Gerry Georgatos - courtesy of The National Indigenous Times and The Stringer - There was great hope for the reclamation of land rights following Mapoon, Yirrkala, Lake Tyers, Wave Hill and Aboriginal Tent Embassy. But this hope has been dashed. Western Australia has the nation’s highest median income – per capita it is the richest State in the Commonwealth of Australia yet it has the highest homelessness rate in the nation, and the First Nations peoples bear the brunt of it. The majority impoverished in Western Australia are First Nations peoples – who have not benefited from the mining boom and who come last when the State puts together its budget. In the meantime the First Nations peoples of Western Australia endure the nation’s worst incarceration rates and whose youth are enduring spates of suicide among the world’s worst.
There have been nearly 300 Native Title determinations, thousands of Aboriginal corporations and more than 900 Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUAs) but nevertheless the Closing the Gap health indicators are failing badly, and impoverishment continues to asphyxiate communities. When the poorest 150,000 First Nations peoples are stood alone statistically and demographically from the 671,000 who identify as Aboriginal and Torres Islander peoples then we find that many of the indicators and statistics are as bad as they have ever been, and quite a few statistics are manifold worse than they had ever been. Therefore the Closing the Gap is a charade eschewed by the hiding behind and within collective statistics.
Many have long argued where has all the revenue generated by Native Title agreements disappeared to when we still see the worst of pernicious poverty and myriad ill-health, and many argue where have all the billions of dollars gone that have been spent by governments supposedly to address Aboriginal impoverishment. Far too many of us have known the answers for far too long but all of a sudden people are starting to speak up as some of them have had enough of the fact of third world poverty in a first world nation.
Former CEOs, directors and members of rort-riddled organisations are speaking, and former native title practitioners are beginning to speak up but more importantly wanting to do something about it all. Journalists are beginning to chase down some of the rorting and are asking questions of the regulators. Will they be heard and will the perfect storm be knocked up?
Some argue that there is an industry built around First Nations issues which in effect siphons funds to personal benefit, but at what cost – from the impoverished? These critics are right, this is exactly the case, Aboriginal peoples and Aboriginal corporations have been screwed by the carpetbaggers.
In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam disbursed $44 million to Aboriginal health, half of it consumed by administrative spends – bureaucracy. Today the spending on Aboriginal peoples is arguably $26 billion. But for the poorest 150,000 Aboriginal peoples little has positively changed and much has got worse.
Last year I wrote that Black Power living legend, Dr Gary Foley said on Brisbane’s 98.9FM’s Let’s Talk program with Tiga Bayles, another legendary figure, that a vast army of non-Aboriginal peoples are the ones who have benefited from the majority of the annual spending. Dr Foley said Aboriginal peoples are the last to benefit, if it all.
“A vast white army larger than the Aboriginal population, an army of missionaries, mercenaries, misfits and parasites have been consuming the monies which were meant for (Aboriginal peoples),” said Dr Foley.
He said what most of us know that not just a coterie but an “industry” of so-called consultants, administrative personnel, bureaucrats, and infantries of line managers have set themselves up – carpetbaggers of sorts – to reap sweetly from the Aboriginal spend.
“If all that money had been given to those in genuine need, to every Black fella in need, then all of us would have good health and a good lifestyle,” said Dr Foley.
Dr Foley said that in the mid-90s Pauline Hanson had got it right when she said that there was a quickly built up industry around Aboriginal issues that had not returned positive outcomes to Aboriginal peoples. He said that what Ms Hanson got wrong was the assumption that the industry was made up of Aboriginal people when indeed it is made up of non-Aboriginal peoples.
Dr Foley delivered a powerful and true anecdote. He said that as far back as the 1970s Aboriginal peoples were aware of the misspending by governments and the “joke” it had become. He said that at the time the health indicators for Aboriginal peoples were worse in WA than the rest of the country and consequently a bureaucracy of consultants and managers was constantly being set up. “There was a running joke among them, in WA Health, that if you wanted to drive around in a four-wheel-drive with a radio, and enjoy desert life with an esky, well here you go,” said Dr Foley. This is exactly what happened and continues to occur.
This is just not the case with Aboriginal programs and services, but also with Native Title. More non-Aboriginal people benefit from Native Title than do Aboriginal peoples. The Native Title industry is also more than a coterie of carpetbaggers, it is an army of non-Aboriginal peoples ripping off Aboriginal peoples – native title practitioners, consultants and administrators. And then there are the Aboriginal Corporations, far too many of them not having made a difference to their people. As soon as one of them comes into the prospect of securing a native title determination and potential ILUA the carpetbaggers swarm. The snake oil charmers whether of a corporate bent or whether as sole traders swarm in with the corporate spiel, their promise of commercial developments, their promise of underwriting culture and community, their promise of good governance, their promise of a good future, but rarely have any delivered on their promises and have just plainly ripped off the joint. You’ll find in many Aboriginal corporations non-Aboriginal executives without any substantive work history to justify their position but nevertheless earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. As soon as an ILUA is generated, all of a sudden we will find executives on a quarter of million base salary while the communities languish in poverty and ill-health.
