After emerging from the Melbourne Writers Festival closing address tonight, a woman remarked to me that she’d never encountered such stillness at an event like that before.
She was right; a hush met the initially soft and then increasingly loud and angry voice of Noel Pearson at RMIT Storey Hall as he delivered his speech, “The Quest for a Radical Centre”.
That quiet wasn’t really punctured until a young man got up at the end of proceedings, even though there was no time for questions, and asked Pearson who he thought his audience was.
Presumably the query was meant to suggest we weren’t it.
Pearson responded that he gets his audiences where he can, and then tailors his message accordingly.
Given Pearson’s lecture was largely an attack on progressive thinking regarding Indigenous issues, we were exactly the people the speech was meant for.
After all, there were more than a few opinion shapers present, including the Vice-Chancellor of The University of Melbourne and the historian Robert Manne.
There was also a lot of the kind of non-famous white folk who go to writers’ festivals in attendance.
While Pearson railed against the lost chance of Mabo in relation to Aboriginal rights, and acknowledged the capacity of the conservative side of politics to, among other sins, deny the wrongs of the past, his greatest criticisms were for the Left.
If Pearson’s message can be summarised by the sound bite that there are no rights without responsibilities, it could be argued he thinks progressives have failed miserably when it comes to the latter.
“I don’t think the Left are clear about how we get above disadvantage”, he intoned at one point.
Contrary to the views of some of his opponents, Pearson didn’t come across as someone who’s doing the bidding for the Right, but as a realist who desperately wants to see changes in communities that are suffering due to problems like those created by booze and other drugs.
“When it comes to substance abuse”, Pearson said, “I’m on a unity ticket with John Howard.”
Pearson talked about the bloke who introduced marihuana into his community, with dire effects.
So much for ideas about the supposed harmlessness of that particular drug.
Pearson’s pragmatism, and what he described as his “pursuit of a cause”, surely explains his ability to transcend “Howard hating” and get on with trying to fix things.
The woman who spoke to me left clutching a copy of Pearson’s Griffith REVIEW essay, and seemed keen to engage with his ideas more.
Her willingness was surely shared by most of the people present.
Note: The documentary about Norma Khouri, Forbidden Lie$, is another Melbourne Writers Festival event that deserves a mention. It was fantastic, and you can read a little bit about it here.
Having been in the audience tonight, I didn’t know whether to applaud him or nut him.
I found him to be rather erratic tonight, most likely trying to justify being in lock step with the Government on the indigenous intervention. And it was the topic of intervention that he chose to focus on, taking aim at TEH LEFT (his argument sounding like it was against the tabloid version rather than the real Left) for always pursuing direct intervention rather than guiding families to take the lead. While there was some justification in attacking the welfare state as it relates to indigenous communities (introducing Pearson’s favourite concept of the ‘hand up’ over the ‘hand out’), he seems to me to have a warped idea of the concept of the welfare state. Welfare should never be considered as ongoing support on its own, but as a support for when regular income fails – of course, that brings up the issue of creating employment in remote communities (refer to the abolition of CDEP schemes as part of the intervention) – so it is fanciful for anyone to think that it’s anyone’s intention that entire communities should be perpetually propped up by welfare, the Left included.
If there’s one thing that he might have right, it’s that the Left’s quest for solidarity with the indigenous cause often runs over into petty meddling, and later into outright intervention – the ‘do-gooder’ syndrome. Somewhere between doing absolutely nothing, playing the progressive missionary and sending in the tanks lies the best solution for the problems of remote communities.
(And for the record, I nearly fell asleep during the address – and I have a reputation for drifting off during bad sermons!)
Well, it’s his schtick, and he does it well, if you can stand the moralising. But Pearson is far better as a critic of others than as someone who can do the hard work both of policy formulation and implementation through consultation, as the rather sad tale of the rush job on the Cape York Institute’s report and its lack of any support in actual studies or comparable policies for the carrot and an awful lot of stick welfare agenda he represents as the solution to all ills tells. Not to mention the even sadder story of the trials up in North Queensland.
He’s got the chance, and so we’ll see. But, as I say, it’s not going swimmingly so far. So I don’t buy the whole pragmatism/ideology dichotomy (and doesn’t he love dichotomies in the tried and true fashion of a “Third Way” thinker who claims to want to transcend them). It’s a false one, and he certainly is reinforcing Howard’s “practical” agenda which has delivered nothing but authoritarianism and bureaucratic overkill for eleven years. Contrary to all this guff about identifying the left with “welfare (dependency)”, things are very much more complex. The agenda of autonomy and self-determination in fact implies the opposite. But it’s never been properly tried.
As to that, he does trade on the reticence and guilt of a certain white liberal (not left) mentality. He’s a powerful communicator, and he picks his speaking position very well indeed. But talk to people who’ve worked with the bloke, and people who’ve been in the communities where the Qld government has given him a free hand, rather than listen to the rhetoric for which he hardly lacks an “audience” (he has one in every Saturday Australian). He’s right – his “ideas” should be judged by eating the pudding not its tempting aroma.
The big question that’s begged, which I’ve been saying for years and years, is where the “hand up” takes people where there aren’t opportunities to work in the mining industry. The Pearson/Brough notion of lots of Indigenous small businesses is a fantasy. The reality, as Howard has made clear recently, is assimilation and displacement into the towns. The desire is for a low wage labour force at a time when that’s very much in the interest of regional capital. The reality will be somewhat different. But while Pearson may be able to sponsor a few kids to go and attend Brisbane Grammar or something, his notion of “orbiting” really means creaming off an elite and letting the rest of the Indigenous peoples (plural – many of whom he doesn’t speak for – and the 4 Corners ep should have shown he doesn’t speak for many of his own if nothing else) find their niche in low waged poverty along with a lot of other non-Indigenous Australians.
I just don’t see where he gets the rep of being either an original or a deep thinker. He’s a success at pushing an agenda, and he is a true son to the hell fire and damnation Lutheran missionaries who once inhabited Hope Vale before the impending appointment of a lot of government “business managers” or Cape York Institute “project officers” who are more into whiteboards and action boxes on agenda papers than apocalyptic sermons.
AlexOnTheBus:
I neither like nor trust Pearson myself. No, that’s not Tall Poppy Syndrome; he could be a down-and-out or a world famous celebrity for all I care about his image or status. If he is an activist then I can’t blame him either for getting publicity, finding support and grabbing opportunities wherever he could to advance his cause – but he should have been a lot more careful because he has ended up looking like nothing more than a mouth-piece for the prime minister, the corporate shonkies and all that mob. I’ve just about given up on the propaganda apparatchiks [formerly called journalists] presenting alternative views from other well-informed Aborigines; lately, it has been Pearson or nothing when it comes to news on matters that affect Aborigines directly.
Attacking “The Left” [whatever that is supposed to mean in late-2007] is fine but what benefit will that have for Aborigines? Yes, the various governments [including the British!!!] should say SORRY to Aborigines for all the harm they have done …. and the well-meaning Do-Badders should say SORRY too for all the deaths they have unintentionally caused, for all the opportunities that they have accidently ruined and for all the misery they have inflicted on Aborigines with the best of intentions …. but what then? We need policies and programs that actually help Aborigines lead longer, healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives – and ones that are readily influenced by what Aborigines do actually want for themselves and preferably run by Aborigines, not ones that are imposed on them.
Just on CDEP: CDEP WAS REAL WORK!! of course there was a need for fine tuning and for experienced and relevant guidance at a local level but scrapping the whole scheme was incredibly stupid – or greedy. Which? If the same criteria were applied in the capital cities, those inside the big fancy glass buildings would now be forced to seek purposeful and honest work for a change [now there's an idea].
Pearson’s comment (in his “oration” on the “7:30 Report” a while back) that critics of Howard’s aboriginal intervention plan “are willing the protection and [succour] to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraq” seems like a good example of doing the Right’s bidding (or falling into its narrative).
Maybe Pearson was truly passionate about his cause and overstepped the mark out of frustration but that comment made me lose a lot of regard for him.
I just think Pearson was tailoring his message to the crowd.
The endless talk of the Left and Right bores the bottom off me (Pamela Bone persisted with it during a session on the media and Iraq on Saturday – yawn), but Pearson perceived what kind of people would be going to a writers festival event and had a go at them accordingly. I didn’t have a problem with that. Perhaps I mistook the silence for sleep. I liked his style.
“Pearsonâ??s comment (in his â??orationâ?? on the â??7:30 Reportâ?? a while back) that critics of Howardâ??s aboriginal intervention plan â??are willing the protection and [succour] to Aboriginal children to fail in the same way and as vehemently as they will failure in Iraqâ?? seems like a good example of doing the Rightâ??s bidding (or falling into its narrative).”
Sometimes inflamed language is needed, isn’t it?
Fair enough points, Mark, but I do think you need to win the hearts and minds of those liberals (they do have a lot of clout). Any movement needs its orators as well as its people doing the work on the ground.
PS – The event about the media and Iraq was really cranky and non-productive.
Id be likely to say the Iraq comment was meant to shake a few people out of comfortable assumptions.
Just holding a “correct” viewpoint and mouthing the right platitudes (sorry/walking across bridges etc) hasnt changed much on the ground. It may be important symbolical but visit somewhere like Roebourne in WA and tell me things are getting better.
Pearson is arguing for functioning civil societies THEN the symbolism. I think many people think he has abandoned these, Id venture to say no, they are further down on his list.
I also dont think it can be overstated the indirect damage done by the rights agenda at the expense of practical programs to ensure equal opportunities in education and employment for Aboriginals.
As Graham points out, CDEP is real work, it operates like a microeconomy in communities where the possibility of commercial employment apart from the mining sector is almost nonexistent. The government’s proposed alternative (although it has come to pass that STEP isn’t even a reality yet; it’s still out to tender. See here) is not real work, it is welfare.
Furthermore it is completely inflexible, in that if a job is offered to you and you refuse, citing so-called ‘cultural’ reasons (I’d have assumed they were just normal reasons, myself) such as not wanting to have to leave one’s community more or less permanently, or moral opposition to the mining industry, then you lose your support.
Thus, the government’s position, and Pearson’s by extension, as he supports this particular point, as is my understanding, is incoherent. ‘No more welfare’, ‘hand ups, not hand outs’ and all that rhetoric is not consistent with scrapping a functional (albeit partly flawed) employment program and placing all those who benefit from it back onto passive welfare.
Pearson is hard to read (‘erratic’ is too strong) and it is premature to describe him as a spokesperson for the Coalition. Read his Weekend Australian article (“big picture required”) and you will find another side to Pearson. In it he refers to Howard’s “punishing negativity” and criticises Howard’s lack of vision.
Correct, Jethro.
To accuse the broad left of bad faith is utterly ahistoric.
The Left didn’t pick winners from among the Aboriginal voices who were demanding a particular resolution of the racist arrangements that characterised the Aboriginal predicament as late as the 1960s.
Aborigines themselves demanded land rights and a return of country. Elements of the Left fell in behind those demands. This was a novel position for the broad Australian Left because until that time their dominant model for a future Australia was secularist and colour-blind. For example, the left favoured equal pay for Aboriginal stockmen and other staff on cattle stations.
