Speech to Australian Liberal Students,
Melbourne, 9 December 2000
Why has policy on indigenous matters been so unsuccessful over the last 30 years? Why has not indigenous life expectancy and employment improved? Why has there been, according to Noel Pearson and other observers, a process of social decay and retrogression in indigenous communities?
Why has debate been far more active over the difference between sincere-sorrow-and-regret and an apology -- a matter of mere words -- than on the deleterious effects of passive welfare on indigenous communities as set out in Noel Pearson's eloquent speeches and writings -- a matter of how people actually live? Why have we had such fixation on the stolen-generation-as-genocide? An alleged genocide which -- as Ken Maddock points out in the November issue of Quadrant -- anthropologists failed to notice and clear cases of which the courts can't find.
It turns out that the answers to these questions are essentially the same. These questions are only important if indigenous advancement actually matters. The problem has been that Australian public debate on indigenous issues, and the policy that has flowed from it, has been dominated by a superficially similar, but profoundly different concern -- the concern to be seen to care. In the gap between caring and being seen to care, great policy failures have been perpetrated.
Let us start with the first great policy disaster of the last three decades: the 1967 decision of the arbitration system to apply the standard award conditions to Aboriginal stockmen. This was presented at the time, and since, as a great achievement for social justice: the application of the principle of equal pay regardless of race. That it would and did result in a sizeable increase in Aboriginal unemployment was acknowledged, but felt an acceptable price to pay for establishing such an important principle.
Who paid the costs of the decision? Outback Aborigines, whose employment prospects were devastated. Who received the benefit of the decision? The progressivist intelligentsia, who could congratulate themselves on what a mighty blow for social justice had been achieved. Tacitus wrote of those who create deserts and call it peace: we now have those who create mass unemployment and call it social justice.
What the decision actually did was make illegal the mode of employment that had grown up between Aboriginal communities and graziers and require the imposition of a different mode -- employment under award conditions -- which indigenous Australians had had no part in creating and which was in no way connected to, and did not suit, the circumstances of those living in outback communities. It was, to use the progressivist vernacular, cultural imperialism, and cultural imperialism of a highly destructive kind and a notably Western form -- to use a universal principle (race is irrelevant to pay rates) to impose a particularist form (award employment which, surprise!, surprise! did not prove flexible enough to encompass the cultural distance between outback indigenous communities and the habits of the Industrial Relations Club). Suddenly, outback Aborigines had to move from what they were used to, and which had evolved from their circumstances, to what others had decided was good for them and which paid no heed to their circumstances or preferences. The effect must have been terribly disorienting: not only from the loss of employment, but from a loss which was in no way their fault and which they were told was for their benefit.
This pattern of disorienting imposition for progressivist causes has been a continuing one.
THE ECONOMICS OF PUBLIC DEBATE
Before continuing, we need to deal with a mode of argument I call the motivational fallacy. In the case of the equal pay decision it would go like this: the equal pay decision was brought in to abolish a form of racism, you have just criticised the equal pay decision, therefore you are racist. We see the motivational fallacy a lot in contemporary debates, for example, in multiculturalism: we advocate multiculturalism to combat racism and racial prejudice, you are a critic of multiculturalism, therefore you are a racist and/or indifferent to racial prejudice. It is closely related to two other fallacies: the fallacy of identity (Hilary Clinton is a woman seeking power, you are a critic of Hilary Clinton therefore you are against women seeking power) and the fallacy of association (racists criticise ATSIC, you criticise ATSIC, therefore you are a racist). These are, of course, merely my names for contemporary versions of fallacies originally exposed over two millennia ago.
