BY ALISON DELLIT
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission's inaugural policy conference, held March 25-26 in Canberra, should have been a chance to reflect on a decade of struggle by Australia's Indigenous people. Instead, the federal minister for Indigenous affairs Philip Ruddock used it as a platform to launch another attack on Indigenous people's rights.
In a speech peppered with phrases like "challenging the paradigms", "the rights debate" and "I am not about separateness, I am about inclusiveness", Ruddock argued that government policy should provide assistance to individuals, rather than Indigenous communities.
"Should we give more emphasis to individual home ownership than to community housing grants?", he asked. "More emphasis to individual entrepreneurship than to community enterprises?"
"How the money is channeled, whether through community controlled organisations or otherwise, is far less important than how it is targeted", Ruddock argued.
Ruddock listed five points to be addressed in formulating government policies and funding to redress Indigenous people's disadvantaged status:
1) Shift the policy emphasis towards individuals and families;
2) Replace "welfare dependency" with "economic independence";
3) Give equal emphasis to individuals' responsibilities and rights, especially in welfare assistance;
4) Make substance abuse a central focus of health strategies; and
5) Better target government programs to indigenous people so funding can be more effective.
Not everybody agreed with Ruddock's enthusiasm for "individual" rights. At an "Indigenous governance" conference organised by Reconciliation Australia in Canberra on April 4-5, several Aboriginal leaders hit back.
"You can see the problem we have", Kimberley leader Peter Yu said after quoting Ruddock's five points. "The implied assumption of the minister's agenda is that he views ATSIC and the current Indigenous leadership as defenders of the status quo. He wrongly thinks that the current chaotic arrangements in which public funding is drip-fed to the plethora of Aboriginal service delivery organisations is self-determination".
"Ruddock's statement flies in the face of decades of research", Northern Land Council Chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu's prepared speech stated.
The fiercest blast came from Pat Dodson, founding chairperson of the Council for Reconciliation. "Ruddock doesn't have the intellect to understand that we require a form of self-governing based on our own traditions", he said.
Dodson said that ATSIC should organise a meeting between Indigenous leaders and Ruddock to determine if "his agenda is assimilation". He told the conference that he had had a discussion with Ruddock the previous evening and told him, "We don't like [your plan]. We don't understand it. You don't understand why we don't like it and you don't understand why we don't like you".
"If Philip is insisting that there will be an attack on the collective rights, or non-recognition of collective rights, he's going to have an argument with me", ATSIC chairperson Geoff Clark told the April 8 Sydney Morning Herald. Clark added that "goodwill" existed between ATSIC and the government, and that differences could be "talked through".
Language
At first glance the debate between Ruddock and Indigenous leaders appears to revolve around language. While concrete proposals are thin on the ground, all participants use phrases such as "welfare dependency", "self determination", "self governance", "self reliance", and "community capacity". However, vastly different meanings underlie the words depending on who utters them.
A maze of language is being used by the government to obscure its real "shift in the paradigm" — to destroy the ability of Indigenous people's organisations to collectively challenge racist government policy.
The 1992 High Court decision that acknowledged that some Indigenous communities maintained sovereignty over land was a huge victory for the Indigenous people's movement. However, for Australia's mining and pastoral magnates it again raised the frightening spectre of Aboriginal land rights.
Anxious to keep their paymasters happy, ALP and Coalition federal governments passed legislation to limit the power of Indigenous people to claim land wanted by big corporations. The federal Coalition government upon taking power in 1996 set about starving ATSIC of funds. It vilified and attacked Indigenous people's organisations.
The Coalition government was helped by a system of funding set up by the previous federal Labor government, which placed stricter accountability mechanisms on Aboriginal organisations than on other organisations. Many Indigenous bodies are required to spend their budget in three-monthly lots, and justify how the money is spent to as many as 12 agencies.
But at least the ALP provided funding. By the beginning of 2002, ATSIC had little money left to assist communities to prepare land claims. ATSIC's $1.1 billion budget represents less than half total government spending on Indigenous affairs. Worse, more than half of this amount is spent on welfare payments to participants in special work-for-the-dole programs. More than half the remaining amount is spent on housing and infrastructure.
