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July 2, 2007
The Australian argues that recent events in Indigneous affairs in Australia we are witnessing a dramatic turn in events - the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It says:
Four decades of sterile debate bounded by the rhetoric of rights and reconciliation has given way to a new agenda in which fundamental questions about quality of life, social cohesion and, most importantly, the rights of the child have come to the fore....This is a rare moment in Australian politics, which is by nature evolutionary, not revolutionary, but the speed of change shows just how rotten and unworkable the old order had become. With hindsight, we can see that the rights-based, self-determination agenda that has driven indigenous policy since the 1960s was bound to fail. It was a tangle of ideological contradictions, symbolism and tokenism resulting in separateness or apartheid in the strictest sense of the Afrikaans word. The well-intentioned social engineers driving the policy were informed by left-Libertarian thinking that held that indigenous peoples should be free to live their lives as hunter-gatherers, theoretically uncluttered by modern society but able to tap into the resources of the welfare state. In fact, the two are totally incompatible.
Left-Libertarianism is the big problem for the conservatives. Since they talk in terms of the rights of the child I presume that they are hostile to both land rights and indigenous political autonomy, which would include some form of Aboriginal self-government.self determination as a right. This means that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must be able to make the important decisions regarding their future.
Though the the Keating government presented ATSIC to the other countries as the model for self determination representative, it was more an arm of the white bureaucracy. ATSIC, Nugget Coombs writes in his Aboriginal Autonomy: Issues and Strategies (1994):
was established as an instrument of government consultation; that is, of listening (or appearing to listen) to carefully selected Aborigines to create the appearance of consent, or at least conscious acquiescence, while continuing to make unilateral decisions.
The principle of self determination had become an important principle in Indigenous communities and also in the delivery of government services to Indigenous people. It is reflected in the establishment of Indigenous legal, health and other community services. This 'organisational self-determination' (the capacity for Indigenous people to realise their goals through their own incorporated bodies) implies self-management (the capacity to effectively administer them).
Self determination is predicated on the basis that Indigenous people themselves are uniquely placed to determine the needs of the community and that it is unlikely that mainstream services would be able in the same manner to incorporate the needs of the community in service delivery.
This self-determination is seen by conservatives as 'separateness or apartheid in the strictest sense of the Afrikaans word.' It is more likely that the recognition of native title is interpreted as a re-invention of apartheid. If he opposition to native title reflected the hostility to the Aboriginal political movement, then the debate is about development in Indigenous affairs. The conservatives are currently in the political and policy ascendancy, and they run a line that goes something like this:
1. The last 30 years of Indigenous affairs has been a failure.
2. This failure is associated with land rights and native title, so that Aboriginal people in remote Australia are land rich but still dirt poor and marginalised [although if land rights is the problem, then why are urbanized blacks without land rights also so marginalised and relatively poor?)
3. The way forward is to move policy from self determination [if some such ever existed] to mainstreaming, mutual obligation and shared responsibility, terms borrowed by and large from overseas welfare reformers.
4. The way forward is also to systematically abolish the institutions of Indigenous Australia, land rights, native title, ATSIC and the work-for-the-dole CDEP scheme.
Associated with this view is an interpretation of history. The period since 1972 has been a socialist-inspired [Nugget] Coombsian social engineering; that the period before 1972, the halcyon days of assimilation, are reinterpreted as a success;and that the post-1972 decolonisation of Aboriginal Australia was avoidable.
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Op-eds are overly dramatic and TheAustralian's very much so recently, 'fundamental change', 'time has come', 'just this week'. It is an op-ed writing style that is mixes drama as opinion.