The business of Indigenous Affairs then and now

Disastrously, this also meant rejecting the expectations and disciplines entailed in market-based employment. At this time, the Australian “outstation” or “homelands” movement understandably began to crystallise.

The Homelands Movement

As outlined in one of the movement's key documents, A Certain Heritage, the Homelands Movement was essentially restorationist:

Aborigines hoped that smaller, more dispersed groups would find their traditional hunting and gathering more rewarding and their dependence thereby reduced.

There was something wrong, nonetheless, with supporting policies that wilfully diminished standards of living or access to opportunities.

… There is in the homelands little prospect of employment; access to necessities is more difficult; schooling … medical services often unavailable … choice between the lifestyle of homeland and that of the larger settlement or township is inescapable. Aborigines cannot hope to have all or the best of both.

The homelands movement meant accepting low standards of living. As Marcia Langton, a leftwing Aboriginal academic, has pointed out, the New Left failed to notice that as Aboriginal people become more reliant on subsistence activities for survival, their emerging demands for land rights in the 1970s were oblivious to their exclusion from the workforce.

Welfare and employment

Indifference towards Indigenous participation in the workforce then conspired with the morbidity of welfare dependence. Beginning in the 70s, elders and communities became increasingly alarmed at the corrosive effects of easy access to welfare. The incentives to participate either in the labour market or in cultural maintenance were obviously diminishing.

The Fraser Government responded with the Community Development Employment Projects program in 1977. Initially CDEP was set up so that remote communities could forgo unemployment benefits for community obligated projects. This Indigenous work-for-the-dole approach grew exponentially. As the largest single Indigenous specific program, it has 37,000 individual places, many in urban and regional settings, and funding of over half a billion dollars annually. Despite this growth, it has neither linked individuals to local labour markets nor uniformly enforced mutual obligation requirements.

The percentage of Indigenous Australians who rely on government pensions and benefits has decreased - from 55 per cent to 50 per cent - in the eight years to 2002. But the fact that half of a population rely on pensions and benefits has sounded alarm bells in commentators as different as ANU Professor Bob Gregory and Noel Pearson, who calls this “welfare poison”.

In 1999 the Federal Government established the Indigenous Employment Policy (IEP) to give better access to private sector jobs for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The policy now boasts many success stories.

The basic lessons the Australian Government has learnt are these:

• indigenous job seekers are not hardwired to fail in employment;
• with goodwill, local jobs for local Indigenous people can be found;
• private sector jobs do not take away Indigenous identity and can restore pride in individual and community achievement;
• private sector jobs are a vital component towards building meaningful economic independence; but,
• considerable barriers to employment remain.