The motivational fallacy, as with the fallacies of identity and association, provides a triple benefit: it de-legitimises critics and criticism, it elevates the mode of action or claim being defended and it establishes or reinforces that action or claim as a moral asset for its proponents. (And it is certainly very elegant to use one's own motivations to de-legitimise critics). These modes of argument flow directly from viewing public debate not as a conversation with hypothesis to be advanced, but as one made up of moral assets to be displayed. As an area where good people believe y (such as: the Native Title Act is a pillar of social justice) and bad people believe x (such as: the Native Title Act is at best a mammoth distraction and at worst a slow motion disaster). Public debate being practised as a matter of displaying moral assets -- and thereby disconnected from truth and consequences -- is quite central to the failure of indigenous policy. The Age's Economics Editor Tim Colebatch showed up the problems of current debate by comparing (The Age, 20 October 2000) treatment of Cathy Freeman's exuberant comments about her brothers being happy without being drunk and Immigration Minister Ruddock's comments about not having the wheel indicating the huge technological and cultural gap indigenous cultures have to bridge. His comparison of what would have happened if each had made the other's comments is particularly revealing.
Carefully sifting through evidence, developing a coherent and apposite analysis, advocating the resultant preferred mode of action is a public good, in the economists' sense: action whose costs are personal but whose benefits are dispersed and cannot be directly captured.
Being seen to care, on the other hand -- what we might call conspicuous virtue, conspicuous compassion or conspicuous correctness -- is a private good. It takes far less effort -- merely expressing the appropriate approved propositions -- and generates the status benefits of moral approval and mutual support for that status for all those in the same game. Public debate then becomes what economists call a club good directed to the benefit of the conspicuously virtuous -- something whose benefits are shared but from which outsiders can be excluded: in this case by such techniques as accusations of racism, denial of advancement or access to public fora, etc. Requiring far less effort than actual attention to the public good, and generating a very direct personal benefit, it is hardly surprising that public debate tends to be overrun with the private good of moral vanity -- of being seen to be of the virtuous. Classic examples have been provided recently by Pamela Bone of The Age (12 October 2000) when she wrote "my own world view, I am aware, is seen as being on the left. If knowing an injustice when I see it is being left, then left I am" and by Quentin Dempster in his recent on-air comments that all intelligent people are at least a bit of the Left (the former staff-elected Board member thereby displaying the ABC mentality in a nutshell). We saw in the lead-up to the November 6 republic referendum how media coverage was corrupted by mutual display of conspicuous republican virtue amongst journalists -- the effects of which Nancy Stone has documented (The Australian, 13 November 2000).
The cost of assembling information encourages judging a policy by its intentions (easy to determine) rather than its effects (much harder): what we might call the intentional fallacy. In the moral vanity game, looking at consequences has a further disadvantage: at best, it will confirm the virtuous intention; at worst, it will void it. Why take the risk?
There is also an inherent tendency for competition to set in to see "who is more moral than thou", since being conspicuously virtuous is also what economists call a positional good. The result is, as black American conservative Thomas Sowell has pointed out, a situation where that if one believed that everyone should be under the same rules, that labelled you as "a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today". The constant pressure to be "more virtuous than thou", to have a higher grade of moral assets, produces such shifts. (Though it is hard to beat Germaine Greer announcing she was an "honorary Aborigine": Sun-Herald, 16 January 2000)
And the more removed, weaker and worse off any minority in question is, the easier it is for public debate about them to be captured in such a way.
In the case of the Hindmarsh Island fantasy, religious ideas appropriate to, for example, the north of South Australia and central Australia, were translated to the very different religious traditions of the Ngandjerri people. But the idea of a single Aboriginal people, with a single culture, single religious tradition, single approach to land, single structure of authority, single set of wants, single views, single politics is natural to a state of mind where the role of "indigenous Australian" is to play a certain role in a ongoing moral passion-play performance. Thus, The Canberra Times can begin an news article about the Yanner case (8 October 1999) "Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders won the right to hunt protected animals with a landmark High Court ruling ..." which was simply false -- the actual judgement pertained solely to native-title holders, which most indigenous Australians -- 73 per cent of whom live in cities and towns -- are not and will never be.
