Well, as I noted on another thread about Germaine Greer, I’ve bought and now read On Rage. I’d like this post to stick to discussion of the merits of her arguments, which I continue to think has been something largely absent from most of the debate to date. I also think that very few people who’ve rushed into print have actually read her book, and instead taken the odd comment here or there that she’s made in the course of promoting it and projected all sorts of things onto her.
Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole - for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book - challenged to agree with Greer’s view that - on the basis of the evidence - the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources - is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says - accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on - unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.
What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are - and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well - in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.
Continue reading ‘On Rage: Germaine Greer reviewed’
As a bit of a follow up to the discussion of Germaine Greer’s latest book On Rage here, I was interested to see Gary Sauer-Thompson observe that most of the reaction (and there’s been tons of it) to her writing and various speeches and appearances in the press has completely avoided the issues she actually raises, and concentrated on interweaving loud denunciations of her - and claims that she’s irrelevant - with already well established “media narratives”. If she’s in fact got nothing of relevance to say, as one of our commenters observed, you have to wonder why all the energy expended.
Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.
Continue reading ‘On Rage: Raging against Germaine’
In the wake of discussion of Andrew Forrest’s proposal for the creation of 50 000 full time jobs for Indigenous Australians (discussed here at LP) and Germaine Greer’s remarks on the continuing force of history in shaping Indigenous responses to state initiatives (discussed here and see the video of last night’s Q&A), I thought it was worth linking to a paper prepared for the Australian Education Union by UTS Indigenous academics Larissa Behrendt and Ruth McCausland. The specific topic they examine is welfare quarantining and schooling outcomes. I’d recommend anyone interested read the whole thing, but the abstract has also been posted at Australian Policy Online.
As well as discussing the philosophy of mutual obligation (referred to as John Howard’s most significant legacy to social policy), the authors point to the lack of an evidence base for most policy initiatives in this area - something almost totally lacking in the research which justified Noel Pearson’s proposals for “family commissions” in Cape York, which is now being held up as a model for the rest of Australia. This appears inconsistent with Jenny Macklin’s disclaimers of ideological motivation and claims that evidence and “what works” would be the criterion for Indigenous policy. They also point to several studies which demonstrate that parental responsibility in sending kids to schools is at best only one factor in school attendance and outcomes, with the quality of schooling and child health also being very important variables.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that most policy initiatives in this area are at best blunt instruments. It also suggests that they are being driven by a new orthodoxy - arguments about “personal responsibility” and “social norms” being more assertion than evidence based. Most tellingly, perhaps, and here Greer’s comments are important too, is the suggestion that the obligation is almost entirely one sided and thus lacking in mutuality - and that the state is failing to put in place the preconditions for such experiments to have much chance of providing enduring outcomes. That doesn’t leave me feeling me feeling very hopeful about the prospects of closing the gap.
In the (new) tradition of rich dude saves the world, someone I’d never heard of, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest - apparently Australia’s richest man, has been putting his head together with Noel Pearson and Kevin Rudd to announce a plan to create 50 000 full time private sector jobs for Indigenous Australians. Incidentally, I’m sure Pearson is behind the phraseology of a “covenant”, which no doubt appeals to our religiously inclined Prime Minister as well. No doubt such proposals should be judged on their merits, and the whole thing appears fairly sketchy at the moment.
But it is fair, I think, to say that it’s consonant with not just corporate social responsibility agendas, but also with the broader phenomenon of the privatisation of development assistance which we see worldwide - also in the field of public health. One of the criticisms of such programs - often delivered by NGOs deriving funding from foundations owned by benefactors of great wealth - such as Bill Gates - or foundations which leverage money off showbiz or biz or even political celebrity (as in Bill Clinton’s activities) is their paternalism and the lack of an integrated and properly public focus on the true dimensions of a problem - and the tendency or at least the temptation to focus on outcomes which make for good pr. Of course, in the symbolism driven political environment in which we live, you could make equally telling criticisms of a lot of public sector programs. This proposal also obviously partakes in the notion - beloved of Noel Pearson - that work and all its associated ethical dispositions are the solution to most - if not all - social ills.
There is also an obvious line of trajectory from one if not several of the logics of the Northern Territory Intervention. Continue reading ‘The ultimate public-private partnership?’
I’m not quite sure what it was, but there must have been one, because the AGI health checks on indigenous children in the NT last year did not record a single case. (Update: this claim of zero cases of trachoma recorded, taken from the post linked to below, has been contradicted, although the rate recorded is still extraordinarily low.)
Fred Hollows must be causing a scene around the Pearly Gates in the way he’s kicking himself for missing such a simple and effective solution to a common cause of blindness that was a special concern to him due to Australia’s central desert regions having the highest incidence of trachoma in the world.
The crucial ingredient in miraculously eradicating trachoma appears to be (drumroll) the recruitment primarily of recently-graduated doctors from urban and coastal regions (who’d never seen a case of trachoma before) to do all the health checks in a region where the condition is endemic. Voila! No cases of trachoma recorded! The previous incidence rate of 45% reduced to zero in one strike! Marvellous (and who knows what other medical conditions may also have been eradicated by this daring initiative?). Think of all the funding for blindness programs that can now be re-allocated because there are no more cases of trachoma in the central desert!
I suspect that this miraculous eradication method could quite possibly be effectively adapted elsewhere. What say you?
Update: some of you need your sarcasm meters recalibrated. Yes, the “miracle cure” is pure snark.
Paul Henderson, the Labor Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, has called an early election for 9 August.
I’m not sure there’ll be a lot of commentary on LP about the campaign, because I don’t think any of us are well placed to blog it - not being Territorians. If there is anyone out there who’d like to contribute some guest posts, please let me know.
It will be interesting to see if it’s discussed in terms of federal implications - and if the intervention becomes an issue. No doubt we’ll have something to say about that.
In the meantime, Troppo Territorian Jacques Chester has a post up, as does The Poll Bludger. And Antony Green had a feeling it was going to happen.
Crikey is reporting today that a leaked progress report demonstrates that the Northern Territory Intervention, now just short of a year old, is “a shambles”. It’s worth reading the full story, but it’s also interesting to note that Mal “who will think of the children?” Brough has admitted that the thing was cobbled together in 48 hours, as just about everyone suspected at the time.
When Jenny Macklin announced the composition of the panel who will oversee the review of the Intervention earlier this month, commentary predictably focused on whether those appointed were “critics” or “supporters”, which seems an idiotic yet predictable angle given that the whole point of the thing is to see whether it’s attaining its actual goals, something recognised by Peter Yu who was named as the review’s chair. Most of the coverage of the Intervention has continued to be framed in ideological terms, not least from those who claim that we need to move on from ideology.
Continue reading ‘Northern Territory Intervention one year on’
Interest group politics following a change of government is always interesting. It’s not always quite as simple as rewarding your friends and locking out your enemies (though maybe it was with Paul Keating and John Dawkins), but some repositioning always goes on - for a smart lobby, in advance of the election. That occurred last year with business groups - some were prepared to cut the Howard government loose and go public with concerns about lack of infrastructure investment, population policy, climate change, productivity and federalism. From early 2007, blind Freddy could have seen the defeat of the Howard government coming, even if the national news media couldn’t, and the agenda of groups like the BCA was well articulated to the policy direction of the Labor party, thus guarenteeing influence both before and after the election itself. Even on the touchy issue of IR, it became fairly clear that ideologues such as Peter Hendy aside, most business interests had reasonably happily accommodated themselves to the end of WorkChoices well before November, and in fact that they extracted significant concessions in their favour. Those who really kept their head down when urged to put it above the parapets by the Howard government - such as the AIG - have had their reward in spades under Kevin Rudd.
The Australian Medical Association seems to be an exception to this rule. As Tim Dunlop writes:
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has obviously decided they don’t like the Rudd Government and seem to be doing everything in their power to criticise, annoy and/or embarrass them. Since before the election, the doctor’s union has made clear that they don’t like the approach the Labor Party takes to health and were, for instance, critical of Labor’s plan to—potentially—shift control of hospitals to the Federal Government.
Since then, they have taken every opportunity to attack the Government’s plans to change the criteria for the health care rebate, and have been particularly upset about moves to allow nurses to increase their role in the provision of general practices services.
The degree of self interest in the positions they’re adopting is a bit too blatant for comfort, I’d have thought. Continue reading ‘What’s with the AMA?’
Folks might remember I attended my erstwhile colleague Professor Anna Haebich’s book launch earlier this year, and invited her to write a guest post for LP on her book Spinning the Dream. I’ve just received this via email from our friends at Griffith REVIEW. If you’re in Sydney, this event would be well worth attending.
TONIGHT! Wednesday June 11
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
gleebooks
upstairs at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
6.30 for 7pm. $10 / $7 concession. Book gleebooks 02 9660 2333
Multi-award winning historian and author Anna Haebich will be in conversation with Julianne Schultz to discuss the experience of assimilation in Australia. Anna explores how Australians in the 1950s and 60s were challenged by new visions of the nation. Assimilation was heralded as the mechanism to sweep away divisions and exclusions of the past and absorb Aboriginal and new Australians into a common shared way of life. The rhetoric and reality of assimilation was to have a profound and lasting effect on several generations of Australians before it was abandoned in the 70s for multiculturalism. Today a form of ‘retro-assimilation’ has come to haunt public debate on national identity and nationhood. Anna’s new book Spinning the Dream (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) develops some of the ideas she explored in her Griffith REVIEW essays Retro-assimilation (Ed 15: Divided Nation) and A long way back - reflections of a genealogical tourist (Ed 6: Our Global Face).
Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”
Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:
David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.
Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.
It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.
Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.
Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’
It must have seemed a bright idea at the time to get Noel Pearson to write an article for The Monthly on Obama. Trouble is - Pearson may or may not know anything about American politics, but almost his entire article is a discussion of Obama seen through the prism of a book written by Shelby Steele. Those who saw the recent (and totally disappointing) Four Corners show on Obama might recall that Steele was the dude from Stanford who kept banging on about how Obama was manipulating “white guilt”. You can watch (if you can be bothered) his entire schtick via this link.
Pearson has the answer for Obama - emphasise “Black responsibility” and end all that liberal rights claimin’… How boringly predictable. Continue reading ‘Noel Pearson goes to America (well, not really)’
What’s with the Iemma government?
DRINKING a glass of wine in your own home could be illegal under extreme new liquor laws that rubber-stamp the use of no-go alcohol zones in NSW.
All kinds of nanny state madness, I guess.
Apparently, unlike the NT intervention, it’s up to “communities” to request a no grog zone where even drinking in the home will be banned. But who are those communities? And who gets to say whether “chronic alcohol abuse” is going on? All I can see resulting from this is a push from some residents in areas such as Newcastle’s CBD with a big concentration of nightspots in one area to ban takeaway sales. Presumably respectable citizens won’t expect the booze police to knock on their door and confiscate their chardy, and all the bourgie restaurants on Darby Street will fall outside the zone. It may also of course result in all sorts of puritan dogooders forming unrepresentative action groups or whatever in their local hood. Just stupid.
Continue reading ‘No rivers of grog - now for whitefellas in NSW (if they want)’
Today’s Opposition Organ reports that the eminent indigenous academic, Professor Marcia Langton, believes that the Indigenous 2020 Summit Stream, consisting of people selected by the Federal Government, was uninformed and unrepresentative, and failed to adequately address policies to secure the learning, health and economic future of indigenous children.
However, Professor Langton’s views are reported in a way which implies that she is also opposed to the creation of an elected indigenous representative body to advise on policies.
As Mark mentioned a few days ago, the establishment of such a body is also opposed by Warren Mundine and Wesley Aird. Yet Mr. Aird was also highly critical of the Summit Stream, suggesting that its outcomes would be as “predictable as a Zimbabwean election”.
Continue reading ‘Marcia Langton says whitefella government’s handpicked advisers got it wrong’
She has to “wrangle”, to use Virginia Trioli’s term in a Lateline interview with the co-chair of the Indigenous 2020 summit stream, 100 delegates who include some with very deeply felt and opposed views.
Such as Warren Mundine, most of whose public interventions are couched in particularly aggressive language. Take, for instance, this story about his call for Indigenous children to be taught better English skills. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with this, though I stand to be corrected. But it’s a “demand” that he’s making and it’s something he’s going to “insist” on. All very Pearson-esque.
Mundine - along with Brendan Nelson - who’s attending the summit to “listen” despite characterising it as a “stunt” - vociferously opposes the creation of a new representative body for Indigenous leaders. So does Wesley Aird, who was one of John Howard’s handpicked advisors on Indigenous affairs. Yet it’s ALP policy.
Whatever the faults of ATSIC, that commitment exists. Continue reading ‘Spare a thought for Jackie Huggins’
The Oz carries this intriguing report about the upcoming Federal Budget which suggests the previous government did not have any funding allocated for the NT Intervention beyond 1 July this year.
Which reason do you think best explains why Howard and Brough didn’t organise any forward estimates from Treasury?
- Hubris - They assumed that a problem which took decades to develop could be sorted out by the boys in khaki in about 6 months.
- Incompetence - They just forgot.
- Laziness - Couldn’t be bothered. After all, it’s only public money.
- Rashness - Everything was arranged too hastily to make a proper plan (Eek! it’s been under our noses for years! Quick, no time to waste, it’s an emergency!)
- Cynicism -The plan was conceived after the Budget, so we’ll let Treasury doze and draw up some estimates once we’ve counted how many votes this brings in.
- Complacency - They assumed they’d win the election and could write it into this year’s Budget themselves?
- Disingenuousness - They assumed they’d lose the ‘07 election and left it as a Budget landmine for the incoming ALP? (Which it most certainly is - a $600 million landmine according to the report.)
So after all the posturing and bluster, after all the accusations from blowhards that anybody who questioned the Intervention is a supporter of child-rape, we learn that the “architects” of the “plan” didn’t set aside the provisions to actually carry it out.
What great economic managers. What great defenders of the little children. They fully deserved to lose their seats. As will Macklin and co. if they cock this one up.
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