This article first appeared in Quadrant, May 2006

Facing up to the Consequences of Dr Coombs

Hon. Peter Howson

For approximately 30 years the policies of separatism and self determination which Nugget Coombs was able to impose upon the political elites of Australia, and consequently on Australia's aboriginal people, ran without check or hindrance. The turning point came after the 1996 federal election with John Howard's appointment of John Herron as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Herron began the Augean task of cleaning out the stables built by Coombs and his followers, but it took until March 2005 before the first piece of legislation required to begin the dismantling of those stables was passed. That Act was the ATSIC Abolition Act of March 2005.

But now we are witnessing the consequences of 30 years of egregious folly. On New Year's Day, 2006, riots broke out in the Gordon Estate, a suburb of Dubbo. The riot was the work of Aboriginal boys aged 10-20, and it received nationwide publicity for a few days. The estate was trashed, again. Cars were stolen and burned, houses were vandalised, and the Dubbo police were unable to impose order.

The Gordon Estate is a public housing suburb. Most of the houses are occupied by Aboriginal 'families'. Forty-four of these homes have been abandoned and the estate looks as if it belongs in some Third World country where most of the inhabitants had been driven out by brigands. The word 'family' is a misnomer in this context. Paul Keating famously remarked in a different context, "Two fellas and a cocker spaniel don't make a family". In the Gordon Estate mobs of children with no parents in control do not comprise 'families'.

Twelve months previously there were similar riots in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. The spark which ignited these riots was a police chase which culminated in the death of a 13 year old Aboriginal boy who impaled himself on a cast iron fence.

In December 2003, during a drunken Xmas Party, a toddler was run over in Namatjira Ave in an Aboriginal ghetto 5 km from Dareton in the south-western corner of NSW. Her body was discovered in the ghetto's rubbish tip three days later.

In Nov 2004 serious riots broke out on Palm Island, an aboriginal ghetto established in 1918. The federal member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay, wrote on 2 Dec 04:

The shocking events of last Friday on Palm Island underscore a dysfunctional community in disarray, a community that must be helped.

In all of the words that have been said and written about the riot on Palm Island I have not been able to find any that talk about the real solution that has to be faced.

A community of 42 different tribes that have lost their cultural heritage will continue to spiral downwards if Indigenous leaders and governments do not face this core problem.

With 86 years of experience, just how long is it going to take all Australians to conclude that Palm Island is not viable and never will be while it sits as an "out of sight---out of mind" welfare dependent community. It will remain a community where alcoholism, domestic violence, drugs, health problems, unemployment, housing, sense of self worth and literacy standards may be the worst in the country.

The 42 tribes and their leaders on the island have had ample time to do something about the hopelessness that pervades the community. They have had more than enough money, yet nothing changes---year after year after year. Since 1998, after I came to understand Palm Island, I have been supporting an integrationist model---a model that has worked well on the mainland.

There are 8,000 Indigenous Australians in my electorate, the majority living in the cities of Townsville and Thuringowa. Those on the mainland do not share the lack of self-esteem, the domestic violence, the lack of job opportunities, the lack of housing and poor education that typifies the Palm Island community.

The suburbs of Perth continue to suffer from car thefts, household break-ins, and casual but often serious violence as WA police arrest teenage Aboriginal boys, let them go, and often arrest them again in the same evening. Curfews have been imposed from time to time and the WA Labor Government has imposed mandatory detention. But the criminality gets worse, and no one has offered any hope of improvement. The latest proposal is to establish special courts for Aboriginal offenders.

In the Northern Territory and in the adjacent Pit lands of South Australia the violence is much worse. Drunken brawling leads to appalling violence directed at wives, children and relatives, with homicide a frequent outcome.

Increasing Aboriginal violence in the main towns of the Northern Territory, including Darwin, is causing an exodus of non-Aboriginal people. If the Army did not locate some 3,000 troops there (a policy which the Army would dearly like to reverse) Darwin would rapidly revert to the status of an administrative outpost. The NT differs from every other State in that the Aboriginal population is 30 percent of the total; and is growing much faster than the non-Aboriginal population (despite the much shorter life expectancy of the former). [1]

All of these manifestations of serious social breakdown within Aboriginal communities across Australia are linked by a common thread. The principal actors are aboriginal men and boys aged between 10 and 25. They have grown up without any authority figures in their lives. They live off welfare (primarily CDEP) and crime. They are, in the main, illiterate and innumerate. While most of them have pretended to go to school from time to time, some have never been to school. Most of them are unemployable, not just because they cannot read or write, but also because they cannot function in a normal work environment.

There are about 25,000 of these boys and young men, and unless swift action is taken they will either kill themselves with alcohol, petrol-sniffing or other drugs, or become a racially based criminal underclass of very large proportions. The NT will become a Third World enclave in a First World nation and a continuing source of international embarrassment and domestic political helplessness.

This is the legacy of the Coombsian policies of separatism and self determination. These policies rapidly destroyed the authority of missionaries and public servants employed in Aboriginal Welfare. The rent-seekers of the aboriginal industry replaced them, but since the rents depended upon the continuance and growth of a visible class of victims of the European invasion, their primary task was that of increasing and publicising Aboriginal victim-hood.

The authority figures of the Coombsian era, the Dodsons, the late Charlie Perkins, the Yunupingus, had one simple but appalling message. Whatever violence you had inflicted on others; no matter how awful was the drunkenness which dominated your life; however great was your misfortune; none of this was your responsibility. The responsibility rested on the shoulders of other; missionaries, patrol officers, pastoralists, the European "invaders" of 1788.

