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‘Peace won’t cost the earth’ but it might save the environment

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Essentially human beings cannot afford war. Nor can we continue to breed like rabbits. The imprint of humans on this planet is getting close to a tipping point which, once reached, will result in massive disruption, destruction, significant loss of life and, inevitably, in vast civil unrest.

Currently, environmental jargon wavers between “climate change” and “global warming”: neither expression is inherently frightening. It is possible to imagine a George W. Bush, Mark Latham, Pauline Hansen or Sarah Palin saying something like “Well, in principle, I think global warming in winter would be a good idea but I don’t think we could afford to do it for everybody in the world”.

Whether people choose to speak about global warming or climate change they are using a metaphor to highlight or deny the impending environmental catastrophe that awaits us if we continue to mine, pollute, pillage and exploit the natural environment.

I don’t pretend to know what the tipping point of the coming environmental crisis is. It may happen when there are ten billion people struggling to survive on this planet. It could be when we have released so much carbon dioxide into the oceans that plant and animal plankton, which ultimately sustain all forms of life in the sea, can no longer survive because of increased acidity. It could be in five years, 25 years, 100 years or more: or when we’ve heated the earth by another degree, two degrees or five degrees. It could be from something else that we are doing which scientists have yet to identify as the cause of major environmental damage. What I do know is that most of us won’t know we’ve reached it until well after we’ve passed the point of no return.

Human beings may, however, be able to change their patterns of behaviour enough to avert this impending disaster. Some of the things which need to change are, in the first instance to:

  • eliminate hunger and malnutrition from all parts of the world;
  • share income more equitably between countries and between people; condemn racism in all its forms;
  • stop population growth and then work to decrease the world’s population; attempt to
  • resolve disputes between countries and promote peace;
  • aim for a fair settlement of intra-country disputations;
  • promote antiviolence strategies in cities, towns and villages everywhere; work to
  • enhance just solutions between groups and individuals;
  • actively pursue sustainable environmental practices; and
  • place justice and honour at the centre of all our dealings.

By eliminating hunger and malnutrition and promoting greater income equality we make it easier to curb population expansion, civil disputation and war.

Racism festers where there is great inequality particularly between indigenous people and colonisers. Both economic and social justice, are more easily obtained in more egalitarian societies. When sections of a society have to be aggressive merely to survive, violence between minority and dominant populations is likely to develop.

Egalitarian and sharing societies extinguish such potential flare-ups. If all are obtaining some benefit from the sharing of resources it is easier to implement sustainable environmental practices because the benefits of over- exploitation are no longer going to a handful of greedy people. The majority know that, in the long term, they are protecting the interests of all by ensuring sustainable use of natural resources.

Each of us has the capacity to start working towards building a more equal, inclusive and sharing society. We can start today, by word and deed, to help build a more egalitarian society. We can work with our friends, our work mates, our unions, sporting clubs, professional associations, social agencies, church groups and our neighbours to build a better world. As we engage in this civic project we benefit personally from being surrounded by a safer and stronger community which acts justly and promotes individual autonomy.

But in the short term military forces will be seen by many of our friends and neighbours as necessary for their protection. So we will need to explain why we can no longer afford to maintain military forces at anything beyond a sufficient force to repel an aggressor from our shores.

During the Cold War, Russia and the US amassed sufficient nuclear weapons to eliminate life as we know it many times over. The Americans used Agent Orange to defoliate large environmentally important parts of Indo China. Considerable numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian children continue to be born with extreme deformities, as a legacy of these chemical weapons. Similar herbicides are being supplied by the US to defoliate poppy crops in Afghanistan and coca crops in Columbia. Land mines and cluster bombs are blowing up poor people in many parts of the world for decades after conflicts have finished. Depleted uranium is causing the deaths of babies and children in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is not only the combatants and civilians of invaded countries who become the casualties of war. Many members of the invading forces return home disfigured, drug addicted, poisoned by chemicals, mentally scarred and physically disabled. In some ways the soldiers who get killed are the lucky ones in the inglorious situation where countries send their troops off around the world to wage war.

The homes, hospitals, sewerage treatment works, schools, factories and commercial buildings that get destroyed during wars all have to be replaced after the strife subsides, requiring further impositions on the environment. The families whose child, mother, father, or other relative is killed are not as easily rebuilt. As Warner (1996) says (in T H White’s The Once and Future King in an “Afterword”):

War was a ruinous dementia. It silenced law, it killed poets, it exalted the proud, filled the greedy with good things, and oppressed the humble and meek; no good could come of it, it was hopelessly out of date. Nobody wanted it. (Unfortunately, no one had passionately wanted the League of Nations either.)