Far too many Aboriginal Corporations are run by non-Aboriginal executives, with token Aboriginal Boards, with maybe one First Nations person as an executive while all the rest are non-Aboriginal. And then there are the consultants, whether they are anthropologists, sociologists, joint venture commercial entrepreneurs – they come in droves to attach themselves to Aboriginal corporations and to invoice the house down, while Aboriginal peoples die in third-world conditions.
This is no longer about just an industry of carpetbaggers, it is about the most deplorable sheer and utter corruption.
Impoverished First Nations peoples have missed out on what would have been a once in a lifetime opportunity to rise out of poverty.
With native title generated ILUAs, even resource companies are slamming each other claiming some give more than others to Aboriginal corporations and that there are no cross-industry standards. Some resource companies are slamming the State and Federal Governments for not doing enough to wipe out an abject poverty that should not belong in a first word nation.
These are little steps – talking is one thing and action is another matter. So far it has only been a handful of researchers and rights advocates who have been pointing out the bleeding obvious but recently the debacle in the Western Desert while the Martu peoples languish forever and a day in poverty has been highlighted by The Age journalists Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie.
Pilbara Meta Maya Regional Aboriginal Corporation CEO Rachael Denney said remote Aboriginal communities were not benefiting from the mining boom. She said the mining boom had generated some very damaging, negative effects. She argued rents are so outrageously disproportionately high that they have become a crippling stressor in terms of budgets. The high rents are wiping out support agencies, effectively shutting them down. Agencies that do struggle on with high rents have made staff redundant and are inadvertently short-changing the people who depend on them.
According to the Chamber of Minerals and Energy Aboriginal peoples make up nine percent of mining jobs and apprenticeships. But various organisations in the Pilbara including The Salvation Army, The Smith Family and Mission Australia are describing third world conditions. The descriptions of third world conditions are not limited to remote and semi-remote communities but are also being levelled at communities within major towns like Hedland, Roebourne and Onslow.
The descriptions of third world conditions are nothing new. The late Dr Archie Kalokerinos spent his working life in the remote with Aboriginal peoples and during the seventies described their living conditions as third world. Dr Kalokerinos dedicated himself to reducing the prevalence of glaucoma among Aboriginal peoples. He banged his head against brick walls trying to get the Commonwealth of Australia to address the impoverishment of Aboriginal communities – almost to the point that he was effectively ostracised. In recent years the Secretary-General of Amnesty International Shalil Shetty visited Australia and in particular the Northern Territory – he travelled to Utopia, north of Alice Springs. He described the conditions in Utopia as third-world. The UN’s Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay has described the Commonwealth’s ongoing neglect of Aboriginal peoples as racism.
I have visited many First Nations communities, and in recent times visited a number of the Pilbara’s communities. The Pilbara is the engine room of Australia’s mining boom – and super towns for the fly-ins have been built out of seemingly nowhere in places such as Karratha, Port Samson, Newman and so on. So the question begs; why not build towns like these for Aboriginal peoples and end the abject poverty?
Parliamentarians know the deal out there but few of them speak up.
The Pilbara’s Aboriginal Elders accept mining companies have helped individual Aboriginal operators improve their lives and those of their families but that they have not improved the lives of the majority of the people. Claims by mining companies that they are changing the landscape for Aboriginal peoples are scoffed at by many Elders. They say the claims are plainly rubbish and media spin.
Some Aboriginal corporations have become quite wealthy while at the same time many of their peoples remain impoverished. Are some Aboriginal corporations following the model of some of the resource companies – the organisation first, stakeholders next, and community last?
In the heart of Australia’s mining boom – the Pilbara – homelessness and youth unemployment rate amongst the Pilbara’s Aboriginal peoples have not dropped and poor health, especially among the Pilbara’s Aboriginal children, continues at the same rates.
WA’s Telethon Speech and Hearing Centre confirmed the prevalence of middle ear diseases with Aboriginal children was at crisis levels in Western Australia and particularly the Pilbara region.
Their screening data tragically describes more than 50 per cent of WA’s Aboriginal children under the age of 12 as unable to pass a simple hearing test.
In Roebourne, at the heart of the Pilbara region, more than 80 per cent of Aboriginal children could not pass the test and had middle ear diseases.
The Telethon’s Speech and Hearing Centre spokesman Paul Higginbotham said the issue of middle ear infection “was a health disaster and it must be addressed.”
The State Minister for Health, Dr Kim Hames acknowledged not enough has been returned to Aboriginal communities from the mining boom and even his Government’s $22 million investment in Aboriginal rural and regional health in particular to upgrade remote Aboriginal health clinics is only a drop in the bucket.
The Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation’s CEO Michael Woodley once said to me, “Real change will come when things are done directly for the people.”
“That will happen when our communities have the money spent on them in terms of housing, community institutions and other developments and when money is spent on enterprises that everyone benefits from and not from which only some people benefit,” he said.
