The bit that most interests me starts half way down - what's happened to the bureaucracy delivering services to remote indigenous communities - as you may know Mrs Hinge spent half her life in that space but the move to PMC, catastrophically inneffective new programs, and the inability of the new department to even understand the indigenous setting meant she took a (very generous) package and is well out of it.
Abbott loses Aboriginal friends as disappointed expectations pile up
Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian
March 14, 2015 12:00AM
133 comments
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WHEN the Prime Minister for indigenous affairs leaned into the microphone of a Kalgoorlie radio station last Tuesday and expressed his view that existence on remote West Australian outstations was a “lifestyle choice”, he may not quite have foreseen the full suite of consequences — the splintering of his indigenous support coalition, the furious pouncing of the radical intelligentsia, the vast manipulation of his simplistic words.
But he was already well aware that the future funding of outstations in the bush was a subject rich in potential for controversy — a touchstone for his leadership on Aboriginal policy and a topic rich in emotive resonances.
In the wake of an agreement reached by the commonwealth last year with the West Australian government, Premier Colin Barnett announced his intention to withdraw funding from about 150 small outstations, but he was imprecise in defining his list of settlements to shutter, at one point even seeming to suggest the large Kukatja community of Balgo may be a place with devastating dysfunction at its heart.
The dilemma for policy architects is that there are many types of outstation and homeland, controlled by different legal regimes and with different histories. They range from family outcamps on the Dampier Peninsula near Broome to permanent communities of desert dwellers seeking to live a deeply ritual life. The present uncertainty has filled remote bush people throughout Western Australia with fear: many smaller settlements feel they may be on the state’s shortlist for funding cuts.
Just a week before Abbott’s Kalgoorlie trip, the atmospherics had been primed by his Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, who gave an interviewer his sketch of bush conditions: “Many of my communities live on the floor, it is like a cave. I think one of the characteristics of civilisation must be that you don’t have to eat at the same level as your animals; it must be something like that.”
The Prime Minister let these remarks drift by unrebuked. He elected instead to home in on the economics of outstations.
The lie of the land in the smallest remote settlements is plain enough: Aboriginal men and women choose to live there, and make that choice for multiple reasons, and receive a state subsidy that helps ease the hardship in the decision. Traditional people remain on their own country because they like to be on land they feel is close to them; they gain a sense of sustenance from prolonging or reviving their culture.
Indeed, their culture is linked to place, it survives in its most integral form on its own ground, and it is something distinct and original to that world.
But in most such cases traditional people are opting to live beyond the reach of conventional schooling, health clinics or employment, even beyond easy transport infrastructure.
Almost always, their outstations are on private Aboriginal land. Hence the immediate dilemma for the state as potential infrastructure funding body — just as Abbott outlined it.
But the paradox lies exactly here. Only today, in the conditions of technological modernity, with high-speed broadband in the picture, do outstations at last have the potential to develop as viable long-term residential centres. There is no reason that schooling and economic opportunity cannot reach the homelands of the desert and the north.
Remoteness is no longer an absolute bar. To the contrary, the argument for the Aboriginal presence in the furthest reaches of the landscape is augmented by the urgent need to manage the continental land mass, to develop and husband its resources and to compensate for the progressive rundown of mining communities and the departure of regional Australia’s non-indigenous population to the coasts.
The indigenous population groups of the inland and the tropics are the natural workforce for projects that aim to develop the country’s outback and tropical savanna: they are also often the owners of the resources.
If the large native title agreements covering the remote north and centre are to mean anything, they strongly imply a continued Aboriginal life on traditional lands, and a degree of subsidy similar at least to that provided by the commonwealth and states to outlying and regional townships with mixed populations.
Far-flung though they are, the small homelands often provide a simpler, safer and healthier environment for extended families than the crowded larger indigenous communities where official services are clustered, and where drug dealers and grog smugglers can operate with impunity.
Outstations, though, are not merely places to live. They have a special role in the Aboriginal thought-world: they are the old, true country of tradition, and they are also the promised land, the customary estates that the first firebrands of the Aboriginal rights movement fought to win back.
The initial northern homelands settled in the early 1970s were carved out of the stringybark forests of Arnhem Land by missionaries and young Aboriginal men who saw themselves as culture warriors, seeking to preserve their languages and beliefs.
In the deserts of the centre, the rough outcamps set up by advance parties leading the exodus from official ration stations were deliberately placed very close to ritual sites. Even today, indigenous men and women in the cities who have never lived on outstations, or dreamed of living on one, regard the continued presence of communities on traditional lands as a vital element in the compact between incomers and the descendants of Australia’s first peoples.
The depth of this conviction explains the strength of the reaction Abbott’s phrasing provoked. In midweek, his most prominent indigenous backer, Noel Pearson, went on ABC’s Radio National to put him to the sword. This was the signal that Abbott’s standing in the indigenous realm has been transformed.
On election in September 2013 he was a potential saviour: goodwill flowed towards him. Today he is too toxic even for his own former supporters.
Pearson had clung grimly to Abbott in the hope that the commonwealth would bring in the Forrest welfare package, which picked up the Cape York reform program’s blueprint for full-scale welfare income management controls.
On Wednesday, he was accusing Abbott of reducing complexities to thought bubbles: “A very disappointing and hopeless statement by the Prime Minister.”
Indigenous leaders closely connected to the bush and poised at the vanguard of powerful constituencies are also now out in open field campaigning against the Prime Minister and his policies: the chief executive of the Northern Land Council, Joe Morrison, delivered a speech in Canberra last month accusing Scullion and his Northern Territory political party of trying to seize control of indigenous lands held under the Land Rights Act.
The combined Aboriginal organisations of the Territory are up in arms over cuts and have proclaimed their lack of confidence in the commonwealth government. This fierce opposition is the natural consequence of Abbott’s policy announcements and the new architecture of Aboriginal affairs he has put in place.
The goodwill of bush people that he brought with him into office has evaporated. At the half-way point of his government’s first term, the portfolio has already all but defeated him. A quick overview of the various initiatives he has set in train will paint the picture.
Abbott shifted the key indigenous services bureaucrats into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, causing a turbulence that has yet fully to subside, and elevating officials inexperienced in the field to positions of controlling prominence.
Federal cabinet approved a $530 million cut over the next half-decade in the dedicated Aboriginal programs budget, and a wholesale redesign of service delivery funding arrangements into five streams. The impact of this Indigenous Advancement Strategy is only now being felt for the first time: it is an earthquake.
Specialist Aboriginal legal services and outstation organisations in the Northern Territory have had their budgets slashed, the larger land councils may lose their ranger program funding, while small, long-established centres such as the Institute for Aboriginal Development, a language research and education campus in the heart of Alice Springs, face being shut down.
The result of these decisions, multiplied across the whole country, is a substantial cutback in positions for the educated indigenous middle classes now employed in publicly funded entities: a cutback that will have a harsh long-term effect on regional Australian society.
But there is money aplenty for preferred projects. About $40m has already been poured into Abbott’s flagship bush program, the Remote School Attendance Strategy, which now employs substantial numbers of Aboriginal community members, engaged in a futile campaign to coax or constrain young children into classrooms. It remains a fiasco.
For policy advice Abbott set up a special indigenous affairs advisory council: its chairman, Warren Mundine, has emerged as a free-speaking and sharp critic of the Prime Minister’s regular slips of the tongue.
In a bid to change the relationship between indigenous populations and the bureaucrats who fund them, Abbott was induced by Cape York’s Pearson to explore an opt-in “empowered communities” project: many meetings and Canberra consultations later it is still nothing more than a deranged spaghetti diagram.
Jobs for the jobless of the indigenous world was a key feature of Abbott’s pre-election rhetoric, but the Remote Jobs and Communities Program his team inherited from Labor has hit the skids: work-for-the-dole schemes will now be phased in.
Scullion views with equanimity the prospect of bush Aboriginal men and women subsisting on such programs for as long as three decades: a big retreat from the initial dreams of large-scale opportunity.
In fact, the agenda for remote and regional communities is now dominated by a single big idea that has gripped the Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy. When Abbott asked mining magnate Andrew Forrest to provide a report on indigenous job training, he was surprised to receive a document outlining a large expansion of the scope of welfare income quarantining measures.
Launching the report after a long delay, Abbott adjudged many of its recommendations over-bold. Today Scullion and Abbott’s parliamentary secretary for indigenous matters, Alan Tudge, are canvassing the Forrest “healthy welfare card” package as their preferred means for combating the misuse of welfare income. It would be a new intervention across the remote bush that would make the 2007 NT Emergency Response seem a mere bagatelle.
The evidence-based case for the viability of this measure in today’s remote communities and regional centres has yet to be made, while the argument to secure the support of bush people has not even been attempted.
Such is the balance-sheet. This list is not some cruel caricature of commonwealth indigenous policy: it is commonwealth indigenous policy, in the plans of its administrators and in its impact or likely consequences on the ground.
Of course, Aboriginal affairs has been a graveyard of conservative dreams all through the past generation. When John Howard and Mal Brough planned their intervention in the Territory, they hoped to cut back sexual abuse of children, increase the remote housing stock and lift the number of community jobs.
Almost a decade on, the outcome has proved to be the precise opposite.
With the arrival of a new, committed Prime Minister at the helm in Canberra, though, there were hopes that the federal government, omnipotent in its control over the remote indigenous realm, might act with finesse as well as with dispatch.
Abbott’s pledge was that he would be a different kind of leader for indigenous Australians: he would consult Aboriginal people and move forward in concert with them, rather than seeking to impose one-size-fits-all solutions.
After all, he had a special connection with the communities of the centre and the north, he had seen the challenges they faced first-hand, and grasped the bond between bush people and their landscape.
When he went to northeast Arnhem Land late last year for his first Aboriginal community immersion week as Prime Minister, he listened deeply, spoke gently, comported himself with modesty and thrilled all with the tact and grace of his understanding.
He was on remote community land: land compromised by an imposed resources project and its associated works. He grasped the weight of ceremony and tradition; he wanted to craft a new way ahead. No mention then of lifestyle choices: the notion would have come as a great surprise to his host that week, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, whose religious life is firmly centred in his remote homeland of Dhanaya.
It is, then, the bitterness of disappointed expectations that now fuels the outrage Abbott’s stray remarks in Kalgoorlie whipped up. These responses highlight a self-created political problem of epic scale for the Prime Minister. It was he who crafted his persona as a committed supporter of indigenous rights and traditions.
He stands at the apex of the federal government, which retains prime responsibility for ensuring Aboriginal progress. And yet he seems distinctly unwilling to use his position and authority in support of the remote indigenous world.
The past fortnight’s ministerial and prime ministerial pronouncements have guaranteed the end of the short-lived rapprochement between bush Aboriginal people and the political parties of the conservative Coalition.
More than this, the focus has been thrown once more on to Abbott’s strange gift for damaging the interests of his own supporters and his declared cause.
If he survives as Prime Minister long enough to spend another week in an Aboriginal community setting, he could do worse than choose a suitably remote outstation — for the lifestyle, of course.