While countries are spending vast sums on defence equipment there are more socially or environmentally useful expenditures which are foregone. This money could have been used to improve civic amenities in the home country or provided as foreign aid to help build a more peaceful world. The time wasted training troops to maim and kill could be better spent by employing them engage in some socially or environmentally useful tasks at home or abroad.

Apart from the overt environmental destructive nature of war, there is the environmental cost of just keeping the defence forces mobile. In 2007 Sohbet Karbuz noted in the Energy Bulletin that:

As of September 30, 2005 the US Air Force had 5,986 aircraft in service. At the beginning of 2006 the US Navy had 285 combat and support ships, and around 4,000 operational aircraft (planes and helicopters). At the end of 2005, the US Army had a combat vehicle fleet of approximately 28,000 armored vehicles (tracked vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles). Besides those the Army and the Marine corps have tactical wheeled vehicles such as 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles. The US Army has also over 4,000 combat helicopters and several hundred fixed wing aircraft. Add all those also 187,493 fleet vehicles (passenger cars, busses, light trucks etc) the US Department of Defense (DOD) uses. The issue is that except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, almost all military fleet (including the ones that will be joining in the next decade) run on oil.

He went on to point out that (excluding fuel obtained overseas at no cost, used by contractors, or used in rented or leased vehicles) the Pentagon still managed to use 320,000 barrels of oil per day in 2006.

If we want to keep the world environmentally healthy then we certainly can no longer afford such profligate military consumption of carbon products. We just need to convince our fellow citizens that it is better to have a world at peace rather than one in pieces, because as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “the real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”

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‘The War on Terror’ is what it claims to counter

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Tuesday, 17 August 2004

The “War on Terror” is real, frighteningly real, if agents of the State break into your house, terrorise your family, seize your computers or whatever. But realistically this is unlikely to happen to the majority of Australians at the moment. For most citizens, the “War on Terror” is simply a metaphor, albeit a metaphor that is subject to several interpretations.

Those opposed to being misled by John Winston Howard’s adoption of Bush’s “Pre-emptive redemption” have renamed the metaphor the “War of Terror”. They point to the 37,000 Iraqi-civilian dead since the beginning of the current invasion of Iraq, the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison, the widespread bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, support for the Israeli land grab on the West Bank, the continuance of Israeli assassinations of Palestinians, and the continuing threats, made by the US, to attack Syria and Iran. In addition there is the erosion of civil liberties in the West, the draconian increases in power given to ASIO and other security forces, and the spectre of being whisked off to Guantanamo Bay or other centres of torture.

The xenophobic, the fearful, the poorly informed, the confused and those on the far right who believe in the necessity of the current American, British and Australian Governments’ crackdown on “terrorists” embrace the metaphor of the “War on Terror” in much the same way as frightened children clutch their favourite teddy bear on dark nights. For many, the bogeyman is everywhere.

Alexander Downer’s recent intemperate attacks on Spain and the Philippines for withdrawing troops from Iraq may have gone down a treat with a frightened and confused electorate. His suggestion that both countries were pandering to terrorists ignored the fact that the Spanish Socialists had promised that if they won government they would withdraw their troops prior to the Madrid terrorist bombing and that the Philippines were only going to stay in Iraq for two more weeks. The Philippine government succeeded in saving the life of one of their nationals who had come to represent the migrant worker’s “everyman”. Downer whipped himself up into such a lather of denunciation that he evoked in me an image of someone who would be prepared to go to the Philippines and personally slit the throat of the released truck driver just to stymie the kidnappers.

Spain and the Philippines have had decades of dealing with terrorism, whereas most Australians ignored terrorism until the attacks on the World Towers and in Bali. Downer himself continued to deny the Indonesian TNI and militia’s prolonged terror attacks on the East Timorese nearly up to the referendum in 1999. He ignores the on-going TNI attacks in Aceh and West Papua. Until recently he has been remarkably silent about the Sudanese government’s support for militia violence in southern and western Sudan. He ignores the on-going violence in the Central African Republic, the Russian government’s brutal crushing of Chechen aspirations, and the US government’s bankrolling of numerous right-wing paramilitary groups in South America. It is a case of “terrorism: now you see it – now you don’t”.

There is a need for citizens in the West to carefully reflect upon what is happening in our name both at home and abroad. Hopefully, we may, with a little effort, put the “War on Terror” into perspective. If we continue to use the concept as some sort of cuddly metaphor we may see it as an antidote to violence. In fact, it is simply a convenient mystification of the violence that our governments use against those whom they’ve decided are our enemies.