Pearson should remember that it was the Right who wanted to keep those racist arrangments in place. And the mainstream rightist parties in Australia pandered to this racism. If the maintstream rightists had their way, little would have changed.
Aboriginal separatism has produced and perpetuated many evils. There is nothing in Howard’s emergency legislation that is likely to alleviate those evils in the medium term, and the legislation brings a fresh crop of evils.
Pearson is demanding that critics of Howard’s emergency legislation simply shut up. It is impermissible, according to Pearson, for the little boy in the crowd to shout “the Emperor has no clothes!”
Pearson embraces the catch-phrase “civil society”. What sort of civil society frowns upon a small boy stating an evident truth?
And as for the concept “willing failure”: is Pearson implying that if every leftist in the world went to church to pray for success in Iraq, success would be more likely?
Magical thinking of that kind is intellectually bankrupt.
And has he spoken out on this little atrocity?
Unless or until he gives the Liberals a good go for their current policies, I’m going to think of Noel Pearson as Australia’s own Uncle Tom. It’s a big fucking asset grab, it’s doesn’t help fight child abuse in any way shape or form, and it’s WRONG. As far as I am concerned, he can save his pontifications on the feel-good Left until the next election.
And what Graham Ball said.
One of Noel Pearson’s greatest echievements over the past ten years or so has been to help create a climate where it became acceptable for Governments to begin dismantling the welfare state. It doesn’t matter how noble his reasons for advocating this may be, the ultimate outcome can only lead to disaster for the poor and disadvantaged of this country, white and black. So far as I’m concerned he’s always done the bidding of the far Right and is a traitor to his people.
Pearson’s column in Weekend GG is about the most chastening read around on a Saturday, and as Fred notes, this weekend is above the pack.
He focusses on the distraction of arguments stemming from left, or right dogmatic positions. His analysis of the 4 chief policy issues facing the next govt – and he doesn’t mind who it will be, that much is clear – is clinical, and logical.
He certainly does tailor his message to an audience, what effective communicator wouldn’t?
I reckon he’s misread in these forums far more than is useful, or necessary.
It is upsetting for liberal white Australians, who are concerned about indigenous issues, to feel that their support and point of view is not appreciated, but Pearson wants change in the communities not a consensus of opinion on the coast. White opinion makers (no matter what their political persuasion) will not be there, day to day, fixing the problems. A leader inspires his people to act in their own best interests and that is what he is doing.
1) It seems that when the subaltern DOES speak, the white bourgeois narcissists of the Luvvie-Left hold their hands over their ears, cats-bum, hurl insults, before charging back to the seminar-room to continue the transgressive deconstructions.
2) So far as I’m concerned he’s always done the bidding of the far Right and is a traitor to his people.
It would seem Noel is not the only one to use inflammatory rhetoric!
Incidentally, in relation to Katz’s point:
For example, the left favoured equal pay for Aboriginal stockmen and other staff on cattle stations.
Pearson should remember that it was the Right who wanted to keep those racist arrangments in place.
One of the earlier essays I’ve read by Pearson addresses this point – he argued that equal wages seemed like a good idea, but it in effect may have caused hundreds of Aboriginal stockmen and workers to lose their jobs and further lose their independence.
“Pearson is arguing for functioning civil societies THEN the symbolism. I think many people think he has abandoned these, Id venture to say no, they are further down on his list.
I also dont think it can be overstated the indirect damage done by the rights agenda at the expense of practical programs to ensure equal opportunities in education and employment for Aboriginals.”
You’re right. He hasn’t abandoned them. He mentioned them (e.g. Mabo). People have selective hearing. Indeed, you’re right on both counts.
“Pearson is hard to read (â??erraticâ?? is too strong) and it is premature to describe him as a spokesperson for the Coalition. Read his Weekend Australian article (â??big picture requiredâ??) and you will find another side to Pearson. In it he refers to Howardâ??s â??punishing negativityâ?? and criticises Howardâ??s lack of vision.”
Exactly Fred. Again, I will say that he tailors his messages. There’s no point berating lefties to a bunch of righties. It may make the righties feel good, but Pearson’s surely about more than that.
“Unless or until he gives the Liberals a good go for their current policies, Iâ??m going to think of Noel Pearson as Australiaâ??s own Uncle Tom.”
That’s outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.
At any rate, the same principles Pearson’s supports apply to other communities as well.
“It is upsetting for liberal white Australians, who are concerned about indigenous issues, to feel that their support and point of view is not appreciated, but Pearson wants change in the communities not a consensus of opinion on the coast. White opinion makers (no matter what their political persuasion) will not be there, day to day, fixing the problems. A leader inspires his people to act in their own best interests and that is what he is doing.”
As a liberal (small l cum social democrat), I agree.
“So far as I’m concerned he’s always done the bidding of the far Right and is a traitor to his people.”
Again, Outrageous. He’s a pragmatist, and pragmatist know that sometimes you’ve got to deal with the far Right.
via collins
Your post is the wisest, most accurate, and succinct of all the commentary I have ever read on LP about Pearson!
Are you referring to my comments, to Mal Brough’s proposed asset grab, or both?
Darlene,
I agree Pearson has to be a political pragmatist to deal with Howard and his cronies. But he didn’t have to set the agenda for them years ago on social welfare issues, that ultimately resulted in social welfare policies such as work for the dole,instead of working for proper wages,breaching the unemployed so they’re left homeless and starving, trying to force disabled people into work when they’re not fit to do so, and punishing single mothers for being single mothers. Pearson was one of the first to encourage with these ultra-right wing nostrums in Australia with his decrying of so-called welfare dependency and JWH leapt on them with alacrity as soon as he came to power.
I don’t think it’s very helpful to label comments that you disagree with as ‘outrageous’, or even ‘absolutely outrageous’, particularly when they relate to actions that are clearly ‘outrageous’ in themselves.
Indeed it’s a measure of the extent to which public discourse has been tarnished in recent years that Pearson isn’t called to account to explain how removing assets from Aboriginal communities assists these communities in any way shape or form, and why its primary aim isn’t to destroy these communities.
In any reasonable society, this blatant rascism would be a national scandal.
I any event, Pearson will probably be remembered as the Aboriginal leader that condoned and supported the government’s destruction of the last vestages of indigenous independence.
South African mineowners prospered under a very similar IR policy during the days of apartheid.
The Aboriginal stockmen took the decision themselves to strike against racially based IR arrangements.
You and Pearson are perpetuating the myth of the “happy Sambo”, an attitude that denies Aborigines agency and ultimately their humanity.
Katz
Re: stockmans wages
Its was another case of morally right but with huge unintended downside.
That seems to be a common refrain in a lot of this argument, sometimes doing what is apparently right has an unforeseen (by the moral person) consequences.
The right to drink may be seen in this context. It was morally indefensible that the Aboriginal population didn’t have the right to drink alcohol the same as others. Unfortunately the morally right position has caused huge damage, cultural and individual.
The fair pay dispute was entirely morally right, no doubt about it, but it did more to drive Aboriginals living on their land and preserving their traditions into towns than any deliberate policy could have.
Many stations were set up to provide basic facilities for families and their employees (too basic in most circumstances) including stores for basics. Most properties could run with many many less staff than they had, which is effectively what happened. Instead the work of 10 being done by 50 (receiving the pay of ten) economics dictated if you wanted 10 that’s all you paid for.
Sometimes morally right causes damage, often that wont be seen until years later. The trick is to acknowledge that can happen and attempt to alleviate it.
The great disconnect in the Pearson-haters is not appreciating the inextricable link between private property rights and the functioning economies of responsible citizens they produce. The notion of imposing bourgeois “rights” onto societies that are not functioning liberal economies is naive.
OTOH I’m not convinced that there is much point in just berating lefties to a bunch of lefties either. Criticism can be productive to building a more mature, nuanced view of the situation but it needs to engage with the person or group being criticised, such as acknowledging past sucesses as well as failures.
I’m not always convinced that Pearson engages those he criticises in this way.
Once the deliberate policy allowing for the original dispossession is treated as a fait accompli, that is.
Martin B
Without the stations there would have been lower numbers of Aboriginals living an at least semi-traditional lifestyle. Aboriginals lives on the stations were way ahead of the hand to mouth struggle of the hunter gatherer.
“Once the deliberate policy allowing for the original dispossession is treated as a fait accompli, that is.”
Which means what? The land should have been left unimproved? The lands would have emptied of aboriginals for exactly the same reason stations attracted groups of Aboriginies. Life was easier, food was not a struggle and the white man had objects of beauty and usefulness far beyond stone and bone tools.
It would have led to what is prevalent today (only more so), a large urban Aboriginal population disconnected from traditions.
I think the “pull” effect of the stations is a massively underrated and ignored part of Aboriginal history. It is nowhere near as dramatic or tragic as the stories of subjugation or massacre, but it played a massive role in why Aboriginals stopped being as nomadic as before white settlement.
mole, your portrayal of Aboriginal life before white settlement as one of deprivation and hardship shows complete ignorance of the sophisticated and successful way of life that the original inhabitants of this country engaged in for thousands of years.
Similarly, your portrayal of the stations of some sort of nirvana for hopelessly deprived Aborigines ignores historical realities.
adrian
Life was easier on the stations. Not nirvana, just easier.
The myth of the “romantic savage” is long gone, life was easier for some groups of Aboriginies (coast/rivers) than others but to claim it wasnt hard or difficult is a bit odd.
So when will Noel make representations to the government to change the IR laws to allow discrimination in employment on the basis of aboriginality? Closely followed by a Fair Pay Commission decision awarding a special aboriginal minimum wage of, oh IDK, $5 an hour? I mean that’s the logical road to follow if people sincerely believe that the equal pay decision was wrong, so let’s see people do something positive instead of whining about things that happened 40 years ago.
Captain Brough’s project has deemed all indigenous people in the NT to be incapable of managing their government-sourced incomes and will now administer half of it for them, regardless of their personal circumstances. I can’t think offhand of any single initiative more likely to encourage a culture of dependency.
BTW does anyone know how many hundred child sex offenders they’ve arrested so far in this response to the national crisis we were told existed? Last time I noticed it was 0.
Just a small clarification: my brief remark re CDEP was supposed to be in reference to its abolition at a time when those responsible for the intervention are banging on about trying to create more jobs in remote communities. I fully agree that CDEP was real work.
mole:
I’m not idealising a pre-contact past (although I think we should be careful not to do the reverse either) nor suggesting that inconvenient facts of history can be wished away.
However I think it is important to be explicit about the assumptions used, particularly in an area such as this.
I don’t question that station work provided better economic benefits and connection to land relative to other opportunities. However these stations were ultimately parts of the imposed economy and expecting them to act as cultural protection agencies in the long term is unrealistic; if large numbers of aboriginal stockmen weren’t forced off stations by equal pay in the 60s they surely would have been so by corporatisation and consolidation in the sector in the 70s and 80s.
The question of how mixed aboriginal economies can work sustainably in remote areas is obviously a complex one but Indigenous Australians as subsistence labourers sure as hell ain’t the answer.
Possibly so. However it was operating in the context of a pretty big “push” effect.
Another aboriginal voice, not so ‘pop’, at the moment, Darlene? I refer you to uncle Pat.
“Dodson says the Northern Territory intervention is a realpolitik that rolls back the Racial Discrimination Act.
