Waking up to Dreamtime

WAKING UP TO DREAMTIME The Illusion of Aboriginal Self-Determination Edited by Dr Gary Johns Published by Quadrant Online January 2012 Waking Up To Dreamtime First edition published in 2001 by Gary Johns and Media Masters Pty Ltd Copyright © this 2012 electronic edition held by Quadrant Online and Gary Johns Front cover: The painting is by Aboriginal artist, Vanessa Fisher. She lives and works in Brisbane. Vanessa has been a major force behind the revival of Aboriginal visual and performing arts in Brisbane since the 1970s. Original ISBN: 981-04-5150-4 Introduction For at least the last thirty years, money, programs and white advisers have engulfed Aboriginal people. Some Aborigines have survived the deluge. They have found a place in society that suits them. Some have not survived the deluge. They have been swept away by despair, grog and violence. Some have become leaders, and they have been looking for followers. They are seeking to build a new Aboriginal society, fully 200 years after the modern world came to this continent. They see their future in promoting a separate Aboriginal identity. The trouble is, many of their troops have moved on. They have moved into the Australian society. They regard their identity as a matter for themselves, not something that comes in a government program or in an Aboriginal politician’s speech. Each generation creates a new policy fashion, and each fashion brings a new problem. The Aboriginal leaders from the 1930s to the 1950s wanted equality, their children won it, and then wanted something else, self-determination. They borrowed the clothes of post-colonial nations and began to parade themselves as leaders of ‘peoples’. The whites went along with some of this, handing responsibility for programs to people whose hands were already full just coming to terms with the modern society and the prejudice that confronted them. Forcing Aborigines to manage government-funded programs was inviting trouble. Management and leadership positions became the prizes. The struggle for identity became the scramble for state sponsorship and for preferment. Those who managed to escape this game were the lucky ones. The failures of Aboriginal policy have not been for a lack of trying, goodness knows the goodwill of the nation is with Aboriginal people. Unfortunately, those who see it as an opportunity to re-create their dreams of another world have captured the area. A new class of Aboriginal leader, well schooled in the ways of the liberal democratic society, has seized an opportunity to become great by using the wealth of the nation and the fear of their own people, to create a separate political entity. Self-determination has masked a whole array of Aboriginal policies in the last thirty years, but the measure of success is always the same. Those who escape aspects of their past are the winners. Identity is a fine thing, so long as it does not prevent you from achieving what you want. A new world presents many opportunities, denying a child those opportunities for the sake of the solidarity of a people is a mistake. Canada is held out as the way to proceed for indigenous people. In fact, it is absolutely the wrong road to travel, and Tom Flanagan shows why. Self-determination is the mantra in Australia and my essay seeks to point out its contradictions. Trevor Satour has real misgivings about telling Aboriginal people how to conduct themselves, he sees a new authoritarianism on the rise. In fact, it is being used in remote Australia to smother Aboriginal people, as Steven Etherington points out. Stephanie Jarrett proves that separate services run by and for Aboriginal people are leaving Aboriginal women at risk. Helen McLaughlin shows that while policy fashions come and go, a great deal goes on despite as much as because of them. Kenneth Maddock shows why the great desire to have Aborigines live by their own customary law is an experiment that will end in tears. iii Acknowledgements My first foray into Aboriginal matters was as a high school student in the 1960s, verbally assaulted by a very angry young Aborigine who wanted to change the world for Aboriginal people. It was a most uncomfortable experience, but I hope he had some success. I never came close again until in 1990, as a Member of the House of Representatives, the Coronation Hill dispute was brought to my attention. Dr Ron Brunton lobbied me. With his advice, and after judging the facts, I believe I took a principled view on the issue. The Cabinet agreed, but unfortunately, the Prime Minister disagreed. Coronation Hill, the gold, platinum and palladium mine became a park. A result of environmental and Aboriginal myth-making and mischief-making. I thought it was a daft way to run a nation. My interest in Aboriginal policy continued in my minor role in Native Title matters as Special Minister of State. It has continued, particularly in a paper I wrote with Ron Brunton on Aboriginal Reconciliation for the Institute of Public Affairs. It is