Once we come to understand that the violence of the State is often far more widespread and terrifying than the violence of non-State forces then it behoves us to take a position on violence per se. Pacifists clearly have a far easier ethical path to tread than do most of us who would, in some circumstances, resort to violence. But most people would consider that State violence should be commensurate with the violence directed against the State. War hawks can justify, if only to themselves, the use of disproportionate force against an opponent.

Some ethicists may be able to justify killing Charlie if Charlie was attempting to kill another or oneself. But such justifications would inevitably rely on a very high degree of proof that Charlie was intending to kill in the very near future. It would be necessary to prove that there were no non-lethal alternatives available to prevent Charlie carrying through with the intention to kill. One would need to do much more than simply assert that “intelligence” existed that Charlie had weapons of mass destruction. The principle of proportionality is the central justifying feature in such thinking and the subsidiary principle is due process.

The “War on Terror”, as presented by the leaders of the Coalition of the Killing, in Iraq and Afghanistan, lacks these elements of proportionality and due process. Clearly, in the dropping of cluster bombs on civilian targets one can detect vengeance, haste, hostility and indifference to the wellbeing of civilians – sorry, I meant potential collateral damage. The attack on civil liberties and critics in the home countries is also out of line with the threat that due process and respect for justice pose to the “democratic” State. It is of the same order as setting out to win a “War on Poverty” by shooting beggars.

Clearly, most would prefer to live in a world in which terrorism and violence was entirely absent rather than the current conflict-filled one we inhabit. If we want to have a peaceful world then the first step is to understand what fuels violence and to appreciate that violence takes many forms. There are massive inequalities of wealth within and between countries. Each day 40,000 people die of starvation or malnutrition, billions are without clean drinking water, health services, adequate shelter or education, where 22-24 million people are refugees or internally displaced people. There are on-going wars in Africa, Asia, and South America. Injustice is pervasive. In Australia, the incarceration of asylum seekers in concentration camps is driving many of them mad, the government’s treatment of Indigenous Australians would shame any civilised nation and the widespread breaching of social-security recipients endangers the health and security of hundreds of thousands of our poorest citizens.

If we worked to ensure a just world in which the gross extremes of wealth were abolished, past injustices addressed, where everyone was assured of the basic necessities of life and where current conflicts were negotiated we might not succeed in abolishing all violence and terror but we would certainly have made a good start. Before this can happen, we have to stop glibly accepting meanings attributed by governments to each and every metaphor that their spin-doctors bowl up to us.

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“All they will call them…”

First published Al-Moharer
www.al-moharer.net/moh164/tomlinson164.htm

People keep coming to my country.
The First Peoples arrived first.
Then soldiers and sailors
thieves and blackmailers.
Next we let into our fold
Yanks and Chinks
who came for gold.
After World War II we imported
Dagos, Wogs
odds and sods
ten quid Poms,
pimps and toms.
Off we went with Uncle Sam
dropping agent orange and
napalm
the length and breath of
Vietnam.
We had boat people arrive
many of them hardly alive.
The latest arrivals, we are told,
are queue jumpers, not proper refugees.
They are from the Middle East
the very people we want least.
Ruddock’s job is to get it sorted.
They, he says, should be deported.
The army calls them
Suspected unlawful non-citizens
S.N.U.C.S for short
Why are they called that do you suppose?
Do they have a nasty effect on your nose?
The Government attempts to apportion blame
they’ll do anything to hide their shame.
They have decreased our foreign aid,
exported weapons Australian made.
They claim we want full global trade
but, refugees should stay.
Stay where they are made.

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“Something is rotten in the state of Queensland”

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Friday, 31 October 2008

Queensland has had a long history of police killings of Aborigines. In 1848, the Queensland Government set up a Native Police Force under the control of white officers specifically to “disperse” Aborigines considered to be standing in the way of white expansion on the frontier (Rowley, The Destruction Of Aboriginal Society, 1972).

“Disperse” was the euphemism employed to describe riding up to family groups and shooting them. Little regard was shown by many settlers for the sanctity of Aboriginal life. Frederick Walker, former commandant of the Native Police Force on July 10, 1861 wrote to the Colonial Secretary of Queensland about the actions of the Native Police Force in the aftermath of the Hornet Bank murders saying:

At the Juandah massacre, the Blacks who had been proven to the satisfaction of five magistrates to be innocent of any participation in crime, were subsequently murdered, some in the verandah, some in the kitchen of a magistrate who in vain remonstrated. Two blacks who had by some whim been spared were then made to bury the victims, and one ruffian said to the other, “What shall we do with the sextons?” The answer was “shoot them”. One was accordingly shot. Why the other was spared, I know not. Possibly the supply of cartridges was running short (Skinner, Police of the Pastoral Frontier, p. 370, 1975).

