news| media clipping

please report any broken links or other errors to › want to come back later?  click here to add this page to your bookmarks / favourites

Mainstreaming still unworkable

EDITORIAL

17 April 2004 - 'Well, less resources are clearly going to be wasted, and we are not looking for any savings, so it follows that more resources will get through on the ground," an impatient Prime Minister, John Howard, said on Thursday, while announcing the Government's decision to abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, its associated bureaucracy and an intention to "mainstream" service delivery to Aborigines. Leaving his grammar aside, one might wish that it will be so. Few will regret the passing of ATSIC as a political body representing Aborigines, which has manifestly failed to achieve almost all of the hopes placed in it. But the performance of its bureaucracy, retitled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services, was not that bad, even if it too must share some blame for failure to achieve better outcomes for Aborigines. What is not clear, however, is whether mainstreaming services will provide better solutions. There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical.

Many Australians seem to think that Aborigines are a privileged species so far as government is concerned, receiving all sorts of special benefits and entitlements not available to other Australians, having money spent upon them out of all proportion to other needy groups, yet strangely (probably because of their own fecklessness) mostly unable to advance either individually or as a class. Indeed, some seem to think, their very pauperism, mendicant status and welfare mentality might be a part of the problem, likely to be shaken only if they are sent out into the wicked world and forced to compete on equal terms.

Those sorts of sentiments echo in parts of the community, occasionally given impetus by the ignorant statements of old populists such as Pauline Hanson, and dog-whistle noise from the Prime Minister himself. But the truth is quite different. In almost every area of government social welfare activity, Aborigines consume government services, at almost all levels of government, at a rate well below ordinary Australians, including Australians living in their very own regions. Even with special focused services - such as Aboriginal medical services - designed to deal with some of the practical consequences of the gap in such consumption, net per capita assistance from government falls well below Australian averages, even the averages of comfortable middle- class areas such as, say, John Howard's own Sydney seat of Benelong. Yet the evidence unequivocally shows that Aborigines are in almost any welfare area profoundly more disadvantaged than other Australians, and that the particular nature of much of that disadvantage - poor education, for instance, or poor health, or lack of job skills, or lack of access to professional services - creates not merely instant inconvenience and suffering, but long-term problems which will as much affect their children or their society a decade, a generation, perhaps a century hence.

The failures which have produced this do not occur only at the Commonwealth level. As the Commonwealth itself has argued, and as the Commonwealth Grants Commission has demonstrated, Aboriginal Australians are simply not getting, or being allocated, the sorts of services from state and local governments that other Australians take for granted. But even at the Commonwealth level it has long been a disgrace that, say, Commonwealth aged-person spending, or child-care spending, on indigenous communities runs at only a fraction of that demanded by, and provided to, the comfortable middle class, who have only a fraction of the need of Aboriginal communities.

To be fair, John Howard knows this well. He has done more than most prime ministers to galvanise combined action at every level of government through the Council of Australian Governments, and he has in place a good scheme, run by various Commonwealth departmental Secretaries, to force better cooperation, coordination and outcome-oriented programs. If Howard has often sounded antipathetic to Aboriginal aspirations, he has tried better than most to improve outcomes. Even if every ATSIS project were 100 per cent successful, there might be little real improvement in outcomes, simply because so much depends on what other agencies are doing, or not doing. Precisely because Howard knows the realities of poor services on the ground, he must appreciate that merely "mainstreaming" services will not work. It hasn't worked in the past, and he simply has no plan, yet, to make it work in the future. Aborigines will, yet again, be the victims of services ill-adapted for their needs, locked in inflexible programs unable to coordinate with other ones, treated as Martians or marauders by agencies unwilling to adapt their systems, then blamed for not lining up to receive the charity which was in theory available.

Source: The Canberra Times

Further information:

• Howard silences Aboriginal advocates
  April 16, 2004- The Federal Government has ended the policy of self-determination which for three decades has taken the voices of elected Aboriginal representatives to Canberra, with the Prime Minister, John Howard, announcing he will abolish the nation's peak indigenous body.
• Aborigines promised apology
  June 3, 2001 - BBC - In Australia the Labor opposition party has moved to put an apology to the country's indigenous people back on the political agenda ahead of a general election due later this year.

|| click to go to the top of this page