Bridging the Gap

Bridging the Gap John Hilary Martin

Bridging the Gap

John Hilary Martin

The Wadeye Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory has been transformed. About 100 new homes have been built, and a large number refurbished. They are brightly painted with large covered verandas to ward off the sun in the hot dry season and the rain in the steamy wet season, and have two and three bedrooms. The community wanted and needed new houses. The houses they had were overcrowded by anybody’s standards. ‘More houses’ was one of the requests Government officials heard as they worked out what should be done after the first stages of the Northern Territory Intervention.

The NT Intervention, as we remember, was the name used to sum up the response of the Government in 2007 to the Anderson-Wild Report, Little Children Are Sacred. This Report presented a truly horrific picture of widespread sexual abuse of children in the Northern Territory, excessive drinking in Aboriginal communities - “rivers of grog”, it said - abuse of children, lack of proper nourishment for them and mismanagement of the monies which the Government was putting out and which were supposed to be spent to alleviate those very problems. To the Government of the day, the Report seemed to outline a national emergency, and in the first stages of the Government response, known as the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), it acted as if it was indeed an emergency.

The first steps of the Intervention included dissolving the local Governments of 72 or 73 Aboriginal communities and placing them under appointed administrators. Their assets were placed under Government control, and their property was under compulsory lease for five years. Children were to be examined medically, the sale of alcohol in Aboriginal communities was to be banned, and a percentage of welfare money (eg benefits coming from unemployment, child endowment, some pensions, and the like) was to be quarantined so that it could be spent only on necessities such as good food and standard domestic needs. A card, which would come to be known as the Basic Card, was to be issued to every adult to restrict purchases from welfare entitlements to approved grocery stores. The Community Development Employment Project (CDEP), a program that subsidised the salaries of Aboriginal people who worked for the community, was abruptly cancelled, and participants were placed on the dole. Attendance at school was to be enforced, additional police were to be stationed in local communities, and night patrols stepped up to ensure safety.

The immediate reaction in Aboriginal communities to this activity was outrage about being singled out and demeaned, and large numbers were further alienated from a bureaucratic administration. It should be noted, however, that significant Aboriginal spokesmen and women - Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Galarrwuy Yunuppingu - strongly supported elements of the Government action as necessary and long overdue. After a Federal general election, the new incoming Government promised a Review of NTER measures.

In the event, the Review in 2008 did not change the basic policies of the Intervention. Government leases on property were to be maintained, and Aboriginal communities would be coaxed into extending them to leases of up to 99 years in exchange for Government funding of local projects, mainly new housing. Cancellation of the CDEP program was reversed, restoring true salaries, and local Aboriginal business was to be encouraged. The Basic Card would be kept, but no longer seen as discriminatory, since non-Aboriginals receiving welfare benefits could also now be assigned a Basic Card. New schools were to be built and a subsidised breakfast and lunch program instituted to encourage students to attend classes, as well, perhaps, as acting as a ‘carrot’ for parents to encourage their children to go to school where they would be sure to eat a balanced, nutritious meal for a nominal fee. Medical clinics would be built or refurbished, and staff upgraded, in order to support the health of children and older Aboriginals. The problems of sub-standard housing would be addressed as a matter of high priority.

In the Review, the Government promised to take steps to handle the Intervention more benignly than in the previous year, and also took on itself the task of supplying a great deal of money to carry out its many promises. The budget required to bridge the gap between Aboriginal disadvantage and conditions for other Australians would amount to several hundred million dollars. Some estimated that A$1.7 billion spread over ten years would be needed.

The agenda of the 2007 Intervention and the 2008 Review enfolded many quite worthy intentions, expressed by members of all political parties in idealistic and high-minded terms, but they were to be implemented and carried through by the same bureaucracy that had been running Aboriginal affairs under different Governments over a long period of time.

The Office of Aboriginal Affairs and its successors (its name has been changed several times since 1967) had employed many well-intentioned, hard-working, dedicated public servants, a good number with deep affection and admiration for Aboriginal peoples. The organisation also involved a number of persons who were, frankly, on the make, or who knew people outside Government who were. There were also those in and out of the bureaucracy who felt that Aboriginal people needed to be protected from themselves, and had to be taken in hand by a generous State which knew best how to provide for their needs.

The Office of the Department was and remains an imperfect instrument to carry out its task, a somewhat overpadded bureaucracy getting in the way too much of the time. A good case might be made here for doing more with less, simplifying operations, not replacing retiring staff, avoiding paid consultants, and hiring increased numbers of Aboriginal employees in coming years.

Four years into the Intervention, there were columns on the inner pages of local newspapers, pieces in magazines, long articles in learned journals, and highly critical headlines in major dailies, sometimes calling for an end to it altogether. Galarrwuy Yunuppingu, an important Aboriginal leader who sometimes sided with the former Liberal Government, is said to have lost faith in the Intervention, saying “It has been a failure”, and that it had become another form of apartheid. He called for an end to it. He made the point to his audience at the recent Garma Festival (2011) that Aboriginals must “Stop relying on welfare handouts”, and Noel Pearson agreed, “Please, no more welfare handouts”. Yunuppingu is a very wealthy man, whereas the average Aboriginal man or women will still need those handouts to get through the week or the day. Stopping welfare payments (for food, petrol, heating, sanitation, for example) is not a viable policy for today, or even for tomorrow, but it is a goal that must be reached over a reasonably short time.

