Desert sweep (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Desert sweep

Nicolas Rothwell | August 11, 2007
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22223488-28737,00.html?from=public_rss

ABORIGINES across the Northern Territory can feel it like a hot, fierce wind
from the southeast, blowing through their communities and pulverising the
old established order and its familiar routines.
sweep

[photo inset - One of the most significant changes advocated by the reforms
is a strong police presence in the Northern Territory. Picture: Renee
Nowytarger]

The 500-page NT National Emergency Response legislation - passed by the
House of Representatives in Canberra on Tuesday, examined by a high-speed
Senate inquiry yesterday and due to become law early next week - aims at
nothing less than the refashioning of indigenous northern Australia.

Constraint and education, health checks and modernisation, surveillance and
opportunity: it holds out the prospect of all these things. It begins from
one key, all-justifying assumption: the federal Government sees a social
breakdown in the bush so deep that the life and wellbeing of young
indigenous children are at risk.

The plan comes with a large price tag. Its implementation will cost more
than $500 million in its first year, a sum that equates to $8 million in
additional funding for each of the 73 main target communities.

These new laws, which give Canberra wide control over remote Aboriginal
lands and confer a heavy responsibility on the nation, rescind a range of
basic rights granted to indigenous bush communities only a generation ago,
or restrict those rights drastically, to guarantee a future of promise.

The legislation is unapologetic about this and quite clear about the
reasons: "In the case of indigenous people in the NT, there are significant
social and economic barriers to the enjoyment of their rights to health,
development, education, property, social security and culture. The
emergency measures are part of the action to improve the ability of
indigenous peoples to enjoy these rights and freedoms."

But few observers have yet grasped just how coercive the new regime will be
and how much it will change life in the remote world.

Family heads who repeatedly fail to send their children to school will not
only have the cash part of their welfare or community work payments cut
back; the remainder will be supplied in vouchers that can be spent in the
local community store only, essentially producing a kind of movement
control. Until now, bush Aborigines could collect their payments in town.
With that system drastically changed, a lifestyle of subsidised nomadism
will be much more difficult to sustain.

The Community Development Employment Program that provided most of the wages
in remote settlements and served as the low-grade fuel of their economies is
being scrapped across the NT. In its place comes training and work for the
dole. The same principles will apply to the new labour programs as in
mainstream society. If remote community members regularly fail to discharge
their appointed tasks, they will be held to be in breach and lose their work
slots, and money, for several weeks. This is a big change from the CDEP
system, which had an opt-in, opt-out flavour: people often worked only when
convenient.

Remote community members also will need to prove they are job-seekers, in
training or looking for employment through their registered local work
provider, or they will lose their weekly payments: a sharp departure from
the days of unconditional money and yet another mechanism for keeping
people close to their communities.

Power in remote Aboriginal societies comes from organisations and their
funds. Almost unnoticed until now, the new laws have changed this power
game, giving Canberra full override.

Federal Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal
Brough gains complete control over NT indigenous community governance. He
can suspend and take over Aboriginal local councils and any of their
associations, including art or resource centres, and transfer their assets
to the new local government shires being designed. An axe thus hangs over
any bush indigenous grouping that fails to perform.

This all adds up to a new regime with bite. It spells the end to the hazy
days of many remote communities, of all-day television watching and card
playing, watched over by a clutch of harassed mainstream advisers. It is
intervention that brooks no appeal and is designed to change behaviour
fast.

"In a crisis such as this," declares the commonwealth's background memo,
"the measures are necessary to ensure that there is real improvement before
it is too late for many of the children. The bill will provide the
foundation for rebuilding social and economic structures, and give
meaningful content to indigenous rights and freedoms."

So runs the extraordinary argument behind this policy revolution. Not since
wartime has language of this kind been presented to federal parliament, and
the index of the crisis lies in federal Labor's broad acceptance of these
startling measures.

Yet the emergency response, for all its high seriousness and deep pockets,
faces an uncertain evolution as it moves from blueprint to reality in the
field. There are two fundamental challenges ahead of its architects and the
teams of experts charged with making a difference on the ground.

The first, and most perplexing, is the sheer resistance of remote Aboriginal
societies to improvements mandated and delivered from outside.

Many of the observers of this other Australia have come to the conclusion
that its problems lie much deeper than economics and education, and relate
more to loss of hope and purpose, to an almost subterranean ailment of the
spirit that besets many small cultures overwhelmed by the outside world; an
affliction that may require as much care and compassion as administrative
guidance and financial transfusion.

The second, more immediate, challenge is political: the commonwealth's
intervention has a degree of soft popular support but is opposed, in part
or whole, on practical and moral grounds by a range of interest groups,
including Labor politicians of radical stripe, the NT Labor Government, the
established Aboriginal intelligentsia and organisational leadership, a
variety of academic experts in indigenous affairs and legal voices.

These voices were raised high in yesterday's emotive Senate inquiry
hearings. Some of them warn of cultural genocide, while some bitterly
condemn the lack of consultation with the affected communities. Some argue
that the limited lifting of the access permit system for the larger
communities, a change designed to promote economic and social connection
with the outside world, will in fact gravely harm their interests and erode
their cultural timbre.

Much of this criticism is a form of mourning for an old paradigm that is now
dismantled: the model that advanced the three-fold agenda of land rights,
self-determination and reconciliation.

But the reaction has been intense for, like all the most profound reform
projects embarked on by the Prime Minister, the intervention has a strong
ideological component. The Aborigines occupy a hallowed symbolic role in
the pantheon of the intelligentsia and the cultural establishment. This
social class has a deep influence over national opinion and much of its
membership is inclined by instinct to oppose the Coalition Government and
to resist measures that infringe on indigenous rights.