“This is supposed to be a democracy, founded on some principles and some respect for the rights of individuals … This government does not treat Aboriginal people even as adults.”
Dodson says he supports tackling “the heinousness of people abusing children” — the issue that motivated Canberra’s intervention — but attacks the usefulness, and bona fides, of this action. “Where are the prosecutions over these allegations? Where are the charges, if it is so rampant?”
What the legislation did do, he says, was take away the rights of Aboriginal people — “not just their property rights, but their rights to their cultural heritage, their rights to their attachment to their land, to their languages, to their extended families … to retain their Aboriginality”.
“In any other nation, we’d look at this and say, well … it borders very close to genocide,” Dodson says.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/spirits-gather-for-a-timely-collaboration/2007/08/24/1187462524614.html
I havent and do not think the equal pay decision was wrong. Just the unforeseen (some station owners partially predicted what would happen ) results of a morally right decision can be negative.
Which would have been better, equal pay for all employees on the station with the effect of driving about 90% from their lands to the towns, or discriminatory pay scales with the majority staying?
Both are crap outcomes in one way or another. But only one, fair pay, appears moral.
In a perfect world with hindsight, at that time , a government subsidised pay scale might have worked, with options for outright purchase of properties by a combo of government and traditional owners monies.
Im sure there would have been problems with this as well, and it may well be morally right to say “its their land, it would be morally right for the station owner to be kicked off and it be run by the Aboriginals themselves”. But politically impossible.
Pearson is doing what is possible within the current governments ideology. If the ALP wins office id expect his rhetoric on what is possible to change. he appears to be going for 25% of something rather than a more moral 100% of nothing.
It’s a bit old now so I don’t know what the current state of scholarship is, but Sahlin’s “The Original Affluent Society” suggests that hunter-gatherer lifestyles provide considerably more leisure time (insofar as that idea is meaningful in this context) than settled life.
Once people become aware of the consumption levels made possible by settled society it is hard to return to an entirely subsistence lifestyle, but that is not quite the same thing as saying that that original lifestyle was especially hard or of low quality.
mole, I’m not subscribing to the myth of the noble savage, but I think that you’ve certainly fallen for the kind and benevolent white man myth, and it might be an idea do a bit of research before making generalised statements that life was easier.
Maybe it was easier for some, but certainly not for the Aboriginal women who were often bartered for sex in exchange for food or wages. Or the Aboriginal children that were often separated from their families and forced to work in conditions akin to slavery.
And only the same one had any realistic prospect of being sustainable.
One of my points is that attempting to provide cultural protection for remote Indigenous Australians by maintaining the economic interests of their colonial employers would have been a pipe dream. Those economic interests would inevitably have changed.
Facilitating economic power for Indigenous Australians (such as fair pay) may have had unintended consequences, but any other response would certainly have failed in the long run. (And in their own way I think all parties to the debate agree with this, it is just conceptions of waht meaningful economic independence entails that differ.)
No not the benevolent white man, station owners profited from cheap labour, abuses took place, and bad things were done. I should have snuck that in one of the previous posts, my bad!
But the simple argument that the fair pay was right got my goat. It effectively whitewashed the negative side of a morally right position.
It would have been argued the separation of the children was morally right as the Aboriginal race was “dying out” during the early 1900′s and (I think the term I saw used ) “the white man should smooth the pillow of the dying Aboriginals”.
That was probably considered morally right by the churchmen and authorities at the time. The unintended consequences of that mistake are with us still.
Im enjoying this little debate, as it isnt being treated as simplisticly as I have seen on other forums, its a dredit to the majority of the posters. thanks.
Pearson,a commercial lawyer,is tresspassing all the time lately.In my younger days in Melbourne fully unemployed then as now, I attended protests,sold badges and at times went to aboriginal events,with some people whom I thought were really caring to be trying to assist Aboriginal matters,whereas they could of been earning heaps of money,and Melbourne is a long way still from the Northern parts of Australia.Stan and I and Stan and his sister,will be Known to Pearson,had a problem in meeting in a pub on these issues of land rights and no mining.{Pearson doesnt know me].Reminded nearly everyday by some opinion in newspapers,about dole-bludgers,and knowing the conditions of such for me..it was easy to be concerned about those up north on unemployed benefits,and related attitudes and costs.Pearson is not serving the Aboriginal cause at all now,by not recognising the very valid point that welfare dependency,as he and others of the seemingly hard working opinionated must think of themselves,meant very little in buying power,even if individuals had access to how to get value from it.The welfare dependency is a a problem of perception and comparison,sure,if the young are killing themselves try to correct it,but welfare dependency doesnt kill anyone,if you have self worth that sustains itself against those who will devalue you by any means at their disposal.We have seen farmers kill themselves in recent times,and welfare dependency may or may of helped.Pearson is way out of line,and what has marijuana got to do with the Left?Even in my early twenties it was being noted amongst the Aboriginal support groups that marijuana wasnt that helpful,and was apparently so.If your diet wasnt built around requirements of sustaining,and only purchase price because essentially,getting pissed regularly doesnt automatically mean you are good at calculating the ending of the cash..Pearson has confused drunkenness and the lack of resources over a long period of time.It is essentially a well known fact,that if the diet is adequate,then the alcohol dependency is reduced.Pearson has given up the process of looking at things as they are,and is now compounding the problems in a manner,which suggests to me is a problem of his own pathology.He is forcing the views of what he considers are personal success on those whom may have not recognised their own.And what would one of those be!?Just surviving and learning how the ropes are being used on you by friend foes and indifferent alike. I dont think the welfare dependent Aboriginal was at all silly,maybe lacking some real life choices,and not able often to keep out of trouble,but, if you dont want to apply generalities they only exist then for the lazy.What Pearson is doing is dominating,whilst others may seem him as somewhat of a joke now.Why encourage Pearson,encourage others instead.
Life before contact was no bed of roses. Hence those who actually had to live that way readily gave it up.
The coming of the european brought many things.
The biggest single change brought by Europeans was underwriting of the food supply.
Starving to death, the single biggest spectre hanging over the inhabitants of this continent, was now avoidable.
Infanticide need no longer be a routine part of drought years.
Family groups and tribes could gather in once place, in parties of great number, for as long as they wished. No longer was the supply of water and of food the limiting factor in social intercourse. No longer was the desperate search for food the all consuming factor of every day of one’s life.
Yes Adrian, life on the stations was a significant improvement on life in the wild. Why else would the people have so readily embraced it?
It was still prone to disease, ill-treatment, exploitation, and infanticide of mixed-race babies was rife. However it sure beat having to scrounge a living from the bush!
It’s difficult to explain the resistance to colonisation if people “readily gave it up”.
They didn’t realise what they were getting in to Mark. How could they?
Pearsons address is covered by the Oz today.
There are some strange contradictions.
Pearson says,
The solution to which apparantly is to further inflate the govt infrastructure (~500 Centelink and FACs workers) and micro-manage people’s welfare payments, telling them what they can spend and how.
“I don’t think it’s very helpful to label comments that you disagree with as ‘outrageous’, or even ‘absolutely outrageous’, particularly when they relate to actions that are clearly ‘outrageous’ in themselves.”
Well, I apologise, but people can’t around calling people “Uncle Tom”. Come on, that’s not nice.
Ultimately, it’s about the children, not our ideological attachments.
White kids (except the poor white we couldn’t care less about ones) wouldn’t be expected to live in such conditions.
Yes, it’s about the children, but it’s also about doing something that works. And holding those accountable who are advocating rascist policies as a means of solving the problem.
Oh, but “ultimately it’s about the children” is code for ignoring the fact that the actual intervention, as a number of commenters have pointed out, destroys the micro economies in many Indigenous communities through the abolition of CDEP, forces people onto inactive welfare, attacks existing property rights, etc, etc, all without much promise of addressing seriously the conditions which have led to appalling health and poverty outcomes as well as child sexual abuse. I’m sorry, Darlene, it’s not good enough.
The claim that to oppose Pearson is also to brand him an “Uncle Tom”, or more ridiculously, to be racist, just doesn’t stand up to any examination. It’s a way of shutting down debate.
Crossed with adrian.
Pearson said last night that the Howard Government have failed when it comes to deciding what to after the initial intervention is over. He said he wanted to see a second stage to this whole thing.
Someone else referred to Pearson as an Uncle Tom, while others have accused Pearson of doing the bidding of the Far Right. I don’t think I can be the only one accused of trying to shut down debate (not that I am, anyway).
Mid-term report card on Noel Pearson.
Very promising start.
Results so far: Underwhelming.
Still shows promise, but serious challenges looming.
CDEP is not real jobs. It is “make work”.
It is not limited to reservations, and not limited to the NT. It occurs close to Sydney (there is a large CDEP sign on the way into Narromine)
It is a scheme to impart work skills to people, and to provide a transition into full time and full paid employment.
It has great benefits, recipients are paid to performe useful tasks in their community.
For the first time ever men were putting on work clothes, getting up early and their kids were seeing dad “go to work” with heavy boots on.
When a CDEP recipient finds a “real” job, the organisation which puts them to work on CDEP (often, but not always, the shire council) ceases to receive the collateral payments, (to provide tools, training, administration etc, all to ensure the CDEP recipient is put to useful and productive work).
Thus the organisations which put the CDEP recipients to work have a disincentive to get the recipients off CDEP and into a “real” job. A severe disincentive, there is not only the loss of a LOT of grant money, but a severe loss of clout. And in the highly competitive aboriginal industry, “clout” is everything.
“Ultimately, it’s about the children, not our ideological attachments.
White kids (except the poor white we couldn’t care less about ones) wouldn’t be expected to live in such conditions.”
O.k Darlene, apart from repeating the emotional government line, as to why the intervention was made, what improvements, apart from some medical checks, have been made to the lives of aboriginal children?
I reckon you have allowed yourself to be conned by government propaganda. Sadly, Noel Pearson, has helped underwrite it.
Mark, perhaps you missed Down and Out in SaiGon calling Noel Pearson an “Uncle Tom” @ 9.31
In the interest of equanimity, I will withdraw my “Uncle Tom” aspersion. Apologies.
I still think that Noel Pearson is wasting his time attacking the “Left”, when it is the “Right” that holds the power. And doing deals with the far-Right? Futile. If they’re going to renege on their promises, then no deal can be made.
I wasn’t accusing you of that, Darlene. I was pointing out that those particular rhetorical moves are usually designed to have that effect.
He may have been referred to as an “Uncle Tom” – I haven’t read the whole thread. But that’s not to say that everyone who is critical of him would use those words, or adopt those sentiments.
Having said that, I am thoroughly sick of the “Saint Noel” discourse – he and his wonderful “orations”. I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why his ideas are at all profound and original, and just saying “it’s about the kiddies” doesn’t cut the mustard. Leave aside the federal government intervention in the NT, if you like, and have a look at the appallingly mishandled way his “ideas” have been implemented in Cape York communities – where he’s had, as I said at the start, more or less a free run from the state government. I’ll grant him the moral passion, but that doesn’t either absolve him from criticism or give his ideas a tick. It’s ironic that some commenters can apparently deplore “idealism” when it comes to past policy yet applaud Pearson without looking at the evidence of the actual work his ideas are doing in his own world. It’s not hard to find.