In his presentation to the April 4-5 conference, Yu pointed out the connection between land rights and Indigenous self-government: "Native title common law rights are benign and symbolic if those that possess it do not assert them. An Aboriginal right to negotiate [as a result of a successful land claim] and informed consent [necessitates] a sovereign group whose members are bound together by a system of law and custom.
"This scenario remains a huge threat to governments and industry, which will now have to negotiate ... with Aboriginal people instead of imposing their agenda. It also threatens an army of government bureaucrats whose positions and authority depends on a relationship where Aboriginal people are mendicant recipients of largesse."
Many Aboriginal leaders, including Yu and Yunupingu, argue that Indigenous people's position of disadvantage can only be addressed by communities governing themselves according to traditional law. They believe that the government's "individual rights agenda" is primarily directed towards eliminating traditional culture.
Land
But it is not the use of traditional law that worries the government most — it is the possibility that Indigenous people will control land that the big corporations have other uses for. That is why the government opposes any form of democratic Indigenous self-government or control of funds.
The conflict between Indigenous self-organisation and corporate greed is inevitable. Without access to resources, Indigenous people will never overcome two centuries of dispossession, racism and economic marginalisation.
Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders suffer massive disadvantages. They have a life expectancy around 20 years less than the Australian populations' average, appalling literacy and ridiculously high unemployment. Deep alienation leads to high incidences of domestic violence and substance abuse.
The Coalition government's initial approach of trying to justify funding cuts to Indigenous bodies with the argument that Aboriginal people receive "too much" taxpayers' money contributed to a huge anti-racist sentiment. Millions of Australians were furious at the government's racist characterisation of Indigenous people as greedy and incompetent.
The pressure on the government was eased, according to Ruddock in his March 24 speech, when "a new generation of Indigenous leaders moved beyond the culture of blame and victimhood that led so inexorably to a mind-set of passive hopelessness".
This is a reference to professional Indigenous consultant Noel Pearson, who claims the real cause of poverty in Indigenous communities is "welfare dependency". Pearson argues that the appalling conditions that many Indigenous people live in are caused by their "passivity" and by having embraced a "hand-out mentality". He has advocated cutting welfare and other funding as a way of "helping" Indigenous people recover from their "victimhood".
As a result, Pearson has been lauded by both major parties and the mainstream media as the "voice of a new generation". In support of their calls for the control of canteens to be taken away from Aboriginal community leaders in Cape York, the Australian and the Brisbane Courier-Mail editorialists on April 11 cited Pearson. The Australian stated that claims that taking control away from Aboriginal communities is racist was "nonsense" because "Mr Pearson and many other [unnamed] Aborigines want reform".
"Reform" — now couched in phrases such as "self-reliance" and "linking rights and responsibilities" is not that different to the old situation. Pearson's advocacy of entrepreneurship has provided the government with an unexpected opportunity to by-pass Indigenous organisations and to slash welfare. It has allowed governments and business to shift the debate away from the right of Aboriginal people to control their own land as a means to empower themselves to blaming Indigenous people for the problems they face.
Ruddock's five points are just another attempt to cut funds to Indigenous organisations, take more control of formerly community-controlled programs and weaken the organised strength of Indigenous people.
The rejection by so many Aboriginal leaders of Ruddock's rhetoric is an encouraging sign, but it is not enough to prevent the government achieving its goal of destroying Indigenous organisations and blocking greater Indigenous control of Indigenous affairs.
The massive marches for reconciliation in 2000 proved Australians want to see justice for Indigenous people. To mobilise this sentiment, ATSIC and Indigenous leaders need to reject tactics that attempt to appease the government by accepting, even in part, the rhetoric and logic of "welfare dependancy".
The racism of the Coalition government's policy — and Ruddock's hypocritical claims that he seeks Aboriginal "empowerment" — must be condemned and rejected. The Australian people must be encouraged to mobilise in defence of Indigenous organisations.
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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