Aboriginal resistance to absolute police control has never been tolerated in Queensland. Professor Henry Reynolds provides considerable evidence of this history in The Other Side of the Frontier, This Whispering in our Hearts and Why Weren’t We Told. Historian Dr Ros Kidd in The Way We Civilise details the way police “protectors” and Department of Native Affairs officers systematically defrauded their Aboriginal charges of millions of pounds by manipulating the Welfare Benefit Trust Accounts.

When I worked with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in South Brisbane, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, I witnessed drunken police arresting Aborigines for drunkenness. Often the police were drunker than the people they arrested. One afternoon I saw two police officers pickup a frail, semiconscious, drunken Aboriginal woman and throw her into the paddy wagon from over a metre away from the rear of the vehicle. She hit the front wall of the van with a sickening thud. I lodged a formal complaint with the police the next day only to be assured, some weeks later in a letter, that the arrest had been carried out in line with normal police practices.

While lecturing at Darwin Community College in the early 1980s I became personally involved with the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody. I was secretary of the Northern Territory Council for Civil Liberties and we were told that an Aboriginal prisoner, who had died in the closed mental health ward of Darwin Hospital, had, just prior to his death, been assaulted by prison guards.

I sat through the entire inquest, at the end of which the senior prison guard on duty at the time of the death was charged with manslaughter by the Coroner. The charges were subsequently dropped by the crown law prosecutor and I wrote a play from the transcripts called simply The Death of Phillip Robertson. The play was written in an attempt to attract public attention to the issue of Indigenous deaths in custody.

I was in Perth in 1983 when a young Aboriginal man, John Pat, was assaulted at the Roebourne watch house by five police offers and he subsequently died in custody. I worked with the Aboriginal Legal Aid Service in Perth to get public attention focused on this case. Following the acquittal of all the police involved in the death of John Pat, the Hawke Government established a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

It started work in October 1987 and issued its final report in November 1990. It investigated 99 deaths of Indigenous people in custody who died between January 1, 1980 and May 31, 1989. The Royal Commission made 339 recommendations designed to divert Aboriginal people from custody, address alcohol and street offence problems, enhance Indigenous self determination and improve Aboriginal/police relations.

There were some attempts made to implement many of the Commission’s recommendations. But 18 years later there are now more Indigenous prisoners in custody than in 1990, Aboriginal/police relations in many parts of Queensland have not improved, alcohol and street offences are still a major reason for Indigenous arrest and Australia has yet to sign the United Nations Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or do much else to promote self-determination for the first people of this nation.

Two books have already been written about the events surrounding the death of Mulrunji, one by ABC journalist, Jeff Waters, entitled Gone for a Song and the other The Tall Man by the Walkley Award winning journalist, Chloe Hooper.

There is a consensus that Mulrunji was intoxicated and wandering along the street on Palm Island when he witnessed the arrest of Patrick Bramwell being conducted by an Aboriginal police liaison officer. Mulrunji suggested to the liaison officer that he should not be betraying his own people, this angered Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley who then arrested Mulrunji and drove him and Bramwell to the watch house.

In the yard there was an altercation between Mulrunji and Hurley and Hurley claims he fell on the step at the entrance to the cells. The other prisoner, Patrick Bramwell who was in the watch house at the time gave evidence that Hurley seriously assaulted Mulrunji. An hour later Mulrunji was dead – his spleen ruptured, four ribs broken and his liver split almost into two parts.

Seven days later, following a community meeting at which the crowd was given details of the first autopsy, unrest broke out and there was a disturbance. The police station, court house and some police accommodation was burnt down. Heavily armed riot squads were subsequently flown to Palm Island and suppressed, at gun point, the population including grandmothers and children. The police did not wear any identifying insignia.

After an aborted inquest, a second inquest was conducted by Deputy State Coroner Christine Clements: she found that the arrest of Mulrunji was not an appropriate exercise of police discretion; she did not believe that Hurley’s account of events to be truthful; she believed that Hurley had struck Mulrunji while he was still on the floor; and went on to say “I conclude that these actions of Senior sergeant Hurley caused the fatal injuries”.