Well, I want to apologise for sounding a bit snarky in my previous comment.
I understand what you are saying, and fair enough I went to speech and didn’t look at his policy work. So, I am lacking in that regard.
Pearson’s not a saint, but I’d like to think he knows about his community more than I do.
In short, whether or not Pearson’s talent lies with political communication or policy development and implementation (and I think the former – though I don’t like much of the message), he himself has responsibilities as well as rights. He’s very quick to label others and to sheet home responsibility for the parlous state of Indigenous communities – often, as I’m arguing, unfairly and by aiming at the wrong targets. The whole notion of “the left” being responsible for “policy” over the last few decades is just risibly simplistic and plainly and flatly wrong. The uncharitable would say it’s a lie. He himself doesn’t and shouldn’t escape responsibility for the implementation of his own ideas – where as in Cape York, he’s had on the ground authority and far more than anyone would normally has, and nor should he, no matter how many stirring orations about the kiddies and the evils of the left and maybe the right as well he gives.
If you get a chance, Darlene, and I’m assuming you haven’t seen it, you should watch the 4 Corners ep. In many ways it was constructed as a puff piece, but despite that, it became very clear that he was very far either from having universal support in his own community or of having a well thought out plan when it came time to go beyond the rhetoric and get down and dirty and “practical”. His report is also available on the web, as are several critiques from people who left his project in disillusionment, among others. There was an extensive previous discussion of it all here at LP a while back. I’m sorry I don’t have time to track down the links right now.
A particularly insidious form of politicians logic.
Since parenting is one of the few areas in which paternalistic action is generally seen to be unproblematic, governments can assume these prerogatives by claiming to act in loco parentis…
I agree. “Teh right” have made and administered policy federally over the last 10 years, and the Labor states cannot be construed as “teh left” either.
I think this is a case of attack being the chosen by Pearson as the best form of defense.
Howard and Brough have cherry picked Pearson’s (still unproven) program of welfare reform and instituted a land grab with racial discrimination, masquerading as saving children from sexual abuse (a goal that presumably everyone agrees with except for paedophiles). The bill makes no mention of “child” or “children”. But Brough’s address to parliament during the reading is all about “the children”.
Shameful hypocrisy and politics, with “teh left” absent from both policy formulation and the debate.
Immediate action is required (and has been for over 10 years) but proper consultation, self determination, a treaty and an apology would all be required for it to be effective.
In reality Howard has just sent in the police and army . . . the pieces of this flawed retrogressive Apartheid policy will be picked up and reversed for at least the decade after this election.
Well maybe for the same reasons that indigenous people in many colonised countries ‘embraced’ it – the invaders turfed them off their lands and made their traditional lifestyles unsustainable. One might as well argue that South Africans went down the mines because they preferred a regular wage to the perils of tribal existence. 19th century European colonisers just did to the locals what their ancestors had done back home by enclosing the commons and forcing agricultural labourers into the factories, except here it was hunter-gatherers onto the stations. The principle was the same: remove the traditional means of subsistence and force them into a condition of dependency on the company store.
SATP you decry make-work schemes and it’s a fair point. On the other hand, there seems little or no prospect of any other kind of work. If viable businesses could function out where the communities are, somebody would surely have done it by now. There are only so many tourists wanting to pay money to look at crocodiles. The logical conclusion to your line of argument is assimilation. I’m not necessarily opposed to that, it might be the least bad of the unpalatable options that are available, but I am opposed to bringing it about by stealth, which is what Howard and Brough seem intent on doing.
The ‘Left’ that Pearson attacks is quite an Omnipotent beast. Imagine, that despite conservatives being in power in Canberra for the greater part of the last 50 years and the CLP ruling the NT for all but the last 6 years of NT self-government, it’s the ‘left’ that bears primary responsibility for the current situation.
If Pearson is trying to say that conservative politics is characterised by doing SFA on Indigenous affairs, he might be onto something.
Where Pearson is useful is that he forces people to have a look at why they do and believe what they do and believe- always a useful exercise. What characterises the contemporary pro-rights view is a belief in equality, a post-colonial mindset that consciously sets out to avoid repeating, or being seen to repeat, the errors of the past, and a belief in ‘amenable difference’ ie, that differences b/n Ind/non-Ind people (such as life expectancy) can be reduced.
The same applies to Pearson himself. There are 2 ideas in particular that seem to inform his world view. One is the primacy of agency over structure, eg. that people need to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and the other is that of the ‘Golden Past’, a time when culture was unsullied by the modern. This can be seen in his references to traits “that aren’t our culture” such as alcohol abuse.
The former is one of degree, it’s simply a matter of how much weight you might like to apply each, but the later is more problematic, I think, and is a view that animates some conservative social views that aren’t especially helpful, such as some of the more limited ideas around ‘social capital’.
The Griffith Review is online here in PDF format.
Here is a link to previous LP post & comments about Pearsons strategy: [link].
For all recent indigenous-related posts try [link]
I spoke to a Joy Murphy, a Wurundjeri elder, on Saturday who said that Howard’s legislation and actions were a disgrace, but at they have now mobilised a large section of the indigenous community across Australia to take action to stop their land being taken away (yet again).
Adrian: Please do not believe I am opposed to CDEP-type schemes. There are lots of problems with it, but it is doing more good than anything which came before, and more than any of the contemporary alternatives.
There is also more corruption with it than any other government grant scheme I have had contact with. (Mainly CDEP collateral money being used for purposes other than to facilitate CDEP)
Assimilation, why indeed should indigenous miss out on everything Australia has to offer?
Anyone spending even the briefest time on a reservation will experience mixed emotions about this.
Quite apart from anything else, Pearson’s political astuteness has to be questioned.
He has hitched his wagon to the sputtering star of the Howard government. He has therefore fairly comprehensively undermined his opportunity to work with the other side of politics in the quite reasonable likelihood that they will be successful in the forthcoming elections.
There is, however, an alternative argument. Pearson has spied the possibility of a career as the Right’s Aborigine. Think tanks, paid gig speechifying to corporate luncheons. Things could be worse.
Katz, Noel Pearson not sharing the ideas of armchair theorists on aboriginies does not make him politcally unastute.
Being guilty of not being an ALP suckhole does not automatically make him a Liberal Party suckhole. Some commenters here seem to have overlooked this.
He has seen plenty of the “Left’s Aboriginies” in action, it is unlikely that he wants to be the “right’s aborigine”.
Besides, he is actually doing things for his people. I am not able to think of another who is as committed, and has achieved as much, as he.
I can however, think of plenty who have grown accustomed to government largesse, to dwelling in 5-star hotel rooms, and international travel, while their people decay in squalor.
Katz, my reading of Pearson suggests to me that he knows the left is a captive audience where Indigenous rights are concerned. He is quite confident in his haranguing of the Left because he knows that the likelihood of alienating them is minor. They will always be pro Indigenous rights regardless of how they feel about him. Its the Right he feels he needs to court in order to achieve his stated aim of transforming Indigenous Australia into a lobby group with some power. And Pearson, at least in how I read him, is not above taking advantage of Howard’s prelection race card stunt to get Indigenous Australia back onto centre stage. He will take whats on offer to get his agenda centre stage. At any rate Im pretty convinced by now that Rudd is not just avoiding the wedge in his suport of the intervention in the NT, but that he is also quite in sync with Howard, Brough and Pearson anyway. Thats how I interpret it anyway.
“I can however, think of plenty who have grown accustomed to government largesse, to dwelling in 5-star hotel rooms, and international travel, while their people decay in squalor.” – SATB
That’s a little harsh on the Howard Govt Steve, but I accept the general point.
Oh yeah? Who?
The implication being that I subscribe to any of these positions.
Please show where you imagine that I have done that.
FTR, Pearson’s apparent lack of astuteness has little to do with his position on issues. Rather it has to do with his choice to associate himself with Howard. In the event of a Labor victory Pearson is likely to find himslf a long way from the levers of government power and influence.
Moreover, Pearson has alienated himself from many Aboriginal heavy hitters. He has no natural constituency within the Aboriginal community. That has to tell heavily against Pearson in the event of Cap’n Brough being banished to the Opposition benches.
Pearson is so incoherent, no wonder he leaves everyone speechless. On the hand he claims that Aboriginal communities should take responsibility, on the other hand he supports an intervention that presumes those same communities are incapable of being responsible for some of the most basic parental functions of caring for its children.
I really can’t see why people are bothered with him. His only role is to guilt-trip the left.
But at what point did it become obvious, to a reasonably astute political observer, that Howards star was sputtering (its still not gone out completley of course.)
More charitably we could say that he has held on too long to an opportunity which at one time appear to be golden. This is a not unlikely consequence of a belief that practical progress has been slim because of a focus on symbolic goals. Re: caseys comments, I think Pearsons problem will not be an alienation of teh left as much as the bad policy and (it increasingly seems to me) maliciously malintentioned legislation that will be a reality for years to come.
And are incapable of looking after their assets if valued in excess of $400,000.
I would not put too much hope on Rudd’s victory being a return to the old ways. The land rights lobby has fatally undermined its case by agreeing that there is a child abuse epidemic. By the way, has anyone noticed how many of the nearly 1,000 medical checks have actually led to police referrals? At 500 checks, it was zero.
I raised the nature of Howard’s legislation on another thread. And perhaps this isn’t the right place for a protracted discussion of it.
But it is necessary to notice that Howard’s NT Aboriginal legislation is emergency legislation. Once the responsible minister has declared the emergency to be over, most of the legislation ceases to be operative. I imagine that the next ALP Minister for Aboriginal Affairs will waste little time exercising her prerogatives in that regard.
The big exceptions to this, however, surprise surprise, are the land tenure aspects. These aspects, of course are what chime most resonantly with Howard’s ideological objections to Aboriginal land rights.
… also what i meant by seemingly malintentioned.
Silver lining, though. I suppose it’s spelt out in the hansard speeches?
“He has hitched his wagon to the sputtering star of the Howard government.”
He’s an advocate. The Howard Government are in power. When the Rudd Government is in power, he will hitch himself to them.
Interesting info about 4 Corners. I actually am not in possession of a TV.
I’m with casey. Anyone who saw the coverage of Rudd fawning all over Pearson (and the obligation was mutual) at his conference recently can join the dots. If anyone’s under any continuing illusions that Rudd really isn’t as conservative and authoritarian as he seems, I imagine they will be dispelled pretty quickly if he becomes PM.
People seem to have fallen into the habit (which originated in the US hyperpartisan blogosphere) of including the ALP right in with “the left”. It is not – not in any real sense.
Pearson keeps his bridges from being burnt with the ALP right by ritualistic denunciations of the Tories as well. The “Third Way” Paul Kelly-ism is actually attractive to a lot of ALP rightists. And when they listen to Pearson sledge the left, they certainly don’t recognise themselves in that category.
They’re not interpellated as such, if you want to be all Althusserian!
The ALP left, let alone the broader left, has not had the running on Indigenous policy, as any sober minded examination of the policy battles within the Hawke-Keating governments reveals.
If you’re in possession of a computer, Darlene, you can download the whole show from the web!
Mole and SATP, think Vestys and VRD and exploitation.
