Australian conservatives have decided it’s time for ‘Tough Love’ in the Outback:
On almost every score, from disease to unemployment to illiteracy, the social decay in remote Aboriginal towns like Yuendumu is stunning. Australia’s 500,000 Aborigines are seven times as likely as other Australians to have tuberculosis, and eight times as likely to be infected with Hepatitis A, according to government data. Their life expectancy lags the rest of the population by 17 years, and is lower than that of impoverished countries such as Bangladesh and Bolivia. By contrast, the life-expectancy gap between Native Americans and the general U.S. population has shrunk in recent decades to 2.4 years.“We are land-rich but doing poorly,” says Kim Hill, chief executive of the Northern Land Council, an Aboriginal group that, with a sister organization, the Central Land Council, oversees a swathe of Australia roughly the size of France. Until recently, outsiders, especially journalists, were barred from visiting the several dozen towns that sit on these territories without permits issued by the Council. Aboriginal leaders said they wanted to shelter their 40,000-year-old culture from the corrupting outside world.
Then, in 2007, Australia’s conservative federal government decided that such self-imposed isolation was the root cause of the crisis in Aboriginal areas because it allowed widespread abuses to remain hidden from the public eye. Citing numerous cases of sexual violence against children, then Prime Minister John Howard vowed to bring Aboriginal areas into “the mainstream of the Australian community.”
In June 2007, he launched a federal intervention here in the Northern Territory, Australia’s most heavily indigenous area. Aborigines make up one-third of the Territory’s population and own half its land; they also account for 84% of its prison inmates.
Mr. Howard sent in the army and deployed extra police. Suspending Australia’s 1975 Racial Discrimination Act, the government slapped alcohol and pornography bans on Aboriginal areas — but not on neighboring white towns — and restricted Aborigines’ ability to spend their welfare checks freely. It seized the management of Aboriginal townships, overriding the permit system and opening the doors to non-Aboriginals.
The intervention sparked accusations of racism from many Aboriginal leaders and from some officials in Australia’s Labor Party. Marion Scrymgour, currently the country’s most senior Aboriginal government official, at the time labeled the intervention “a vicious new McCarthyism.” Ms. Scrymgour, the Northern Territory’s deputy chief minister and a member of Labor, has since endorsed many aspects of the intervention, such as welfare controls.
Aboriginal leaders decry compulsory income management:
Under this policy, Aboriginal welfare and pension recipients — the bulk of the adult population in many remote towns, including Yuendumu — are paid half their money in cash. The other half comes in the form of a card which can only be used to pay for food and other essentials at specially licensed stores, and for gas and rent. The aim is to restrict the amount of cash Aborigines can spend on alcohol, gambling and drugs, and to combat child malnutrition. Aboriginal youths are more than twice as likely as other Australians to die of alcohol-related causes, according to a government survey.
I would find this rhetoric amusing if it wasn’t so sad:
“We’ll fight it very strongly. We’ll never buckle down or kneel down to any government,” says Harry Jagamara Nelson, who served as president of Yuendumu’s community government council until it was disbanded last July.
You’ll take money from the government dole, but if they “only” give you ration cards for food and other essentials, you’ll refuse to “kneel down”?
A number of women have opened a store that takes the ration cards, defying the male tribal elders, leading to even more sad rhetoric:
“The government has listened to a minority group of women…who do not have any power in the eyes of Aboriginal law,” Mr. Nelson says. “White people should stay out and not divide a community.”
I doubt Mr. Nelson truly wants white people and their white money, white alcohol, and white gasoline — gas-sniffing is a popular pastime there — to stay out.
The mix of tribal hunter-gatherer customs and modern state welfare payments is awkward — but the ration cards may have helped in some small part:
One big change: undermining a custom known across Aboriginal Australia as “humbug” — harassment, often of the elderly and of women, to share money and goods with their extended families. With only half the amount of cash circulating now, there’s less to be gained by humbugging. “In the past, granddaughters, sons, daughters, they were all humbugging for money,” says local Erica Napurrurla. “It’s all changed. It’s peaceful now.”