Race baiters don't deserve the high ground on Indigenous policy

The feverish determination of race-baiters to shut down debate was again recently seen in responses to announced plans to trial cashless welfare cards in remote communities. The brainchild of mining magnate Twiggy Forest, the welfare card would look and operate just like any ordinary debit card, with the exception that it could not be used on alcohol or gambling.

Given the scourge of alcohol and drug abuse in some rural communities, a modest form of income management that makes it harder for welfare to be squandered on destructive ends seems like a sensible idea. It is true that the card doesn't address the underlying social ills of alcoholism and problem gambling. Nor will it realistically prevent those who are truly determined from getting their hands on alcohol. But as a way of helping to ensure more public money is spent on meeting the basic needs of people in these communities, the idea deserves at least some credit for getting the ball rolling.

Predictably, Greens Leader Christine Milne, thought the welfare card was an idea not even worthy of civilised discussion: "I think it's really offensive to all Australians to see our Prime Minister standing up with a wealthy and privileged other white man, a mining magnate, telling people throughout Australia who are less well off how they should manage their income."

If Milne had bothered to look beyond the gender and race of those spruiking the welfare card, she might have noticed that wives and partners from within remote communities have in fact been calling for moratorium on welfare-funded booze for years. In any event, painting the welfare card as a case of wealthy white men controlling how the benighted spend their pittance is either deliberately coy or peddling pure fantasy. Welfare isn't pocket money. It is distributed to those who need it in order to alleviate poverty and disadvantage. The welfare card does this by limiting spending on gambling and drinking; two luxuries that might readily be described as the polar opposite of what such payments were intended for in the first place.

The intersection of child protection and indigenous policy presents a lesser known, but equally compelling example of political correctness sucking the oxygen out of reasoned debate. Under the 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle (ACPP), indigenous children who require out of home care are to be placed wherever possible either with immediate family members, or within their existing community. Introduced following the public fallout of the stolen generation, the ACPP was devised with a view to preserving the cultural identity of indigenous children in need of care.

The trouble is that by giving precedence to the preservation of 'culture' above all other factors, such as the ability of carers to meet basic needs, the ACPP has consistently seen aboriginal children placed in conditions of sub-standard care. According to Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies Jeremy Sammut, the problem lies in the fact that "the sorts of culturally determined parenting practices… which may have been suitable in the social conditions of the past, are no longer functioning well in the present." Anthropologist Peter Sutton describes this culture of "customary permissiveness in the raising of children" as being responsible for the neglect of basic need such as adequate food, shelter and medical attention in Aboriginal communities.

Naturally, any explanation for the alarmingly high incidence of child abuse in indigenous communities that centred on the prevailing culture within such communities was simply "divisive grandstanding" according to Ngiare Brown, the deputy chairman of the Prime Minister's Indigenous Advisory Council.

The race baiting continued from National Children's Children Commissioner Megan Mitchell, claiming that "a level of racism" was behind the overrepresentation of aboriginal children in the child protection system.

Yet with the number of aboriginal children on care and protection orders doubling between 2000 and 2011, blaming these disturbing figures on 'institutionalised racism' starts to look more like a convenient scapegoat than a plausible explanation.

Some have even attempted to explain-away far-reaching evidence of systemic neglect in some communities by accusing social workers of being insensitive to 'cultural difference.' Paddy Gibson, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney has argued that allegations of neglect are often unfounded because aboriginal children usually have more autonomy than non-indigenous children.

This might be more convincing if Indigenous children were not eight times more likely than other children to be victims of substantiated abuse claims. Then again, with Gibson arguing that whether or not a child is neglected is merely a "subjective" judgment call, it is hardly surprising that statistics seem to carry so little weight with some members of the intelligentsia.

All this would be less concerning if current indigenous policies were achieving anything close to their desired effect. Yet according to the latest 'Closing the Gap' report, there has been no progress in indigenous reading and numeracy since 2008. Worse still, this same period has seen a decline in Indigenous employment.