The thing that really made my mind up about Noel Pearson was that interview on Lateline. Completely out of nowhere, tacked onto the end, he said something like “and they want Howard’s policy to fail just like they want the war in Iraq to fail.”
That red herring made it clear to me that he had moved beyond being an informed commentator on aboriginal issues. He was purely a political partisan, trying to speak that words that will put him on side with rightwingers.
I disagree with much of what Pearson has said publically and I am appalled by the status of “the leader” that has been cultivated – not by him but by a range of white powers such as John Howard and Peter Beattie.
However I can empathise with his frustration with “the left”.
I do not believe the right, left or centre have properly listened to Pearson’s perspective. All have cherry picked individual sentences from his words and applied them to their own positions on the white political spectrum. Pearson is analysed from a white left, white centrist and white right perspective to try and categorise him within the artificial and one dimensional white political spectrum, “left” and “right” being terminology based on seating arangements in white parliaments.
Aboriginal Australia has its own political structure, demands and leadership. This body politic exists parrallel to and outside of white structures and ideologies. There is an indigenous wisdom and logic which appears ridiculous to the white right/left schism, and vice versa – white political notions look ridiculous to Aboriginal Australia, or at least Pearson it seems.
“The Left” identifies (or wedges) a divide between Pearson and, for example the Socialist Alliance’s Qld senate canditate Sam Watson. What the left, right and centre has not yet acknowledged is the dynamic tensions within Aboriginal Australia – creating a dialectical movement into action and the future. It is this internal political dynamism that has carried Aboriginal Australia through a 150 year guerilla war, 80 years of internment and the land rights movement of the second half of the 20th century.
As long as the black body politic is disected into sections and defined by white political dichotomies, by white political commentators, then Aboriginal power will be deflated and channeled into meaningless symbolism within white political debate.
I know Mark. Their little flirtations with each other are quite amusing. In an interview in the Australian on the eve of the leadership ballot Pearson writes this:
Oh puleez, if that aint Pearson positioning himself with the new leader, I dont know what is.
And Rudd after winning the ballot, reciprocates in kind, saying he admires Pearsons work in the Cape here
I dont think Pearson will be on the outer, given the nature of their very own personal reconciliation going on in this public courtship.
The images on the teev were pretty sickening, casey, but then I could be biased – my general reaction to Rudd’s brand of snake oil charm and Methodist minister friendliness is revulsion.
John, I agree with a lot of your points, but I think you’d have to agree in turn Pearson’s interventions play right into that trap.
“I would not put too much hope on Rudd’s victory being a return to the old ways. The land rights lobby has fatally undermined its case by agreeing that there is a child abuse epidemic. By the way, has anyone noticed how many of the nearly 1,000 medical checks have actually led to police referrals? At 500 checks, it was zero.” – TPS
It’s still zero.
Most of the atention has gone to the NTERT. But the ACC was also sent to the NT to investigate child sexul abuse. That ws a year ago and last report I heard of from them was that they had the same number of cases for investigation/prosecution – zero.
Mark, fair enough on the speculation front. Though, as Pearsons former boss, Rudd would have a very good idea of his capabilties. Maybe he was just being polite on 4 corners. I know, for sure, that Howard IS ultra “conservative and authoritarian” and needs to go before he makes matters even worse and will happily trade that certainty for anything Rudd may throw up. I’m happy to maintain any illusions at this stage and, if necessary, bag the new P.M. later.
No way could he be worse.
Michael, while you are on it, do you have any figures for the number of pre-teenage aboriginal children found to be afflicted with STD’s?
Or the number of toddlers who have been found to be malnourished?
I’ve no doubt he’ll be better, joe2. But the whole “lesser of two evils” thing is wearing very thin with me. Perhaps if the election hadn’t been going for almost a year, I’d be able to work up more enthusiasm at this stage of the game. But the IR “clarification” (read – complete turnaround to accept most of business’ wish list) is the final nail in Rudd’s coffin as far as I’m concerned.
If that is true Michael and this child abuse epidemic has been a beat up, then I think those of the right, and the left, ought to think about the assumptions they have had of indigenous parents that led them to go along with it.
Of course there is child sexual abuse, and it’s very likely under-reported, but the permit system is irrelevant to it. The ‘epidemic’ is an epidemic as much as it is everywhere esle, and quite rightly, Indigenous parents are as concerned as any other parents. Victoria was in the news today for the huge increase in the number of children in care due to abuse/neglect, but I don’t think we’ll see the PM at a press conference calling it a national emergency.
There are a range of very sensible measures to take that would assist in protecting victims, catching perpetrators and reducing prevelance, it’s just that the NTERT had little focus on them.
The STD rates have pointed out by numerous people. They are of course a obvious indicator of abuse, in some cases. The NT figures show that the great majority of under-16 STI’s is in the 12-16 age group – usually as a result of sexual activity with their like-aged partners.
Michael – in many cases they’re not an obvious indicator of abuse, but a highly ambiguous one, because as you state, often it’s 12-16 year olds having consensual sex with other 12-16 year olds. For the under 16s, this would be in strict theory illegal, but it’s not “child abuse” in the usually accepted sense of the term. STD rates are rising all over Australia, and they’re very high in remote and regional areas among non-Indigenous people as well.
Do you have a source for that, Mark?
Yes, but not to hand, Paulus. It was mentioned on one of the previous threads about the “Indigenous Emergency”, with a reference to a government department source. But I want to go get dinner now, so you’ll have to either take my word for it or do some googling!
Yes Mark, I do indeed agree.
Maybe the evidence has not been there because of under-reporting, but the first point would be to establish whether this theory is true. I would have thought the fact that the medical checks are not leading to police referrals raises doubts on this hypothesis. The parents of Mutitjulu have already suffered from such false allegations.
The NTERT has a similar focus as the original NT report and Noel Pearson – the behavioural problems of indigenous people. None of them addressed, say, the problem of white miners who were paying for under-aged sex other than to blame indigenous parents. For example, what happened to those miners who were accused of doing this and were reported to have suffered nothing more than being sent home?
The link between STDs and abuse has been questioned by child abuse experts. If there was not this question then we would have seen police referrals when it has been found.
There is no comparison between what the indigenous parents of NT have been accused of and how this issue is talked about for white Australian parents.
CDEP is not real jobs. It is â??make workâ??……. says SATP.
Steve, as self appointed determiner of what a “real job” is, could you do us a favour and define that ?
(And yes, I know, you are “not opposed to CDEP-type schemes”.)
Here are some figures to chew on.
This is for Jun-Dec 2006.
The total number of notifications, NT wide, for gonorrhoea/sphyilis/chlamydia in the 0-14 age group was 56.
Sounds horrific? 51 were in the 10-14 group, 3 in the 0-4 group (not further broken down, but are often in the 0-6 month group indicating maternal transmission) leaving 2 suspected cases in the 5-9 group.
It’s a piece of information that could be reported alarmingly as 56 cases of STIs in children aged under 14yrs in the NT in just 6 months.
Even then, these numbers are notifications, not indicating the no. of individuals with STIs but the number of positive tests for STIs.
CDEP is not a “real” job Joe2.
Joe2 CDEP is for non-urban indigenous people. It is a stepping stone into employment. It is more or less a work for the dole.
The job network presents CDEP recipients to prospective employers to hire. An employer hiring a CDEP recipient is hiring a long term unemployed.
A “real” job (as opposed to CDEP) is a job which is funded by an employer out of funds allocated to meet a specific goal (or funded in the expectation the labours of the employee generate a profit).
The employee receives superannuation, is subject to industrial relations laws, and is classed by the job network as not being a jobseeker.
An employer hiring someone who is in a real job is “headhunting”.
I hope my layman’s explanation clarifies CDEP for you.
joe2
satp is indeed correct. CDEP is meant to be a bridge to employment, not the end in itself. This has been the case since the 80s when it started.
As satp said also, that does not mean it is worthless, just not a real job.
And BTW, this thread has amazed with its length and continued civility. Despite the efforts of some to throw petrol on the fire.
Steve, I was asking for your definition of a “real job”.
Mole:
Tell me about it!
There was once a community living on a big cattle station as a complete integrated well-functioning social unit. The country was their country and the situation was as close as you could get to dual usage of the land; one of the bridges between the two cultures was the paid work by the Aboriginal stockmen [best in the world; they could make the horses talk!] and by mature Aboriginal women around the station homestead. They were indeed underpaid at the set rate for Aboriginal workers at that time …. but guess what happened when “equal pay” was abruptly and unexpectedly imposed on them without any preparation at all for the station owners and the Aboriginal community alike?
Is it any wonder I despise the woolly-headed Do-Badders who never see what actually happens to real people on the ground when their smart ideas hit the real world?
This link to “That mananga linguist” gives a good perspective on CDEP and the NT intervention.
http://munanga.blogspot.com/2007/09/intervention-part-2.html
“Anyway, she talked about moving off CDEP, about looking at the current activities funded by CDEP and then attempting to move funding into to the relevant department so they can turn CDEP positions into real jobs. For those who don’t move into real jobs, the only option is a STEP employment program or simply moving onto Centrelink.”
Like I said, it’s all about another wave of dispossession, getting people out of the communities and into the towns where they’ll provide cheap labour. That’s Pearson’s “hand up”.
SteveAtThePub:
As I said earlier, you can apply that criterion to many those “professional” occupations in the big cities; especially in the finance industry, in health, in education, in the news[?] media, in law. Take a good hard look at what is actually done for the money and the word SINECURE comes immediately to mind.
As for any rorts and corruption that might have happened in CDEP: that comes right down to sloppy oversight and sheer laziness by those who were highly paid to make sure that none of those shenanegans happened. But if you want to see real rorts and corruption you have to go to the office towers in capital cities; Blackfellas are rank amateurs in that game.
Nobody has bothered to mention that when individual CDEP workers felt they could do better for themselves, they went off to other jobs, mainstream economy jobs …. but this happened at their OWN pace, when they were ready to try it and NOT because some remote ignorant paper-shuffler forced them to do so. If things didn’t work out, the individuals had the CDEP back in their community to fall back on. The big problem is that white metropolitan decision-makers are congentiably incapable of dealing with anything that goes beyond three financial years …. and CDEP needed a generation or longer before its main benefits could begin to be seen.
Scrapping CDEP is evidence for Brough’s stupidity rather than any malign intent. The economic lift to be had by forcing CDEP recipients into the mainstream economy is not worth the candle.
I was never a huge fan of CDEP, but to can it just so the Govt can quarantine people’s payments is stunningly stupid and cruelly cynical.
Graham Bell: The main “problem” of CDEP is that the indigenous body “employing” the recipients is unwilling to let them go on to a “formal” job.
There is too much money in collateral payment, and too much clout with the government. Thus they are not willing to embrace anything which would get their people off CDEP in wholesale numbers.
Michael: A lot of original opposition to CDEP was from urban white liberals, some of whom seemed almost bitterly opposed to the concept of aboriginal people working in return for payment.
There was strong aboriginal support for CDEP then, and there is strong aboriginal support for CDEP now.
If there is a flaw in CDEP, it would be that it is a subsidy, it is not self-funding.
“All have cherry picked individual sentences from his words and applied them to their own positions on the white political spectrum.”
This statement is very true.
“If you’re in possession of a computer, Darlene, you can download the whole show from the web!”