The need to build new houses became a kind of flashpoint for anger in 2008 over the inability of the Government to do something positive to reduce Aboriginal disadvantage. Anger at the efforts by Federal and NT Governments to deliver housing was not limited to Aboriginals once the cost became known to the general public. Examples were published of the failure of Government agencies to monitor the building process, which was well over for the NT. A Finance Department audit (2011), not released until its disclosure was forced by a court, found that $3.5 billion had been spent with poor results. There was much duplication and waste. But there are new houses at Wadeye now, lots of them. Perhaps that tide has turned.

A Government report, Stronger Futures for the Northern Territory, issued in June 2011 by the Minister of Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin, outlines the priorities of the Department for Closing the Gap between Aboriginal disadvantage and Australians at large. She admits that the NTER introduced by the previous Government generated a lot of fear and mistrust. We must work in partnership with Aboriginal people, build on the successes of the NTER, and increase consultation and public meetings. A good step was made in June 2010 to reinstate the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act, although the clause allowing for ‘special measures’ was kept. Keeping a ‘special measures’ clause was worrisome, because it had in the past justified discriminatory regulations against Aboriginals. Closing the Gap on Aboriginal disadvantage, however, involves a number of different gaps, and some of these can be handled administratively, while others are cultural.

Stronger Futures in The Northern Territory lists a number of administrative priorities as seen by the Government :

(a) Increasing school attendance

(b) Fostering economic development

(d) Securing community safety, especially for children

(e) Improving Aboriginal health

(f) Food security

(g) Increasing housing

(h) Developing local governance.

All good things that need to be done, all gaps that need to be closed, forming a large and somewhat daunting administrative agenda. To address these priorities Stronger Futures posed a number of action steps :

(a) Require parents to send their children to school, and those on welfare need to show that their children are in fact going to school. Increase police effort to combat truancy. Begin schooling at an early age to encourage a socialisation process that leads to the classroom. Hire increased numbers of English-speaking teachers, and provide better accommodation for them, at the same time helping indigenous teachers and assistance teachers to gain qualifications to enable them to take over increased roles in teaching Aboriginal students

(b) For economic development, finding employment is essential.. Since one third of the Aboriginal population is not in the workforce, employment services are to be improved. Reconsider CDEP jobs as real employment, and payment as real salary. Encourage small businesses (cloth-dying and design, bread-making, manufacture of building materials, tourism, etc), even if they are not as efficient or as profitable as larger external companies. Help people to find useful employment, especially those living in remote communities, and give support to those communities.

(c) In the 73 Aboriginal communities administered by the Government, alcohol is the cause of 30% of all domestic violence, with a cost estimated at $642 million per year. Loopholes in liquor laws allowing alcohol to be brought into dry areas need to be closed. Perhaps ban the sale of very cheap alcohol to limit consumption, keep a Banned Drinkers Register, and monitor those on the Register with ID scanners in order to refuse them service. Even better, enforce Alcohol Management Plans (AMPs) set up by local communities themselves. Rethink the signs posted at the entrances of Aboriginal communities announcing that pornography and alcohol are banned here, as they suggest that these are only problems for Aboriginal people, and are regarded as demeaning for the entire community.

(d) Improve security, hire increased numbers of police, add volunteer night patrols, and provide and maintain safe houses.

(e) To improve health, prices for fresh food and vegetables in licensed community stores are now controlled, and stores gaining in efficiency. The practice of ‘book up’ (delaying payment) is no longer allowed, helping to break the cycle of debt that has plagued many families. The policy of licensing stores will continue.

(f) The acute need for housing is being addressed, and tenants are now expected to pay rent. At the end of August 2012, the five-year leases taken by the Government in 2007 will come to an end, and there will be a need to determine the viability of present and future leases and rentals. There will be a scramble, since only three long-term leases have been negotiated so far.

This busy agenda for Closing the Gap on Aboriginal disadvantage will be expensive for the Government, especially if these strategies are seen as essential. It is a large administrative basket of wishes and hopes for Aboriginal welfare that may tip over and spill out if policies are simply handed down and imposed on communities which do not necessarily want all these things done for them and not being done by them.

In addition to the physical disadvantages which are very real, there is another gap, a cultural gap, which is often overlooked or ignored. The cultural gap is in, I suppose, the proverbial ‘too hard basket’, usually something we plan to deal with later. Like religion, culture is something we do not like to talk about. Economic decisions and their measurable outcomes (at least bottom-line outcomes) ease the decision-making process. But perhaps that is the basic reason the NTER produced dismal results and generated so little initiative within Aboriginal communities. With the best of intentions, it took things out of Aboriginal hands. Taking over 72 or 73 communities, dissolving their governing committees, leasing their lands, and appointing administrators does not and did not inspire local initiative. To build 90-to-100 houses in a smallish town, largely with outside labour (in this case Anglo-European workers), is to leave static the unemployment rate of that very group of young people we say most need to be gainfully employed. To put houses down without asking community members where they should be placed is to ask for an increase, not a decrease in violence. When trees are torn down and roads put through that destroy the natural character of the land, the lynchpin of Aboriginal culture, it undermines a basic value. Building expensive school buildings that few students will attend in the hope that they may eventually want to attend, or may somehow be forced to do so, is to throw money to the wind.