Another day, another story of Aboriginal tragedy in a remote community. The Australian newspaper's report of publicans selling alcohol to Aborigines, and using their bank access cards to pay, creates the predictable response: do something! Right on cue, the Premier of Western Australia leaps into action. "Find me a power to stop this terrible practice". The fact is, it is common in non-English speaking Aboriginal communities for Aboriginal people to leave their credit cards and PIN numbers with trusted white people -- shop managers, charter aircraft operators, outstation managers and so on. Publicans are no different in that regard.
How do we make sense of the fact that many Aborigines, especially in remote communities spend much of their money, which we give them, on grog?
The answer lies in the fact that we have made Aborigines radically dependent on whites, and in such a way that prevents them from living in the modern world. The missionaries who developed the first outstations wanted to help Aborigines escape the pressures of contact with the outside world, especially alcohol. The intention was to allow for a degree of self-government, and to provide a buffer as Aboriginal people were drawn inexorably into mainstream life.
The idea was hijacked. Funding grew and more non-Aboriginal "support" personnel were needed. Secular white missionaries and new Aboriginal leaders wanted to convert the buffers into permanent monuments to difference. As outstations have proliferated in the post missionary era, the original rationale has been dramatically altered. They may now be the most blatant example of spiritual destruction caused by uncontrolled, well-funded, white "benevolence" ever invented.
Remote Aboriginal people have been dragged onto the median strip of change and cannot go back to a traditional lifestyle. They want to integrate, but they desperately want control. While this may be naïve on their part, so too are our contradictory beliefs that remote Aboriginal people are authentically and unchangingly indigenous yet are somehow able to deal, without our help, with the unstoppable incoming modernity. Aborigines need proper protection to buy time and build skills and confidence.
We want Aboriginal people to have equal access to school, but we insist they continue to master their own cultural learning. Our ignorance of their culture is no disadvantage to us. Their ignorance of ours is killing them. We want Aboriginal people to have the freedom to drink despite the genocidal impact of alcohol on remote communities, despite the strong voice of many Aboriginal organisations calling for legislatively imposed control on their own people's drinking.
People who learn to operate in the society into which they are born, do not, by and large, spend most of their money on grog and hand over their bank cards to pay for it. Despair, ignorance and a radical dependence combine to ensure they do. But dependence is not abolished by the imposition of a black power structure, at least not one intent on cornering white wealth. Almost every Aboriginal person is cynical about both the Land Councils and especially about ATSIC.
There have always been two Aboriginal policies, integration and separation. The first has been practiced in a quiet way in the last thirty years, teaching people the skills they need to compete in the modern world. The second has been promoted and shouted from the rooftops, "look how we have freed our indigenous people"! And the more we freed them into the hands of their own politicians and their white agents and programs, the worse it became.
The pretence that a separate Aboriginal society, a collective solution to "the Aboriginal problem" exists, should be exposed. The real successes in Aboriginal policy are those people of Aboriginal descent who have learned the skills to help them cope with the modern world. When we are more honest with ourselves, Aboriginal leaders will be forced to be more honest too. Policy must be explicitly aimed at integration, the long experiment in separatism must end.
The Commonwealth Minister's hands are full at present, but if he or another can give the question their undivided attention, there is a radical task to think outside the orthodoxy of Aboriginal separatist self-determination.
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