A computer????????????????????????????????????
No, I only have a CB radio.
I will have a look for the program.
SATP,
That is (sorry, was) roughly my issue with CDEP.
V-late to the party but I emailed a friend of mine in the WA police to query as to the numbers picked up that he knew of.
This was his response.
“Sorry I missed that, but just so you can write it on the board anyway. There were a good 25 arrests, in the north of WA on child sex (and other sex) offences in the first 10 days of the opp. Can’t tell you what there were in the NT, thats all Fed’s, they talk to no one.”
He was offered an open ended assignment based out of Broome here in WA as a Carpenter Govt crackdown on abuse started.
This happened about 4 days after the Feds announced the NT intervention.
Its not just the Feds to blame for law enforcement in Aboriginal communities.
Crikey today says 700 health checks, 2 sexual abuse referrals.
Apparently there have been 80 arrests but none related to child sexual abuse.
http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070904-700-checks-two-abuse-referrals-the-NT-intervention-in-action.html
This would be falling under the WA state police so your figures are almost certainly right for the NT so far.
the shameful bit is Carpenter (who used to run the Aboriginal affairs portfolio in WA) was effectively goaded into action by the federal intervention. Anyone Black or white deserves police protection from pedos, not the “if its not in Perth it doesnt matter” Carps seems to like.
I don’t trust Noel Pearson, I doubt I ever will. One only needs to look at his bloated face & damaged eyes to know he’s a hypocrite playing messiah. He’s another egotistical political acrobat who will eventually be shown up for the confused pontificator he has become.
There are no BIG ANSWERS…only BIG MOUTHS w/ goals that benefit the few over the many…but it often takes a decade or so to see thru their BS. I’m sure many Aborigines will get a Mission under his stern gaze…& some will even enter the Gilded Halls of the top financial & legal Corporations…but in the long run he can’t ignore the fact that he was a prominent Aboriginal leader during the Aboriginal Community Meltdown.
He can RAGE & RANT all he likes at Left Progressives…but in the long run it is his own sense of failure & guilt that makes him burn & scapegoating the compassionate & wide thinking will not put out those inner-fires.
I think he needs to go Walkabout & reflect on the REAL reasons why some of those communities disintegrated…this Moral Crusading is a diversionary tactic accompanied by a cathartic act. And a SCREAM from a shrivelled heart.
Pearson has some positive ideas…but he’s blowing into the wrong wind.
“I think he needs to go Walkabout & reflect on the REAL reasons why some of those communities disintegrated”
Of course, the infallibility of physiognomy in reading the mans corrupted ethics in the tint of his ‘bloated face’ and in the shadows of his ‘damaged eyes’ is beyond dispute Nasking. It worked a treat for the Victorians I suppose, along with seances, mediums and automatic handwriting and stuff. But, I dunno, do you reckon saying that an Aboriginal ‘needs to go walkabout’ is at all appropriate in light of what we have come to know about the function of essentialisation (particularly based on race) in diminishing the complexities of human beings? mmmm…..
Privileged white thinking. Aren’t we the luckiest people in the world, we whities, that we can say something like this and expect that because we are born white it will be taken seriously. And together (as I look up this thread) we can shout down a black man who just might know a hell of lot more on the topic than we do, and get away with it.
Huh?
Who do you mean, GregM? Pearson? I’ve consistently argued that Pearson should be judged not on his rhetoric but on results. And there is sufficient evidence now in the public domain on his own Cape York Institute project, including a report for which the taxpayers paid $3 million which fails to find any evidence to support the carrot/stick welfare quarantine approach or a link with economic opportunity, and resorts to just rhetorical assertion. And if you don’t trust my reading of that because I’m white, I can’t see that whatever you might say on this topic has any validity either. Which is clearly absurd. He doesn’t get a free pass because he’s an Indigenous person. Sorry, buddy.
If you look at what Sam Watson and others have achieved with Murrie Watch and the work they have done to reduce deaths in custody, it is miles ahead of anything that I have heard from Pearson.
Mark, my comment was not directed at you specifically. I was looking at many comments on this thread, including this one;
Just an assertion. No evidence provided because none is needed in privileged communication.
Then there was the one that called him an Uncle Tom.
There are many other examples, a few of them your own.
This is all privileged communication among wealthy white people. We’re so used to it that we don’t notice when we do it.
Against that there are many other commenters on the thread who have been prepared to challenge that privileging of communication.
So there is some hope.
That was withdrawn, GregM.
I’m not sure what that means. It could equally be short hand. There are numerous statements from Indigenous people and leaders opposing him. You could of course spend hours googling them to provide “evidence” but equally there should be an expectation that people supposedly interested in these debates are following them.
I don’t understand your point at all. And not everyone who posts at this blog is “wealthy” by any stretch of the imagination.
In the long running campaign for a Musgrave Park Indigenous Cultural Centre, I have never heard of any serious input from Pearson either. As the day gets closer to it becoming a reality, it will be interesting to see if this keeping his distance is maintained.
“Privileged white thinking.”
“He doesn’t get a free pass because he’s an Indigenous person.”
To be quite sure, I wouldn’t know Pearson from Adam, but judging solely by the photo in this post, the man looks rather mixed-race to me. Is he substantially part white, or am I just an idiot? (actually, I guess, both things could simultaneoulsy be true.) If you converted the photo to b/w, I think I’d almost mistake the guy for an Irishman, from his features. You can have all sorts of zany fun with color, once you take it out of the equation.
btw, (while we’re on these crackpot subjects), has anyone else noticed how much Barack Obama resembles Don Knotts?
But it was said Mark, and only withdrawn after several objections. A privileged communication.
Of course it’s just shorthand. That’s what privileged conversations are. They are communications between an “elite” that excludes others outside it and relies on a common set of understandings to reinforce its message. The privileged communication doesn’t require evidence to support it but demands, then heavily scrutinises with bias, evidence put forward that refutes it.
I guess that living three years in Cambodia where schoolteachers get by on $30 dollars a month, when they get paid it, has stretched my imagination. By no stretch of the imagination is anyone who posts here not wealthy compared to them and compared to the great majority of aborigines.
I’m still not with you on this, GregM, and I don’t see why it doesn’t disable your participation in the thread. And friend Pearson is making a lot more than $30 a month, which is arguably one reason why he’s not the best placed to speak “for” his people. I don’t know how much you know about Indigenous cultures, but that concept is (rightly) deeply problematic in them. It may be for us as well, and to that extent you might have hit upon something valid though I think you’re coming at it from a completely false set of premisses. But as I said in response to John, Pearson is playing whitefella games in a whitefella discourse and trading on a certain reluctance among white liberals to talk back. I don’t think that’s at all appropriate, and I’m suspicious of any set of arguments more generally which attempt to disable criticism on the grounds of some characteristics of those who wish to criticise.
GrgM.you said
I can understand your indignity …. but has it occured to you that some of us might resent or dislike Noel Pearson BECAUSE we have seen the persistent problems ourselves and seen the queue of inappropriate solutions or because we have listened to what other Blackfellas [whether well-known or unknown] have had to say.
Nobody denies that Noel Pearson is an articulate, intelligent and hard-working achiever …. but how does that benefit ordinary Blackfellas who have been treated as second-class citizens?
What else can he do? We’ve got the money. We make the decisions. And if white liberals are an impediment to him achieving what he believes he must do to improve the lot of his people then what’s wrong with him trading on their “reluctance to talk back”. Not that I’ve ever seen any evidence of that reluctance.
If we agree with you, GregM, what follows?
We all sit back and applaud Pearson and don’t dare say anything if we disagree?
Or something else?
I have no idea how you would translate your objections to “privileged communication” into behaviour.
Find me anything in the MSM critical of him by a white person.
It’s been made very very clear to me over the number of years I’ve been critical of him here in the blogosphere (and I have been writing posts about his stuff for three years – many of which also acknowledge what’s good and valid about what he says) that I’m doing something awful just by daring to criticise him because he’s a Blackfella. From lefties as well as righties who discover a set of talking points about “liberal racism” very quickly, though they don’t stop to reflect on the number of times they’ve attacked Indigenous leaders with little or no respect shown. Predictably.
Is that what you’re trying to say? If so, I completely reject it.
Pearson’s $3Million report also points out problems that he can see no answers for or which if implemented is likely to result in bitterness and violence which could make aspects of his report unworkable.
So it is not as though it is some sort of Holy Writ that can’t be challenged or improved upon. Furthermore the report was aimed at four distinct Cape York communities and was adopted by the Howard Government to apply to the Northern Territory land grab.
Pearson clearly didn’t write the report with this result in mind. He just happened to be there with his report when Howard was looking for an election rabbit to pull out of his many hats.
SteveAtThePub [at 7:44am - reply by carrier pigeon delayed due to weather
]:
There were indeed problems with CDEP but these could have been fixed. It should have been allowed to continue for at least half as long as some of the Whitefella support schemes.
What follows is that you do the hard yards. You engage in discourse- ie serious discussion which looks at what he is saying and why he is saying it, looking for the evidence that supports it, and at the evidence that challenges it, and while you are about it youb challenge your own dearly held premises that have previously given you the frame of reference from which you have developed your ideas on what should happen in aboriginal affairs.
That hasn’t happened much on the Left. It hasn’t happened on the Right where it is increasingly apparent that, not that I doubt his sincerity, Mal Brough has not done the hard yards and so we are seeing another chapter of white mistreatment of aborigines being written in their long sad history of having to live with us.
Heard Pearson’s address from the Writers festival on ABC National’s Bush Telegraph today – so figure it must be online there now.
Out of curiousity, it would be interested to know many people commenting here have actually worked or lived in an aboriginal community, or spent any time in one. Certainly my limited experiences, wearing a number of different hats, significantly changed some of my previous more youthful and cliched perspectives.
Funnily enough I wasn’t particularly struck by the division in Hopevale towards Pearson, perhaps because i’m more accustomed to the reality of fractured allegiences, mutiple paradigms and competing agendas that exists in much human service and community development work.
GregM, I don’t believe that Pearson has rigorously questioned the assumptions that go to Indigenous policy, as I’ve made clear. Rather, I think he’s combined a set of beliefs that come from his own personal experience with a bunch of off the shelf solutions – some drawn from “Third Way” communalism and some drawn from the rhetoric of the CIS mob he was introduced to in 98. Conversely, I’d argue, it’s intellectually sloppy and lazy to make that call and just assume that because Pearson claims to have done so, he has. Rethinking policy in this area is hard work, and it shouldn’t be assumed that it can be done via insta-analysis on a blog thread and even less so through point-scoring. I am, by the way, working on a critique of his ideas for which I have a publisher, and this is an area I know something about. But I’d prefer to research it properly, do some thinking, and then put pen to paper at the appropriate time and in a format where the sources and reasoning can be properly exposed rather than trade barbs on threads. So I’m going to bow out of this debate. In my view, it’s gone on too long, and like many others that do, is going around in circles.
SG, I have had a partner who was from FNQ and Indigenous, and have also known many people from Pearson’s mob (none of whom support him btw) and worked with many other Indigenous people on both policy projects and teaching and research. I note that last time I pointed this out, some rubbish was carted out claiming that these were “elite” Indigenous people, and therefore… blah blah. That’s bullshit, and actually totally misrepresents the experience and current situation of some of the Indigenous people I’ve associated with over the years. But it does signal a danger in all the competing claims about the legitimacy of arguing about these matters which GregM has exemplified with his claims of “privileged communication”.
