The 'new' paternalism

Australians’ sense of guilt about the past and naïve idealisation of communal life may now be the biggest single obstacle to the betterment of Aboriginal people. Having rejected the paternalism of the past, we now insist on forms of self-management for Aboriginal people that would be totally unworkable even in places where people are much more used to them. Because it was wrong to treat Aboriginal people like wayward children, it isn’t necessarily right to expect Aboriginal people to thrive through endless management committee meetings.

As the historian John Hirst put it in 2004: “The last oppressor of the Aborigines is the belief that they are a co-operative people naturally suited to self-government in small communities.” Hirst says it is wrong to expect small, remote communities to organise their own water supply, sanitation, home maintenance, road construction and retail services and laments that self-determination has required Aboriginal people to master skills that are a “cross between a hippie and an accountant”.

A former teacher on the Tiwi Islands, Veronica Cleary, has described how “the schools in Nguiu were constantly asking the Community Council to make children go to school, the Community Council was constantly organising community meetings to tell the parents to send their children to school and the parents were constantly demanding that someone else should collect their children each morning, provide breakfast and lunch and provide school uniforms. The frequent community meetings often ended in chaos as the leaders who had been so keen for them to be arranged could not be found to speak and if they were, immediately handed over to the non-Indigenous executives of their organisations to speak about the issue.”

Normally, dysfunctional local government would mean sacking the particular council concerned and imposing an administrator to sort out the mess. Vesting authority in an administrator makes sense but only when combined with the power to take decisions and make them stick. Someone has to be in charge.

These days, authority as exists rests with local “big men” often in conflict with each other and white managers usually dependent on unstable alliances in the local council. In some places, Indigenous people might choose to substitute for existing bodies an administrator with authority to direct all government funding and government services. In other places, state and territory governments might think that conditions give them no choice but to appoint an administrator.

Clare Martin has just pinpointed the policy of self-determination as successive governments' biggest mistake. As the NT Chief Minister said this week, “the heart of the failure” has been saying to small Aboriginal communities, “manage (your) own affairs”. The challenge faced by all levels of government is to go beyond acknowledging that a decades-old policy has largely failed and to build workable governance structures against the pressure of vested interests and the inevitable cries of racism.

Indigenous townships can rarely produce the kind of local leadership necessary for modern service delivery needs. Noel Pearson once called for outsiders such as Marcia Langton to take charge of Aboriginal education in Cape York, Tiga Bayles to take charge of communication, and Peter Yu economic development. He’s also called for judges to lend the authority of the Crown to the work of community justice groups. This sounds like his way of saying that only so much can be expected of local people. Pearson’s clarion call for Aboriginal people to take responsibility for their personal lives and families should be matched by government officials taking more responsibility for standard governmental functions in Aboriginal townships.

The rhetoric of self-determination has enabled officialdom to parade its concerns while evading its responsibilities. It’s still fashionable to scoff at the work of remote area missionaries but none of them were on short-term contracts and many of them had no other home. Service was their life, not just their business philosophy. They took solidarity with Aboriginal people to be their personal responsibility and many of them left their bones in the settlements they created. Their sense of calling did not make them perfect but it motivated them to commit their lives to Aboriginal people in ways that can seldom now be matched.

It’s not clear how much self-determination has helped or hindered the provision of health services for Aboriginal people. John Cleary, a former Tasmanian health minister and Tiwi Islands CEO, said recently that the structure of Aboriginal health services reflects many of the same weaknesses as local government. “Since the NT Government took over the running of Tiwi health, the service has new cars and staff accommodation … previously … not possible because of a limited budget.”

These days, almost every health-related government board comprises at least one “consumer representative” but experts rather than consumers actually run the operation. Obviously, health services have to be sensitive to Aboriginal needs but that doesn’t mean they have to be managed by Aboriginal people.

The government has not the slightest intention of changing the governance of well-run Aboriginal health clinics. This government is more interested in the delivery of effective health services than in observing ideological pieties and won’t hesitate to intervene where health services are not doing their job.

If, as is generally considered to be the case, abuse is a serious problem among Aboriginal people, there is some ground for concern that abused children are not being brought to clinics or that health services might not be reporting it fully. It's more likely that reports are not being adequately followed-up and prosecuted. There are, of course, legitimate questions over the extent to which health staff can interrogate patients about the real causes of their injuries. If patients insist that bruising is the result of a fall rather than an assault, health staff generally have to take their word for it. Still, it’s hard to see how sexually transmitted diseases in very young patients can be the result of anything other than abuse.

In places where police are reluctant to get involved and often several hours’ drive away, it takes tremendous courage to report suspected abuse (as required by law). To the extent that this problem is successfully tackled, the real heroes will be Aboriginal health workers in the affected communities. In January this year, the Kimberly Population Health Unit Bulletin reported 44 sexually transmissible infections in children under 14 in the previous 18 months. To put this into perspective, in 2004 there were 185 notified sexually transmissible infections in children under 14 throughout Australia

If progress is to be measured and problems are to be detected, it’s very important that meaningful records be kept and effectively reported. All states except Western Australia place mandatory reporting requirements on health staff. Particular cases of possible abuse should be reported to the police. The general incidence of suspected abuse and other injuries resulting from violence should be reported to government if policy and administration is to respond to the real social conditions in Aboriginal settlements.

Federally-funded health services should provide regular, accurate information on the health incidents which reflect the social condition of particular places and I have asked my department to consider urgently how this is best done. Such information might reinforce a few people’s prejudices but this can’t be helped if governments are to know what services Aboriginal people most need and to deliver them more effectively. To provide more services for preventable casualties is to miss the point. Accurate information is often the last thing people want to hear because it can so easily challenge established behaviour and settled judgments but it is the only basis on which good policy can ever be sensibly devised and effectively delivered.