In a school history text discussed by Janet Albrechtsen, Pat Dodson is quoted reminiscing about pre-1788 aboriginal life. "About three days in every week would be devoted to gathering your food,". Hunting, collecting---a bit less in places of plenty, a bit more in the hard country. The rest of your time would be spent socialising, or in religious observances of different kinds." There was a "rich and complicated legal system" and the "children were more deeply loved than perhaps any children on earth". [2]

Here we have Rousseauvian noble savage doctrine in a particularly pure form. And it's purpose is to reinforce the moral superiority of the Aborigine and to underline the duty of the rest of Australia to provide him with all the necessities of life plus a few luxuries as well.

As boys grow up there are two options available to them. On the one hand they can become brigands, joining criminal gangs, or waste their brief lives in drunkenness or drug abuse, often both. On the other hand they can get a job; find a girl; get married and help to rear a family. Of all the institutions which help boys choose the latter rather than the former, the family is by far the most important. When families either do not exist or become completely dysfunctional, it is very difficult for boys to become workers, husbands and fathers. There is no source of authority in their lives which they can emulate as they grow up.

So we have 25,000 Aboriginal men and boys who were destined under the Coombsian vision to be exhibits in an anthropological museum. Not surprisingly, this vision has been spurned. Stealing cars and trashing houses gives much more satisfaction.

Australia is now facing a very serious social and political problem, unprecedented in its scope. At the centre of the problem is providing authority for these many thousands of Aboriginal youngsters who have never known authority.

So what is to be done; who is to do it; and most important, who is going to assume and to exercise the authority which has been so conspicuously absent in the lives of these young men. So far the Commonwealth Government has focussed on reducing truancy rates at school. (One of the most bizarre policies of the Coombsian era was trying to teach Aboriginal children in their tribal language). But improving school attendance through bribes to parents can only be a short term palliative. At the centre of Aboriginal welfare dependancy is CDEP (Community Development Employment Programs). The idea behind CDEP was that instead of receiving the dole for sitting down, dole money would be used to pay people to do jobs around the community. Until 2005 CDEP was part of ATSIC's budget, not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, and costing taxpayers $400 millions p.a.. This very large sum was dispersed to 35,000 Aboriginal recipients in exchange for services were usually ill-defined and rarely monitored. The contracts were often in the hands of relatives of ATSIC luminaries and were used to ensure that votes at ATSIC elections were cast appropriately.

In 2005 responsibility for the programme was transferred to DEWR and Minister Kevin Andrews has been strenuously engaged in seeking ways to make CDEP an effective instrument in moving Aboriginal people from mind-numbing idleness to real jobs. It has been an Herculean task. Some programmes have been successful. Dick Estens' work at Moree and Noel Pearson's work at Lockhart River have produced encouraging results. These successes have been due to local initiative and commitment demonstrating again that Canberra can issue decrees, but it is only when people on the ground want to do things that anything gets done.

When we look around Australia in search of institutions (apart from the family) which successfully exercise authority we think immediately of the courts and the police. As the Chief Justice of the NT, Judge Brian Martin, has demonstrated, these institutions have given up on Aborigines. Imprisonment at Berrima jail, for the young men who come to Darwin from Port Keats and other 'communities', are soon arrested and sentenced to a few days imprisonment, is much better than life outside. Regular food, TV, organised games; this is not a bad life. After release they go back to Port Keats and before long begin their journey back to Darwin.

In WA Aborigines make up 3 per cent of the population but account for nearly half the people in prison. Similar statistics can be found for NSW and Queensland.

So our inherited legal structures simply do not work in this situation.

The Australian churches, through their extensive missionary activities, used to provide an important source of authority in Aboriginal life. This came to an end in the early 1970s, when the Whitlam Government pursued a deliberate policy of withdrawing financial support and applying other pressures to close them. Since then, the non-Catholic churches have been de-legitimising themselves, both doctrinally and in taking up political advocacy in the PC style as a substitute for religion.

One institution which still retains authority and is held in great esteem by mainstream Australia is the Army. The Army leadership would be aghast at the proposal that their authority should be used as a means of rescuing many thousands of Aboriginal boys and young men from lives of permanent delinquency and premature death. But the Army used to run very successful training schools and cadet programmes. Boys used to begin naval training at the age of 12 and Army trades schools used to begin apprenticeship training at 14, and many boys found in these schools an effective substitute for a non-existent family.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and given the billions of dollars that have been spent in creating this problem; and the many more billions that will be spent in trying to prove that we are doing something about it; it would be sensible to find out what has worked in the past and to consider if similar arrangements could be re-established today.

Any successful policy will have to include the States and the Commonwealth acting in concert. When Paul Hasluck first took over as Minister for Territories his personal authority and intellectual preeminence enabled him to achieve a degree of bipartisanship and Commonwealth-State congruity which led to rapid progress. Now that Coombsian doctrine and its consequences are being recognised by everyone except the hard-liners of the Left as disastrous, I believe the time has never been better to re-establish a policy which will be endorsed by everyone except the Tomato Left.

There are two challenges facing Australia. The first is how to get Aboriginal children to school at am early age, and teach them to read and write and to do basic arithmetic. The second is to rescue the current generation of 10-25 year old boys and teach them the skills they will need to become self-respecting Australian citizens.

Notes

[1] See Bob Catley, "The Northern Territory: Seventh State or Internal Colony?", Vol 16, Proc of the Samuel Griffith Society.

[2] The Australian, 1 Feb 2006.