Third Way Part Way

Bizarrely he laments the equal pay case, because it meant that stations could no longer employ aboriginal stockmen for food, tobacco and shelter, so they were sacked. He suggests that perhaps governments of the day should have paid the dole to the station owners so that they could continue to employ the aborigines.

Pearson draws a distinction between what he calls "real" economies – traditional hunter-gatherer and modern market ones - and "false" economies – welfare dependency. While he is right to decry welfare dependency, it never seems to strike him that working for unemployment benefits only goes partway to a "real" economy.

Some of this blindness is caused by Pearson’s attachment to his land. The reason that Aborigines on the settlements are paid "sit down" money is that there is little employment there. While the land is capable of supporting subsistence living, it is not capable of providing the riches sufficient to supply health and mortality comparable to the rest of Australia, let alone the mod cons that we all take for granted. Aboriginal self-sufficiency must involve a migration of a great part of the population to the fertile grounds of the cities leaving the sacred sites behind.

Collectivism is the basis of Aboriginal society, so it is no wonder that Pearson envisages government money being given to Aboriginal bodies who then dole it out, but again that represents an impediment to achieving a "real" economy. Absent from the accounts of both Latham and Pearson was any discussion of how economic wealth could actually be generated in the dependant societies they talked about, yet without earned economic wealth, deprivation and disempowerment will persist.

At the end of the speeches I had a vision of Pearson and Latham, like a couple of bull mastiffs, circling round and round the same bush, giving it an occasional nudge, but never quite having the confidence to put their noses in. The Third Way is a good start, but it has a long way to go.