Bennelong Society Conference 2005:
Remote Aboriginal Communities: Where are the Jobs?

'The First Five Years and the Next Five Years'

Hon. Gary Johns

The Bennelong Society was formed at a Workshop entitled, Aboriginal Policy: Failure, Reappraisal and Reform, which took place in Melbourne in December 2000. The workshop was organised by Peter Howson, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the McMahon Government, and was a follow-up to earlier conferences on Aboriginal policy organised by Quadrant in Sydney in 1999 and 2000.

The view of the Society has been that the most wretched Aborigines are those who are least integrated. The evidence on this is clear. Government policy meanwhile has been, until very recently, hampered by the orthodoxy of separatism. While there are aspects of separatism (and self-determination) that may be useful, there are certain irreducible minima in the integration route. The minima strike at the heart of collective economic self-determination.

In this regard there are three lessons from the last five years.

Lesson One

There is no escaping a thorough grounding in the western education system and all that that entails for indigenous culture.

It was in the first Quadrant workshop that we learned from Derek Hunter of Kormilda College that the educational performance of Aboriginal students in the NT was declining. In the midst of a general expectation of progress in all things, this came as a real shock. The immediate cause of the decline was truancy. In the words of Pastor Paul Albrecht the attempt to 'aboriginalise' education has created immense confusion. In the midst of the confusion parents have forgotten about the importance of education, and students have stayed away.

The data that would allow comparison of the performance of Aboriginal students in remote areas and those in the cities and regions is not available. Education departments regard the data as 'too sensitive'.

Lesson Two

Either Aboriginal culture changes or Aborigines remain dependent on the 'White man's' wealth.

It was in the first Bennelong workshop that we were informed by John Reeves QC that 'most of the $500 million that flowed to Aboriginal Territorians during the first twenty years of the Land Rights Act was expended in Land Council administration costs and short-term consumption by individual Aborigines. Very little of it seems to have been applied to improving the prospects for future generations of Aboriginal Territorians.'

The cause of short-term consumption is the failure to understand wealth creation. This failure has two sources, payments, whether welfare or royalty, and traditional culture.

Pastor Albrecht explains the latter. 'It is at the economic level that the settlers who came to Australia, and the Indigenous people never understood each other, and still don't understand each other. The Indigenous people's understanding of economy ... is at the traditional extreme of a traditional-modern continuum ... The Indigenous people saw ritual as the means by which they produced what they needed. They then collected and hunted what they had created and produced through ritual. In economic terms correct ritual produces wealth. When it is suggested to Aborigines that the wealth enjoyed by Mainstream Australians is the result of work, this is seen as an inadequate answer. They view what we call work in the same way as they viewed hunting and gathering i.e., collecting what had previously been created, in this case by White men/Government through their secret rituals.'

Lesson Three

There are limits to in situ adjustment.

The Reverend Steve Etherington (researcher in educational anthropology) informed us that 'Almost no Aboriginal people live a traditional lifestyle or even want to. We have unintentionally created a group of people who are required to be on permanent holiday at various outstation /homeland centres without any meaningful employment and with a white staff to undertake management of areas of life that every other Australian sees as part of his own responsibility. This kind of publicly supported post-traditional lifestyle bears only the most superficial resemblance to pre-contact lifestyles and will create unemployable people capable only of living in this artificial environment.

Steve's policy prescription at that time was, 'Providing some forms of government-scaffolded, structured real employment in remote communities is the biggest single need in Aboriginal policy.'

In recent correspondence Steve has changed his policy prescription. He now observes that, 'If the government put policies in place to assist movement to housing in urban areas, a large number of [indigenous] people, particularly young mothers, would make this move on a permanent basis. We are talking more nowadays about the unliveable nature of these communities---survival and the protection of children will motivate people---cultural and linguistic maintenance are relative luxuries. As for kinships ties, these are precisely the thing driving people away from their communities.'

Steve continues, 'The necessity to provide employment to avoid social dysfunction will resolve into the question of whether it is feasible to create employment in remote areas. The alternative is to encourage a movement to urban centres. This will no doubt involve a lot of adjustment and a period of turbulence as school attendance and other aspects of child care are built in to people's thinking. Most present day adults will never be able to enter the workforce. The way past the mess is with the generation about to be born.'

'There is no way to move from the present dysfunction to mainstream employment without a hiatus period. For me the question is which kind of discomfort yields the best outcomes---a period of transition or a further stage in the downward spiral? I believe the cost of failing to act radically now, in human terms and in economic terms will be greater than allowing a movement of people to where jobs might be created and where, regardless of jobs in the short term, the kids can be protected and schooled.'

'I believe ... that people are infinitely more valuable in an absolute sense, than their cultures, which are often more valued by people who don't live in them, and whose interest in their maintenance may be quite selfish.'

These are three powerful lessons and they are seeping into policy.

Talk of a Treaty, collective rights, self-determination and reconciliation have come and gone. In their stead there is talk of changing individual behaviour, economic integration, placing human rights ahead of cultural rights, and adjustment and transition. Gone too are parts of the political architecture of self-determination, namely ATSIC. To follow will be many Aboriginal controlled service organisations in health, legal services, education and housing. CDEP will be reformed, although it will always be an inferior form of job provision and/or job preparation. In essence, CDEP is recognition that there is next to no economy in remote areas. As important, it is a recognition that programs requiring a high degree of supervision are very difficult to administer in remote locations.