A destructive simplification is embarked upon where indigenous Australians as diverse people are washed away and replaced by indigenous Australians as Noble Cause. And, again, media coverage of the Hindmarsh Island fantasy was corrupted by journalists displaying their conspicuous virtue; the epitome of this being a vicious attack on dissenting journalist Chris Kenny by the ABC's Media Watch (7 August 1995) acting in its long-running role as progressivist club ideological enforcer. Media Watch implied that Kenny had used and abused an allegedly drunken interviewee to get an unwarranted confession that the "secret women's business" was the fantasy it turned out to be. Kenny has the unique distinction of being the only such victim specifically vindicated by a royal commission -- of course, the ABC never apologised, but being of the progressivist ascendancy means never having to say you're sorry for things you have done, only for things you haven't: so virtue is thereby doubly demonstrated. Other people's moral credentials are always suspect, those in the club aren't -- that is the point of the status.
As Ron Brunton says, the "stolen generation" issue is not like Hindmarsh Island. It is not a complete fantasy. There is historical evidence that children were taken away inappropriately early in the century. It was merely not genocidal in either scope or intent. Nevertheless, we can see coverage and comment once again being corrupted by the exigencies of conspicuous correctness -- never more obviously than in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's deeply mendacious Bringing them Home report which kicked of the stolen generation as the latest basis for moral posturing.
Not that indigenous issues and the republic are the only instances of conspicuous correctness corrupting Australian media coverage. I recently received an email from an American who was startled at how biased and leftist coverage of American politics in The Australian was: he said that Americans often complain about how New York Times and Washington Post journalists prefer Democrats, but he had never seen such slanted coverage in his life and he wanted to know if this was typical. I had to inform him that The Australian was better than most major newspapers. What Greg Sheridan, Foreign Affairs Editor of The Australian, calls the "dumbed down-New York Times view of the world" presented by Australian journalists on American politics is another case of the ill-effects of conspicuous correctness.
There has also been a sad decline in Australia's rich tradition of political cartooning into repetitive, and spiteful, denigration of individuals outside the progressivist club.
Nor do I wish to imply that only journalists are at fault. In the latest issue of Agenda, I delineate systematic misinformation from prominent academics about the economic policy experience of the last 25 years. At a recent conference put on by the Australian Academy of Social Sciences on reconciliation and the academy, there was much denunciation of conservative intellectuals, but no such dreaded beast had been invited to speak. I mentioned to a former Federal Labor Cabinet Minister in the audience that the conference sounded to me like the Eloi denouncing the Morlocks and I was feeling rather Morlockish. He laughed and said he thought the conference could indeed do with some "creative tension". But that implied the conference was about understanding. What the conference was actually about was moral display and inviting any conservative or other dissident intellectual -- thereby implying treasured propositions were possibly wrong -- would have got in the way of that purpose. A notable exception were the indigenous speakers, but being indigenous they are inherently of the virtuous, so they had nothing to prove. And their contributions were actually grounded in indigenous experience. (Two factors which make for something of a rule for these things that the indigenous speakers will give the more enlightening contributions).
THE WELFARE DISASTER
In the case of the stockman award decision, it was perfectly possible to establish the principle that race not matter for pay rates without devastating indigenous employment: all that had to be done was to amend the award to recognise, in completely non-racial terms, a mode of casual employment which would happen to coincide with that Aboriginal stockmen actually engaged in. The problem was not the principle that race not matter for pay rates, but that a particular mode of employment was made compulsory and another was made illegal.
As indigenous outback employment was being devastated, indigenous welfare provision (particularly by the Commonwealth) began to be cranked up. According to Commonwealth Grants Commission figures, Australian governments now spend, per person, 90 per cent more on acute health care, 70 per cent more on primary health care, almost seven times as much on housing and infrastructure, two-and-a-half times as much on schools education and three times as much on employment programs on indigenous Australians as on other Australians. Noel Pearson is the latest voice in a series of indigenous critics of the effect of welfare on indigenous communities -- the provision of income, goods and services which flows from nothing they have done (merely their group membership) and according to modes of authority completely unconnected to their traditional forms.
Part of the problem here is simple intellectual error: ignoring the problem cultural difference and distance causes for extensive delivery of income, goods and services by the state. The social democratic vision of social justice has been central to provision of indigenous welfare. It presumes a high degree of efficacy in centralised delivery and direction. This is clearly much easier to do in dealing with a culturally homogeneous population. The most successful social democracies -- such as the Nordic countries, Austria and the Netherlands -- are all monocultural societies.
