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February 13, 2008
Jack Waterford observes that few have any real idea just what Labor hopes or intends for Aborigines, just what models of progress and development it plans to adopt or what targets it is setting for itself or for Aborigines. Right now it is simply continuing former programs There have been minor changes in the various programs the ALP has inherited. He says:
There is the Northern Territory intervention, which may or may not be starting to improve some facilities in Aboriginal communities but which openly eschewed any form of consultation with Aborigines in doing so. It has also made no bones about coercion, including sequestering the incomes of all Aborigines in target communities. The rationale for the intervention has put most focus on the urgent task of child protection, including citing (if not following the recommendations of) any number of reports showing terrible rates of abuse and neglect. But not much of the intervention's useful activity has had much to do with this, and many of the big promises (say of extra police in communities) have already been whittled down.
 As the cartoon by Sharpe indicates the intervention involved a conscious turning away from a rights and welfare payment-oriented system to one focused on responsibilities and economic development.
Its defenders, such as Marcia Langton, argue in Trapped in the Aboriginal reality show that though first Australians are simply seeking relief from poverty and economic exclusion, in the last three decades, rational thinking and sound theory (such as development economics) to address the needs of Indigenous societies have been side‐tracked into the intellectual dead‐end of the ‘culture wars’. This has had very little to do with Aboriginal people, but everything to do with white settlers positioning themselves around the central problem of their country: can a settler nation be honourable?
She adds:
The rhetoric of reconciliation is a powerful drawcard – like the bearded woman at the old sideshow. It is a seductive, pornographic idea, designed for punters accustomed to viewing Aborigines as freaks. It almost allows ‘the native’ some agency and a future. I say ‘almost’ because, in the end, ‘the native’ is not allowed out of the show, forever condemned to perform to attract crowds.
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Gary,
Langton allows that Aborigines are entitled to a sense of injustice, which Pearson does not. He takes his entitlement argument past it's logical conclusion, to a point where entitlement of any kind is damaging.
Langton's sideshow analogy argues in favour of consultation, if not autonomy, while Pearson seems to advocate the big stick.
He claims to stand in a middle ground between left and right, but do you think he's minimized his own influence by supporting Howard's intervention?