Indeed, this is the problem, as intense was the desire in the assimilation period for missionaries to micro-manage their 'flock', and in the collective self-determination period for Aboriginal organisations to micro-manage their 'people', is the desire in the post land-rights phase by government to micro-manage their 'clients'. Can public servants out-perform missionaries and field officers, can they out-perform Aboriginal leaders and white managers? I doubt it.

Make no mistake, Australia has been through the last great communitarian revolution, and the toll has been heavy indeed. Many Aborigines escaped the collectives, namely those who were educated by the missions, or whose families intermarried or who had the wherewithal or gumption or assistance to get out. But those with least contact with the modern world were swept up and saved for something better, the last anti-civilisation stand of the intellectuals. Aborigines were the human guinea pigs.

What is in store in the next five years?

Those who believe that a land-based solution to Aboriginal strife is appropriate will see all programs through the 'difference' prism. Adjustments will be principally on the part of the dominant society to accommodate the minority culture. Payments and services will be arranged as and where people choose to live, jobs will be sought where none exist, or where they do exist, pressure will be brought to bear on employers to accommodate cultural difference.

The Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, for example, aims to improve desert livelihoods. The partner organisation Desert Knowledge Australia sells itself as 'the unique knowledge of living well in the desert.' What is living well in the desert? A better question for the CRC to study is what a realistic time is for a community or an individual to adjust to the fact that unless a major resource company comes to the community, there will probably never be a viable economy. The program is trying to invent an economic base where none exists.

There are around 1200 discrete remote Aboriginal communities throughout northern Australia. There are, for example, now 180 excisions in the Kimberley, that is 180 different communities or townships that house just a handful of people, and the number is growing. Governments, or occasionally a land council, fund them. They are the price for buying peace between families and groups that fight over land and royalties and public funds. Interventions that rely on land generally consist of three pay-offs---money, jobs and new settlements. Unless there is a trust established the money does not last long. Only some gain and retain the few jobs that wait. As for new settlements, the situation is perverse. The settlement involves housing, water reticulation, sewerage, electricity generation, and telecommunications and so on. This infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain. The organisations that know this best are emergency services, police, Telstra, medical services and all of the other organisations that have to provide service.

Where is this renewed in-migration leading? What is the purpose of the land rights movement when Aborigines cannot live; indeed, do not wish to live off the land? What is the balance of government obligations to provide services and to provide choices? Providing services to tiny remote communities, perversely, denies the inhabitants the opportunity to engage in a wider world.

The re-possession of land or in some cases, the de jure recognition of de facto possession, does not provide a solution to Aboriginal despair. It is more likely that the strife derives from the inability to bridge an overwhelming gap between two worlds, the closed and heavily kinship-obligated Aboriginal world and the open and transaction-based modern world. Solutions that ignore this fundamental problem are doomed to fail. Indeed, land rights and equal service provision may make adjustment more difficult. Mutual obligations may help, but may raise the price of adjustment. As Aborigines seek to re-establish a connection with their country by living on their country, sometimes abandoning existing digs for new ones, sometimes moving from regional centres where the experience has not been good, the cost can be huge. Not just in financial terms, but in the complete disjunction between the requirements of surviving in the dominant society and the regeneration of the old society. The cost is an even more alienated culture built on welfare dependence.

It is important in this regard to distinguish between isolation and insularity. Insularity, which can arise from the desire for solidarity, can of course be experienced in the middle of the city, Redfern for example. Isolation may create problems of service provision, but providing services to someone or some group, which is integrated into the society, is not overly difficult. The combination of insularity and isolation is deadly.

On the other hand, those who believe that Aboriginal people are already adjusting to the dominant culture, albeit in some cases poorly, realize it is impossible to deny adjustment. What follows from this view is that payments and services should be delivered on the same basis as other citizens. Unemployment benefits should be delivered to people who look for work, children must attend school until the leaving age, and illegal activities should be punished and so on. Programs based on adjustment have a chance of succeeding. For example, of the 100 Aboriginal children at Karratha high school, 30 are chosen to enter an after-school program. In essence, this program supports their study each day at a safe and quiet place, away from home. State and federal government and local resource companies support it. The program is meeting with some success. Boarding schools, where Aboriginal children can escape their ruinous home lives also provide a chance of adjustment.

The adjustment path, criticised as assimilation, is for the present generation of young Aborigines in rural and remote Australia made more costly because of the flight to remote locations and the provision of services to such locations, and the cargo cult which places a net under non-viable communities.

Yet, previous ways brought reconciliation between adjustment to the modern world and a chance to walk in the other world. Take for example the 55-year-old WA Aboriginal teacher who has had a successful career. He was taken from his mother; his father was alleged to be alcoholic, and lived at a mission boarding school north of Perth. This form of intervention is not now favoured, even when a child is in danger, but it gave this man a life he would not have had. After 25 years in a successful career, he has left the employ of the education department. He has chosen to return to his country and to make money by explaining Aboriginal culture to resource companies, and to assist these companies in managing their indigenous workforce.

If government has led people down a path that suggested to them it was possible to escape adjusting to the rules of a modern economy, a modern legal system, and a modern welfare state, they have consigned them to the dustbin of history.