The cipher of the sniffer

But to return to the cipher of the sniffer, and to the question of why petrol sniffing should periodically attract such national curiosity and sensationalist media attention. I’m wondering whether it might be because the sniffer represents so much angst about the state of play in Indigenous communities - so much despair, so much damage and havoc, so much futility, so much lost youth, and so much angst about the linkages between government policy and communities, and the future directions for indigenous policy.

I'm also left wondering why it's been so difficult for people to pull out their respective thumbs on this issue, given that in some ways it's a containable problem. In 2000 the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination committee made similar queries about why Australia as a nation was failing to address its indigenous people's problems. The committee's rapporteur observed:

… it's of serious concern the extent of the dramatic inequalities that are still being experienced by these population groups when they represent only, you know, no more than 2 per cent of the population of a highly developed, industrialised state, and … it makes me wonder about things like the effectiveness of the programs, monitoring, benchmarking, what are the standards, is anybody watching this to see whether or not they really are designed to meet the disadvantages that are real in the communities, you know the real history of systemic discrimination, institutional racism?

After ten years of the Howard government’s practical reconciliation agenda aimed at “breaking the shackles” in Indigenous communities, we might well ask what exactly has been achieved. Are policymakers merely killing Indigenous communities softly in a new lather of language - such as “whole-of-government”, “whole-of-community approaches”, “community engagement”, “governance”, “capacity-building” to name a few - without achieving many of those so-called “outcomes”? And is tinkering with social security payments really going to alleviate serious issues such as petrol sniffing now spanning two and three generations in some remote communities, as suggested in a recent Australian editorial. Or are more far-reaching, transformative approaches needed?