If people have a fairly similar range of assumptions about how to live, how to act, right and wrong, patterns of life and so on, clearly it is much easier to design rules and centrally deliver services without too much ill-will and suited to the patterns of community life than it is if one is dealing with highly varied outlooks and patterns of life. What's more -- given the obvious potential for waste and idleness from government delivery and government income -- it is much easier for social pressure to minimise shirking and misallocation if people speak the same language and share a common outlook with decision-makers and administering officials.
Yet indigenous Australians do not form a single culture, and the cultural distance between Anglo-Australia and indigenous Australia -- confronting each other from the opposite sides of the agricultural, scientific and the industrial revolutions -- has been the widest such divide in the Western world. The result has been programs which, by and large, have been wasteful and miserable failures, as both Noel Pearson and Richard Trudgen (in his superb book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die) set out very clearly. Programs have not been grounded in the life of the people they have been trying to help. Regard for incentives, the operation of effective information feedback and attention to consequences have all been woeful. (The violation of "one rule for all" by indigenous-specific programs has also made popular support for such programs more problematic: remembering that the 91 per cent "yes" vote in the 1967 referendum eliminating discriminatory references to indigenous Australians in the Constitution was the most consensual electoral act in our history).
Such information flows are even more difficult to achieve in a situation where debate is a matter of the display of moral assets. Criticising welfare for its deleterious effects is -- under the operation of the motivational fallacy -- easily derided as a lack of moral concern. Moreover, admission of failure on the part of such policies clearly undermines the moral assets of their progressivist advocates and supporters. This encourages silence in such matters in the face of a critic, such as Noel Pearson, against whom such games would be otiose in the extreme -- though Pat O'Shane did have a go (The Australian, 11 May 1999): unlike white progressivists, she was not automatically trumped in the virtue stakes by Pearson's aboriginality.
A real economy, as both Noel Pearson and Richard Trudgen so eloquently put it, is based on striving. Abolish striving -- disconnect action and income -- and social decay sets in. A former Keating Government Minister describes indigenous affairs as "socialism gone mad" where wave after wave of officials tromp through ticking their various lists (have you got x? have you got y?), with indigenous Australians as passive observers. What this seeks is to abolish failure. But in doing so achievement -- and the connection between action and effect -- as been abolished, or profoundly corrupted. The result is ravaged communities.
The challenge Pearson puts is also clear: no one thinks the current policies are working. What are your alternatives? Words and gestures are not enough: unfortunately, but they are the easiest moral assets and so are most on display.
The preference for words over lives and consequences -- and what it means to be inside and outside the "club" -- was never better on display than The Age editorial of 6 January 2000, which berated acting PM John Anderson, when he raised concerns about the effect of welfare on Aboriginal communities, on the grounds that his Party did not say "sorry", that Noel Pearson had better credentials to make such comments and that non-indigenous Australians had welfare and related problems too. But it is hard to beat The Age for humourless, smug self-righteousness, as in the editorial (29 January 2000) which said "the Prime Minister should say sorry to the Aborigines -- and try to mean it". A prominent Melbourne barrister caught the preening over this issue perfectly when he said you would not talk to a child you were trying to get to eat their spinach the way John Howard has been publicly talked to -- or is that at? -- over reconciliation.
The difference between real journalism and propagandistic posturing, and between concern for consequences and for word games, has rarely been so well displayed as in the contrast in coverage of Anderson's comments by Nicholas Rothwell in The Australian -- who informed readers about the range of problems -- and Debra Jobson in The Sydney Morning Herald -- who kicked straight off with various quoted denunciations of Anderson over the lack of an apology and then kept right on going in that vein (both 4 January 2000).