still the only paper that seeks to evaluate rather than indulge Reconciliation. In the last two years, Peter Howson, a former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, invited me to speak at two conferences, sponsored by, among others, Quadrant magazine. Peter, Ray Evans, John Herron, also a former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Maroochy Barambah and others have come together out of concern for Aboriginal people, to form the Bennelong Society. Aboriginal people are squeezed by the good deeds of the white society that surrounds them, but told by their leaders they must continue to fight it, all the while demanding its benefits. We want them to join, not to fight. Then came the opportunity to edit a book with a group of authors of great knowledge and good intent. People who are not comfortable with the orthodoxy of Aboriginal separatism. They see its terrible flaws. They see the damage it is doing to Aboriginal people. When the trajectory of Aboriginal policy was to encourage integration, it was good. It has now overshot the mark and needs to be reined in. I hope that the essays from Tom Flanagan, Trevor Satour, Steven Etherington, Stephanie Jarrett, Helen McLaughlin and Kenneth Maddock help to convince you. Tragically, Kenneth Maddock has passed away since the first publication of the book. His great insights and wonderful calm manner are well remembered by those who remain. My thanks to all of these people, to Grant Watt, to Dr Chris Ulyatt for his great help in bringing it to life in electronic form and to Quadrant for agreeing to publish online. Gary Johns Brisbane 2012 iv Contents Aboriginal Orthodoxy in Canada 1 By Tom Flanagan The Poverty of Aboriginal Self-Determination 15 By Gary Johns The New Authoritarian Separatism 35 By Trevor Satour The Most Threatened People in Australia: the Remote Aboriginal Minority 59 By Steven Etherington ‘This Is As Much As We Can Do’: Aboriginal Domestic Violence 79 By Stephanie Jarrett Are We Headed in the Right Direction? 97 By Helen McLaughlin Sceptical Thoughts on Customary Law 117 By Kenneth Maddock v About the Contributors (updated to 2012) Dr Gary Johns is a former Minister in the Australian Government. He is presently an Associate Professor in the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University, Brisbane. Professor Tom Flanagan was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, Canada, and is now a political consultant. Trevor Satour is an Aborigine and is a former Head of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. He has also been CEO of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council and filled senior level bureaucratic postings in Canberra and other locations. Rev Steven Etherington PhD is an Anglican vicar, and former teacher, who has spent 23 years living in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Dr Stephanie Jarrett is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. Her PhD thesis was on violence in Aboriginal society. Helen McLaughlin is an Aborigine and longtime Commonwealth public servant who spent several years at the United Nations working on indigenous issues. She is a former adviser to the Australian Government on Aboriginal Affairs. Professor Kenneth Maddock is a former Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales (Kenneth recently passed away). vi Aboriginal Orthodoxy in Canada Tom Flanagan Australia and Canada are about as similar as any two countries can be. Both have a medium- sized population spread over an enormous land mass and are governed by parliamentary democracies organised on a federal basis. Both share a political history as British colonies, self- governing Dominions, and members of the Commonwealth. And both face similar challenges in reconciling a small but persistent aboriginal population with a much larger immigrant population of European and (increasingly) Asian origin. Given these similarities, Australian readers may ﬁnd interest in an overview of the Canadian experience. Those wanting more detail may wish to consult my book First Nations? Second Thoughts1 as well as another book published at the same time by the distinguished political scientist Alan Cairns, entitled Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State2. Professor Cairns and I disagree on many points, but we are both relatively critical of the current conventional wisdom, which in my book I call the ‘aboriginal orthodoxy.’ To get a sense of the practical results of the aboriginal orthodoxy, consider the following examples culled from events of the last 25 years: • The annual federal expenditure on Indians is about $6.5 billion (more than $10,000 per capita). • In 2000, the Squamish Nation (about 2000 people) in British Columbia received $92.5 million as compensation for ‘historical injustice.’ The alleged injustice was that the federal government did not stop the BC government from relocating the Squamish reserve 100 years ago.

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