Contemporary Australia: Women

35 New challenges in Indigenous affairs In 2009, Vogue Australia editor-in-chief, Kirstie Clements, invited me to write an article taking the pulse of Indigenous affairs for their 50th anniversary issue. I gladly accepted. What follows is the article that appeared in that issue, with a few amendments to bring it up to date. It is risky to report a commitment to political bipartisanship in Indigenous affairs, given the troubled history of Australian governments in this field. Yet, I am convinced that not just the ALP and the Coalition parties, but the Greens as well, are prepared to take these matters seriously. The extraordinary unanimity of the Members of the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition, which reported to the Federal Government in January 2012, is just one example. There is increasing agreement on the high priority of education, employment and economic participation for Indigenous Australians, ‘a hand up, not a hand out’, to use Noel Pearson’s phrase. The important progress in Indigenous employment in the private sector, hastened by the Australian Employment Covenant, is the evidence of the good sense of new thinking around Indigenous affairs. I have never met Mick Ireland, who sent me an email in June to say he thought the SBS television series First Australians was ‘eye-opening’. Ireland is one of those Australians who believed, as he wrote: ‘What are the black bastards whinging about now? . . . Many countries were conquered and people being displaced was a natural part of this.’ This is how he said he always thought of the early Aboriginal plight. He changed his mind after watching the seven-part series on DVD. ‘Considering that the English were doing what they had done in many countries, you can sort of forgive the blindness of them,’ he said. ‘It’s the camps, transport of half-castes, chains, shootings and so-called protection agencies, in so-called modern times, when governments should have known better, that shocked me.’ The burden of history is the most difficult problem to tackle in Indigenous affairs. It would be reasonable to think the apology delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008 to Aboriginal people who were removed from their families was an effective gesture in removing the stain of the past. It is not that simple, as Ireland wrote. For many Indigenous people directly disadvantaged by the history of their locale, the challenge is how to acknowledge the past and take steps to make the future rewarding. Doubtless, the apology was important to many of those people who were removed from their families and the descendants of those taken away in the past. No words can heal the wounds of those people, but the honest acknowledgment of what happened was profoundly important. By admitting it was wrong to have taken children from their families in order to prevent Aboriginal ways of life and traditions from continuing, the prime minister’s apology was a measure of justice. He inferred that such terrible wrongs must never be repeated. Yet, at the same time that we come to terms with the import of that momentous occasion, Aboriginal children continue to be removed from their families in even greater numbers where there is sufficient evidence that they are neglected, abused or in danger. Levels of neglect of Indigenous children are accelerating and the impact on their health is a matter of concern. Their continuing failure to attend school and attain literacy and numeracy are part of the catastrophe that is likely to sentence many of the quarter of a million Indigenous children to short, miserable lives. With the damning finding that the sexual abuse and neglect of Aboriginal children had reached ‘crisis’ levels in that state, the Northern Territory government’s Little children are sacred report of 2007 stated that the ‘combined effects of poor health, alcohol and drug abuse, unemployment, gambling, pornography, poor education and housing, and a general loss of identity and control have contributed to violence and to sexual abuse in many forms’. This is not to say that all Aboriginal people live in these circumstances or accept such conditions; on the contrary, there are many Aboriginal business people and professionals who want to be successful. Many work as teachers, nurses, carers and volunteers trying to tackle Indigenous problems but say they are caught in an underfunded ‘bandaid’ industry that offers ineffectual solutions. Most Aboriginal people who have left behind the poverty segregation and harsh confines of administered settlements and missions understand the freedom and opportunity that education, employment and enterprise offer. Even so, the model of income poverty is flawed, with many high-income Indigenous families experiencing as much socioeconomic disadvantage as low-income families. With the mean income of Indigenous households at around 60 per cent of that of other Australian households, they are also more likely to be reliant on government pensions and Amata painter Tjungkara Ken at Tjala Arts. Image courtesy: Skye O’Meara, Tjala Arts, Amata Community, SA New challenges in Indigenous affairs Marcia Langton