Article below - the realities of over 5 years of Intervention in the NT which continues under a new name & for another 10 years.
For a glimpse at the new SF & Associated bills legislation see chart at http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au/media/Stronger_Futures_chart.pdf which can be printed in both A1/ A3 size. Increasing controls & disempowerment in Federal Indigenous policy today!
Invitation: Melbourne - in case you missed this. Please see invitation Flow of Voices attached or below
Paintings from the Gulf of Carpentaria With photographs and videos by Jessie Boylan. “I want the government and mining companies to know that we are still here. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t dead yet. We are still here, feeling the country.”
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The great unmentionables of remote life by: NICOLAS ROTHWELL
From: The Australian February 02, 2013 12:00AM
Heather Davis, a self-identified alcoholic, in Alice Springs. Davis says she comes from the township of Hermannsburg, 130km southwest of Alice. Picture: Amos Aikman Source: The Australian
AS the political year takes shape, and a long election campaign looms, eyes turn north and to the far inland, and that familiar, troubling question arises: what progress has there been in the condition of remote indigenous communities during the term of this federal government, and during the past five years of Labor and the conservative decade preceding it?
What do the ceaseless reports and reviews reveal, where are the glimmers of advancement, what, in truth, would count as a sign of deep-seated reform and progress - a closing gap in the official statistics, development in key regions of the bush, effective job training schemes?
The short summary: if policy experts from progressive and centrist camps could debate for once in unguarded candour, they would be forced to agree: the human landscape is no better across large tracts of remote indigenous Australia; in some areas it is getting worse. No one with a sense of life as lived on the frontline could give an optimistic report card from parts of the remote Kimberley, the Centre or the Pitjantjatjara lands.
The shock tactics of the Coalition government's 2007 Emergency Response and the grand bureaucratic initiatives of Labor's continuing Stronger Futures program have achieved little. Why this pattern? It stems from the tactics chosen.
Effective intervention to change group behaviour remains a challenge for all but the most coercive governments, yet it remains the basic tool of bush Aboriginal policy and planning, both in the Northern Territory and elsewhere in the Aboriginal domain.
What governments can do is change the settings that shape behaviour: use incentives more than rules, but this is a hard task when the crucial features of remote indigenous policy are entrenched, fixed in the plans of the bureaucracy; when there are roadblocks to progress so fundamental they are no-go areas - beyond discussion, almost beyond mention.
New ideas are needed, but once they threaten to undermine the deep architecture of the frontier, the comfortable old arrangements that suit both Aboriginal organisations and governmental managers, they are unwelcome. Four key areas are ripe for radical overhaul: they are the bars of the cage containing bush Aboriginal people - the components of the trap.
FIRST among them is the system of land tenure: the great, all-shaping ground condition of remote indigenous Australia. Aboriginal land has a peculiar character - whether it is the land of a community, or a large reserve, or a region gazetted under exclusive native title, or a part of the vast areas of the Territory controlled under the Land Rights Act. All this land is held under collective title, and it is inalienable, it cannot be bought or sold.
In the mainland NT, the interests of the traditional owners are still represented by the two main land councils, bodies set up long ago to win land claims, not run large regions.
Outside access to this Aboriginal land is by permit only: the country is effectively locked up and business initiatives smothered. Progress in sub-leasing land blocks for enterprise development, whether by outsiders or locals, has been glacial across much of the north and centre.
In large part because of this imposed authority structure, the growth of administrative capability in the remote Aboriginal world has been slow, corruption high and institutional failure endemic: several of the main Aboriginal organisations in the NT are currently under special administration or plunged in deep, well-veiled financial scandal.
The land tenure pattern also has far-reaching social consequences. Private home building is virtually impossible, given that the land's value cannot serve as an asset for its owners to borrow against. The absence of capital helps create the dependency economy and exacerbates the housing crisis. The normal mix of private, social and public housing is simply absent from most of the Aboriginal north: hence residential overcrowding and its results, social tension and poor health.
