The Voice: the search for equity

If we were to focus on the real problems, might we come up with better solutions?

Let us begin with Closing the Gap.

Throughout history, most people produced their own food, clothes and shelter, entertained themselves and never moved far from home. Dirt poor, their lives a drudgery, they suffered high rates of child mortality, and ever-present violence. As seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, life was ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and short’. In poor seasons, they starved to death.

For centuries most people lived on $3 per day. Of course, it varied from time to time, and place to place. But mainly it stayed in the range $1 to $5 per day. Improvements were transient. The situation for the Aboriginal people when the English arrived in 1788 was at the lower end of this scale.

Over the past two hundred years countries which embraced liberal democratic principles – individual rights, private property, the rule of law and representative government – have thrived. Today the world average is $42 per day. Throughout the world millions of people are better off than ever. For some countries the improvement began about 1800; for others it has happened in the last thirty to fifty years.  Countries that have seen dramatic improvement in recent times include Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Czechia, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Panama, Chile, Botswana and Algeria.

Today, Australians are safer, wealthier and live longer than ever before. In the last hundred years, homicide rates have fallen from 2.6 to 1.0 per 100,000 per annum,  GDP per capita has risen from $21 to $136 per day, and life expectancy has risen from 61.0 to 83.4 years. Meanwhile the population has increased from 5.4 to 26 million. Most Aboriginal Australians have benefitted from this. However there is a significant proportion of indigenous citizens whose lifestyles have never improved to this level. This is the problem we need to address.

Social policies for Aborigines have not delivered positive outcomes. Despite millions of dollars being spent over the past fifty-six years, serious disadvantage persists. Attempts to “close the gap” have failed. In many communities, children are not getting an education; health is poor; life expectancy is low; there is a lot of drug abuse and violence; employment opportunities are few or non-existent; and there is an entrenched culture of welfare dependence.We need to face the reality that well-intentioned welfare solutions have failed.

The 1967 constitutional referendum was meant to be for political equality not special rights. But instead of deleting all references to race, the plea was amended to allow special laws using the race power because it was hoped this would eradicate Aboriginal poverty and hardship. “Now after decades of failure which should have shattered that illusion, we are once again being told that constitutional inequality will promote equality and that enshrining separateness will reinforce national unity”

In his 2015 report, Empowered Communities, Noel Pearson was critical of the Aboriginal support industry. “Our service delivery system promotes and exacerbates passivity. It doesn’t actually do any good for the people the services are directed towards”. According to him, about 70 cents in the dollar was going to administration of programs by non-indigenous staff. Gary Johns has detailed similar deficiencies in his recent book The Burden of Culture.

There is a disconnect between the problem and the solution. The Voice provides power and money to an Aboriginal elite who are already well-educated and participating in our first world economy, but it can do no more than existing lobby groups to help the disadvantaged who live in third-world conditions.

We need to acknowledge therefore that 56 years of welfare has not worked. Perpetuating a failed system will not lead to different results. More bureaucracy, even if tempered by better local input, will not lead to better outcomes. There is a fundamental conflict between the desire to maintain a traditional lifestyle yet have all the benefits of a modern first-world society. It cannot be done. Nor can a society function if it is forever funded by the goodwill of others. It is not dignified. It is not sustainable. Closing the Gap requires a willingness to accept the modern world.

So the first thing we need to do is to encourage those who wish to embrace a first-world lifestyle. We need to facilitate the transition. This will probably require a focus on the young. And in most cases, it will require that they move to cities and regional towns, returning to being ‘on country’ only for holidays.