The business of Indigenous affairs

Meanwhile, the New Left was in its early ascendancy and Indigenous “separate development” became a key component of the movement. The movement argued that since capitalist society had created racism, dispossession, and disadvantage, creating great distance between the Aborigines and capitalism was both humane and urgent.

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 restorationalist:

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

… There is, however, little prospect of employment in the homelands; 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.

There was more than a touch of irony when Labor’s new Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, said recently that “decades of failure had spawned, inside our national boundaries, a country within a country. It’s the unluckiest of countries - characterised by neglect, disadvantage and poverty” (National Press Club, February 27, 2008).

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 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 approach grew exponentially. As the largest single Indigenous specific program, it had 37,000 individual places by 2004, many in urban and regional settings, and funding of over half a billion dollars annually.

Despite this growth, it neither linked individuals to local labour markets nor uniformly enforced mutual obligation requirements. Major reforms to the program were commenced in 2005-06, to ensure that Indigenous people in strong labour markets were encouraged to obtain real jobs, and to discourage young people from accepting a form of “work-for-the-dole” for life.

The percentage of Indigenous Australians who rely on government pensions and benefits 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 sounded alarm bells in commentators as different as ANU Professor Bob Gregory and Noel Pearson, who called 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 learnt were: