Bennelong Society Conference 2003:
An Indigenous Future? Challenges and Opportunities

The Authority to Intervene in Aboriginal Matters

Hon. Gary Johns

I am going to address the question of ATSIC legitimacy and in doing so make a simple observation. I do not think it is possible to evaluate the structure of ATSIC in isolation from the purpose for which it was established.

If ATSIC were helping to produce the right answers, no one would care about its structure. It would be legitimate because it came up with some solutions to real problems. Unfortunately, ATSIC has not produced any answers, in fact it is part of the problem. The reason is that too much of Aboriginal life is politicised, and too much of Aboriginal life is lived in the government domain. ATSIC serves to keep too many Aboriginal people playing the one game of politics, in particular, the subvention of the public purse. If life is lived through that game then it does become essential that you, or your family be closely aligned with an ATSIC official. Political allegiances in Aboriginal politics have real consequences for peoples' lives. Of course, it should not be that way. How can the situation be changed?

A lot of this revolves around the question of authority. So a little story to take us to that. I rang a schoolteacher in Kowanyama---which is on the West of Cape York---some months ago. I had visited Kowanyama---an Aboriginal community of about 1,200 people---some years ago and wanted to catch up with what was happening. This teacher had served in an Aboriginal community elsewhere in the Cape. The teacher entered Kowanyama prepared to implement all that had been learned at university about Aboriginal culture, and how to be sensitive to cultural difference, and to the Aboriginal right to self-determination. Within weeks, reality forced the dumping of those university lessons. It quickly became apparent that they were pure ideology.

We talked about life and teaching in Kowanyama. I was told, 'look, this is the best resourced school in the state.' But it was the worst community. The recent major innovation at the school was to keep the kids in Friday night, not because they had misbehaved, or at least not sufficiently to be punished in this manner. They were kept in, to prevent them from going home. Friday night was a big night on the grog in Kowanyama, and it was not safe to be at home.

For this teacher the main problem was knowing that almost no child at that school would ever graduate. The only successful students were those who left Kowanyama.

Who Has the Authority to Intervene?

The question had become one of authority: who has the authority to make a child go to school. If a child was to have any chance of taking advantage of an education, they had to attend school. Truancy is a major problem at the school, exactly as Bob Collins found in his report on schools in the Northern Territory. The only solution, as Collins recommended, was to make children attend school.

The teacher said to me, 'these kids parent the parents'---they are parents. Kids have the authority to play hooky, and parents do not have the authority to make kids go to school. When some Aboriginal children who are at boarding school come home for holidays, they say to their parents that they do not want to return, and the parents are powerless, unable to make them return. Parents simply could not fight them. Kids do not go back. This is a clash of cultures. Some will argue---mainly the people that sit at the ANU---that you must respect aboriginal culture. Well, fine---but which parts?

Is it the part that says you should stay at home and learn your culture, but also learn about grog and violence? On the other hand, is it the part that says the only way you will ever learn about your culture is to go to school, become independent of the government, and reproduce that culture yourself? Aboriginal culture cannot survive unless Aboriginal children are western educated. Moreover, important parts of Aboriginal culture will not survive when the child does attend school. That is the conundrum.

Aboriginal people will lose it, and they have lost it, as they sit in the middle of nowhere, unable to reproduce anything of value, living in totally devastating environments. The question for me from this teacher is, 'who has the authority to drive the changes that we---perhaps paternally---know to be essential?' Not just we, but thousands of Aboriginal parents who want their children to go to school but do not necessarily have the authority to make their children attend school, or the temerity to fight Aboriginal separatists and school authorities who will not enforce truancy laws.

I asked an Aboriginal Queensland public servant earlier in the month, the problem of enforcing truancy in Aboriginal communities. He said, 'well, we can't get our public service to make our kids go to school.'

I replied, 'that's your job'. You have the power of the State to make children go to school, and that power is to be applied to children of any colour. Some people where I grew up, and you grew up, in cities around Australia did play up, and were dragged along at school. Some were recidivists, and never did attend for any length of time. That is the way it goes. Some made it, and contributed to society and to their own people. Aboriginal people want to contribute, but it is hard to contribute if you do not have the skills. How do you get the skills? You have to go through the system.

Citizenship

I think there are some irrefutable minimum criteria for Australian citizenship. That is, that you must make yourself available to be educated in the system. So compulsory education is at the very basis for our system, and you cannot get the benefits of our system unless you are educated. That is the core concept.