Coroner Clements referred the case to Director of Public Prosecutions, who declined to prosecute, but after a public outcry and further judicial inquires Senior Sergeant Hurley was sent to trial in Townsville. On June 20, 2007 he was acquitted by the all white jury: a fairly likely result for a man whose actions had been investigated by his mates. And by then Patrick Bramwell was dead, having been found hanging in a tree some six months earlier.

On October 24, 2008, Palm Islander, Lex Wooton, was found by an all white jury in Brisbane guilty of “riot with destruction”: he was remanded in custody in Townsville to be sentenced in November. The maximum penalty he faces is life in prison.

Not satisfied with gaining the conviction of another Palm Islander who opposed police, the Police Union demanded that the Parliamentary Speaker, Mike Reynolds, whose electorate is in Townsville, apologise to the police for supporting “the rioters”. Reynolds in return accused the Union of “political thuggery” and of “continuing a vendetta against him” (ABC News 2008).

There is a long trail of similarities from the murders of the Arrernte by Constable Willshire in Central Australia in the 19th century (SBS TV) to current police killings and their subsequent cover-ups. But there is little to match the arrogance of the present Queensland police service. Three days after Lex Wooton was remanded in custody, the Police Commissioner announced that 22 police would receive bravery medals for their actions on Palm Island following the killing of Mulrunji.

In Queensland, for as long as Lex Wooton is in jail and Inspector Chris Hurley walks free, and the Queensland Police Union continues to intimidate politicians, there are serious problems for the justice system. There is a need for a further Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody paying particular attention to:
  • the deaths of Mulrunji on Palm Island and Daniel Yock in South Brisbane;
  • the behaviour of the riot squad on Palm Island following the burning down of the police station;
  • a thorough investigation of the intimidation of witnesses who give evidence not appreciated by police; and
  • an investigation of the intimidation of politicians and others by members of the police union.

I don’t know how this will be achieved, short of some decent police officers becoming whistle blowers. However, if the Royal Commissioners were able to investigate the widespread perjuring conducted by police in Queensland, then they might finally get to understand the underlying reasons for the high number of deaths in custody.

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“70,000 years of the Dreaming and 200 odd years of the Nightmare”

How can non-Indigenous Australians dream of a better life
when they’ve destroyed so much of the dreaming of Indigenous Australians?

Written in 2009 not published

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its-timecook

“It’s Time” to meet our obligations: Education for what?

Keynote paper given by John Tomlinson at the Australia New Zealand Student Services Association, Canberra 4-7th December 2005. reproduced in the Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Student Services Association: No 27. April 2006 pp.56-73.

In 1972, after Whitlam’s “It’s Time” victory, it seemed to me that a better world was possible. Education, health and social services were revitalised. There was reform in the air and in those days reform meant ‘to make better to improve’. These days, ‘reform’ is again being spoken about – but it has a new meaning. Welfare ‘reform’ means loading more obligations onto the shoulders of those who are unemployed, have a disability or who are single parents. Kevin Andrews’ (2005 [a]) industrial relations ‘reform’ amounts to squeezing even more out of an already-stretched workforce. In such an environment, the health ‘reforms’ of “Medicare plus” result in less bulkbilling and greater costs accruing to individuals and families for private medical and pharmaceutical services. Brendan Nelson’s educational ‘reform’ means increasing student’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) debt, demolishing student unions and limiting students’ access to services.

In the years since 1996, when prime ministerial aspirant, John Howard, assured us that we could be “relaxed and comfortable” if only we would vote Labor from office, we have seen:

  • the social security system reduced to a series of compulsory obligations in return for income support set at a rate below the poverty-line,
  • the reconciliation process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians grind to a halt
  • horrendous treatment meted out to asylum seekers,
  • an increasingly casualised tertiary education workforce,
  • increased privatisation of the tertiary sector
  • increased costs imposed on tertiary students,
  • increased class sizes,
  • decreased Government financial support, and
  • demands for even greater productivity gains in our sector.

The prevailing political climate, informed as it is by neo-liberal economic fundamentalism, preaches that the market is the final arbiter of good taste. In this paper, I will reflect upon the changes that have taken place since 1996 and argue that it is time for those employed in tertiary education to meet our obligation. Our obligation is to our students. It is an obligation to provide a supportive educational environment which educates students to live in society rather than simply equipping them to become pliable peons in the global marketplace. We should aim to prepare our student for what Guy Standing (2002) calls an “occupation” rather than just skilling them for “jobs”. That is, we should aim to produce citizens not slaves – citizens equipped to demand that all permanent residents of this Commonwealth have access to a fair share of the common wealth.

On reform

From Alice in Wonderland to Joseph Goebbels, from Stalin to Bush and from Blair to John Howard’s media machine, it is imperative to the spin doctors that words come to mean what the powerful want them to mean.

When Howard speaks about removing workers’ protection against being unfairly dismissed, he claims to be removing “unfair dismissal legislation”. When he speaks about destroying the near universal membership of student guilds he claims to be protecting choice and introducing “voluntary student unionism”. When he discusses imposing oppressive obligations on unemployed people, he claims to be saving them from the scourge of “welfare dependency”. When he announces that from July 2006 lone parents, once their youngest child reaches six years, will be required to seek employment and when the youngest child turns eight year will be transferred to Newstart unemployment benefit (Lewis and Karvelas 2005), he claims to be assisting such parents to “take their place in the labour market”. He makes similar pronouncements about his plans to restrict those with disabilities gaining access to Disability Support Pensions. (For a more detailed discussion of these last two issues see Galvin 2004 and Tomlinson 2005[a], ABC News Online 2005, Perry 2005).

When you are trying to work out what is happening in social policy debates it can be helpful to go to a good dictionary and look up the meaning of some of the words being used in the debate. You can then see the degree of departure from the meaning that politicians are giving, or attempting to give, to concepts and the standard dictionary meaning/s of the same terms. For instance, when Howard Government ministers claim to be “reforming” everything from welfare, education, Medicare to industrial relations, the meaning they give to such “reforms” appears to be vastly different to that which the Macquarie Dictionary (1987 p. 1479) provides:

re-form verb. to form again.
reform noun. 4. the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, etc.: social reform. Reform 4. to restore to a former and better state; improve by alteration, substitution, abolition, etc. to cause (a person) to abandon wrong or evil ways of life or conduct. 6. to put an end to (abuses, disorders, etc.). 7. to abandon evil conduct or error.

Whether the Howard Government’s “mutual obligation” policy is ethically just, we might consider if the imposition of such obligations upon those forced to rely on income support could accurately described as “mutual”. The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘mutual’ as:

1. possessed, experienced, performed, etc. by each of two or more with respect to other or others; reciprocal: mutual aid.
2. having the same relation each towards the other or others: mutual foes.
3. of or pertaining to each of two or more or common: mutual acquaintance (1987 p.1175 italics in original).

There is no reciprocity in the relationship between the Howard Government and unemployed people. The opinions of unemployed people were not sought; their interests are not considered. The Government unilaterally imposed the policy; the Government unilaterally extended the policy in every budget from 1996/7 to 2005/6.

Now let’s look at the ethics of such policies. Goodin (2001) provides a sustained articulate analysis of the failure of ‘mutual obligation’ and increasingly targeted income support to achieve justice for the least affluent Australians (see also Kinnear 2000, Standing 2002, Bessant, Watts, Dalton and Smyth 2006).

Goodin (2001) points to the propensity of governments to assert an implied consent, for changes in income policy between welfare recipients and the State, through the widespread use of the language of the social contract. He conjures the image of a highwayman declaring that even if one had parted with one’s money in return for one’s life no court would enforce such a contract. He goes on:

The proposition that the welfare worker is putting to her putative ‘client’ is: ‘Agree or starve.’ That is the same, in all essentials, to the proposition the highwayman puts to his victim: ‘Agree or die.’(p.191).

Just as we still have an obligation to feed people even after they have committed heinous crimes so too we have an obligation to not let people starve even if they have committed mortal sins against the labour market …Welfare recipients have not agreed to those new arrangements at the macro- level; and such consent as they give at the micro-level, in ‘agreements’ negotiated under effective duress with welfare caseworkers, has no moral standing (p.195).

If we seriously believed that work is good for you and that it is the state’s legitimate role to force you to do it, then we would have no grounds for confining our paternalism to the poor. Paternalistically speaking, it would be equally important to make the rich work too (p.198).

But, perhaps I have missed something – maybe Frederick von Hayek (1944) John Howard (1999, 2000) Jocelyn Newman (1999) Abbott (1999) and Andrews (2005[a]) are on to something when they claim that by forcing people off income support they are saving the poor from their slothful desire to sink into the quagmire of “welfare dependency”.

