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Third Way & Indigneous Australians#2 « Previous | |Next »
December 16, 2003

I've been off line the last day or so because my ISP was having "minor " problems with broadband. Disconnection from the internet felt like a withering on the vine. I've lost my train of thinking. It is now like starting allover again.

In the previous post I mentioned the puzzling displacement/silencing of Noel Pearson by Indigenous Australian intellectuals in Blacklines. This is a book designed to show their perspectives and analyses as a critical mass that transgressses the previous anthologies that established them as a token, minority or peripheral presence amongst a wealth of non-Indigenous critical voices exploring genocide, trauma, guilt, shame, willful forgetting, denial in reponse to the centuries old policy of assimilation. The post colonial response has been concerned with treaties, terra nullius, land rights and the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their families.

So what is Pearson saying when he addresses the social, economic and cultural problems Indigenous Australians face as a people? In my judgement he is saying something important. I'm going to spell the argument out to counter the tacit objection that Pearson's embrace of the Third Way has meant his shift from the left to the right, and him becoming a part of the contemporary constellation neo-liberal market economics and social conservatism.

For starters Pearson does not downplay the historical importance of Mabo. In the fifth Hawke Lecture he says:


"The High Court told us on 3 June 1992 that our understanding of our legal history was incorrect. The true history, according to the High Court, was that at the moment of sovereignty in 1788 when the British Crown unilaterally assumed sovereignty over the Antipodean continent, the Aboriginal peoples in truth became subjects of the British Crown
At the moment of sovereignty, as subjects of the British Crown in occupation of their traditional homelands and entitled to the protection of the new land law brought on the shoulders of the settlers from England, the indigenous peoples became in British law no less comprehensive owners of the entire continent. Native Title existed wherever Aboriginal people held traditional connections with their homelands. The High Court told us that their dispossession of those titles occurred over the next 204 years through a process of parcel by parcel extinguishment."


Ten years on nothing much has happened to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians as a result of the Mabo decision. Pearson says:

"So those are the three limbs of Native Title Law as articulated by our High Court in this country. The whitefellas keep all that is now theirs, the blackfellas get whatever is left over, and there are some categories of land where there is coexistence and in the coexistence the Crown Title always prevails over the Native Title. That is the proposition put forward to us as Australians by our judicial elders for our consideration, to see whether as a people we would embrace those terms as a just compromise 204 years after the initial failure of recognition."

A few pages are then devoted to the importance of the economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating Labor Party. Pearson then turns to the category of triangulation. He says


"Triangulation is the political or tactical strategy that complements the Third Way as a political program or philosophy (if it can be called a political philosophy). Superficially we in Cape York appear to be disciples and evangelists for the Third Way. Many people on the left, because they associate us with Mark Latham in the Australian political scene—and with other friends in the "social entrepreneurs" movement—see us as Third Wayists. In terms of political strategy and policy thinking, there is considerable common ground between what we are trying to do and the Third Way which is associated with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton (and with Latham, who has been the only explicit advocate for the Third Way in the Australian Labor Party). But we in Cape York are not Third Wayists in the generally understood sense."

He then links this back to the old left tradition (international socialism) which is routinely displaced by the Thiird Wayists as little more than heavy handed statism. And Pearson? What does he do?

He comes at the left tradition differently. He accepts the old left account [Marxist] of a class society, the element of unjustified stratification in our society, and that many aspects of our cultural and intellectual superstructure seem to have the objective function of maintaining social inequality. He has not abandoned the defence of the welfare state, nor does he berate organised labour as he recognises the role that organised labour has played in making our society a civilised and relatively egalitarian one throughout our history.

Pearson has problems with the cultural left. He summarizes his position:


'So our position may be understood as follows: our intellectual and analytical framework is an old left analysis, but our policies and strategies must contend with our current political and cultural predicaments. In a world of ideological confusion, declining collectivism and heightening stratification, our people must pursue strategies that aim to improve our position in a society where our people reside in the most miserable underclass and there are structural reasons why this is so and there are structural impediments to our people rising out of this underclass. As one of the elders from Cape York said after we had discussed the impediments that keep our people down: "we have to zig zag past the snakes, and scramble up the ladders"'.

So what is the zig zag? Pearson addresses this in terms of the policy issues of passive welfare and substance abuse. He says:

"What has prompted my reorientation over the last years is that, as the social disintegration among my people in Cape York Peninsula accelerated, no intellectual and political response emerged among Australia's political and intellectual elites — the journalists and commentators, the anthropologists and other academics, the progressive politicians.— I literally hung out to read some insightful explanation for our deteriorating condition as a people and what we needed to do to turn things around. I waited and waited. Then I realised that we Aboriginal people had to do it ourselves."

Indigenous Australians had to do it themselves because the problem was only a lack of theory dealing with the social disintegration among Aboriginal people. However, it ws not as simple as that. The cultural (and postcolonial) left had got it wrong. Pearson identified:

"....a set of ideas that seemed to travel together in the minds of liberal and progressive Australians and form a complex of automatic responses to the indications of how bad things were. There was a tendency to always interpret substance abuse as a symptom of circumstances, in our case dispossession, rather than as a causal factor in its own right. There was a belief in the ability of welfare payments to sustain people that led to a lack of interest in the social effects of passive welfare on indigenous Australians compared to the social effects of historical factors such as dislocation and separation of people from their families. There was a tendency to think of enforcement of social order as an unsophisticated rightist approach that didn't deal with the underlying issues. There was a great interest in Land Rights and historical injustices, and a focus on lack of funding and infrastructure as the explanations for bad health, disadvantage and violence."

Instead of the focus on reconciliation as culture, rights and apologies Pearson focuses on the very practical obstacles to a better life, such as domestic violence, drug abuse and passive welfare. Social policy reform is the new policy agenda in this new millennium

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
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