The Local Road to Recovery

Nicolas Rothwell | July 18, 2009
Article from: The Australian

COMMUNITY-focused and traditional routes offer the ideal means of tackling the lot of indigenous citizens in remote communities.

ON rare, revealing occasions, the scale of Australia's Aboriginal crisis -- and the incapacity of successive governments and bureaucracies to frame or comprehend it, let alone to devise effective responses -- becomes clear.

One such moment came earlier this month at the Darwin meeting of the Council of Australian Governments, which coincided with the release of the grim new Productivity Commission report on indigenous disadvantage. Two years had passed since the launch of the Northern Territory federal intervention and the commission's previous bleak statistical inquiry into the wellbeing of Aborigines.

Little had changed, though there were intriguing clues to the depth of the problems besetting the indigenous landscape. Many of the key social measures were static or showed a worsening trend, even though there had been improvements in the economic indicators for Aboriginal communities.

Employment levels were up but substantiated reports of sexual abuse and neglect hadalso risen between 1999 and 2007 to a level six times the rate recorded in the non-indigenous population.

Kevin Rudd, alighting briefly on the nation's most urgent moral agenda, announced his confidence that the great measures being pursued by his government -- the modified federal intervention, systematic schemes for job creation, the slow-dawning program for new housing in the Territory -- would eventually bring progress.

"A large number of inter-governmental agreements have been signed which go to our common national resolve to act to close the gap as it occurs in the critical areas of disadvantage for indigenous Australians," he said. "Areas such as infant mortality, educational attainment, health outcomes, as well as employment outcomes."

Rudd went on to single out the three large-scale ventures in indigenous social re-engineering under way across the north of Australia -- the new broom in the Northern Territory, the alcohol restrictions in the Kimberley and the Family Responsibilities Commission in Cape York -- as "different forms of intervention", marking a break with the patterns of the past.

This is the new paradigm: observation and consultation, followed by targeted intervention and constraint. It strips away the anarchy of unbounded freedom, the better to build the structures of responsibility. Will it succeed? Bluntly, Rudd went on to say he was committed to the new approach because "everything we've tried in the past hasn't worked". It is being applied with particular commitment to the remote communities of the Aboriginal world, whose members make up less than a quarter of the half-million indigenous population.

The prescription book for this fresh approach is the Productivity Commission report, a work of sweeping scale and ambition that represents the distilled wisdom of the Aboriginal affairs policy establishment. Though few of the politicians and bureaucrats who cite its headline findings will be familiar with the detail of its 700-odd pages, it goes far beyond mere statistics and enshrines a set of core beliefs about how best to achieve development and progress across the indigenous domain. One of its crucial underlying assumptions, shared by many potent Canberra public servants, is the view that the failures of the past were due to insufficient government attention or consultation. On this argument, more, rather than less, outsider involvement and more precise managerial oversight hold out the best promise of a shining future. The commission's report is studded with analysis of "things that work" and it even identifies "success factors". These include co-operative approaches between indigenous people and government, direct community involvement in program design and decision-making, and the nebulous ideal of "good governance" for Aboriginal institutions.

This vogue term, borrowed from Native American sociology, tends, at least in remote areas, to be bestowed on indigenous organisations that administrators find easy to deal with, rather than ones that represent Aboriginal interests well and are popular at a grassroots level.

So strong is the persuasive force of the Productivity Commission's world view, with its dream of perfectly informed surveillance, that the COAG leaders decided to spend an additional $40 million on collecting further statistical information on Aborigines.

Rudd's approach is aimed at strengthening indigenous communities. But can intervention on such a draconian scale, when prolonged, breed strength and resolve?

One of the most significant consequences of the administrative upheavals in remote central and northern Australia is the intensity of the consultation process. It acts as a fiercely disruptive, capacity-sapping force. Few community leaders have time to do anything but discuss their plight with government representatives and program managers. So many programs are being delivered, in so many conflicting ways, that the commonwealth and Northern Territory governments have been forced to appoint co-ordinators of remote area services: a confession of Kafkaesque gridlock.

"People are overused, pulled from pillar to post," says one central Australian leader. "They have no thought in their minds about the future direction, their lives are lived in meetings, constant meetings."

External management on the scale required by the intervention also implies a high degree of control. Indeed, the draining away of autonomy and authority has proved the one constant in the administration of the indigenous realm. When the missions came to the north in the early 20th century, strict rules were put in place to govern their populations, as anthropologist Peter Sutton points out in his landmark new book on indigenous policies and their consequences, The Politics of Suffering. When the welfare era came, in the late 1960s, Aboriginal communities were controlled and weakened by the provision of "sit-down money". When the intervention of 2007 came, the limited autonomy of remote communities was eroded by the drastic measure of income management.

All these manoeuvres stemmed from different philosophies; all leached power from the local communities. How to build power back up and create new, effective institutions for remote Aboriginal Australia? This is the hidden policy challenge before Rudd and Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin. Significantly, it is one that has already been taken up in a quiet way by indigenous groups on the ground. Old forms of representation have failed and, as this power vacuum deepens, new ones are slowly being built.

