1. Our national disgrace (SMH, 11/2/95) | 2. The true conservatives are those who deny our welfare policies have failed (SMH, 26/10/95) | 3. Truth, sentiment and genocide as a fashion statement (SMH, 14/9/00) | 4. PM, Aborigines and the missionary position (SMH, 9/12/00)

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Our national disgrace,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, February 11, 1995, p. 32.

The report which was published this week on the state of Aboriginal health in the Northern Territory was shocking, since it showed that despite all the huge expenditures on Aboriginal health, welfare, housing and education over the past 25 years or so, there does not seem to be any improvement in mortality and disease rates among Aboriginal communities. What are we doing wrong? It is true that the report was concerned mainly with the health of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, especially Aboriginal women. But it only fed into the debate which was already raging as to whether control of health expenditures should be given directly to Carmen Lawrence’s Federal Department of Human Services and Health, or should continue at least in part, to be administered through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). Whatever may be said in criticism of the policies of the Northern Territory Government towards Aborigines (and it has to be said that the increasing number of Aborigines voting for the Country Liberal Party is evidence that many of them do not treat it as their enemy) it is clear that the problem is not confined to the territory.

The present Federal Government has had 12 years to come to grips with the problem. It is now obvious that whatever it has done, it has not produced an improvement in health standards. Billions of dollars have been spent on Aboriginal health and welfare, judges and Government ministers have seen with their own eyes the conditions in which people live and have emotionalised publicly about it, yet there has not been any improvement, but a deterioration in life expectancy and general health, especially among women. It ought to be apparent that the problem is not one of who controls and directs the money.

It is true that a lot of money seems to be spent without much evidence of a result of the kind intended — and much of this must be going on bureaucrats and others who fritter their time away, as well as on medical and paramedical staff who work back-breakingly hard to no net effect. One might think that this enormous additional expenditure on what amounts to only about 2 per cent of the population (because, of course, they share also in the general expenditure of government) would have some impact on the problems from which they suffer. It is not a matter of begrudging it — only the ill-informed really oppose such spending. It is unacceptable that there should be any group in a country as wealthy and advanced as Australia which is so much worse off in health and life expectancy, and everyone agrees that a solution must be found.

But what is the solution? The Australian Medical Association and other medical bodies will usually argue that it is a matter of spending more money on medical staff, medicines, hospitals, and so on. Others will talk about improvement of housing, of water supplies and waste disposal for Aboriginal communities in remote areas or on the fringes of towns, of education in the threat of AIDS, the ravages of alcohol and tobacco, and so on. But there has been plenty of money spent on all these things over the past 12 years, at least.

There has been a succession of ministers, and no shortage of prime ministerial support, for the whole of this period. We can no longer argue that it is just a matter of money, or just a matter of transferring responsibility from one level of government to another.

There has to be something much more fundamentally wrong with our whole approach. If we go on at present, and this is what a transfer of Aboriginal health from ATSIC to Dr Lawrence’s department would involve, despite the change of bureaucratic arrangements, we may well find future generations accusing our generation of genocidal policies, just as so many people these days make such accusations against the well-intentioned but hopelessly incomprehending policies of the past. Make no mistake. If the term means anything at all, the deteriorating health and life expectancy of Aborigines must be ascribed directly to the policies of the past 12 years, and of the years before that to the extent that the policies remain roughly similar — that is, the Government of Hawke and Keating deserves the charge of genocide if any government in Australia has ever done.

And those in the media, in academia, in the professions, and in the community generally who have applauded the policies of the past decade or so, and who have clamoured for more and more of the same, as if funding were the essence of the matter, will share the guilt.

By all means let there be organisational reform. None of that has worked so far, but there is a case for handing the whole problem of Aboriginal health, welfare, education and housing over to a single organisation. It is a genuinely national problem, and since 1967 the Commonwealth has had, if it wishes to exercise it, overriding powers to legislate with respect to Aborigines. ATSIC is so far an unsuccessful experiment in allowing a greater degree of self-government to them, and while it should be continued and improved as a consultative body, it is a failure in administrative terms. The objections of the Northern Territory Government do not matter, since its claims to Statehood are nonsense in any case — there is a good case for reducing the self-governing part of the Northern Territory to Darwin and its hinterland.

All such changes would, of course, generate enormous heat and controversy, but they still would not come to grips with the essential issue, that we do not know how to improve the health of the Aborigines. There is a general problem of indigenous peoples throughout the world, where health and mortality standards are much worse than in the white and urban populations. It seems that we are doing even worse than most, which, if anything, indicates how irrelevant and probably harmful our policies have been.

We are not going to get any solutions from the orthodoxy of the white proponents of current policies or from the medical profession — with, perhaps, the exception of the mavericks like the late Fred Hollows, who pointed out the inevitability of the spread of AIDS in the Aboriginal communities. His analysis of the reasons for this has been virtually suppressed. Anyone who questions the dominant paradigm of Aboriginal policy, and similar policies in other countries, is written off as an “arch-conservative” or something along those lines, as has been, for example, the New Zealand writer Alan Duff whose novel Once Were Warriors has been turned into a powerful film. Perhaps those who are so sure that a continuation of current directions of policy, with the addition of more funds, is the best way to go are the real “arch-conservatives”.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “The true conservatives are those who deny our welfare policies have failed,” The Sydney Morning Herald, October 26, 1995, p. 14.

It was inevitable that I should have been described as a conservative or a reactionary for writing that the social welfare policies of the last 20 years have not been working and are creating as many social problems as they solve, if not more. In particular it is not permissible to point to the fact that the paternalistic policies imposed on black communities in the United States, and on Aborigines here, are contributing to the spread of dependency, crime and hopelessness amongst these communities.

It has always seemed to me that if one is genuinely concerned for the welfare of the disadvantaged, and indeed for a social welfare “net” to prevent people falling into the status of an underclass, then it is absolutely vital to get the policies right. But too many people are obsessed with old slogans.

It is perfectly clear in the United States that despite a huge increase in spending on various forms of welfare, including assistance to poor families, food stamps and Medicare, that the social problems of America are getting worse. It is not true that this is a result of cutbacks by the Reagan and Bush administrations, which were barely successful even in reducing the rate of growth of spending on such programs. This does not prevent earnest believers in welfare spending, however, from arguing that the solution to the problems is more spending along existing or even more extravagant lines. Surely some of them have noticed that the expenditure is not only not making many people better off, but is actually creating social problems itself? There are certainly some beneficiaries of social welfare policies. It is difficult to argue that, for example, single mothers should be left without any support. Nor would anyone wish to see a society in which there was no support available to the unemployed. But it is notorious that the means of delivery of such support can produce undesirable results, including welfare dependency, unwillingness and unsuitability for work, permanent demoralisation and, indeed, the passing on of social pathologies from generation to generation. It is not enough to prattle about “empowerment” — the fundamental issue is how to get people to take responsibility for their own lives without at the same time withdrawing support for those who are in trouble through no fault of their own. And the evidence is that government welfare delivery is a very bad way of achieving this dual goal.

The situation of blacks in America, and Aborigines here, is even worse, since they have a legacy of past maltreatment and racial stereotyping to overcome. Nevertheless, it is clear enough to anyone who wants to use their eyes that many of the problems of American blacks have been the result of the breakdown of the family, the abandonment of traditional morality, the spread of crime and drug-taking, and the increasing hopelessness of the young. When one in three young American black men is either in prison, on probation or on parole, the situation is desperate.

In the case of both the welfare dependants in general and the blacks in particular the record of welfare policy can only be said to be one of failure. To increase, to double or treble, the spending would not improve this — if anything it would make the overall problem even greater. The issue is not to cut back spending. But to suggest that there is no case for reducing and abolishing some programs is to live in fantasy-land, as I am afraid many conservatives of the Left do.

Since the problem is very largely one of self-respect and the willingness to make an effort on one’s own and one’s community’s behalf, there is much to be said for community leaders who convince people that their own behavioural patterns are part of the problem. Crazy as Louis Farrakhan and his “Fruit of Islam” goons may be in many respects, loathsome as their anti-Semitism and anti-white racism are, they do represent one strand in the growing realisation in the black communities that they have to contribute to the solution of their own problems by accepting a much greater degree of personal responsibility than at present.

The pledge which the half-million or so men in Washington at the Million Man March took, along with millions of other black men across the US, was one of rejecting violence against their own families, accepting responsibility, and forswearing drugs and crime. It was a recognition that there will be no solution to their problems which does not involve taking responsibility for themselves, individually and collectively.

That is why it represents an example which Aborigines can learn from.