THE ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN
Welfare policies have imposed further burdens on indigenous communities: they absorb scarce indigenous expertise in their administration. Seventy per cent of indigenous Australians in employment work in the public sector, compared to the national average of about fifteen. Furthermore, many of these structures provide jobs for indigenous Australians based on indigenous Australians continuing to be disadvantaged. Rather than generating incentives to genuinely change circumstances, they create incentives to administer continuing failure. Not only does this constitute a double burden on indigenous communities, traditional society is further disrupted by creating modes of authority (imposed from outside) within indigenous communities completely unconnected to their traditional structures.
The disruptive effect was perfectly predictable. As a junior public servant I drafted a paper in the late 1980s predicting it regarding the creation of ATSIC: I was treated as naïve by my seniors. Quite so: I wrote as if actual indigenous cultures mattered, but that was not the game. The game was being seen to care about indigenous difference, not actually respecting them.
Which points to a further level of burden on indigenous communities: playing the progressivist game has long been the easiest game in town for indigenous activists. The progressivists constitute the willing audience and support network, and with not insignificant patronage advantages.
In the last ATSIC elections only 22 per cent of those eligible voted, some districts had the same number of candidates as positions, others had less candidates than positions: not a result suggestive of a burning desire for separate representation.
INDIGENOUS TITLE AS COLLECTIVISATION
Progressivist policies are insulated from criticism since the original sin of dispossession and the continuing sin of racism are held to be responsible for indigenous disadvantage -- and the stolen generation claims extend the historical span of dispossession. Yet, according to the last Census, in 54 percent of indigenous households, one of the adults was married or cohabiting with a non-indigenous person: a sign of how far the social distance, at least, has narrowed. Blaming mainstream Australia for all the ills of indigenous Australians elevates and protects the moral assets of the progressivists -- they are able to parade themselves as superior in morality and wisdom to mainstream Australia while the policies they advocate are protected from consideration of ill consequences. Yet the indigenous homicide rate has dramatically increased over the last 30 years and is now about 10 times that of the national average. Suicide -- which was largely unknown in indigenous communities 30 years ago -- has reached epidemic proportions. Colin Tatz, while noting the dramatic increase, blames it on history (i.e. colonialism) (Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1999) rather than the progressivist policies which have so dramatically affected indigenous communities over the last 30 years -- such blaming being the required ritual denunciation to preserve progressivist moral assets.
Use of the original sins of dispossession and racism then also tends to de-legitimise application of mainstream forms to indigenous Australia. If the gap between indigenous and other Australians in income, employment prospects, life expectancy and so on is unacceptable -- as surely it is -- then the question should be how indigenous Australians can share in the basic sinews of that prosperity and its concomitant benefits. As many writers have argued -- notably Peruvian thinker Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital -- Western prosperity has been based on a particular structure of property rights.
Yet special forms of "indigenous title" have been created -- communal, inalienable ownership -- which fulfil progressivist fantasies about Rousseauvian noble savages and collectivist morality: forms of property completely different from those the progressivists' own prosperity is based on -- alienable individual ownership. Inalienable, communal property fails in predictable, and predicted, ways -- what "indigenous title" really represents is the collectivisation of indigenous assets in like form as those which failed so egregiously in the early American settlements, in the Soviet Union, in China, in Ethiopia and now in North Korea. The failure to achieve prosperity of the wider society (based on a completely different structure of property rights) is then used as the basis for even more posturing: indigenous Australians are much more useful to the progressivist club suffering conspicuous disadvantage than in sharing in mainstream success.
How many of us would enjoy a situation where our major assets were held in common amongst all members of our extended family and a group of distantly related families, and all decisions about those assets had to be joint and all benefits in their use to be shared? Including assets which you were not allowed the adult responsibility of being able to sell? Think about it: how much would get done? So why, on Earth, do we think imposing such structures on indigenous Australians has anything whatsoever to do with social justice or indigenous advancement? How can imposing a mode of property on modern assets which, in its notional origins, never had to deal with anything remotely resembling participation in a capitalist economy be, in any way, intelligent policy?