Over and out! The Sopranos is on!
This is the very thing I am asking for. But the question I have is will you, can you, as I said above, and ask now:
If not, then what will you have added to discourse and so why bother?
Coming late to a topic about which I know little and have even fewer opinions about but what’s been put on the table here as pragmatic solutions suggested by or endorsed at the pointy end of all this?
Might be a timely way of at least clarifying and steadying this thread if not the actual issue.
Wait and see, GregM. But I’d invite you to think more clearly about what precisely such challenging may involve. As I’ve suggested, Pearson hasn’t really challenged his own premises, and certainly not his frame of reference which is very simple. A clean slate is impossible. Being self critical is something we can achieve, but there’s no virtue in holding anyone to standards that can’t be achieved. Where do your premises and frame of reference come from? Do you constantly challenge them? I can tell you’ve already rejected certain others, just as Pearson has. That’s actually not an intellectually desirable way of proceeding, I’d suggest.
Certainly enough’s here been hazarded about Pearson. But what about the issues themselves?
The rhetoric of rights with responsibilities; hand-ups not hand-outs etc is the recognition that paternalism, whether malign or benign, is corrosive of well-being. The program now that all must pursue is to make sure that any and all measures put at centre the aim to empower their subjects.
The left has always known this in theory – the practice has been found wanting. It’s a big issue – and one on which the next Rudd government will be judged by history.
Howard’s clearly failed despite some last minute grand-standing. Ironically however Howard’s last ditch actions have raised the bar. Rudd will need to appoint a bloody good minister to the area. Hopefully one of them will have the guts and interest to accept the job.
Along with sublime cowgirl I heard Pearson’s talk on Bush Telegraph today, have listened to it again tonight (it starts about 20 minutes in) and have pretty much read the whole thread. I’m not going to justify my credentials for commenting, GregM.
Pearson identifies his audience near the end. The “you” is “the leaders of the cultural left”.
Near the beginning he says that “we” are keenly aware of the problems coming from the Right but are less aware of the “silly thinking from our allies”. He repeatedly identifies with the Left.
Along the way he says that when you intervene in a community you take away responsibility from the community. He says that the current NT intervention is justified, but when intervening you have to have a plan to withdraw and hand back responsibility. He is pessimistic about this happening.
I’ve got two large worries about things he’s said recently. He says that the key to solving the problem is strengthening the family unit. He says that the problem with the Left is that they are too tolerant and have no norms.
That’s not necessarily exact word for word but those were the words he used. His idea of making kids drug and sex-proof is to enforce a strict moral code.
It just doesn’t work that way these days, but it demonstrates his essential authoritarianism.
The second is a statement he made soon after the NT emergency plan was revealed. He said that social order was more important by far than land rights.
I thought this was a strange thing to say, given the importance of land in Aboriginal identity especially in relation remote communities.
As Mark said, he’s fond of dichotomies, but to dichotomise those two concepts in this context is more than passing strange and perhaps explains why he doesn’t have more support from Aborigines.
Brian, I really do think he’s a child of the Lutheran pastors.
Most communitarianism (and that’s what Pearson’s ideology boils down to) is in fact a species of nostalgia for imagined past communities. That’s why it has to be authoritarian – for two reasons – the first being that the “social norms” tolerate no dissent and secondly because usually they either have or are perceived to have broken down and the only way to put them back together again is seen as “social order” – imposed if it can’t be created. The funny thing with Pearson – and many of the people who don’t or initially didn’t agree with him enjoy higher status according to the customary norms of his own people – is that it’s not so much an imagined Indigenous culture prior to dispossession he looks back to but an imagined reservation Indigenous culture guided by the pastors.
Oh, and wbb, the post was about Pearson so I don’t think we’re on shaky ground discussing him! If we were to talk seriously about solutions, as I’ve suggested, it would be better to have something about that which has had a lot of thought put into that issue specifically to respond to. That’s why I’m reluctant to bandy around policy ideas on a thread like this.
Mark, as you know I understand something of the legacy of Lutheranism.
Pearson has said that the challenge is to update and recreate Aboriginal law in the light of their present circumstances. In order to do this I think he needs to
This includes the norms he would have inherited from a fairly narrow strain of a confessional church kicked off when a certain Augustinian monk had a stoush with the Pope in the 16th century.
There is an issue to be addressed that relates to the role of norms in child development and child rearing in Aboriginal versus what I’ll term for convenience European cultures. I don’t believe that Pearson comes anywhere near understanding the nature of the problem although he would be well versed in how the problem manifests itself.
That doesn’t really scratch the surface of the issue I’ve raised, but it really needs a separate post. I don’t have time to deliver right now and I’m not sure I’m the one to do it.
wbb, you identified the need to
My worry with Pearson is that he doesn’t have the understanding of what needs to be done within communities to begin the healing, to turn the pain into creativity and positive energy. I was more impressed with the approach taken by Judy Anderson as shown in these three pieces.
She is but one amongst the broad Aboriginal community with much to offer. There are others.
Meanwhile Guy Rundle at Crikey has delivered a searing broadside.
Brian, I hope you do write that post.
Kim, I’ve never had my head right into the topic, to be honest, so I’d have to do a bit of work and then I’d still feel presumptuous. There’ve been windows. Like the two weeks holiday I had in Hope Vale when I was 19 when my sister was teaching there, six years before Pearson was born.
Then there was the time I visited Thursday Island. You land on Horn Is and go by boat to TI where you find that if you’re white you are the last the taxi picks up (no offence meant!)
There was the time we had to assess a play about white settlement for touring schools with the Arts Council. It was angry and awful but the wonderful Tracey Bunda who was with us then sorted it out.
The kernel of the idea, which I picked up reading around the NT intervention thing is that Aboriginal people love and treasure their kids above everything. It seems they placed few constraints on the kids. So norm-wise the regime growing up seems to us very permissive, but totally embedded in the community, so the norms of the community actually do provide what educators term the necessary scaffolding within which the individual can grow.
The identity thus formed is very social but also individually centered and resourceful.
Throw in the land as a player, because Aborigines typically say that they are owned by the land, rather than the reverse.
But the initiation into adulthood is an essential part of it and I understand without it Aborigines could not be regarded fully as people.
The problem is that external values have corroded the system they had going through white contact and the missionaries, and more recently by the media. In many (most?) situations the old can’t be regained so a new culture and new identities need to be forged. This is more likely through the approach such as Judy Anderson’s, where the arts are used, than through authoritarian, punitive interventions.
So Kim, it’s a difficult notion to get across. I’ll leave it there, I think. If I did something more detailed and considered I’d feel I’d need to get it checked out. If I’ve made a mess of it in this comment it doesn’t matter as much as if I put it up front as a post.
Brian, it would be interesting just to read more about those experiences!
Kim, I’ll think about it along with the one I promised you about a year ago on ageing!
Thanks Brian!
I’ve just come upon a really interesting article by Robert Manne in The Monthly. It’s entitled Pearson’s Gamble, Stanner’s Dream: The past and future of remote Australia. (I can’t link directly to the article. At present it’s on the front page, but for the future it’s the August 2007 issue.)
It’s long (6,300 words) but very interesting. Manne gives credit to the anthropologist Elkin and to Nugget Coombes, but his clear favourite is the anthropologist
For example on assimilation:
It’s worth a read and quite balanced on Pearson.
WEH Stanner, Brian, was the person who came up with the idea (in the late 60s) of the “great forgetting” – a deliberate desire to erase Indigenous people from collective memory which he tied in with all the fantasies of “a dying race” and a lot of other stuff. (You know, what you get from Jack Strocchi and his pals these days).
Great article by Robert Manne. Thanks Brian. Straight to the printer. (Sorry, Morrie.)
What’s more interesting to me is the difference of opinion between white Australian discussing a blackfellas view about them and of course his well know deprecating views about his own people. (White Australians love hearing a self loathing black, it absolves them from any responsibility)
There is a consensus view in black Australia that he’s a deluded and lost.
We can thank Labor for lionising him and the Murdoch Press for providing him with uncontested room for him to throw his crap at his own people.
Meanwhile, those black leaders who need to be supported and who want change in their communities are locked out of expressing their views.
Why?
Well everyone here is mesmerised with Pearson, the Cathy Freeman of Right Wing politics.
Maybe because they have done nothing at all to demonstrate that they’d make the slightest bit of positive difference to aboriginal well-being.
But you are welcome to show evidence to the contrary. I accept facts, not assertions.
“There is a consensus view in black Australia that he’s a deluded and lost.”
This is simply a lie perpetrated against Pearson by certain elements in the Left. Pearson does have support from other Aboriginals, including “Young Australian of the Year” Tania Major and former ATSIC board member and Carpentaria Aboriginal Murrandoo Yanner. http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2007/s1936373.htm
The lies and hysteria generated about Pearson is puzzling.
Dig them up your self. Surely you don’t expect everyone else who is lightyears ahead of the argument to do the research to allow you to catch up with the debate. If you don’t believe what you read it is up to you to change and do some catching up not people who have been following these issues for years.
Does “following these issues for years” translate as “armchair theorist” or as “monday morning quarterback”?
You decide
Great original post, I enjoyed sublime cowgirl’s and John Tracey’s comments.
Trackback.
Correction. Trackback.
this is the very thing I referred to earlier on this thread when I referred to privileged white thinking and said:
Now I call it what it is- racism. It allows people who have not done any research to avoid having to justify their views by appealing to the common set of understandings and uses cheap tricks like this to avoid producing evidence to support them.
I love it when the likes Tania Major and Noel Pearson are crucified by the likes of Michael Mansell. It says something worth listening to.
Produce evidence to support your own views; what other people believe is their business. Others are not here as your handmaiden or butlers as much as the right believes them to be.
Reading the report by Pearson, listening to Sam Watson or John Tracey speaking publicly or attending NAIDOC week functions never hurts. Reading the National Indigenous Times regularly also isn’t a bad idea.
Oh gawd, you people really have no shame, do you? How many more ‘white man’s burden’ circle jerks are you going to hold before you get the message? Stop using the misery of these people as a toy-thing for your moral narcissism.
Privileged white communication again.
Steve,
I assume you are aware that John Tracey is essentially a self-appointed voice of Aboriginal Australia.
He also happens to be white.
From what I can gather from Mark B, the solution to the Aboriginal problem is:
-unconditional welfare payments to anyone who describes themselves as indigenous
- resurrection of ATSIC with a massive increase in funding and power
- unfettered self-determination on Aboriginal lands
Ten years ago I would have agreed. I don’t now.
like this? Nothing is priveleged, Pearson’s Report is a public document anybody can choose to read or not read. I find it very difficult to discuss Pearson’s Report with people who can’t be bothered reading it, if you can understand that much. The report is here.
If you do choose to read the report, you will find a lot of what is said around here is based on what Pearson says or doesn’t say and it might stop the startled rabbit ‘where did that come from?’ stance you seem to regularly try to use as a form of attack.
I am not the self appointed voice for Aboriginal Australia. God appointed me.
