Power without responsibility

Noel Pearson is admired as one of Australia's great political leaders and thinkers. In 2015, he produced a 178-page report Empowered Communities: Empowered Peoples recommending radical changes to government policies for Indigenous Australians.

Instead of policies being determined by bureaucrats in our capital cities and delivered by a largely non-indigenous support industry, the report called for the decision making and its execution to be devolved to empowered communities. As Craig Ingrey of the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council explained at the time, "The goal is to help individuals be more responsible for their families and themselves."

Being an advocate for subsidiarity, Noel Pearson's work appealed to me. See my blog Empowered Communities (30 March 2015).

Noel Pearson is still around, and retains some influence, but he has been sidelined in the current debates by younger activists.

His ideas have morphed into the Uluru Statement from the Heart. His message has been diminished and distorted; responsibility has been replaced by grievance and entitlement.

Speaking at The Australian's first Great Voice Debate on 5th September, he returned to his theme about Aboriginal people taking responsibility for their own lives. "Unless we take responsibility", he said, "there'll be no turnaround in closing the gap".

In an essay in The Australian, (7 Sep) Tony Abbott reviewed Pearson's speech and explained what has changed in eight years and where the voice has gone astray.

The voice would have "power without responsibility, the power to make endless demands without ever having to take responsibility for anything. Indeed, every failure and disappointment would be someone else's fault; in the first instance the government's for failing to spend enough to meet the voice's demands, but ultimately the Australian people's for the original sin of British settlement."

Abbott shares Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's concern that the voice would entrench welfare dependency.

"In times past, Pearson's public advocacy has been of great service to our country. In denouncing welfare dependency as the 'poison that's killing our people', he was telling a profound truth transcending race."

Abbott wants to balance the ledger. He asks that the benefits of Western civilization be recognised too.

"It's no disrespect to the First Australians, or their achievements in surviving so long in what was then a very challenging environment, to say that they too have been beneficiaries of British settlement. 'The world's oldest continuing culture' now has the advantages of equality before the law, respect for women and other minorities, and previously unimaginable technical advance."