It is even worse than that, as those assets are administered by bodies -- land councils -- imposed from outside with no connection to indigenous culture and whose boundaries are completely arbitrary: in indigenous society clans are generally the holders of estates. It is hardly surprising that John Reeves QC found, in his review of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, that most of the estimated $600 million received as income under the Act (about $20,000 in current dollars per Territorian of Aboriginal descent) had not been invested wisely, but had gone on administration and consumption -- this is a completely predictable consequence of collectivisation, even without the compounding effect of cultural disconnection.
When, as set out in Ross Terrill's very perceptive Australians: The Way We Live Now, one State Aboriginal Affairs Minister -- the very non-pc Bob Katter in Queensland -- actually asked indigenous Australians what they wanted, they overwhelmingly chose individual title -- the same form of title as mainstream Australia and the basis of our prosperity. But that was the "wrong" answer for the progressivist ascendancy, and subsequent Governments retreated from this unusual outbreak of genuine indigenous decision-making. So-called indigenous title in all its forms is grounded neither in modern capitalism nor in indigenous culture but in nothing other than the Roussevian and collectivist fantasies of the progressivist ascendancy. This pattern of being a surreal half-way house doomed to failure pervades so-called indigenous institutions -- ATSIC, Land Councils, various indigenous service bodies, etc..
THE GUILT OF THE GATEKEEPERS
Public debate as the self-serving display of moral assets explains such entrenched stupidity. It may seem paradoxical to say that progressivist policies are a disaster both when they ignore and when they exult cultural difference, but it is not. In either case, those policies have not been grounded in the situations of indigenous Australians, but in the conveniences of progressivist posturing. As Noel Pearson said in his Chifley address, for good policy for indigenous people, "progressive" thinking is the enemy.
Systematic rejection of the institutions of Western civilisation which have created the longest-living, most prosperous, most free, most varied and most stimulating lives in human history must result in inferior outcomes for any such "favoured" group. Public debate as display of moral assets is even more important -- because it brings in a much wider class -- in explaining policy failure than the direct self interest that Noel Pearson points to when he writes (The Australian, 1 December 2000), "our present policies are often the justification of their existence as a class whose role is to service social dysfunction, which explains why they refuse to rethink even as the consequences of their policies reach genocidal proportions in Aboriginal Australia" due to the loss of decades of life.
It is inherent in the social justice mindset of government-as-solution-society-as-problem that doing good is something done to people. Added to this is the impatience inherent in wanting to be seen to care in the most dramatic and immediate way possible. The consequence, as Richard Trudgen documents, is that indigenous "self-determination" is a hollow mockery. The processes are driven by purposes external to the communities and without anything even approaching the slow, careful work and the genuine inter-action required to bridge huge cultural gaps or ameliorate cultural collapse. At all levels, the process is hostile to genuine personal responsibility. The overwhelming bulk of indigenous people have no responsibility in these processes because they have no power and they have no power because they do not have responsibility -- which is why Noel Pearson speaks of "our right to take responsibility". It is usually communities which have suffered the least dispossession of land, and which previously had the least modernisation, which have the worst social pathologies because the scale of impact from progressivist policies is so intrusive and pervasive -- and so externally dominated -- that it engenders the complete collapse of traditional structures, putting nothing rooted in the life of the people in its place.
Social justice is conceived by progressivists as a gift, as their gift. The sheer powerlessness this engenders is illustrated by the fact that recommendations by inquiries -- such as the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody, the Queensland inquiry into domestic violence, the Collins inquiry into education -- number in their hundreds. Not one is addressed to what indigenous Australians should do: they are all about what governments and others should do. What is called social justice is something done to indigenous Australians.
And it sure is. The wider community devastates indigenous communities for the purpose of moral grandstanding and calls it "social justice". A people without responsibility are a people without dignity. A new dispossession has gone on: the dispossession of basic dignity.