When the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program - a remote housing project - began five years ago, its effect was not to change this picture but to deepen governmental authority over Aboriginal lives: all NT community houses were quietly transferred from local to government ownership at a stroke of the pen. Even the freedom to start up in small-scale trading is restricted by today's system: local bush tourism projects, plans to recycle car parts from roadside wrecks, private stabs at feral pest harvesting - ventures of this kind by traditional owners on their own land face a red-tape maze.
A number of straightforward reforms could help resolve this impasse. They would be best done with bipartisan political support, after fundamental review, as part of a blueprint for remote Australia in the generation ahead.
What to do? Change the land ownership system itself; allow private holdings, whether lease or freehold, within Aboriginal land trusts, so creating economic assets in families. Scrap or recraft the superannuated land councils, which have long since degenerated into fiefdoms of patronage, at once gatekeepers and post-colonial mediators, dominated by their unelected outside administrative staffs. End the permit regime, which restricts investment. Introduce a housing voucher scheme so as to wrest decision-making power back from building consortiums and program administrators, and place it firmly in the hands of local community groups.
Linked reforms of this kind would transform the power balance in the bush, and the understanding of land's place and function and potential. They would give remote people a self-determination long since stripped away. None of them are on the agenda, or even in discussion.
THE second critical question, welfare reform, is at least in the headlines. Conservative and Labor ministers have grappled with the passive welfare problem in the remote indigenous realm all through the past decade, and come up with contradictory initiatives. In the early days of the NT intervention, the Coalition did away with the community development employment program, a part-time public works scheme that was ill-run in the north and widely exploited. CDEP was revived by Labor, refashioned in several different streams and linked to grandiose training initiatives: its framework is still under redesign today.
At core, the welfare dilemma in the Aboriginal bush stems not only from a lack of jobs in a vast region without economic activity but also from a lack of local workers willing to give up unconditional welfare payments to take up community positions.
The most contentious component of the initial NT intervention was its mandatory welfare income management system, a measure designed for the short term but now extended indefinitely by Labor: a sharp means of social control. The past five years have been years not of change but of training for change; private companies deliver instruction across the remote bush and government pays them by the numbers of participants they sign up, with predictable results: much course-taking, few real jobs.
A large fraction of the extra money committed since the intervention goes on paying managers and advisers, rendering social self-sufficiency an ever more distant mirage. Public service positions have been forged from old CDEP slots, and squadrons of environmental rangers are also funded by the state.
The effect of this pattern is an ever-greater centralisation of control in the hands of the two commonwealth social affairs departments. Canberra now effectively micro-manages remote Aboriginal Australia. Under this public service layer, contractors and consultants compile reports and run pilot projects - but a local private sector is near-absent. The map is complex: there is both too much dampening welfare, a permanent pandemic of welfare funding, and too little local control over its use and flow.
The initial model of CDEP, in which a community received a block grant or sum of funds for its part-time workers plus 10 per cent for administrative on-costs, was preferred by many remote community managers, who felt this gave them at least some capacity to finance social support services and left the locals a say in setting the priorities of their own world.
Despite all the interventions and upheavals of the past half-decade, the old blanket welfare paradigm is essentially intact; indeed, it is expanding and it has a large invisible component: social services, day and night patrols, child and after-school care, arts and culture programs, all provided through the munificence of the state, all creating a social playground where initiative is sapped away.
Both sides of politics endorse this constant flow of funds and have tinkered only with the ways welfare monies provided to individuals can be spent, not with the supply itself.
The idea of conditional welfare is still the great unmentionable of Aboriginal affairs. The tacit assumption of politicians and bureaucrats is simple: Aboriginal community people cannot run their lives productively. History tells a different tale. For much of the past century the remote population lived on missions, self-supporting: they grew or raised their own food and built their houses. These were communities that subsisted with scant external input and sent out productive workers into the wider world.
The able-bodied and healthy among the remote community population choose not to work because they have no need to. Consider Kings Canyon luxury resort near Yulara. It is American-managed and employs about 100 people, almost none of them locals; there are 60 able-bodied men and women living on the surrounding outstations, the majority of them unemployed, a familiar imbalance.
What steps might change this picture? Several obvious short-term moves could swiftly be made in the bid to reshape community economies: core jobs - childcare, aged care, the like - could be reserved for locals and a strict cap on the percentage of outside workers enforced.
