This article first appeared in The Australian, 22 June 2007

Remote communities: the task ahead

Hon. Gary Johns

Is the Prime Minister John Howard being a populist with his announced six-month ban on alcohol and pornography in discrete Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory?

No he is not. Populist, means doing something popular which you know to be wrong. The ban is right, but it is the opening gambit in a much larger drama. The larger drama is that Aborigines living on welfare in enclaves can no longer do so. The task ahead is no more and no less than offering ways and means for Aborigines to choose a better life. Should Aborigines so choose, the governments of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland with the Australian Government must be ready for the change.

The change will involve people changing their ways, and in order to do so many will leave their lands. In the first instance, they will abandon the 1000 or so outstations in far northern Australia. These will no longer be supported by government. Aborigines will congregate where they know people, in the larger communities of the Territory and Kimberley and Cape York and elsewhere. They will flock to the 200 or so former mission settlements that will be supported and indeed upgraded by government.

Aborigines, unfortunately, may find these places unacceptable. They will face people they do not get on with---not some mythical white redneck---but other Aborigines, Aborigines which custom would dictate separation. In Wadeye in NT there have been riots by competing gangs. In Palm Island in Queensland scores of families wait for others to do something.

Aborigines in some of these settlements prefer to be the last person standing rather than risk a step into the world outside. Their gaze is not upon the outside world, it is on the family next door, what they are receiving, what they up are to. It is an insular, limited, dismal world. Insular communities are death, which is why the Prime Minister is right to abolish the permit system for common areas on Aboriginal lands.

Beyond the move to the larger Aboriginal settlements is the move to more established towns such as Alice Springs, Karratha, Kalgoorlie, Cooktown and others. The change will involve people who will be refugees, but refugees who are possibly less able than the most modestly skilled Sudanese or Afghan. In these places Aborigines will face other risks, of unemployment and drugs, and the young especially may turn to crime. They will find acceptable a period in gaol as a respite from a distraught life.

The best thing that government can do for Aborigines in these circumstances is to use incentives to drive change but also lower the risk of failure. They must lower the risk of being caught by a thug husband, when a woman runs away. They must lower the risk of a man escaping the community ending up in the long grass. They must lower the risk of a student escaping school and avoiding the essential years of learning needed to survive in the modern world.

In a liberal society, the right to tell another person how to live is limited. It makes the task of saving troubled Aborigines in remote Australia so difficult. In remote communities many Aborigines are welfare recipients, and the Australian Government has the authority of the taxpaying public to withdraw funds or place rules over welfare recipients. Change to welfare rules is a key tool to change lives.

Many Aborigines hate undeserved welfare and regard recipients who do not work for their money as bludgers. They hate the life in so many communities. The broader obligation is to show Aborigines in these circumstances another life. Whether they chose it is a matter for them.

If they do not want to play by the rules, they do not get the money.

Sitting around playing cards and drinking, failing to bring up children is not acceptable behaviour. So long as welfare obligations are imposed regardless of race or any other discriminatory grounds restrictions are perfectly reasonable.

The announcement, therefore, that fifty per cent of Centrelink payments to parents of children in discrete Aboriginal communities will be quarantined to prevent all their money being spent on alcohol is to be applauded. Fifty per cent can only be used for the purchase of food and other essentials.

In addition, school attendance will be enforced by linking income support and family assistance payments to school attendance for all people living on Aboriginal land.

Former Labor Senator Bob Collins report for the Northern Territory government pointed to the necessity of school attendance for Aborigines in his 1999 report, 'Learning Lessons'. What Bob did not have was a tool for the job---docking pay. Too many have sought change in setting targets and goals and 'talking to the community'. That may cut the mustard in polite society, or in opposition; it does not do so in government.

The corner has been turned in Aboriginal policy, there is much to do, but at last we know and soon many Aborigines will know where they are headed.