It is merely wilful misrepresentation to suggest that I am recommending the withdrawal of all welfare payments, or the abandonment of the poor to starvation. What I am saying is that if we are honest we have to admit that so far we have got the welfare system wrong.

The increasing rate of family breakdown in our society has much more to do with the collapse of traditional morality than it has to do with any other factor. What substitute can be found for this is a problem which will not be helped by sloganising about devastated women and children and their need for welfare — it is not the Government which causes family breakdown, unless perhaps to the extent that it creates incentives which encourage it. The only cure for the collapse of the family is some willingness to accept self-discipline, whether through traditional morality or by some other means. Like it or not, traditional religion is better at delivering stable family structures than are government welfare workers.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Truth, sentiment and genocide as a fashion statement,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2000, p. 12.

The record must be set straight on exaggerated propaganda about massacres and stolen generations, argues Padraic P. McGuinness.

The prevailing fashion in Aboriginal history is crumbling, under challenge by courts and dissident historians. The “legacy of unutterable shame” to which a couple of High Court judges referred hyperbolically in the Mabo case is being questioned. How much of the legacy is the product of invention and exaggeration?

The reality of European takeover of Australia, the incompatibility of pastoral pursuits with the traditional life of the Aborigines, and the devastation and consequent misery of Aboriginal society resulting from contact with whites is undeniable. It is the story of encounters between European colonial expansion and indigenous peoples everywhere.

But the trend of the latest generation of historians has been to paint a far worse picture of Aboriginal history than is compatible with the experience of many who have had dealings with Aborigines. In the process, they have encouraged those Aboriginal leaders and white self-flagellators who prefer to tell a story of victimisation and blame, and demand a kind of ritual abasement of the white community before a version of history that is simply not supported by evidence. This kind of history is encapsulated in contributions to The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998), which is a kind of compendium of every wild allegation advanced for political or other purposes against earlier generations of white Australians.

It has led Phillip Knightley, the author of The First Casualty, to become a casualty of the ideological war, too. In his new book Australia: A Biography of a Nation, he has swallowed the dominant propaganda line wholly, and asserts: “Australia was able to get away with a racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and slavery and genocide, practices unknown in the civilised world in the first half of the 20th century until Nazi Germany turned on the Jews in the 1930s.”

This is overstating the case to such an extent that the vast majority of even those who walked across the Harbour Bridge a few months ago would have to protest. But it is the logical outcome of the accumulation of assertions of malevolence coming from the “stolen generations” report and from the academic historians.

Last weekend, Quadrant magazine organised a seminar to have another look at some of this material, under the title Truth and Sentimentality. The recent O’Loughlin judgment in the Cubillo and Gunner case did not invalidate the existence of a “stolen generation”, since that is not the function of a court. But it did invalidate the claims of these two to have been “stolen” and, along the way, found that there was at the relevant time no policy of forcible removal of children in the Northern Territory. A similar allegation concerning NSW was thrown out by the Court of Appeal on Tuesday.

Presumably these were among the strongest cases that could be brought and, so far, there is not a single authenticated case of a “stolen” child brought to any court. While there must have been some genuine cases of forced removal, they do not seem to be nearly as common as the Wilson “Bringing Them Home” report asserted, on what appears to be shaky grounds. The Government’s leading counsel, and two other eminent legal and historical analysts who spoke at the Quadrant seminar, showed that the whole Wilsonian edifice is built on sand.

Keith Windschuttle was able to demolish the exaggerations of general massaceres and frontier warfare which have been advanced by the Oxford Companion school. The commonly cited estimate of 20,000 Aborigines killed in massacres is a wild overestimate based on pure speculation. While there certainly were some massacres — Myall Creek and Coniston are well established — others, like Waterloo Creek or Forrest River, were either inventions or exaggerations of police actions. The inventor of the 20,000 figure, the academic Henry Reynolds, admits it was a guess, but claims it was a conservative guess. A guess is still a guess. The reason for this seminar was to show that much of what has been asserted as obviously true by this generation of writers of Aboriginal history is not at all the secure construction of new knowledge which they like to assert. Rather, it is the creation of a great deal of research designed to bolster the indictment against Australia’s white history, research that does not support the sweeping conclusions being drawn from it, and certainly not the kind of breast-beating of Knightley.