Neither John Howard nor his various Aboriginal affairs ministers have
prepared the case for indigenous reforms during the past decade.

That task has been left to one man: Cape York leader Noel Pearson who, step
by step, has argued his way towards a new understanding of the plight of
remote Aboriginal societies, finding few supportive echoes beyond the
editorial columns of this newspaper.

It is the Pearson analysis that stands, like a shaping shadow, behind the
chief measures in the new legislation. One of his core arguments is that
alcoholism, drug abuse and gambling should be viewed as illnesses, subject
to treatment, rather than just afflictions caused by indigenous social
deprivation.

He also contends that passive welfare rots away post-traditional societies.
On to these Pearsonian ideas another current of thought has been patched:
the view that collective land tenure stunts economic activity and that
private leases are essential to bringing security, growth and commerce to
bush economies.

This view, developed by Aboriginal affairs veteran Neil Westbury when he ran
the NT's office of indigenous policy, lies behind the federal Government's
backing for the introduction of 99-year leases on Aboriginal land in the
NT.

Westbury, significantly, is also the chief proponent, together with another
former senior NT public servant, Mike Dillon, of the argument that
Aboriginal Australia is a failed state within the nation: a view that
almost invites the emergency-response model developed by Australia in
Solomon Islands.

This, then, is a theory-driven legislative package, and its creators and
proponents will be looking for swift signs of success to back up their
prescriptions for remote Australia. The deeper problems confronting the
indigenous world, though, may take decades to address.

Housing shortages can be remedied with money, which is beginning to flow,
but the behavioural problems that doom houses to short lifespans are more
difficult. Educational failure and illiteracy can be stemmed by systematic
improvements in the quality and permanence of teaching staff, and by the
availability of boarding school places or dedicated regional colleges, but
the two generations of ill-educated, quasi-illiterate bush Aborigines now
in their maturity present a more disquieting problem.

Healthcare and nutrition for the young children who are the chief focus of
the intervention can be quickly boosted, but what of the middle-aged desert
and Top End Aborigines whose kidneys are failing and who will need lifelong
dialysis?

Alcohol and drugs can be banned in communities, and their smuggling by
grog-runners more thoroughly policed, but who will stop the drift of bush
drinkers into towns, where they are already prone to congregate, or fill
the void in their lives that drink and drugs once occupied? The blanket
alcohol prohibition and the quarantining of welfare payments, two of the
most urgent measures in the Brough plan, are at best a stop-gap solution
rather than a step towards a cure.

If the emergency response does succeed in creating calm and order in bush
communities, it is clear - though not yet conceded by the Prime Minister -
that a further, generational commitment to educating and developing
indigenous remote Australia will be needed.

And in this natural progression, the Howard Government's thinking, and
multi-billion-dollar spending package, inevitably converges on the most
expansive blueprint for Aboriginal progress advanced by the idealistic
Left.

It is also clear that a transition time lies ahead. As soon as next week,
the new regime will be imposed on some central Australian communities.

Hard choices loom: Brough made it plain late in the week that the
continuation of full-scale funding for the NT's remotest outposts, many of
them mere shells in the deep bush, was not guaranteed.

This warning came on the same day as the leak of a report from his
department suggesting remote outstations may be economically viable. The
divergence of views illustrates how much depends on the framing of initial
assumptions.

The truth is that a particular vision of remote Aboriginal society is under
threat. Until now, development experts and anthropologists have favoured
the idea of far-flung outstations or homelands, sometimes occupied by only
a single family group, and developing a "cultural economy" based on pillars
such as art, ranger patrols and land care.

But the federal intervention will concentrate services in regional core
communities. These will be offered 99-year leases and will become, so the
plan goes, economic and educational centres.

If there are 70-odd communities in the NT today, that number will shrink,
perhaps to as few as 50, while bureaucratic streamlining will follow the
establishment of the new, shire-based local government system.

The soft, introductory phase of the emergency response is over. Already, the
new government business managers, all drawn from the senior ranks of the
public service, have been appointed to the communities they will run.

An atmosphere of cautious, expectant waiting fills some of these small
societies. Among older women of the central desert, in particular, there is
a palpable hope that the new measures will have positive effects and reduce
the crushing poverty.

In the NT's political domain, though, the perfunctory support of the Darwin
Government for the emergency response has been continually undermined by
the furious criticisms levelled by ministers against key parts of the
program.

Meanwhile, regional Aboriginal spokesmen, ranging from veteran Yolngu leader
Galarrwuy Yunupingu to Central Land Council director David Ross, have
condemned the sweep and effects of the plan.

Such attacks, of course, form part of the environment in which the
commonwealth reforms will unfold and help to cue the popular reaction.

But Brough is not courting love or popularity with his scheme, and a degree
of sharpness seems built in with his measures of constraint and control.
The first striking signs that some Aboriginal communities see the logic
behind the broader lines of the Brough philosophy and its aim to set up
long-term futures for the bush, even at a high cost, began to emerge this
week.

The tiny, well-managed Anindilyakwa Land Council, on Groote Eylandt in the
Gulf of Carpentaria, announced on Monday the completion, after a year's
talks, of a regional partnership agreement with the federal Government: a
landmark deal that, in return for the grant of 99-year leases to three
communities, secures Groote a tightly targeted $20million first package of
extra federal investment, designed to craft a viable remote economy, with
substantial further funding to be agreed later. By no great coincidence,
the conceptual architect of the 99-year leasing scheme is Westbury, an
adviser to the Anindilyakwa, an Aboriginal group of impeccably traditional
slant.

Transformation, rather than continuity. Constraint, rather than license.
Imposition, rather than consultation. Obligations, rather than rights. Such
is the novel language of Aboriginal north Australia. These are new tones for
the remote world and for the whole nation: the future of a distinct domain
hangs in the balance.