There’s one abiding truth about Federal and State government policy towards indigenous people — with rare exceptions, it is overwhelmingly directed towards white people, and their shifting values, assumptions and prejudices.
Counting for 2% of the population, indigenous people simply don’t have the demographic heft that US African-Americans (13% of the population) or Hispanics, have to swing crucial seats.
Thus whatever genuine impulses there are to try and create real change — or open a space within which indigenous people can organise and progress with less obstacles — must always be subsumed to a consideration of how this will play in the cities.
The paradoxical thing about this imperative is that the policies dictated by it have done more than one one-eighty shift in recent years. For decades, the policy simply conformed to a near-universal racialism that assumed inherent characteristics of races, from which it was deduced that aborigines had no future as a distinct race/culture per se.
What is noticeable about the records of this policy today is not its viciousness, but the absence of such. Like much of the wave of eugenics that engulfed the 20th century — forced sterilisation in the US, Sweden and elsewhere, the language of apartheid in Africa, interracial marriage bans — it is the cool pseudo-scientific logic that is most notable, the urging on people to suspend their sentimental impulses — the impulse that would make it hard for a policeman to remove a child from its mother, for example — in the service of the greater good.
That attitude, in the cities at least, was swept away by the 60s global revolution of ideas, and the replacement of a skin privilege ideology which had sustained global imperialism (of which the very existence of Australia is simply a hangover) by a liberal, secular, anti-biologistic one — which eventually blossomed into a full culturalism, the belief that there was no universal cultural endpoint to which we were all trending, and that different societies would take different paths.
As far as non-urban indigenous people went, culturalism suggested that — barring the genocidal dissolution of a culture, no longer morally acceptable — an indigenous non-agricultural people would not have the same path to modernity, and that attempts to simply replicate the Western path would be not only wrong at some deep level, but also futile.
The implicit assumption of what one could call “developmental culturalism” was that an aboriginal society would emerge that combined both traditional and modern features, and — this was the extra bit — that it might avoid some of the widely-perceived negative features of consumer capitalism.
It’s fair to say that the results of that policy, ain’t been so hot.
For some years now, a counter-strategy has been under way — one which, in varying degrees of oversimplification — damns culturalism as a “culture cult” that keeps people suspended between two worlds, one utterly over (nomadic traditional life), the other held out of reach. The post-culturalists run all the way from unashamed neo-assimilationists such as Gary Johns, through former Pol Pot enthusiast Keith Windschuttle — spruiking a renewed enthusiasm for forced population movements with a call to forcibly abolish small communities — over to Noel Pearson, whose arguments retain some “culturalist” ideas of maintaining aspects of traditional life, but who also believe that a lot more modernity has to go into the mix. Others, such as Warren Mundine, seem to be saying both at the same time, sometimes in the same speech.
Whatever the case, the one thing that is noticeable about the post-culturalists is that they have the same confident disdain for what went before them, as the culturalists did for the assimilationists they replaced. Where eugenics and assimilation was constructed as arrogant and vicious (where it was more often merely pseudo-scientific), culturalism is now constructed as naive and narcissistic, a projection of western obsessions onto indigenous people.
There was some of that, but in the obsessive focus on that, the post-culturalists have disregarded a lot of the more materialist arguments being made around indigenous development — specifically that without a longish history of agriculture and institutional development, the idea that indigenous communities could just make a single, collective historical sprint was madness.
Increasingly, what we get in these debates is an anti-intellectualism, in which any attempt to talk about the major differences between indigenous and non-indigenous paths is then assailed as “patronising”, “relativist” and the like.
Take plans to educate significant numbers of aboriginal kids at boarding schools — effectively as a way of creating a larger aboriginal leadership class. This may work, but the possibility that aboriginal kids will find separation from kin and country harder and more damaging than non-indigenous kids (many of whom have mixed feelings about boarding school life) can barely be said without being howled down.
But the major confrontation between culturalism and its critics appears to be coming in the NT proposal to sweep up many smaller communities into 28 “hubs”, even where there is strong evidence that people are having better lives in key aspects — violence, alcohol and drug abuse, etc — in smaller communities.
Doubtless a principal driver for this policy is budgetary, not to mention all sorts of political skulduggery around factional and other fights. But the cover under which it is being presented to the nation is anti-culturalism, or at least a sort of simplistic pro-modernism — alleged improvements in service delivery, efficiency etc.
Culture, place, rights — these have become swear-words, and any mention of them is likely to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. We’re trying something new now.
In terms of playing to a white urban audience, the more bold and sweeping a policy is, the more it can be sold as the government “doing something” — a process that John Howard recognised in his canny (but ultimately politically futile) NT intervention. What white urban people want from indigenous policy above all is to be assuaged of the guilt of sharing a continent with a people in a deeply problematic period, caused by the historical ruptures that created the country in its modern form — a people who share citizenship but are nevertheless historically, culturally, existentially different.
The one thing that cannot be said in indigenous policy is that there are no easy answers, that social change is measured in decades not years, and that to presume that fixing a social problem is like fixing a mechanical problem – that repairing a broken community is like repairing a broken TV — is a category error of the highest order.
Do governments have the courage to be more piecemeal, less faddish, more reflexive, more willing to accept small gains, in indigenous policy? Or are they going to charge ahead with Big Ideas, as bold and unquestioning as the last set of Big Ideas, and “bravely” suppressing their own sentimental assumptions — such as that most people have a sense of place and cultural continuance, and cannot simply be decanted from one community to the next?