I am the voice of the whole of Australia too, lets not be discriminatory.
and I’m not white, I’m Irish.
Now that my true purpose has been revealed, God has told me to pass the following message on.
I am reluctant to criticise Pearson because I do not want to join the chorus of white commentary that assesses him from a position of ignorance. It is not about white priveledge, though that is a factor. It is about basic non-understanding of the realities of Aboriginal communities. The problem is “outside” commentary, not just white commentary.
However, since I am speaking with the authority of God, I shall pass judgement on Pearson.
Superficially I agree with Mark’s sociological/statistical critique – has it worked? So far the answer is No! However it is not just Pearson’s programs that lack serious analysis in design, implementation, management and assessment. Indigenous policy and funding is all about the squeaky wheel phenomenon, not intelligent policy development.
But that is not what God thinks. God says the essential problem with Pearson’s model is it is accepting of colonial land paradigms. Murris just have to accept the fact that they were dispossessed of their land and make the best of their lot. There is much wisdom in this and I do not discount it. The capacity to stay alive in the face of overwhelming oppression over many generations has necessitated a certain detatchment from history and political reality. This is a major factor in drug and alcohol problems – the ability to escape/transcend the unbearable reality that many people find themselves in.
Pearson seems to suggest replace alcoholic escapism with the protestant work ethic as a similar transcendance from a bad situation.
The problem with Pearson, Beattie, Howard, the Socialist Alliance, ACOSS, Centrelink, ANTAR is the same. They do not want to look at the cause of the problem – invasion, genocide and colonisation. These things caused the massive problems of today.
Without revisiting these original sins and developing holistic and radical solutions based on rectifying these things, then all programs, designed by indigenous leaders or stupid bureacrats alike will be failing bandaids.
As I, I mean God sees it, there can be no real solutions until land reform occurs. The original native title legislation was a fair starting point but it was turned around to be a mechanism for further dispossession of land.
Land reform has to involve houses in cities not just “hunting rights” on ever decreasing parcels of crown lands. Compensation must be paid, not just for stolen or under award wages in the mission times, but for the theft of huge tracts of real estate – of the most valuable capital in the nation.
Obviously all the migrants are not going to go home and all land going back to their original owners is not realistic. But if all Aboriginal people do not have secure access and control of real estate including residential, industrial, commercial and agricultural property then they will remain at the bottom of the heap with only the faint possibility of a blue collar job and a mortgage as being the hope of the future.
Murris will never be able to borrow money and purchase land at a rate fast enough to make a difference to such things as child abuse, domestic violence, drug and alcohol issues, education or anything. The damage is unfolding faster than Murris can climb the ladder or buy back the farm.
There has to be a return of at least some of the stolen wealth before change can even begin.
God gave the following scripture to me in a dream as an example of what a part of the solution might look like. “out of the box. A vision of housing” http://www.kalkadoon.org/index.php/out-of-the-box-housing-vision/
Amen
“Obviously all the migrants are not going to go home and all land going back to their original owners is not realistic. But if all Aboriginal people do not have secure access and control of real estate including residential, industrial, commercial and agricultural property then they will remain at the bottom of the heap with only the faint possibility of a blue collar job and a mortgage as being the hope of the future.”
John,
You are painting a picture of Aboriginals as hopeless victims who need charity to improve their lot. Wave after wave after wave of impoverished migrants have arrived on these shores and generated wealth largely through their own efforts. I’m sure Aboriginals have the same innate capacities to help themselves as these people.
As a supporter of the welfare state I support giving Aboriginal people a hand so that they can lift themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. But it has to be a two way street: I’m not in favour of throwing buckets of unconditional money at self identified “victims” as this will only encourage a cargo-cult mentality, indolence and a lack of dignity. In any event, any attempt to do this would never be politically acceptable.
Aboriginals cannot thrive on a culture of victimhood anymore than, let’s say, Jewish descendants of holocaust survivors.
I think that one of the major weaknesses of Pearson’s work is that he is advocating a temporary sense of place where workers would fly out to work outside their community in a mine or whatever. My understanding of the legal process for Native Title is that it requires proof of uninterrupted living on the land. Pearson does not seem too clear on how the conflicting models are to be reconciled.
Neither is he convincing about why everyone should be treated as though everybody has no responsibility over their financial affairs. It may be true in some cases and not in others.
He still has not told us where all the people who have been taken off CDEP are going to find work and seems to just assume that they will. It won’t take long to find out how many CDEP former recipients land real jobs but it is difficult to see enough jobs being created for all who want a job. His idea of people under 21 only getting three months to find employment seems a bit of a short timeframe too. His case for mobility seems a bit weak, how are people supposed to get to a job on the other side of Australia when they are living on next to nothing now? Haven’t heard anything from the Feds yet about his suggestion of a $5 000 relocation allowance.
His opportunity plus responsibility mantra seems ok as long as the opportunity is opened up but I have seen no moves from the Feds in this regard.
How is the three unexplained absences from school going to work? There are plenty of kids from private schools across every capital city who wag school more than that now.
Just being investigated by the Child Safety Department is a breach. Surely Pearson as a lawyer would want to see a more legally acceptable test than this before breaching parents.
As for parents not breaching alcohol, drug or gambling laws. This does seem like a moralising attitude that does not apply to the rest of the community.
Hopefully he means at some level that is higher than what seems to be suggested in the report.
It would be hard to see the Feds getting excited about his suggestion that housing be paid for by the Feds at construction cost and sold to indigenous people at market cost. A shortfall of about $300 000 per house on the report’s figures. I’ve always thought that this sort of thinking was not on as far as conservative Governments were concerned.
Anyway in my opinion, while it is good to see that ideas are being bandied around, they just do not seem to be developed to an extent where they will be immediately implemented successfully. Wierdly enough the Feds moved into the Northern Territory using some of these concepts and a grab – bag of their own underdeveloped policies the week this report was released.
Clearly as a small stepping stone to something better this report has merit even if it is just to make people think. As a package to be implemented immediately, very doubtful. But then again this whole thing was proposed for a trial in four communities and perhaps the Feds would have been better off doing that and no more until the rough edges had been knocked off it and it was thought out more carefully.
Melaluka,
I think it is particularly cruel to ask people who were dispossessed of their inherited estate and imprisoned for 80 years without recieving wages for their labour to be asked to start climbing the white ladder from the bottom.
Most migrants arrived in the 20th century while Murris were in the missions. Migrants recieved their wages. Murris worked as slaves for rations. To compare the plight of the two is ignorant of history.
Those migrants that arrived in the 18th and 19th century occupied the lands cleared by the native police, poisonings and smallpox.
The Australian migrant reality is the appropriation of Aboriginal wealth. This is the very reason for the genocide and missions. The opportunities we migrants have is a direct result of the opportunities denied to Aboriginal Australia.
But issues of justice and morality aside, it is simply an absurd notion to grind people into the dirt for 200 years and then expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It wont happen. No matter what you think of the notion of “victim”, almost all Aboriginal people suffer some form of mental health issue – many are very severe. Intergenerational trauma and contemporary horror does not allow the headspace to wake up one morning and go to work. Humans are notlike that.
Any economic strategy must be accompanied by a holistic healing strategy which involves some acknowledgement and rectification of the genocide by those of us who have inherited the stolen loot because of it. Murris know the truth of this matter but white society denies it.
As long as Murris are told it is their fault and only they can change, then people will continue to drink the days away.
When some real hope, good will and resources to deal with the problems is offered by the sociology that caused the problems – then there will be a change of social environment that will catalyse changed behaviours in white and black alike.
also
The welfare state is a European colonial notion and not appropriate to the stateless sociology of Aboriginal Australia. Murris need land, not welfare.
And
If you look at history you may find that the establishment of the state of Israel so Jews could be free in their own land rather than being governed by others was a pretty important response to the Jewish holocaust. There needs to be a similar land based response in this country too.
“But issues of justice and morality aside, it is simply an absurd notion to grind people into the dirt for 200 years and then expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
I don’t expect Aboriginal people in dysfunctional and impoverished circumstances to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. They need help. But they also need some stick as well as carrots.
See the Alert Digest no 9 showing problems with the Bill now Act that introduced Pearsons work into the Northern Territory.
Here is the speech given by one senator showing the problems Highlighted in Alert Digest 13 to be over come from Pearson’s influence.
Sorry the speech refers to the same alert digest no 9. Pearson also admits to having problems with the way the Howard Government handled the Bill.
Back in this comment I made some links to the work of Judy Anderson.
In the immediate period after the NT intervention was announced, listening to ABC radio about 10 hours a day as I do, I was struck by the number of indigenous voices that made it to air saying that their communities are doing well and resented being typified as failing.
Anderson’s approach seems to be to build on success with community-based solutions, building on the strengths within each community. Her academic program produces people with community development skills specially trained to work in Aboriginal communities.
But it goes further than that. She believes in a research-based approach so that what works and what doesn’t can be identified, documented and shared with other communities.
There has never been enough funding to utilise fully the human resources she has developed. Furthermore the Government has a bad habit, not just in this area, of short-term funding and then defunding programs that are shown to be working.
You don’t need to know a lot about on-the-ground problems in communities to see that such an approach might have something to commend it compared with formulaic externally imposed ‘solutions’.
Melaluka,
What kind of “stick” do you think is appropriate and what would a beating with this stick achieve?
Or is it just fear of the stick that is the motivating force?
John,
One of the obvious reasons for the failure of many Aboriginal individuals and communities to thrive is a failure to promote an ethic of education. As an example, two female friends of mine (both single mums) have recently immigrated to Australia from Asia. They are both sacrificing everything possible to ensure their kids get the best possible education. The kids themselves appreciate and love school and learning. They’ll sit about in groups and have fun solving maths problems one or two years above their age level.
How does this compare with the education ethic inculcated by indigenous communities? Judging by truancy rates etc the answer seems obvious.
Hence an appropriate “stick” would be assessments, and if necessary penalties, for those parents (and obviously this also includes neglectful white parents) who fail to take responsibility for ensuring their children are educated.
I think that with Lutherans it has always been a literal stick to beat the Devil out of children.
It may work Steve. The ABC programme on Pearson at Hopevale revealed the “Hopevale Hopeless” as waaaaay more erudite than most people I have interacted with.
There is both discipline and motivation inherent in customary law – which every Aboriginal family is connected to. Obviously this manifests differently to 18th century museum notions of Aboriginal culture – it is alive and contemporary and lives in elders, mens business, womens business and education pedagogies – and of course in the landscape.
As long as customary law is seen as an uncivilised hangover from savage culture rather than social capital to build a future then nothing will be achieved.
It is on this level that I become quite impressed by Pearson. He is talking about solutions within Aboriginal frameworks including a certain authoritarianism inherent in eldership. So I forgive him his authoritarianism, in fact I agree with its necessity.
However the excercise of power in Aboriginal sociology cannot occur within white bureacratic or legal frameworks and colonial land paradigms. Pearson’s attempts to hunt and gather in the white world, by any means necessary, has seen his cultural power and vision refracted and misused by white power blocs.
There is a big difference between “tough love” and a big stick. I believe Pearson knows the difference but his white audience does not.
Yep, the day after a three- legged horse suffering equine influence wins the Melbourne Cup galloping backwards will be when it is most likely to happen.