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February 17, 2009
A year on after the apology the Rudd Government has moved slowly on aboriginal reform to raise life standards for indigenous communities whilst the emergency intervention looks more and more permanent. The need for spending in the indigenous realm remains as great as ever: the need for boarding schools, dedicated regional rehabs, all-weather sealed road networks, machine shops for communities, permanent staff accommodation -- all the basic infrastructure so gravely neglected for decades by the Northern Territory and Commonwealth governments.
In The Australian Nicolas Rothwell says that:
The reasons for the breakdown in the reform agenda for Aboriginal Australia are multiple, but at their heart lie basic failures by Rudd and his ministers, failures both of sympathy and of analytic understanding. Some core measures of the first intervention program remain in force: the strengthened police presence is still in place across the remote Territory, the 50-odd exorbitantly paid government business managers too. The most controversial constraint -- income quarantining -- has not only been kept, it has been extended into other regions of Aboriginal Australia and is embraced by Rudd and Macklin as a key means of social control over the behaviour of indigenous welfare recipients.
Rothwell argues that Aboriginal societies and communities are far from solely responsible for their plight. As we see with hindsight, it is the policies put in place over the past generation that are very largely to blame: in education, in training, and, above all, in governance and welfare delivery.
He adds:
The key institutions involved in management of the Aboriginal domain have also failed, or become superannuated: the land councils, the policy research centres, the government departments. And yet policy is still in the hands of the same small networks of individuals, whether indigenous leaders or mainstream bureaucrats: those who "fail upwards". The conceptual break from past policies that Brough was trying to engender has been swiftly reversed. But without a frank intellectual critique of past policy fiascos, new approaches cannot begin. In short, Rudd and Macklin effected a restoration: not for them the ardent fervour of the Noel Pearson analysis, which Brough came to endorse. They have welcomed back the familiar old guard, both in the Aboriginal leadership and in the advisory nebulas that steer inner governmental debate.
Rudd's $42 billion including $6.6 billion for new houses but only tossed the NT a mere $200 million for its infrastructure projects.
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Rothwells article in the Australian was spot on and against the soft Australian lefts orthodoxy and incredible conservatism. Rudd appeased the white masses with his sorry apology - but to those who know - his words were cheap platitudes to the realities facing contemporary Aboriginal Australians - sorry is totally meaningless to the social and economic realities for the Aborigines I know. It as suspected was always going to be enough for a Rudd government to mouth the easy trendy platitudes and follow it up with the continuing non action in respect to real issues of Australian governments.