“Profit-streams that go to individual operators, which is a positive in one way does not mean they flow on to communities. When the statistics on the Pilbara’s homeless rates and unemployment rates change, when our children’s literacy rates improve and when the gap on health closes, when our children can hear, then the mining companies and government will have something to rightly boast about.”
Many First Nations peoples do live with poor nutrition and do sleep on a dirt floor despite being within close proximity to the mining boom. Yet just about everyone in State Government is not speaking to this. Others sell the damaging messages that First Nations peoples are not able to manage monies or advance themselves and then images of abject poverty and incidences of domestic violence and substance abuses are packaged with these messages and sold to the rest of the nation. Far too many are setting up the platforms for the carpetbaggers.
But there is a fight back, however will the fight backs be isolated? The Arnhem Land’s Yalmay Yunupingu said, “We are not brainless and dumb and we can manage our own communities, our own affairs, our own organisations.”
I have spoken on numerous occasions with the Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Senator Nigel Scullion and have hammered the need for the carpetbaggers to be dropkicked. Minister Scullion said he is saddened by the “rorters” and that he “has seen it all, what goes on.” He is “saddened by the failure of the mining boom’s riches to improve Indigenous welfare” and that there is a need for new policy and reforms “to ensure that Indigenous corporations improved the lot of their people.”
Some Aboriginal Corporations have become among the nation’s wealthiest while their people, who can number as low as 1,000 and in general, average a few thousand people, languish impoverished. Tens and hundreds of millions of dollars have washed through some Aboriginal Corporations while little, if any, improvements are made to the everyday lives of far too many people living in third-world-akin conditions.
“The royalty process across the country just leaves me with a sense of sadness, the amount of money that is being paid out in royalties and the poverty of the people in receipt of those royalties,” said Minister Scullion recently to The Australian journalist, Paul Cleary.
Like so many of us Minister Scullion is concerned by the disproportionate high number of highly paid executives who are non-Aboriginal.
“I have people come and lobby me …. and I have to say they are all European people, they are all non-indigenous people, who are on a pretty good wicket batting for one side or the other,” said Senator Scullion to Mr Cleary.
Minister Scullion commented that if some of these non-Aboriginal executives had their moral compass intact that they should be “working themselves out of a job.”
Relying on a moral compass does not work, as I have said to Minister Scullion, and he agreed.
Several times, Minister Scullion has said to me that there are a lot of shonky individuals who take advantage of Aboriginal corporations and more must be done to weed them out. We have discussed some of the more shonky practices but to the frustration and suffering of a generation of First Peoples they have continued on. After what I have seen in far too many Aboriginal corporations, while their peoples starve and suffer, I hope Minister Scullion does make the long overdue basic differences and soon.. Firstly, there should be no Aboriginal corporation with more non-Aboriginal executives than Aboriginal executives. Secondly, everything should be done to advance the opportunities for upskilling Aboriginal executives. Thirdly, royalties and funds to Aboriginal corporations should be proportionately disbursed to the urgent needs of communities. Fourthly, material and impartiality conflicts or interests need to be declared by all executive members of Aboriginal corporations and boards, and lastly some practices that are in effect excessive self-interest and multiple hats or interests by executives must be made impermissible.
And while the carpetbaggers continue to line up, families suffer, thousands of families. In Hedland there are families sleeping under corrugated iron. There are families in homes so dilapidated that they are beyond repair. It is hard to believe this is Australia. It is not limited to Hedland. Kalgoorlie-Boulder’s Ninga Mia is a shocker with families there too in the most deplorable conditions. They have been there for ages, under the nose of the Department of Housing which does next to nothing. They live under corrugated iron and cardboard, within sight of mining prosperity. Kalgoorlie’s Wongi Pastor Geoffrey Stokes could talk endlessly about the ongoing neglect of his peoples by State and Federal Governments. The tragedy is just as bad in many parts of the Goldfields. It is also the case in the Kimberley – a shocker in the otherwise much visited tourist mecca – where homelessness rates are more than ten times the national average – once again, most of the homeless are First Nations peoples.
Interventionist programs and support agencies help but for the most part they are band aid responses – healing may come only with the elimination of abject poverty. The money is there; Australia is the world’s 12th most powerful economy. Western Australia accounts for 46 percent of the nation’s mining exports. In Hedland, according to the Department of Housing, 338 people (mostly Aboriginal) are on the State housing waiting list but with an average wait of four years. Hundreds of others are not on any waiting lists, they do it dirt-poor. Nearby Hedland’s abjectly poverty stricken Aboriginal communities is the Port Hedland delta, Australia’s busiest port, exporting high grade iron ore to China and the rest of the world.
The monies are there, but should be a must-do spending on First Nations peoples, acquitted substantively, and the carpetbaggers should nick off. It is easy, just craft the anti-carpetbagger laws. Native Title needs to be fixed, and the corruption end. Otherwise, we will continue to watch First Nations peoples denied opportunity from the beginning of their lives, who will continue to be incarcerated at among the world’s highest imprisonment rates, who will live in overcrowded private and public housing, and their children will continue to endure among the world’s highest mortality and suicide rates.
