The Hatfield clan circa 1897 |
I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn’t seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you’ve both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty years.
Somewhat surprisingly for an aging lefty, my old mate’s attitude was quite similar to mine (and that of another old lefty in Bob Durnan who I often mention in posts like this). The former left-liberal approach to Aboriginal affairs, based as it was on “self-determination” and symbolic issues like treaties, apologies and recognition of customary law, just didn’t work. The plight of Aboriginal people actually became progressively worse by just about any measure. Of course, some supporters of that approach continue to argue that self-determination was only ever tried in a half-hearted, piecemeal, stop-start fashion. There’s probably some truth in that , but you still can’t argue that those policies even remotely resembled a raging success.
Similarly, the Howard Intervention and its relabelling by the ALP government as “Closing the Gap” has also enjoyed underwhelming success to date despite multi-billion dollar spending, as a recent article by Indigenous legal academic Larissa Behrendt highlights. Part of the problem, as Behrendt argues, is the “top-down”, prescriptive, paternalistic nature of the federal programs. As Behrendt observes, successive Productivity Commission reports (hardly a bleeding heart, left-leaning organisation) have found that the programs that work in Aboriginal communities are those based on consultation, partnership, mutual respect and communities “taking ownership” of initiatives. That must not obviate acountability or efficiency, but the two are not incompatible.
However, I strongly suspect after nearly 30 years of observation that the lack of a “partnership” approach per se isn’t the main problem. The principal and possibly insoluble problem is that key central aspects of traditional Indigenous culture are simply fundamentally incompatible with a contemporary, post-industrial, western capitalist individualistic culture like that of the dominant Australian community. However, as soon as you make such a statement, other than privately and sotto voce, you end up being howled down as a “racist” (or at the very least an arrogant xenophobe). Even undeniably well-motivated, knowledgeable experts like veteran anthropologist Peter Sutton have experienced this backlash after daring to critique aspects of Aboriginal culture. Here is Sutton talking about the inherent extreme violence of Aboriginal society:



