Finding the future: three approaches to the problems in Aboriginal communities

The dominant society tried to control the choices made by Indigenous people, sometimes selfishly, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with racial or cultural arrogance. Attempts were made, with varying degrees of compulsion and cruelty, to constrain Indigenous choices by imposing an overall direction and speed of change. Assimilation was such a policy, when Aboriginals were allowed only one choice, to mimic the white majority.

Assimilation policies were abandoned not only because they were demeaning and racist, and often cruel, but because they didn’t work. They undermined the traditional structures that once held communities together but failed to provide a substitute, as became apparent when the authoritarian missionaries and superintendents departed.

Welfare dependency is not something that Aboriginals chose, or were seduced into by self-determination. Their niches of employment in the pre-welfare era were largely destroyed by economic changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Poor education, discrimination, geographical isolation and attachment to home communities made most Aboriginals uncompetitive for such jobs as were available. Meanwhile alcohol became legally available and insinuated itself deeply into Aboriginal life.

Suddenly unemployment benefits became available as part of a new equality in citizens’ rights. It was a novel concept: ‘sit down money’, i.e. payment for doing nothing. Few Aboriginals had an understanding of the economy, let alone the theory of the welfare state, in which the payments were intended as temporary relief between the jobs that would normally be available. This central promise of the welfare state – regular employment – has never been taken seriously in relation to Aboriginal communities. As Noel Pearson has emphasised, few have had access to a ‘real’ economy.

Self-determination was intended to reverse the destructive paternalism of assimilation; not to encourage separatism, or discourage change, but to give Aborigines the chance, as individuals or as members of families and communities, to make the decisions about their lives and communities that protection and assimilation policies had placed in the hands of others. Today however, many feel that this is the opposite of what has happened. People in communities say that they have lost control of their lives – lost it to funding authorities; lost it to bureaucratic processes; lost it to those who can capture and manipulate organisations; lost it to experts, whose claim to expertise is sometimes only the colour of their skin; lost it to alcohol; lost it to the drunk and violent and loud-mouthed minority; lost it to the paralysis that comes when one cannot see a future worth working for.

There are many reasons self-determination has not delivered its promise. They add up to the fact that, for all the lip service, it has rarely been seriously implemented. It is not some state of grace, or political status, that government can confer on people who are thenceforth permitted and qualified to make whatever decisions they please. It is a process that takes place whenever a person, family or community makes a decision about their own affairs, instead of having it made for them by a superintendent or missionary or anyone else. It may be as simple as accepting or refusing a drink; as insisting a child go to school; as growing some fruit and vegetables; as weaning a child off soft drinks and fast food; as voting a corrupt office-bearer out of office; or as mobilising a community to condemn and if necessary charge those who disrupt its life, damage its buildings, drink its income or molest its women and children. On the other hand it may be as impressive as campaigning for a national apology or for a treaty. Aboriginal people, like other self-determining people, have to decide where their immediate priorities are.

The ideological voices of the Left and the Right have tended to drown out a third voice, the people in the communities, who have been sending out two messages: One is that grog is ruining their communities – leading to violence, murder, sexual abuse, wrecked houses, no money for good food, sleepless hungry children who can’t compete at school, won’t take any notice of their parents, grow up seeing no future and end up in gaol or take their own lives. The other is that they want real jobs for their kids.

For many years few took them seriously. Too many of us have thought we knew better what they needed – more grandiose forms of self-determination, apologies, bigger and better rights, constitutional amendments, treaties, whatever we thought were the big issues. Noel Pearson will go down in history because he listened, thought and wrote and lobbied. Recently John Ah Kit, as a Minister in the Northern Territory Government, has followed his lead in acknowledging the problems, and started his own search for solutions.

Pearson showed that in Cape York at least the priority must be getting on top of the grog, because it causes or exacerbates or prevents the solution of every other problem. He also called for the reassertion of the personal responsibility that has been undermined by generations of welfare dependence, and a search for ways to escape that dependence through re-engagement with a real economy. His detailed proposals emphasise that government assistance is still needed but must be given in new ways.

Few have read his intellectually powerful work, but many, black and white, judge it from sensational media grabs. On the Left they ignore it, dismiss it as ‘blaming the victim’ or attack its author; on the Right they selectively hijack it for ideological use.

Premier Beattie listened to Pearson, formed Cape York Partnerships, and sought Tony Fitzgerald’s recommendations on the grog situation. Beattie’s response, Meeting Challenges, Making Choices promises the first serious attempt to empower Aboriginal communities to find a future.. It offers a framework of law and government partnership within which people in the communities can themselves make effective choices.

Successful change depends on community members, alone or in families or groups, summoning the will to tackle the problems. It will be difficult and painful, particularly in a society that respects personal autonomy so strongly, particularly when it means confronting kin and resisting their demands, particularly for people whose exercise of will has been historically undermined. Hope lies in the many people in communities all over Australia who have maintained control over their lives, people we hear little of in all the accounts of disintegrating communities, some of them people who have courageously formed night patrols, justice groups, youth groups and other forms of resistance to grog and despair.

I called my lecture ‘Finding the future’ because I believe that Aboriginal people must find their own futures. The role of the rest of us, the white community, is to make room for them; to negotiate when they come to boundaries, to offer friendship; to share knowledge, experience and resources; to welcome and encourage participation in institutions, associations and activities; to listen and learn; to be sensitive and respectful of difference; to pressure governments. For example, white parents can help Aboriginal children feel comfortable and welcome in schools by forestalling the unthinking cruelties of their own children, fostering friendships and inclusion in activities, encouraging Aboriginal parents to take part, listening to them and working with them to make the school rewarding for all children.

It is not for us or our governments to pre-empt the myriad choices that open to Aboriginals as they seek their futures, whether as individuals or as members of communities. There are enough constraints imposed by the real world, where choices are always limited by scarce resources, by the rights and interests of others, by law, by the needs of one’s family, by the trade-offs in every decision that is made.