The impact of enforcing obligations upon unemployed people, insufficiently employed people, lone parents and people with disabilities, is the same whether it is expressed in the considered tones of Patrick McClure’s (2000) Report, or Minister Abbott’s (1999) suggestion that unemployed people are “job snobs”. The hysterical denunciation of “welfare dependency”, particularly intergenerational “welfare dependency”, is based on a myth. There have been no intergenerational panel studies of long-term social security recipients in Australia. Recent overseas long-term panel studies refute such assertions (Goodin, Headey, Muffels and Dirven 1999, pp.260- 261). Cook, Dodd and Mitchell (2001, p.24) report that since 1975 in Australia there have been around eleven job seekers for each job vacancy. Even, the Minister for Family and Community Services, Kay Patterson (2004) has admitted “we do not have adequate longitudinal data in the Australian context from which to draw a reliable picture of the extent and circumstances surrounding the cycle of intergenerational welfare dependence.” (See also Banks 2005.)

There is little recognition that workfare jobs entrench low-paid employment by displacing full-time, above-poverty-line jobs (Briggs and Buchanan 2000). “Work for the dole” and Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) jobs in Australia have a similar effect of entrenching poverty (Tomlinson 2003 Chapters 4 and 6). The CDEP is a “work for the dole” program which has been operating in Indigenous communities since 1977. The bulk of Indigenous “jobs” on Indigenous communities are CDEP “jobs” – paid at about the rate of unemployment benefits and only the most misguided would claim that such “jobs” have abolished poverty in Indigenous Australia.

Advocates of participation-income seem oblivious to the life experiences of low-paid workers revealed in the Australian Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union’s (LHMU) submission to the Senate Inquiry into Poverty (2003). There is very little recognition of the demoralisation that follows in the wake of working full-time yet still experiencing poverty, or only being able to gain casualised, poorly remunerated, precarious employment.

Relations with Indigenous Australians

The Mabo High Court judgement in 1992 led, in 1994, to the Native Title Act. It appeared, for a while, that reconciliation might be reached between the original owners of this continent and those of us who arrived since 1788. This was particularly so after Prime Minister Keating’s Redfern speech on 10th December 1992 when he declared:

…the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non- Aboriginal Australians.
It begins…with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion (Australian Politics 1992).

After the Coalition regained control of the Treasury benches came the Wik High Court judgement which recognised that native title could coexist with pastoral leases. The Coalition Government was determined to provide “Bucket loads of extinguishment” (McKenna 2004) in its 1998 “Ten Point Plan” which made it very much harder for traditional owners to establish ownership of land. Middle Australia hit back in 2000 when over a million marched against the failure of the Government to facilitate the reconciliation process. Then there was Howard’s refusal to apologise to the stolen generations, his amalgamation of the Aboriginal Benefit Study Assistance program and Austudy, the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission and the imposition of shared responsibility agreements. All the while Aborigines continue to die twenty years younger than other Australians. (For further details see Tomlinson 2005[b])

Asylum seekers

In October 1999, asylum seekers who arrived without visas were granted three year Temporary Protection Visas rather than permanent protection (Phillips 2004, p. 1). A system of concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as Immigration Detention Centres, proliferated. These camps were usually located in remote and inhospitable places. Then, in 2001 came the Tampa with its cargo of 430 asylum seekers which the crew had rescued from the Indian Ocean. Howard responded with his ‘Pacific solution’ which began a policy of incarcerating asylum seekers, who had not set foot on Australian soil, in camps on Nauru and Manus Island. White racist groups here and in Europe praised the Australian Government but in other circles the ‘Pacific solution’ was roundly condemned (Maley 2004, Marr and Wilkinson 2004, Brennan 2003, Lock, Quenault, and Tomlinson 2002).

The privatised concentration camps established in many arid parts of Australia have been the setting for hundreds of incidents of self-harm every year, many people have been driven mad by their incarceration, cells have been set on fire, asylum seekers have sewn their lips together, families have been torn apart, and riots have been ruthlessly suppressed. Australia’s oppressive treatment of asylum seekers in the camps has been criticised by a number of United Nations Committees, particularly the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) here (CERD 2005, HEROC 2005). For too long, all this made little impression on the Government despite every Australian professional health association warning of the destructive impact that such indefinite incarceration was having on the health of inmates.

Gradually refugee advocacy groups (Rural Australians for Refugees, Chilout, Spare Rooms for Refugees and many others) began to change public opinion. The story about the young boy Shayan Bedarae being driven mad inside a detention centre, as shown on Four Corners (2001), made an appreciable dint the wall of public indifference. But, after the Coalition Government was returned to office in 2004 and gained control of the Senate from July 2005 it seemed that there would be little change in asylum seeker policy. Then came Cornelia Rau, Vivian Alvarez Solon, the Palmer Inquiry, the Giorgio Bills, the Prime Minister’s initial stone-walling and subsequent relaxation of some of the most punitive aspects of refugee policy. Recently, the Howard Government brought back all but two of the asylum seekers remaining on Nauru. The ABC’s PM program 25th of October this year revealed, in relation to the Immigration Department, that “…of the 220 people whose cases the Commonwealth Ombudsman is examining for possible unlawful detention, two were locked up for between five and seven years”.

