Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty generated headlines over the weekend after describing the ”devastating” plight of Aborigines in central Australia after visiting communities in Utopia, Northern Territory at the weekend.
”I’ve been to many places in bad shape in Africa, Asia and Latin America but what makes it stark here is when you remind yourself you’re actually in one of the richest countries in the world,” Shetty said.
Amnesty profiled the Utopia region in an August report that claimed homeland communities were being starved of money for proper housing, maintenance and basic services such as rubbish removal. Amnesty said the policies were aimed at driving Aborigines off their homelands and herding them into 21 ”hub towns” where the federal and Northern Territory governments were splashing out cash for resources and services.
It is predictable perhaps that the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) is putting the most concerted effort to “close the gap” at 29 priority communities, while ignoring the needs of nearly 1000 outstation/homeland communities. Evidently, the gap will close even as Australian citizens living at these most remote and smallest localities, established with Australian government support in the 1970s and 1980s during a more benign period of Keynesian social democratic consensus, languish neglected during a belated neoliberal time of Canberra consensus in the early 21st century.
The Closing the Gap mantra is most heavily focused on priority communities (or Territory Growth Towns in the Northern Territory) targeting larger more visible communities only because they are larger and more visible and because economic rationalist thinking is so convinced that size, be it of townships or shires, will deliver cost savings from economies of scale. And so the logic goes, a large school even if devoid of students is more cost effective that a number of small schools where attendance might just be higher.
Outstations/homelands (the terms can be used interchangeably) represent a service delivery headache for the state, but this is mainly due to unimaginative policy approaches. Hub and spoke models have worked efficiently and effectively for outstation resource agencies and regional art centres and Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) organizations over the past four decades. Even schooling and health services and the delivery of consumer goods to remote homelands occurred more effectively in the 1980s as documented in the parliamentary report Return to Country in 1987.
So what has happened since then, have we become less efficient? Has the widely reported loss of national productivity impacted disproportionately on remote Indigenous Australia? Or has there just been unconscionable diminishing investment at such communities? Perhaps COAG has not applied evidence to assess relative returns from investments?
During the current neo-liberal “revolution” in remote Indigenous Australia we are seeing the creative destruction of community-based organizations that historically delivered to homelands, not in the name of contestability and marketisation, but in the name of Closing the Gap and associated imagined development for some in larger places rather than for all.
And yet what evidence there is suggests homelands might be as, or more, productive, viable and socially vibrant communities than larger places. This is not to suggest that all larger places are unproductive, unviable and socially dysfunctional, it is just that they often face more complicated political challenges than smaller more cohesive places: imagined service economies of scale might in fact be offset by real diseconomies of scale resulting from past colonially imposed presence of people on someone else’s country.
It is of deep concern that to date there is no evidence of any economic growth at Territory Growth Towns, despite the massive pump priming by National Emergency Intervention programs and National Partnership Agreement multi-year multi-billion commitments, at least not for most black residents.
A recent ANAO report Indigenous Employment in Government Service Delivery notes that jobs created by the Australian state in townships in the name of proper employment to replace state-subsidised CDEP jobs are only deemed sustainable if accompanied by continual state subsidisation. This surely gives sustainability a very new meaning.
It is also of grave concern that not only has there been no scenario planning for what is possible or desired (including by the land’s owners) at larger places targeted for growth, but that the inter-connections between larger communities (of which there are about 200) and smaller places (of which there are about 1000) is neither recognized nor explored in any systematic way.
Australia is a signatory to a number of international human rights conventions that oblige the nation to provide basic services to its citizens, including at places that have been repopulated as a direct consequence of colonial and post-colonial policies including land rights and native title rights. Importantly, the provision of such basic services, health, housing, education and livelihood opportunity could be a mainstay of the economy of larger places, if properly resourced.
Equally importantly there are compelling Indigenous well-being and livelihood reasons to support homelands. Data from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) 2008 show that wildlife harvesting (food security) and cultural production is highest at homelands; there are even official statistics that suggest that subjective views of happiness and well-being might be enhanced at smaller places.
The massive Indigenous estate needs to be populated for environmental management reasons and for strategic reasons; Australia was concerned for a long time to populate the north and centre, but clearly with particular types of citizens.
Other settler colonial and Scandinavian countries seem able to support tiny Indigenous communities in remote and difficult circumstances better, but we seem to be incapable of learning from others. Instead Australia clings to abstract utopian views that neoliberal moral restructuring alone (to inculcate individualism, private property, accumulation-focused norms) will deliver development outcomes, even as report after report indicates that progress is slow or non-existent or that well-being is declining. Perhaps it is time to look at some development alternatives, with homelands in the mix?
Evidently, the bipartisanship of the 1980s, when there was agreement by both major parties that homelands should be supported, has been replaced by a new dangerous and highly ideological bipartisanship that homelands hamper the new state project of normalisation.
Not only is this new approach neglecting people living at homelands, but it is also jeopardizing service organizations that have been carefully developed over decades; and so in the name of Closing the Gap we are seeing outstation people with less opportunity for education and employment, and less likely to receive health and housing services on an equitable needs basis where they live.
This new approach is based on a misguided belief that people will respond to the deployment of state power to enforce centralization to access services at bigger places; and that living on someone else’s country or on land now compulsorily leased or owned for between 40 and 99 years by the state will magically improve people’s quality of life.
