the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. She got broad support, including help from the trade union movement. She recalled at one time she and Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Nunuccal) went to a conference in Cairns, were thirsty and went to a hotel for a drink. She said: "The bloke there said, 'We don't serve coloured people here'.

"Kath said, 'We don't want coloured people; we want a drink'." The strength of the story is that the trade union movement put a ban on the pub.

In 1966, when the Federal Government announced there would be a referendum to bring about constitutional change, Ms Bandler became leader of the "Vote yes" campaign and addressed huge public meetings.

"Most people would say, 'It is about time something was done'. They were not quite sure what, but I think there was a feeling in the community that the first people were not being treated well."

She said there has been progress for indigenous people since but that "there is a huge amount of work still to be done".

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

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