The political revolution in the remote Aboriginal regions may well be the most significant mid-term consequence of the intervention, though it has yet to register at federal level. By now, the sweep of recent history can begin to be seen: the collapse of the welfare dream, the long chaos it brought, the undermining of indigenous cultures and the creation of a loose, fraught pan-Aboriginal political identity. The removal of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission from the scene and the collapse of relations between the most prominent members of the old national Aboriginal leadership and the Coalition government of John Howard ended that phase. Something new began to form in Cape York, where Noel Pearson began working to build up local communities from ground level, and in small areas with forward-looking Aboriginal councils, such as the Western Desert's Ngaanyatjarra shire.

The X-ray map of today's Aboriginal power system in the Northern Territory and the remote northwest shows a fascinating picture quite at odds with the official blueprint. The legitimacy of the old architecture has begun to fade. Federal bureaucrats and their praetorian representatives continue to hold sway and to hold the purse-strings, but the sense is strong among many remote-area leaders that the reformist zeal of the Mal Brough era has vanished. Indeed, the emergency response is in danger of stalling: the key housing program is advancing at a snail's pace, its funds soaked up by administration. Attempts by indigenous politicians to streamline the vast public service machine and instil a mood of urgency have proved unavailing. Struggles for bureaucratic control of projects are commonplace.

Of all this, not a word in public. Meanwhile, the survival of the new policy initiatives is in doubt. The Territory's minority government appears stalemated on its indigenous initiatives, now its Chief Minister Paul Henderson is being held hostage by a Labor defector turned independent. Beyond government, the picture of decay in the old authority networks is similar. For decades the accepted political voice of Territory Aborigines was provided by the Northern and Central land councils. Both are Labor creatures, heavily enmeshed with the federal and Territory parties. Macklin's key confidant on central Australian affairs is CLC director David Ross, while the NLC's chief executive Kim Hill is the Labor heir presumptive to the Territory bush seat of Arafura. The two councils derive their power from their position as gatekeepers, mandated to issue permits and negotiate on behalf of Aboriginal landholders.

But a tide of anger against the NLC is blazing in the key northern communities of Wadeye, Maningrida, Borroloola and Ramingining, where local traditional owners have been trying for years to advance commercial development. In the centre, the CLC last month advised Warlpiri leader Thomas Rice Jangala that his ownership of a key set of dreaming sites was in dispute: the controversy, first reported in Alice Springs News, has received little attention in the outside world, but this was a shot heard all across the Western Desert, where Rice is one of the region's most senior traditional men.

The authority of the CLC, whose new, $16m headquarters was just opened by Macklin, is in shreds among the people it purports to represent. Meanwhile, different indigenous institutions have begun to take form. Several of the new Territory local shires are in effect Aboriginal regional bodies, exercising considerable power. The councillors of one shire recently removed their white chief executive, to vast surprise and consternation in official circles. In the Top End, autonomous bodies of traditional leaders are emerging; new councils made up of senior figures have been set up in the Thamarrurr region around Wadeye and in the Yolngu region of northeast Arnhem Land.

Not only are these developments telling responses to the recent phase change and to the slow breakdown of old authority structures caused by the paralysing welfare culture and the collapse of the schooling system; they also highlight the divide between traditional Aboriginal societies and the indigenous institutions set up under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act to serve as designated representatives in mainstream society.

The Aboriginal politics triggered by the intervention is thus tense and complex: the struggle being played out is largely invisible to outside politicians, since their information comes from the placemen and administrators charged with controlling the field. Why, indeed, should Rudd know any of this, if his sources are the Productivity Commission's statistics and a quick COAG breakfast with a broad spread of NT Aboriginal figures?

But the optic through which to view much in north Australian indigenous affairs is precisely this battle for influence between old institutions and new. Significantly, two of the key official interventions listed by Rudd in Darwin were in fact governmental co-options of promising local plans: the Cape York Family Responsibilities Commission and the Kimberley alcohol controls. Both are testimony to old, local, lurking networks of social capital rising up to defend Aboriginal interests.

Various paradoxes flow from the strange configuration of divergent interests in the Territory. Traditional community leaders and those close to the cultural heart of remote Aboriginal societies tend to have quite strong biases in favour of a degree of modernisation and integration into market economic structures, while preferring a sharp boundary between their own realm of law, language and culture and the Western world. But the leaders of old representative bodies and their advisers, whose influence is tied to the preservation of the status quo, often hold opposite positions.

Thus many traditional leaders welcome the breaking of the welfare trap and yearn for large projects that offer prospects of sustainable employment, even as they oppose excess commercial development of the Aboriginal art sector and, secure in their own languages, oppose plans to deliver bilingual education. In the long-dominant "progressive" establishment that comments on indigenous affairs, the view is almost the reverse.

How, though, for the federal government, still very much the post-colonial power in the north, to oversee the successful transformation of a broken system? The intervention, in its first two years, has been a one-size-fits-all affair; its natural evolution would be into a range of local regimes, with calibrated degrees of social control and specifically tailored economic projects for different areas.

Traditional Aboriginal power structures and local indigenous councils, rather than old regional bodies dominated by partisan networks, are the way ahead for a Prime Minister who understands the powerlessness of today's remote Aboriginal world, and who is on record as saying that "everything we've tried in the past hasn't worked".