The deployment of spin to plaster over the possible emerging tragedy of homelands neglect will come, with time, to haunt the Australian nation and its dominant political parties who stand by condoning pain in the name of some imagined longer-term normalisation “gain”. In the absence of national political leadership in sensible outstations policy, the smallest and politically most vulnerable group of Australians is placed at risk. This is an issue not just of rights and social justice, but also of freedom and choice.
The current national smugness driven by resource plentitude and strategically managed by big business interests (including the compliant media) and a minerals dependent state and citizenry is very evident; but the emerging post-neoliberal world is far from certain.
Common sense suggests that a heterogeneous approach to development might minimize risk. And policy needs to be crafted with care, without too much emphasis on statistics and numbers as if people do not matter. Evidently, and unfortunately, we as a nation do not have the strategic vision nor the common decency to recognize the value of alternative possibilities at homelands on the Indigenous estate as a livelihood option.
This piece originally appeared in Tracker Magazine. Jon Altman writes a regular column for Tracker entitled “Evidently”.
Load of bollocks. I’ve worked extensively in this field, and although I’m obviously biased, there are many flaws in this article, not least in the author’s the understanding of what priority sites are. In brief, the 29 priority sites were chosen so that there was broad range of sizes and interests in the RSD program, so that we can compare what works best in communities depending on factors such as: population size, distance to nearest large town, etc.
You’ve also got the typical line that Government should just continue to pump money into the “homelands” and “outstations”. Because that has obviously worked so well over the last 50 years, hasn’t it? As far as I can tell, indigenous people are more than welcome to live however they like on their own country. But if they expect Government to spend millions of dollars so that a family of twenty people can have fresh water, electricity, phone coverage, decent roads and access to education and health services…. I don’t think so. They are rightly expected to go to the nearest hub to access these services.
It is no wonder that there is no policy support for the smaller communities. Policy is driven from Canberra by people more interested in furthering their careers than furthering Aboriginal welfare. The high rotation through jobs as public servants make decisions then move on before the flaws are evident mean that there is always someone new coming in to clean up the mess created by their ignorant predecessors. In the 1980’s those who made decisions were there long enough to know the impact of those decisions and also had to clean up the problems ignorant decision making caused.
Canberra is remote from the problems and only requires actions to be taken and results are measured in a very narrow way. Whereas there were once people in the public service who would work with communities for a long time those people have been packaged out as inconvenient as they knew too much and they show up those who are now in charge. Until the culture of the federal public service is changed things will continue to deteriorate as the “seagulls”* continue to make decisions.
* – Seagulls are white, fly in, pick over the bones, crap all over everything and then fly out again.
“if they expect Government to spend millions of dollars so that a family of twenty people can have fresh water, electricity, phone coverage, decent roads and access to education and health services…. I don’t think so. They are rightly expected to go to the nearest hub to access these services.”
So you’d be advocating closing down Darwin and Kununurra on that basis then Wombat? The thing about the so called ‘economies of scale etc’ that so called economic rationalists claim to be guided by is that they never seem to apply to towns that are occupied predominantly by whitefellas. If they were we’d be having a debate about shutting down 90% of rural and regional Australia as it clearly isn’t ‘paying its way’. Not to mention towns as big as Darwin and Alice Springs etc There might be all kinds of reasons for dealing differently with remote communities. But if you are going to say they are too expensive then you have to look at all the whitefella communities as well don’t you? Never seems to happen though…
There is a fundamental problem with this article. No Australians whatever their ethnicity should assume that they can occupy a location with little or no potential for economic value output and expect the rest of the community to feed clothe and house them. Rightly or wrongly we have encouraged a welfare mentality around which aboriginal communities live on a dysfunctional basis notwithstanding their access to resources is no different to the rest of the Australian community other than their physical isolation.
Whilst each Australian city has pockets of welfare dependency, at least they are reasonably situated in relation to the provision of economic services, and in most cases form part of a broader community where working for a living is seen to be the norm rather than the exception. People who live 500 miles away from urban centres and expect services to be provided at a significant cost to the community at large, without the economic ability to support themselves are in effect welfare bludgers. The quicker we recognise this and do something about it the better.
I have no problems individuals wishing to or choosing to live a the Stone Age lifestyle or its associated culture provided they hunt and gather their own food. If however they want to be integrated into the broader community’s consumption patterns they need to produce something in return. If that is not possible because of the economic constraints of the environment they need to relocate elsewhere into the Australian community where they can be integrated into the broader economic framework of the country. Any other solution is patronising nonsense reinforcing a welfare dependency with all of its associated negative connotations.
People who live in these disgusting “Third World” conditions are exercising freedom of choice and the rest of us should not be held accountable for these decisions.
Whistleblower, with all your talk of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ one wonders how you think we should treat the other ‘non-productive’ members of our society? – Children, the aged, the disabled? When you lose your job, your health or your home, will you find some compassion then? People are not battery hens. With attitudes likes yours, who can blame these communities for choosing to separate themselves from a society that rejects them?
Contrary to your stereotyped view, many of these communities do in fact make extremely valuable contributions to our society. They support and protect each other in ways we do not in our big urban centres. They produce beautiful artworks, and a rich culture which we can and do sometimes learn from.
There is long-accepted historical evidence which demonstrates that herding people, black or white, into large service centers only serves to concentrate disadvantage, poverty, crime. Witness the ghettos and tent communities growing around towns like Alice Springs of communities forced to travel to major centres for services. Our govts have already recognised this problem in the dispersion of public housing estates. Why are they now repeating the same mistake with aboriginal communities?