What motives lie behind all this? One can only speculate on the motives of the Oxford Companion school, but they seem to have a common source in 1970s radicalism and a desire to impose a policy prescription for Aborigines which will establish them as a kind of separate enclave rather than a part of the general Australian community. But there is little doubt the initiatives that have resulted from this policy approach, often identified with the late Nugget Coombs, are not benefiting Aborigines and are making things worse. Future historians will not, one hopes, throw about charges of genocide, but if they do they might nominate Coombs among the genocidal policymakers.

The emerging generation of Aboriginal leaders knows that the policies of the past generation are doing harm. They, like the participants in the Quadrant seminar, are seeking new directions and new understandings.

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “PM, Aborigines and the missionary position,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 9, 2000, p. 33.

The metropolitan God botherers who proudly lead marches in support of reconciliation and who preach half-baked politics to their dwindling congregations are, in general, deeply unimpressive, as are those prattlers about spirituality and the search for meaning who infest the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. They are on the make and their concerns with respect to Aborigines are really a matter of their need to feed their own moral vanity and find a meaning for their lives by emoting about the misery and dispossession of the Aborigines.

But last weekend at a seminar in Melbourne I was compelled to reconsider some of my reflexive dislike of the religious. Faced with several who had dedicated their lives to the welfare of Aborigines, it was impossible to accord them anything short of respect. The best known was the pastor Paul Albrecht, who succeeded his father at the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission, and is a fluent speaker of Arrernte and a number of related Aboriginal languages.

There was John Leary, a Catholic priest who has spent the past 47 years in the Northern Territory, mainly at Port Keats. There were others, some of whom prefer not to be named, such as the Anglican priest who has spent 23 years with the people of Oenpelli and is probably the greatest non-indigenous authority on the Oenpelli language. His bishop was unhappy about his attendance.

These people have no illusions about the mistakes made by their missionary predecessors. But, having lived most of their lives in remote areas, they have developed a knowledge of, and an empathy with, Aborigines that puts us metropolitan chardonnay and latte drinkers to shame. With the purest of motives, since there is no possible reward in this life at least, they have shared the lives of the poorest and most underprivileged in our society, unlike the white administrators from the Federal Government or from ATSIC who are making careers that will secure their future in white society; and unlike the lawyers, the business consultants and the tradesmen who swan in and make a quick killing.

There was undoubtedly much harm done by missionaries in the past, but also much good. The worst of them were those who tried to destroy what remained of Aboriginal culture and language, who rounded up the people and placed them in missions, not for the sake of their own welfare, but to keep them separate from the rest of the community for religious or moral purposes. It appears that quite a few of those who told stories about atrocities allegedly perpetrated by white settlers did so because they were determined to imprison the Aborigines in conditions of virtual apartheid, even when the latter had no inclination to separatism.

But those religious who have worked in remote areas and witnessed the problems of alcoholism, petrol sniffing, diabetes, smoking-related cancer, violence and high mortality do not see any answers in the policies of the past 30 years. Like Noel Pearson, they know that the “enlightened” progressive policies are the modern version of genocide. Thirty years ago, suicide of young Aborigines was unknown; today it is a big issue.

Leary’s years of service in the Northern Territory have led him to lament the progressive breakdown in discipline among the people, with the authority of the elders eroded by the blending of clans and tribes which never used to mix. Power rests in the hands of the white advisers and bureaucrats who cannot speak the local languages.

They communicate with the elders through young men who disrespect their leaders because they see where the real authority lies and realise that the “democratic” consultative procedures are phoney. The same kind of point has often been made by Albrecht, who explains how the elders of his region feel themselves betrayed by a land rights law that deprives them of any real ownership of their clearly defined tribal grounds and any authority over access to and use of that land.

Aborigines are not an amorphous or homogenous mass. There are clear differences between clans, those living in remote areas and the relatively few full bloods, and Aborigines living in cities and major towns. The latter live very much like the average Australian urbanite, even if predominantly dependent for their incomes on government. (The latest census says about 70 per cent of Aborigines are Christian while those who profess to adhere to traditional Aboriginal religion/spirituality number about 2 per cent.)

Next week, the Prime Minister will deliver a speech in Sydney titled “Policy Perspectives on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Issues”. In this he will deal with the proposals of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and will set out his vision of the path to reconciliation, regardless of the political demands being made on him by those who espouse the policies that have been destroying Aborigines for the past 30 years.

With a bit of luck he will definitively dismiss the separatist message of the “progressive” consensus and outline practical alternatives that will offer a way out for Aborigines in remote areas and a better deal in terms of social inclusion for urban Aborigines.