One of Jack Lang's favourite epigrams was "in the race of life, back self-interest, it is the only horse that's trying". And there is no more ugly and destructive display of self-interest in Australian public life than the progressivist ascendancy's preening and posturing over indigenous issues. In Senator Herron we have a Commonwealth Minister interested, as is Noel Pearson, in truth and consequences. He is not adept at the politics of progressivist preening. Naturally, he is judged by much of the media to be an inadequate Minister -- though notably not by The Australian's Nicholas Rothwell, one of the few journalists who writes in an adult and knowledgeable fashion about indigenous affairs. Thus Peter Manning, in Media (20 April 2000) sneered at Herron for his use of language, calling his appointment "provocative" and writing that he was "the old-style planter type who wouldn't know when he was being racist and when he wasn't". This of a Senator who spent his own leave acting as a medical officer among Rwandan refugees (and fancy appointing a noted surgeon to attend to the chronic tragedy that is indigenous health). But it is one of the features of the progressivist ascendancy that it holds that words -- easy moral assets -- are so much more important than actions and that it has no shame.
At the most recent Adelaide Writer's Festival, writer Bob Ellis lurched to the microphone and launched into a tirade denouncing past treatment of indigenous Australians claiming, among other things, that the Northern Territory had, in the past, been turned into a vast concentration camp for Aboriginal Australians. The literati audience rewarded the speaker with something close to a standing ovation even though the implication was that great Australians such as Curtin, Chifley, Menzies and Hasluck were the moral equivalent of Adolf Hilter.
One of the panellists was novelist Mr Justice Hasluck, son of Sir Paul Hasluck who had been the Commonwealth minister for the Territory for much of the 1950s and 1960s. He responded with rebutting truths; particularly against the claims of a genocidal policy having created a "stolen generation". The audience, in deference to a distinguished son defending his illustrious father, listened in polite silence. Later, another panellist, a visiting writer on the Holocaust, was heard to say, "what is happening in this country that people cannot tell the difference between taking children away to be educated and the gas chambers?"
What has been happening in this country is a debate on indigenous issues that has been dominated by a progressivist intelligentsia which uses propositions on indigenous issues as moral assets to be displayed, not hypotheses to be tested against reality and consequences (and what greater moral asset can there be than discovering and denouncing genocide?). When the stolen generation Cubillo and Gunner test case failed, Robert Manne -- who had previously criticised the Commonwealth for even contesting the case -- immediately attempted to show that the judgement of the court did not really undermine the claims of a stolen generation (The Age 14 August 2000). A mere court -- dealing with facts, evidence and witnesses -- couldn't be allowed to devalue progressivist moral assets like that! (And Manne, an early genocide claimer who has a large Australian Research Council grant to research the stolen generation, has more career and other assets at stake than most).
Clement Attlee once defined democracy as government by discussion. If, in a liberal democracy, disastrous, counter-productive policies are implemented over a period of decades, then you have to look at the behaviour of the gatekeepers of public debate -- journalists, commentators, academics -- in order to properly explain this. A classic display of such gatekeeping behaviour is the way indigenous affairs get reported in terms of traditional indigenous religious beliefs that, according to the latest Census, only 2 per cent of indigenous Australian profess (less than 8,000 people). Aboriginal Christian Churches, the large Christian "praise corroborees" held in Canberra, that almost 72 per cent of indigenous Australians profess to be Christian: these are almost entirely ignored. But a Christian indigenous Australian is not "authentic" in a way congenial to the progressivist moral-passion play. When I asked a prominent legal academic at a recent conference whether Aboriginal Heritage legislation, aimed at given special legal protection to the beliefs of (less than 8,000 people) violated Section 116 of the Constitution's prohibition against the Commonwealth making any law establishing any religion or imposing a religious observance he said (in private later) that of course it does. Such are the deadening effects of the progressivist ascendancy's wielding of the motivational, association and identity fallacies, he was not prepared to say this in public and be branded "a racist".
The Australian people, particularly indigenous Australians, are entitled to a rigorous and open debate to find the best solutions. As Noel Pearson says (The Australian, 1 December 2000) the first task "is to get our thinking straight". Unless and until public debate on indigenous issues can be wrested away from the progressivist club's destructive -- and ultimately profoundly callous -- self-indulgence, indigenous policy will continue to fail. And indigenous Australians will continue to pay a deadly price.
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