Rick Kuhn
IN JUNE 2006, Tony Abbott gave the Howard Government’s approach to Aboriginal affairs an accurate name: “new paternalism”. This was rather too accurate, so the Government distanced itself from the phrase. The measures associated with the current moral panic about child sexual abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is new paternalism with a vengeance. The Government has sent in the army and police to reduce the control Aboriginal people have over their own lives.
The Commonwealth, rather than the communities themselves, will control the Aboriginal land on which they live, through compulsory leases. This terminates local self- government in favour of decisions by hastily recruited, trained and despatched public servants from Canberra. Unlike other land owners, Aborigines will no longer be able to decide who enters their land.
The Government, not Aboriginal people themselves, has decided that their children must undergo medical checks; that pornography and alcohol will be forbidden in their communities. The Government will restrict what they can buy with their already small incomes if they receive social security payments or work for the dole. This will apply to all Aboriginal people in the designated areas, including the majority of Aboriginal parents who do a good job looking after their children, with very limited resources. Payments to parents whose children miss a few days of school will also be cut.
Its record of throwing children into refugee detention centres suggests that the Government’s concern about the wellbeing of young people in general is very recent. Over more than a decade in office, it has not seriously tackled poor Aboriginal health, unemployment and housing.
The Howard Government has not even funded effective programs that Aboriginal people have themselves set up to deal with problems of violence, like those in Redfern and Cherbourg. Though its own programs, the Commonwealth spends less per capita on Aboriginal health than on other people.
The Prime Minister’s “national emergency” over abuse of Aboriginal children is certainly an act of opportunism in the run up to this year’s federal election, as 60 per cent of those surveyed in a recent poll recognised. Even though Labor leader Kevin Rudd gave this manoeuvre a chance to succeed, by endorsing Howard’s actions, it seems to have backfired.
Instead of driving a wedge between Labor and those genuinely concerned about the welfare of Aboriginal children, Howard looks not decisive but cynical. He has wedged himself. Hardened racists, to whom the stereotyping of all Aborigines as child abusers might appeal, are probably wondering why the Government is spending more money, even if on police and troops, to help black people in the outback.
The Government’s actions are nevertheless also consistent with the long-standing views of prominent Liberal and National Party members, especially Howard himself.
Mining industry and Liberal Party figure Hugh Morgan pioneered public campaigns against the rights of Aboriginal people, especially to their land rights, in the mid 1980s. These intensified, funded by the Mining Industry Council and extended by the Liberal and National Parties, during the 1990s.
One of the Coalition’s main themes in the 1996 election campaign was bashing the “Aboriginal industry”. On taking office, one of its first priorities was to start the process of undermining the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
It “mainstreamed” publicly funded services into government departments, ending Aboriginal control over them. ATSIC and its regional councils, elected bodies, were abolished in 2005.
The same disdain for democracy is apparent in the Government’s hostility to university students’ elected representatives and the persistent use of police and military forces in Australian foreign policy, rather than relying on the capacity of ordinary people to sort out their own countries.
Howard probably does genuinely believe that greater freedom of action for corporations, especially mining companies, in industrial relations and gaining access to Aboriginal land can increase the prosperity of all Australians. The correctness of this belief is another matter entirely.
Underlying problems like child abuse in Aboriginal and, for that matter, other communities, is a lack of resources and power. So far, the Government has eroded resources available to Aborigines, while attacking their capacity to control their own lives.
The “new paternalism” looks a lot like the old paternalism, when indigenous people were pushed around by “Protectors of Aborigines”, local bureaucrats and church appointed administrators on reserves or mission stations.
A priority of yesterday’s paternalists was often to provide low-paid Aboriginal workers for domestic labour, pastoral and agricultural industries.
The new paternalists are taking steps to provide cheap and uncomplicated access to that recently reinstated Aboriginal asset land.
The Government thought that widespread prejudices against indigenous Australians could be mobilised to justify controlling their lives in ways that would be unacceptable for anyone else, at least until this precedent was set.
Collective decision-making by Aboriginal communities about the use of their land that does not always put profit maximisation above all other considerations is an affront to the material interests the Government promotes and the Coalition’s individualist rhetoric. Such practices can create delays and costs for corporations and even prevent them from gaining access to the resources they want.
For there is a category of individual to which the Government is particularly committed. Not flesh and blood human beings, but the ideal personalities fixated on profit-making that are created by companies legislation. The Government’s latest Aboriginal affairs policies are motivated by opportunism, convictions and the pursuit of particular material interests.
The explosive mix of public concern about terrorism and anti- Muslim racism is one of the few weapons the Government has not used to rebuild its support this year. The Sydney meeting of the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in September, with George W. Bush present, will be a particularly good theatre of operations in which to detonate it.
Rick Kuhn is a reader in political science at the Australian National University, editor of Class and struggle in Australia and a member of the Stop the Attacks Coalition which is organising a protest against current Aboriginal affairs policies, at 12.30pm on July 14, in Garema Place.
Earlier version published as “Emergency as opportunism” Canberra Times 6 July 2007 p. 13
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Author Rick Kuhn.
File created 7 July 2007. Last revised 7 July 2007.
Original URL:http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/rick/howardwedgeshimself.htm