Other people like Mundine think in terms of empowering Indigenous people through individual ownership within a collective framework (with which I have some problems but nevertheless) but Pearson always seems to play into the big stick welfare discourse, and really has very little to say that’s positive these days. It’s fine to say jobs are the answer, but that doesn’t go far towards doing the hard work of figuring out how to create them, or the commitment that’s necessary financially to create opportunity in terms of both skills and outcomes.

Anyway, I’m full of ‘I don’t knows’ on this subject.

I don’t know if it’s welfare dependency, though Noel makes a good case IMO.
I don’t know why Indigenous women and children are subject to horrific violence.
I don’t know if it’s the vast gulf between traditional cultures and post-industrial economic realities.
I don’t know if it’s better in the long term for Indigenous people to get with mainstream culture or not.
I don’t know if giving them back the desert and the scrub and the ghost gums and the dry river beds and the red river gums and the mountain ranges is really going to help.

I’d just like to be able to walk through the streets of Alice without feeling this constant need to burst into tears.

Apologies for a pointless comment.

It would be good if Pearson had as much compassion as you.

As for domestic violence happening everywhere, that’s true - but many of the Indigenous women in Alice are literally the walking dead. I’ve never seen anything like it, anywhere. Something essential to life has been beaten out of them. It’s horrible; I would never have believed it possible.

This is the nub of the issue - Pearson is conflating problems with alcohol and violence and unemployment. The solutions are interlocking, but claiming it’s all down to “welfare dependency” is misleading. It’s astonishing to me that he doesn’t believe in cultural dispossession. But maybe as a mission boy educated at Sydney University, he hasn’t felt too much of it.

If you could find the link, Rob, I’d be interested in reading it.

I don’t know about Queensland, but I do know about Alice. And I can tell you that the sight of Aborigines shuffling from the ‘bad’ end of town towards the bottleshops every day at 2 pm, when they open, and emerging with their 2 litre casks of port and heading down to the dry river bed to drink is a dreadful sight. For those of us who are sensitive and sympathetic to their plight, our hearts break a little more every time we see it; and I don’t care if that sounds paternalistic or not, it’s not the issue. Others see it in other ways.

But I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think anyone here does. All that seems possible is to make and mend. Mend the women whose eyes are dead, who’ve lost the living spark to men’s violence; mend the kids who were bashed in utero, and won’t live past two or five or 13.

It’s tough out here. Textbooks aren’t going to help. Pearson seems to have some good, strong ideas. Let’s try them out. Nothing could be worse than what we have already.

Maybe you have and I’m being judgemental, but if not - live in or even visit Katherine, Carnarvon, Port Hedland, Wilcannia, Dubbo, Geraldton, Roebourne. You get to the point where you think it would be worth just about any sacrifice of personal liberties just to see what you could do once the most hellish end of the hopelessness was gone. And taking the “alcohol is a problem for everyone approach” line just dilutes the reality again - it is THE problem for these communities. I don’t give a toss for bored housewives in Noosa who have martini’s for lunch - I do care about indigenous kids who watch their Dad drink himself blind and then flog their Mum. The rest is just sophistery.

The way forward for Indigenous affairs is the creation of genuine economic opportunities. There’s not much point going to school - Black or White - if you feel (reasonably) that nothing lies at the end of the educational journey. The Queensland government has done some good stuff here - for instance negotiating agreements with mining companies to take on Indigenous staff and apprentices in remote areas, and providing the school and technical education infrastructure to ensure these staff are properly trained. This has also involved a whole of government approach with certain Departmental CEOs being responsible for partnerships with particular Indigenous communities to cut across the dysfunctions of bureaucratic infighting and buckpassing. That’s the way forward - and involving Indigenous people themselves in determining their economic future - not any species of paternalism, however well-intentioned.
Posted by Mark Bahnisch at November 11, 2004 10:58 AM [permalink]

Tying welfare benefits to school attendance need not (and should not) be confined to Aboriginal welfare recipients. I agree it shouldn’t be colour-based, and I’m sure extending that sort of mutual obligation across the whole community would attract widespread support. Why should parents remain on long-term welfare support if they don’t bother to send their kids to school? At least if we returned to a system of enforcing school attendance, we might have some chance of breaking the generational cycle of welfare dependency.

Moreover, part of the measures of which you complain includes extending the “mutual obligation” system that already applies elsewehere to Aborignial communities as well. That involves removing current racially discriminatory aspects. Trouble is, there are few “work for the dole” or training schemes in remote areas. That’s why the CDEP program has evolved in remote communities, to take the place of urban “work for the dole” schemes. But a CDEP scheme requires a whole community vote to be impelemented, and many of them work very poorly i.e. they require token attendance at best to be eligible for the fortnightly payment. For instance, the Bagot community in Darwin has a CDEP program, but you’d never know it from the state of the grounds and buildings. Most participants do SFA. They’d be much better off being forced into general community “work for the dole” or skills training schemes.

We need to take a pragmatic rather than ideaologically-driven approach (either left or right ideology cf the debate about whole language versus phoics that we’re having on another thread). What works and what doesn’t?
Posted by Ken Parish at November 11, 2004 11:03 AM [permalink]

Yeah, but Ken, there are problems with “work for the dole” schemes in cities too. Compared to the Keating government’s Working Nation programmes, there is evidence that “work for the dole” performs much worse in generating employment outcomes. Part of the difficulty is that the Commonwealth (as in other areas of policy where they have a strongly ideological bent) has suppressed its own evaluations of such schemes because they show that they don’t work as well as the previous Government’s. Not that this is restricted to the Libs. I had a consultancy in 98 to evaluate a programme by Queensland Health to raise awareness of breast cancer screening. The incoming Labor Minister canned the whole programme before the evaluation was done because it had been the previous government’s idea. So what works and what doesn’t can also fall prey to party politics.

Every time I’ve raised issues of Indigenous policy, I’ve taken care not just to be critical of the Government, but to suggest what direction policy should be moving in, recognising that it’s a highly complex area.

ATSIC was indeed flawed, but nothing is going to work if Indigenous people themselves aren’t involved in the solutions. Punitive “incentives” for non-existent jobs aren’t going to help anyone, except perhaps Mr Pearson get a generous consultancy fee.

And, yeah, jobs. The partnerships that the Queensland government has facilitated between mining companies and TAFE for the training and employment of Indigenous youth are an excellent model, but it’s very hard to see a viable economic base emerging in some remote communities. What’s certain is that beating people over the head with a stick won’t make them get jobs in areas where there simply are none.

BTW, I meant to say in the earlier comment, before my non-vegetarian sausages threatened to catch fire - such are my modest culinary needs - that instead of indulging in a lot of theorising, we should maybe listen to the old men out in the desert, when they say, ‘Don’t give us money; give us jobs’.