Imagine that you are an unemployed Aboriginal teenager living an aimless life on a settlement or in a declining country town. Is suicide a rational response to your situation?
Earlier this week, the Sydney Morning Herald published a peculiar article suggesting that the answer might be "yes". Professor Colin Tatz, a political scientist at Macquarie University, wrote about a report on indigenous youth suicide that he has just prepared for the Australian Criminology Council.
According to Tatz, it is wrong to believe that Aboriginal youths who committed suicide were suffering from some kind of mental disorder. Quite the contrary, says the professor, who recently received the Order of Australia "for service to the community through research on social and legal justice for people disadvantaged by their race".
His research supposedly indicates that most Aboriginal youth suicides are a rational attempt to find meaning, freedom and respect. Young people who committed suicide were reacting against authority, "whether police, custody officers, teachers, parents". Among other things, their actions are a rebuke "to 'us' in mainstream society", and to the past experiences that Aborigines have endured at our hands.
Tatz explicitly states that this history is a "primary cause of suicide". In his words, "no other group has a comparable history to Aborigines: wardship, minority status in law, effective exclusion from the state school system from 1900 to the mid 1970s, wholesale removal of children, whole population relocations, incarceration on reserves and 'missions', and economic and social discrimination".
But there is a fundamental problem here. Tatz himself said that Aboriginal suicide was "unknown until perhaps 30 years ago" (although this probably overstates matters). So why has Australia seen an epidemic of indigenous suicide after this history largely came to an end, and amongst those who never really suffered it? The trend in Aboriginal suicides is precisely the opposite of what we could expect if past dispossession and powerlessness were a major factor.
On the other hand, "perhaps 30 years ago" does happen to coincide with the general spread of the welfarist mentality amongst Aborigines. This is the notion, encouraged by "progressives" and a self-serving bureaucracy, that the circumstances of indigenous people entitle them to receive "assistance without reciprocation", as Noel Pearson has expressed it. But if Tatz suspected that there might be some link between these two 30 year old developments, he did not share such insights with his readers.
Certainly, if we wish to understand a contemporary problem, we usually require some knowledge of the past. It is wrong to pretend that Aborigines did not go through a long and unhappy history of discrimination and injustice after Europeans settled in Australia, or that the effects of this history do not continue to reverberate into the present.
But equally, if we take human freedom seriously, we must accept that people have the capacity to transcend even the most horrific experiences. This is not just a theoretical possibility -- Australia has many refugees from totalitarian regimes whose experiences are worse than anything Aborigines encountered this century, and who have managed to put shattered lives together and raise reasonably well-adjusted families.
The real question is how best to ensure that people do not become imprisoned by their history. Common sense suggests that one way is to discourage them from using it as an alibi, and to remind them that dignity and respect come to those who set their face against the poisonous temptations of victimhood. But if you want to trap people in a destructive fog of despair, keep telling them that their feelings are justified by their history, and create incentives that allow them to avoid taking personal responsibility for their own lives.
Noel Pearson has suggested that those who hold stereotyped views of Aborigines are unlikely to change their attitudes whatever happens. Indeed, these people are actually dismayed by stories of Aboriginal successes, because such accounts make it more difficult for them to justify their prejudices.
I imagine that Pearson had right wing "rednecks" in mind, but I think his remarks apply just as strongly to many people, particularly on the Left, who present themselves as being "deeply concerned" about Aborigines. For them, Aboriginal social and economic disadvantage is an important psychological crutch, one which helps to validate their dislike of market based liberal democratic societies in general, and Australia in particular.
The last thing that these people wish to see is Aboriginal economic and social equality, unless it involves a complete transformation of the wider Australian culture and society as well. Aboriginal needs must take second place to their ideological preoccupations, their guilt, and their moral vanity. This is the "black man's burden", and it is destructive to the nation as a whole.
Perhaps this is why the new approach Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron has brought to the portfolio has occasioned such hostility from the country's intellectuals and the Aboriginal industry -- they fear that he might actually bring about significant improvements in health, housing, community services and economic development where decades of leftist breast beating and welfarism have failed.
It may also explain why there is such a reluctance to encourage a wide ranging and open debate about indigenous policies. When it was released three months ago, I naively hoped that Noel Pearson's discussion paper, "Our right to take responsibility" would release a flood of commentary from the numerous denizens of our universities who are working on Aboriginal issues.
Pearson's paper challenges shibboleths of the Right as well as the Left, and he cannot be dismissed as a tool of the Federal Government or other forces of reaction. Whatever one may think of his ideas -- and I certainly disagree with some -- they are considered and courageous, and deserve to be taken seriously.
But so far, it seems that few supporters of the Aboriginal industry or of the Left have really sought to engage with Pearson's arguments. These people can see where the arguments might lead, and it is not a place where they care to go.
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