The second part is you have to make yourself available for work. You cannot as a deliberate strategy, live off the rest of the community. I once had this debate with a very distinguished former High Court Judge, who said there is a right to work. No, no, no. There is a very limited right to unemployment benefits. That is all. That is all we can offer. There is no right to work.

So, we have ourselves in a position where we are too afraid to enforce the minimum criteria essential to Australian citizenship. It has come to this. Who has the authority to enforce the minimum criteria for citizenship, and who is willing to enforce penalties for those who are deliberately disobedient? In some instances, it will be the Commonwealth government, which was given great responsibility in the 1967 referendum. I am thinking increasingly now along the lines that it is the state governments, which have the greatest powers to effect change. The Commonwealth has squandered too much of its power on symbolism, and rhetoric, and ideology.

Let us move ahead 50 years. Who will be living in the remote Aboriginal communities? Will the population be higher or lower, and what will those people do? We should make a realistic assessment of the---and this may be not be an appropriate phrase---carrying capacity of Aboriginal communities. Will the hundreds of discrete Aboriginal communities in Australia support perhaps 50 or 100 people?

These places will only ever generate a small number of jobs. Once we understand the complete unsustainability of these settlements in terms of the obligations of citizenship, then certain things must follow. What is happening in Queensland right now is that plenty of discussion is going on about what parts of the land Aboriginal people own will be held collectively in trust, and what parts will be turned over to private ownership in order to generate an income. We are now in a post land rights phase. Now comes the task of making the land work, and in a way in which traditional Aborigines have no answers. Fortunately, there are Aborigines who do not want a traditional life; they would rather the life led by other Australians. That being so, they will have to make the same decisions about employment prospects and location, as other Australians.

When that discussion takes place right around Australia, the realisation will be that not everyone can live together. Not everyone on Palm Island can survive on Palm Island, Kowanyama or Doomadgee unless they become economically viable communities. I am not advocating that people be removed from Aboriginal communities. Heaven forbid. We must tell the young ones that there is little prospect of a future in these communities, on their lands.

If we know in our hearts and in our analysis that the carrying capacity of most Aboriginal communities, who now have sufficient land, is not enough to make all their residents Australian citizens, then a lot of Aboriginal children will have to leave and grow up somewhere else.

The experience of kids who have moved off farms is apposite. When dad and mum move on only one son or daughter runs the farm. The other two, three, four or so sons and daughters do not go back to the farm. They remember the farm, they visit the farm, and perhaps they learn their greatest lessons from the farm, perhaps some enduring values---their culture. The values gained on the farm, are theirs to hold or dispose of as they see fit. It is their decision about what they pass on to the next generation.

We must avoid this tendency to say Aboriginal culture must be preserved, and that somehow governments can preserve it. Governments cannot preserve culture. Aboriginal people own their own culture, and every mother and father in this room knows that you can pass it on, but you cannot be assured that your sons and daughters will want to hear the message that you pass on. You just cannot control the next generation. Thank goodness. They will go off, make and recreate culture as they see it.

I think we have come to a juncture where we say 'hang on, listen, we've made some great strides in the last 30 to 40 years.' The notion that Aboriginal people should be accepted into full Australian citizenship was all the discussions of the 1960's and 1970's. It had to be achieved not just in law but in fact, people talked about participation.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was hijacked, because the obsession was with land, as if it was a postcolonial situation where people had regained their land and were fighting to establish a nation. There was an obsession with preserving difference. It is what you do in zoos---preserve things and put them aside. Now, it is too late, for many who thought there was a life to be had on Aboriginal land. It is not too late in as much as Aboriginal people have a restored dignity derived from the knowledge that they can succeed in the modern world. Many Aborigines, many who have joined the Bennelong society, are getting on with life. They are fully competent. They can do whatever they want. They do not rely on us.

The good news is that, despite our bumbling policy mix of the last thirty years---or the last 200 years---many Aboriginal people have escaped the twin yokes of policy and culture. They have gone off all by themselves. They have found their own path. Now, many of those have been through intermarriage---between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. This is a reflection of people making their own decisions, with whom they shall live, how they will bring up their children, how they will live their lives. I am making the reflection that we are fortunate in this country, that the rate of inter-marriage is so high; around 70 per cent of all marriages of an aboriginal person are between an aboriginal person and a non-aboriginal person. It clearly says we are getting on. We are reconciled. It does not get any more reconciled until the individual makes up their own mind to create a life with others. That is fine for them, but we still have those Aboriginal people who are sitting on missions from the 1960s, who gained their freedom but lost their foothold in the economy.