We will find out. Some of us will find out far more forcefully than others.
Guy, thanks for that 1,000-word precis of what I’ve been trying in vain to write for years! You nail it with “Or are they going to charge ahead with Big Ideas, as bold and unquestioning as the last set of Big Ideas” – this revolving door of continual policy change assumes that Aboriginal people will ignore the failures of the last big idea – or the one, five or ten before that – and accept the latest version as bigger, better, best.
Of course this doesn’t happen – we all have short memories about government policies that only affect others but more acutely remember those that only affect kith and kin. Governments seem to love a constant re-write of the Aboriginal policy landscape – as always, it is better to be seen to be doing something (new) – old policies can easily be cast as failures.
But for people at the receiving end of this shifting state of exception, where every dollar that hits the ground seems to cost ten or more to get there, it just means policy and reform fatigue – they either get on the gravy train or just give up and retreat with a deep cynicism and a fundamental loss of faith (have we given them a reason to have any at all?) of all things government.
For many people Government has just become a lot of white people and their black proxies talking past, of and for you – but not to or with you.
Both the NT Intervention (under Brough/Howard & Macklin/Rudd) and the NT government “Growth Towns” policy come from so far up the Government chain that people here on the ground have no idea of the content, aims or purported benefits of these frighteningly expensive and doomed-to-fail ideas.
Or how to engage with them – mainly because the policy design and implementation is so poor that there is no means by which people can connect with the people putting the policy into practice.
We elect governments to make hard decisions for us all and I applaud them when they do – but recently, particularly in the Aboriginal sphere, governments have become lazy and forgotten the important first steps of policy development – come up with an idea, then talk to those that it will affect, then re-write, then implement. Now all they seem to do is come up with the idea and then implement it. And they wonder why we have so little faith in them and why we moan about lack of consultation, engagement and inclusion in their Big Ideas – and why their policies always seem to fail.
But of course that is never their fault, is it?
Best, and more please…
“Little people are sacred”.
Remember that title? Read the report, perhaps? There are over 100 very well presented and positive recommendations in this report, which was unfortunately trashed by both the NT government (through inaction) and the Howard Government (through bloody-minded white man prescriptive and expensive actions taken despite or to spite the report and its authors).
The original report is well worth reading, despite its now being 3 or 4 years old and despite the so-called intervention, which started with military action and continued as though via an army of occupation.
Not only little people are sacred. Much money has been lost in demonstrating again that neither of the two possible federal governing parties has a rational understanding of how to live with and to support the weakest members of our society, who in this case just happen to be aborigines.
Read the report. Act on its recommendations. Please.
Shouldn’t we just reverse the refugee policy reversal for which the uninspiring Kevin Andrews got such stick when he did something semsible. Why not bring in lots more of the African people whom even an Age editorial described as “recently tribal and nomadic” so we can make our capacity to improve the lot of our indigenous people look better, or at least an equal opportunity disaster. Me, I’m off to get practice on easy short-term problems like making Palestine livable for Jews and Arabs…..
Under “Dis Utopia” please
Many useful insights from Guy Rundle. A pity that the executive either don’t share them or don’t care.
The undeniable impotence of disdavantaged minorities in majoritarian democracies places them at the mercy of politicans, who see the world through the lens of electoral advantage, and often act to intensify the prejudice and misconceptions of the electorate at large. Indigenous peoples – throughout the world – are the most vulnerable to these processes, given the impact of colonisation, removal from traditional lands and attempts at forced cultural assimilation based on little understanding of the culture targeted for replacement.
Indigenous Australians ar doubly disadvantaged – they have no treaty, and, in common with all Australians, they have no entrenched guarantees that will enable them to say to government – you have no power to subject me to oppressive or discriminatory policies.
Human rights are designed to curb the power of the elected majority. A requirement that policy be evidence based would also constrain the executive from acting in accordance with prejudice or ignorance, as well as providing discipline in the design and evaluation of spending programs.
The Rudd government has made new commitments to the recognition of the rights of Indigenous Australians – commitments which are yet to be realised in its law and policy. It has access to a considerable body of evidence concerning what troubled Indigenous communities need to improve health, education and economic activity. And there is ample evidence that the necessary transitions would be expedited by adhering to human rights standards.
As Will Kymlicka has noted, the accommodation of difference is the true test of tolerance. Indigenous Australians need the cultural space to make transitions in way that best reflects their cultural values. Claims that this would entail either violation of the rights of women and children, or treating remote communities as cultural museums or money sinks, are spurious.
Why not invite and assist Indigenous people to frame the policy problems and develop lasting solutions?
Robin Seth-Purdie might care to examine some assertions and the assumptions that I think I find in his comment and justify or modify them.
If he thinks “Claims that this would entail either violation of the rights of women and children, or treating remote communities as cultural museums or money sinks, are spurious” why? What does he really think the path would be from now with communities and families wrecked by alcohol, glue-sniffing, foetal alcohol syndrome, sexual abuse of children etc. ? Where would it be heading and what would be the course and the incidents on the way?
The big assumption seems to be that mainstream Australians – including most of the Aboriginal and part Aboriginal population – as taxpayers would want to finance indigenous adventures in finding their own adaptations to modern life in remote and expensive locations, that they would want to give some preference to this over those waiting for hip replacements and decent aged care, drug rehabilitation in big cities and all the other ways money could be spent usefully within 100 miles of where they live.