A regional jobs services board could be set up to balance competing interests and recruit men and women: business start-up funds could be given direct to such boards on a per capita basis, with a view to setting up workshops and land-based private enterprises; transaction centres of the kind found in small towns across Australia would be a priority. Tax holidays could be used to encourage outsiders to create community-based businesses with local staff.
All this is social engineering. It is quite absent from the policy agenda. It is not even a dream.
DEEP reform of remote community education is the third policy no-go area: essential, but unmentioned. The system has collapsed in the NT and in other parts of Aboriginal Australia. It delivers next to nothing useful to its pupils and the extent of its failure is so evident and so depressing that the public focus is carefully placed on its minor achievements, not its global eclipse.
School enrolment is low, attendance is low, the figures are heavily massaged, and even when children spend their time in classrooms, their results, as measured by the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy - an imperfect but not a useless measure - are far below the figures routinely achieved by Aboriginal children in regional centres such as Darwin.
There are reasons for this. Why should a child go to school when her parents fail to demand it, why study hard when there are no jobs or satisfying career pathways in the communities, why study a curriculum completely removed from the circumstances of your daily life? The dilemmas pile up and reach further than mere schooling: what is a young remote community person expected to become in modern adulthood, can they aspire to be fully bicultural, like members of other minority groups?
The state keenly defends its interests as a quasi-monopoly provider of schools services: the most developed remote education centres in north Australia have become large, complex, well-staffed operations, growing despite the outcomes they deliver.
How to break this component of the trap? Again, the past can serve as a suggestive prologue: many of today's traditional Aboriginal leaders of the north or inland went to a regional boarding school, away from their communities, and returned with a complete education. Yolngu clan chiefs across northeast Arnhem Land are keen to rebuild their own Dhupuma College in the bush outside Yirrkala, the hub of learning for an entire generation in the Top End.
But regional boarding schools are the road not taken today. A set of five national-standard high school campuses across the north and centre would transform the look of bush education. Some groups have been taking action of their own: the new Tiwi College at Pickertaramoor on Melville Island, deliberately sited far from the pressures of community life, shows this desire in action.
Indeed the eagerness of many bush communities to opt out of the state schools network is very plain. Small outstations are fighting to join the Catholic education system even though they are far away from old Catholic missions. Southern boarding school places are also highly prized by concerned parents. One immediately available model not widely taken up is School of the Air education, even though it is well developed in the north, and modern technology means this form of teaching can be delivered cheaply to remote communities and outstations in a range of instruction languages.
Such are the structural possibilities. But if bush schools are to thrive, the approach of the teaching profession needs to change as well. Today most schools are staffed by a preponderance of young teachers at the outset of their careers, passing through.
The necessary reform is obvious: a specialist cadre of dedicated cross-cultural teachers, trained for the bush, engaged for the long term, would end the staffing instabilities that plague remote schools and would restore the pattern of the mission era, when teachers stayed for decades and successful education with minimal resources was feasible.
Again, the key is local empowerment. The system operates today for the benefit of those delivering the service. A voucher system giving parents the capacity to send their children to elite southern boarding schools or a community opt-out system so groups could choose the educational approach they wished to follow: these are the kinds of modifications that would engender swift and wholesale change. They are not widely canvassed.
FOURTH, and last, the most easily identified policy no-go area: the most baffling and intractable of them all. It is in the spotlight but in an uncreative way, with its problems plain, the possible solutions off the table. This is grog, of course: the pattern of heavy binge drinking and long-term alcoholism in the towns and regional centres of the inland and the Top End.
Almost all property crime, road death and interpersonal violence in the remote Aboriginal world stems from abuse of intoxicants. The NT intervention banned drinking on communities, town camps and reserves: drinking continues at full tilt. Restrictions on the legal sale of alcohol have been tried in multiple variants, with mixed success. Alcohol management plans, locally devised and overseen, have proved effective in Fitzroy Crossing and on Groote Eylandt, where they are applied to all residents regardless of background - but they often serve to shift the problem, not solve it. Illegal sales, or sly-grogging, remain rife in centres such as Kununurra and Katherine.
The quest for drink actually brings people into towns: Alice Springs, a township of 28,000 people, now has an additional 4000 Aboriginal incomers, almost all drinkers and their dependants, staying in its camps and riverbeds and in shelters around its fringe. Clearly, restrictions, local prohibition regimes and price increases are only stop-gap measures, not ways to stop this phenomenon of collective self-destruction. Clearly, too, stringent enforcement of such controls requires resources and surveillance levels quite beyond the scope of regional and remote authorities.
A deadlock has been reached: existing measures have achieved little but an uneasy status quo. Drinking continues, as does the battle against it. More pointedly, alcohol is actually yesterday's trouble. Bush drinkers tend to be in mid-life. The new pandemic is marijuana: ganja use is prevalent among the young in the communities and town camps: there is a constant supply, smuggled in, widespread despite police patrols and interceptions.
"The cops don't really make more than a marginal difference," says one central Australian with an inside view. "On any community, if you want to get high at any time you can. The only thing that changes is the price. The drugs are always there" - ganja itself, hydroponically grown, in intense near-psychedelic strains, and synthetic variants, chemically treated. Ecstasy and other boutique drugs are making their first inroads.
The substances are strong, the number of users is high, the stupefaction great. The results in the communities are evident: work undone, courses missed.
Sometimes things go badly wrong. At the height of the recent desert summer, police in the Pitjantjatjara lands had to scramble: a new batch of the synthetic marijuana, Kronik, was in the communities. It had been treated with a toxic enhancer; it had an odd vanilla taste. One user had died and the drug was a possible factor in the death. Police had to drive the streets of Amata using loud-hailers, pleading with the community's younger members to stop smoking the new batch and pass the word on to their relatives elsewhere on the lands at once.
The problem, then, is not just alcohol-fuelled crime or even grog itself. It is not a purely criminal problem. It is addiction - the last unmentionable, the last no-go area of Aboriginal policy debate - a medical and spiritual condition as much as a law and order issue.
And there is an untried solution, costly and elaborate: advanced rehabilitation of the kind given to addicts and alcoholics in Western societies. Town camp and bush drinkers, lost in poverty, jobless, surrounded by other alcoholics and drug-users, have almost no chance of fighting free unaided. Rehab services in the bush regions are minimal and short term and have a low success rate. The new government in the NT aims at introducing rehabilitation centres, but its plans now seem limited to setting up harsh boot camps for persistent offenders.
Effective rehabilitation would require substantial expenditure for the creation of regional facilities run on 12-step program lines, providing long-term therapy and care: the treatment method that holds out the best hope of transformation for mainstream alcoholics and addicts. Such a shift in policy would change the landscape of remote Australia, providing a pathway out of dependency, crime and violence and offering hope of a new life course ahead. It is not on the agenda. It is not even on the intellectual horizon: the need has never been greater.
THESE are the four chief areas of crisis and systemic policy failure bedevilling the indigenous societies of the inland and the north: the four great unmentionables. In the forthcoming election campaign, when debate turns to remote Aboriginal Australia, these are the key topics. Silence surrounds them: the time for clear words and fresh approaches is long overdue.
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Refer also attached new book review of,: ‘A Decision To Discriminate: Aboriginal Disempowerment in the Northern Territory’.
2nd print now available-order form at http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au/media/ADTD_Order_Form.pdf
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Flow of Voices:
Paintings from the Gulf of Carpentaria With photographs and videos by Jessie Boylan
“I want the government and mining companies to know that we are still here. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t dead yet. We are still here, feeling the country.”
Opening on Thursday the 14th of February, 2013, 6 - 8pm
At the Arena Project Space (APS)
2 Kerr Street Fitzroy, Victoria
Opened by Jacky Green, Prof. Jon Altman & Dr. Seán Kerins of Centre For Aboriginal Economic Policy Research: The Australian National University
Exhibition runs 14 - 24 Feb;
Wednesday to Sunday - 11am - 6pm .
Contact APS projectspace@arena.org.au (03) 9416 0232 www.arena.org.au