In a sense, the drawbridge was lifted up, and they were left there. They were left there with welfare money, but not with the ability to get on. Then their position was legitimised by the ANU and its like; who say 'this is how you should be, this is your land, this is your culture, these are your people' and all the rest. I would argue that the academics have taken power from those Aborigines and produced a whole new set of Aboriginal leaders who knew that they would come to power by using western education to represent their people, and no longer seeking equal opportunity, but the right to be different in a very radical way. To which I would say that is fine, but if you do it with my money, I get a say on how that money is spent. The latest craze from the academics is to have the Aboriginal population receive a permanent slice of the GDP and have it do as they please. We do not even allow the states to do that!

Is ATSIC Any More Than A Lobby Group?

Like John Hannaford, [chairman of the ATSIC Review who addressed the Bennelong conference] I agree that ATSIC should be an advocate. But should it be part of executive government? This is the sort of indistinct position that we legislated. This is the sort of game being played by Noel Pearson in Queensland, where there is an enormous confusion now about who is responsible for what. We have had three or four different Ministers sitting around the table with three or four different heads of Departments. Some of those Ministers are the local member, as well as being a Minister for Roads or whatever. There is only one other bloke at the table and that is Noel. Noel represents all of the indigenous people of Cape York!

The government does not know whom it represents because public servants find it difficult to know to whom to report---no one is running the show. Ministers do not even operate through Cabinet anymore. The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs is not there all the time. There is this hybrid---as is ATSIC. If you ever want to design a beast that is meant to fall at the first hurdle, you design an ATSIC or a Noel Pearson model. It will work early on because it is carried along by this great joy that 'this is it, we've got the new remedy, we've done it.' Then it falls in a hole and you try another one.

So, let me refer to another one. There is always something new in this game of Aboriginal separatism. A new product on the shelf. The Harvard University Project on American Indians. I had a look at this 20-year project on Indian communities which sought to explain why some succeeded and some do not. The study found that some American Indians live on their land and succeed in running their communities and businesses. I am glad they did. However, what the study does not tell us is; are there other American Indians who do not live on their land, who are also succeeding. If there are those people, who is going to say they are not American Indians?

Let us just have a look at the subset of all American Native Indians---those who live on American Indian land, and the authors say they have mostly failed. They found some success stories. Why were they success stories? Well, the successful communities usually had resources. But the resource base was not critical. Apparently, the critical factors were, stable institutions, fair and effective dispute resolution, separation of politics from business.

What they were really saying is, if you have a Western style system of management whereby you never have political leaders running the business, and political leaders' decisions are appealable to a separate body of appeal---judges or decision makers---then there is some prospect of success. The European community has taken perhaps a 100 years to work that out, we think that is good practice. So you if you are an American Indian community and you pick up the best of western practice, you separate politics from business, and you have fair and effective dispute resolution, and stable institutions, you may do well.

The study concluded that there had to be a 'cultural match' between the American Indian, or a particular tribe's ways and the European institutions, for the community to work. Now that seems to come down to this: the study did not find any indigenous successful communities, the successful ones were that ones that best mimicked the successes of the dominant culture. The successful communities were, perhaps by means of good teaching or cultural match, predetermined to succeed. They were self-selecting, the way in which they live was perhaps not that different to the way in which everyone else lives. They were successful. That is a great insight! The bleeding obvious! If you pick up the best ideas out there in the world, and use them, you will succeed. This message is the very antithesis of self-determination as demanded by Aboriginal leaders.

The other part the study left out of course was that they did not account for state support for the successful organisations. I did not see any reference to for instance, the casino licenses granted to Indian communities, or the tax breaks, I did not see any reference to that. If you have the best ideas outside your community, and you implement them, and your implementation probably works because you were culturally disposed anyway, and if you have a fair amount of state support, and you have the right resources, you should succeed. There you go. Game, set and match!

For everyone else, it is not going to happen. We have reached this point of bashing our heads against the wall, saying 'we want to be different', but those who have been successful are the least different. If that is too great a conundrum, too great a hurdle to jump, then someone in authority is going to have to do a bit of rejigging of policy. It has come to that point now in Aboriginal affairs where someone has to take charge.

What do I say to the teacher in Kowanyama about who is going to take charge? Who is going to make kids go to school? Give them the chance. That is the point that we have reached and I do not know whether ATSIC will provide a voice for Aboriginal people.......

Thank you.