From Australia - A failed indigenous experiment ends

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http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=14772&

This week in Australia we finally see the results of black indigenous people in Australia being left to run their own affairs.
George

Editorial: A failed indigenous experiment ends

June 23, 2007

National emergency confirms three decades of denial
THE declaration of a national emergency in Aboriginal Australia puts an end to the great experiment of exceptionalism that glorified indigenous culture but was blinded to the modern-day scourges of welfare dependency, substance abuse and boredom. After a decade spent shouting in the wilderness, Aboriginal advocate Noel Pearson has finally been heard. His message is that free money and access to grog has polluted many Aboriginal communities to a point beyond the capacity for a negotiated retreat to the accepted norms of social behaviour. The release of a report into physical and sexual abuse of children in the Northern Territory was the final straw for the Howard Government. That a bipartisan consensus exists to attempt to put things right speaks volumes about how bad they have become.

Voices of dissent remain, notably from those who cling to a misguided view that more government money and endless negotiation with dysfunctional communities will provide a long-term fix. But as Mr Pearson has argued, no amount of talk-and-spend will do the job. The first step to a lasting solution is to sober up and take stock. No one has said this will be easy. But the evidence from Queensland is that alcohol management plans can dramatically reduce community violence as measured by hospital admissions and call to police and medical services.

John Howard's critics allege that, having failed to act for 11 years, the Government is more interested in a political wedge than a practical solution. They ignore the facts of the past decade. When the Prime Minister took office, in the wake of the High Court's Mabo decision and former prime minister Paul Keating's landmark Redfern speech accepting white responsibility for the plight of Australian Aborigines, the imperative was for symbolism rather than substance. But city bridge walks and sorry days were always in stark contrast to the pleas for help from the vulnerable on the front-line of remote indigenous communities racked by violence.

The Howard Government has overseen a turnaround in the approach to managing what has been an enduring international shame. The Howard Government's first Aboriginal affairs minister, John Herron, pioneered the project of practical reconciliation against an entrenched obsession with the politics of victimhood and blame. More recently, Amanda Vanstone fostered the abolition of the inefficient and corrupt Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. Existing Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough has shown a dogged determination to break through with tough measures to force change. His reforms owe much to the intellectual strength of Mr Pearson, who has championed a tough-love approach to break the debilitating effects of welfare dependence. The Government's dramatic declaration of a national emergency followed Mr Pearson's call for support to introduce new restrictions on welfare payments in communities in north Queensland. In the NT, the Government has gone much further, with a six-month ban on the sale, transportation and consumption of alcohol on Aboriginal land. Every child under 16 will receive a medical check-up. Parliament will be recalled, if necessary, to pass legislation allowing welfare payments to be supervised to ensure that children are properly provided for. The permit system that restricts access to Aboriginal communities will be scrapped, possession of X-rated pornography will be banned. The Government will also compulsorily take control of Aboriginal community land under five-year lease agreements to enable it to improve infrastructure and facilities.

As The Weekend Australian's Nicholas Rothwell has said, the declaration of a national emergency ranks with the referendum of 1967, or the passage of land rights in the NT, as a turning point in Australian history. It marks, in dramatic fashion, an end to the great experiment of exceptionalism that took root after the 1967 referendum and found a champion in Herbert Cole "Nugget" Coombs, the governor of the Commonwealth and Reserve banks from 1948 to 1969. Exceptionalism grew out of the romantic belief that Aborigines wanted space to live according to their own traditions, separated from the settler society that had corrupted their identity. As The Weekend Australian said last month when noting the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, exceptionalism has been a disaster. Its most insidious legacy has been the entrenchment of homelands, remote, festering, welfare-dependent communities. As columnist Michael Duffy wrote last week in The Sydney Morning Herald, the plight of the Australian Aborigines over the past three decades represents the greatest failure of left-wing prescriptions outside of communist countries.

Having forged a new course, the Howard Government has a great responsibility to make sure the emergency effort is both properly resourced and sustained. The new way is obviously paternalistic and focused on the welfare of children. But it is not a return to the old paternalistic ways of the mission days. Rather, it seeks to reinforce equality of rights and responsibilities. The new prescription outflanks those who favour symbolic gestures rooted in the trifecta of land rights and the reports into black deaths in custody and the stolen generation. A soft approach to law enforcement has resulted in unchecked domestic and sexual violence. The refusal of well-meaning authorities to remove children from harm's way has spawned a generation who have kept their parents but had their innocence stolen. And the land rights that were supposed to restore pride and dignity have instead enslaved indigenous people in poverty through communal ownership.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952105-7583,00.html