Last week Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson probably put himself offside with the majority of Aborigines. He had a private meeting with Geoff Clark, the recently elected Chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an organisation regarded with such disdain by many indigenous Australians that less than 1 in 4 bothered to vote in the 1999 elections for ATSIC regional councillors.
The percentage of Aborigines voting in ATSIC elections has steadily declined since it was established by the Hawke Government in 1990, despite admonitions from indigenous leaders that a high turnout would send a "message" to the rest of Australia. If most of its own supposed constituency is unwilling to take ATSIC seriously, why should anyone else?
However John Anderson's office says that the talks with Clark were constructive, focusing on common ground rather than on matters which divided them. Given the displays of moral fervour which indigenous issues occasion amongst the nation's intelligentsia, it is understandable that even a politician with Anderson's refreshing candour would tread gingerly.
But if Australia is to make real progress in dealing with the seemingly intractable issues of Aboriginal disadvantage and social breakdown, a number of divisive and unpalatable issues will need to be openly discussed. These include the continued existence of ATSIC, and the whole structure of government legislation and programs which are predicated on the notion of a distinct Aboriginal people with rights different from those of other Australians.
In an article criticising the American government's unwillingness to adopt colour-blind policies in the face of growing black integration (AFR, January 17), New York columnist Deroy Murdock cited the rapidly increasing number of interracial couples in his country. In 1993 nearly 9 per cent of black men married white women, which seems impressive until it is compared with Australia. The 1996 census revealed that 64 per cent of Aboriginal families involved a union between an Aboriginal and a non-Aboriginal partner, a figure that indigenous organisations such as ATSIC are most reluctant to publicise, given its implications for the separatist sentiments harboured by many of their leaders.
Nevertheless, since Noel Pearson's discussion paper "Our Right to Take Responsibility" was circulated last year, a number of non-Aboriginal commentators have felt less diffident about raising the need for indigenous people to develop a greater sense of personal responsibility over their own lives. Pearson acknowledged that although previous generations of Aborigines suffered much greater discrimination and abuse than their descendants ever experience today, contemporary Aborigines are still encouraged "to see themselves as victims and to take on the mindset of victimhood".
Unfortunately however, Pearson and most of those who have taken up his concerns still seem to assume that a strong sense of individual responsibility is compatible with contemporary pieties such as special indigenous rights and a resistance to the culture of mainstream Australia. They have fallen prey to the illusions of a post-modern age, where cultural characteristics and social institutions are treated as though they are supermarket consumables which can be blithely added to the shopping trolley irrespective of what is already there.
The problem is illustrated by remarks of Fred Chaney and Neil Westbury that one of the unexamined critical issues arising out of Pearson's paper is "how to assist communities to maintain strong Aboriginal identity in the face of mainstream values, beliefs and expectations" (AFR, January 14). The possibility that communities which stress a "strong Aboriginal identity" under such circumstances might be undermining the personal responsibility of their members has obviously not occurred to them.
Similarly, Pearson himself falls into the trap of attempting to justify affirmative action programs on the supposed grounds that race is "all-pervading" for Aborigines, determining their "social, political and economic position" in contemporary Australian society. But as the black American critic Shelby Steele has eloquently pointed out, giving such primacy to race as the explanation for disadvantage completely subverts the notion that it is individuals who control their own destiny. If, as the indigenous establishment and its supporters constantly claim, racism really is the major cause of all the misery, then Aboriginal disadvantage is a white problem and there is not much point in urging Aborigines to take more personal responsibility.
Unfortunately, while Steele's writings are widely discussed amongst Americans concerned with race issues -- having been published in journals such as Harper's, New Republic and Commentary -- he is little known to Australia's intelligentsia. The ABC ignores him, and few university libraries carry his books. Perhaps he cuts too close to the bone; although his focus is solely on America, his diagnosis of the destructiveness of affirmative action and other race-based compensatory programs is almost as applicable to the Australian situation.
Steele argues that the "black grievance elite" of academics, politicians and bureaucrats maintains its power by exploiting white America's justified feelings of shame at its past treatment of blacks, which compromised the moral principles on which America was based. The liberal-minded whites of the post-Civil Rights era who were most sensitive to this "national legacy of unutterable shame" -- to use an Australian judicial phrase -- were hungry to recover their lost moral authority and show that they were not like their forebears.
Their quest for redemption beguiles these whites into seeing themselves as largely responsible for the freedom and advancement of blacks. In the Australian context this translates into the refrain that Aboriginal domestic violence or alcohol abuse is "our shame", rather than the responsibility of the individuals who beat their spouses or drink to excess. To suggest otherwise is "blaming the victim", a sure sign of the absence of moral virtue and an epithet which promotes structural explanations of disadvantage at the expense of an ethic of personal responsibility.
As Steele has observed, "it is precisely the rejection of the very idea of black responsibility that protects whites from the charge of racism". And because moral redemption is their overriding concern, these white liberals are most reluctant to scrutinise policies and programs supported by the grievance elite, even when there are strong grounds for thinking that the programs are counter-productive for blacks suffering genuine social and economic disadvantage.
Steele's analysis helps us understand the moral indignation that invariably envelops those who stray from accepted positions on Aboriginal issues. It also suggests that white Australians who respect the human dignity of the Aborigines they meet, but who are otherwise indifferent -- or even hostile -- to the urgings of the indigenous industry may prove better friends than those who smother Aborigines with their righteous concern.
ATSIC Chairperson Clark portrays himself as a radical. This is no bad thing, considering Australia's lack of success in achieving genuine freedom and economic equality for Aborigines despite all the energy and resources that have been devoted to indigenous issues over the past few decades. A true radical is prepared to go back to basics, and struggle against the power structures that perpetuate the problems. It would be utopian to hope that Clark might push for the abolition of ATSIC itself. But perhaps he may be willing to challenge the black establishment and its posturing white supporters. Inviting Shelby Steele to Australia could be a first step.
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