Clearly, there are many improvements which could be made to Australia’s asylum seeker policy: the end of mandatory detention, the closure of Baxter, the end of off- shore processing, the end of detention beyond initial health and security checking (say 48 hours), the removal of the exclusion of off-shore islands from our immigration zone, the provision of Medicare and social security to asylum seekers awaiting determination of their refugee status but at least Australia seems to have turned the corner and these struggles lie ahead.

The loser pays principle

Neo-classical economics now holds sway in Australia and has done so since the mid- 1980s. Some trace its re-emergence to Austrian, Frederick von Hayek’s 1944 text entitled The Road to Serfdom and his involvement with other right-wing business leaders and economists through the Mont Pelerin Society. Susan George (1997) points to the proliferation of well-funded right-wing think-tanks for abetting the rise in economic fundamentalism. Michael Pusey (1991) here and Jane Kelsey (1995) in New Zealand have recorded the rampage of neo-classical economics.

Economic fundamentalism has become so much a part of the Howard Government’s mind set that it is sometimes hard for Australians to remember that from the early 1940s until the end of the 1970s Keynesian economics prevailed and with it came full employment, improved welfare and educational services, decent industrial relations and for a while universal health care and free university education.

Nowadays we have a “user pays” system underpinning most decisions made by governments. I think this system should more appropriately be referred to as a loser pays system as the Patrick Cook cartoon amply demonstrates.

its-timecook

Those of us who don’t have the time or patience to come to terms with the intricacies of economics owe it to ourselves and our students to read at least Bob Ellis’ (1998) very amusing little book entitled First Abolish the Customer: 202 Arguments Against Economic Rationalism and the first eight chapters of the concise text How to argue with an economist written by Lindy Edwards in 2002. Then we might start to see that those economists who believe in an invisible hand which controls the market should not be taken too seriously but should rather be seen as objects of ridicule. Of course, if you do have time to deconstruct economic fundamentalism then I suggest you start your journey with Rees, Rodley and Stilwell’s (1993) Beyond the Market, Paul Ormerod’s (1994) The Death of Economics, Will Hutton’s (2002) The World We’re In and Frank Stilwell’s (2002) Political Economy.

Industrial relations policy

Seventeen academics (July 2005) who specialise in labour market research reviewed the Howard Government’s proposed Industrial Relations policies. They concluded:

On all the evidence available … there is simply no reason to believe that the federal government’s proposed changes will do anything to address these complex economic and social problems. The Government’s proposals will:

  • Undermine people’s rights at work
  • Deliver a flexibility that in most cases is one way, favouring employers
  • Do – at best – nothing to address work-family issues
  • Have no direct impact on productivity
  • Disadvantage the individuals and groups already most marginalised in Australian society.

The Howard Government’s industrial relations policy involves coercing more people into the labour market, staying longer at work, decreasing the conditions of employment and conscripting the reserve army of labour to accept precarious, casual and part-time work or being forced into workfare type programs in an effort to ensure the quiescence of organised labour. At the very time when more of the population is part of the labour market and the Australian nation is more affluent than ever, the Government is demanding that all (even those most marginal to the productive process) demonstrate their economic utility and self-sufficiency. This is the real agenda of the Howard Government.

The tertiary sector

From 1996 to 1999 the number of academic staff fell by 5% across the board…. Between 1998-2000 casual employment of academic staff in universities rose by over 18% (Group of Eight [Universities] 2001).

Student-staff ratios in the Humanities rose from 15.5 in 1995 to 20 in the year 2000. Source: Group of Eight [Universities] (2001)

Prior 1974, students, with the exception of scholarship holders, paid university fees. Gough Whitlam argued that university education was a public good which should be publicly funded: the “Whitlam Labor Government abolished university fees with a view to increasing the number of Australians able to study at university (Bessant et al 2006, p. 316)”. It is ironic that university fees (HECS) were reintroduced by the Hawke Labor Government as a way of funding more university places (Bessant et al 2006, p. 317, Edwards, Howard and Miller 2001). Judith Bessant and her colleagues (2006) detail what a cash cow HECS has become for tertiary institutions and governments when they point out that:

Until 1997, HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) contributed about 20 per cent of the cost of a degree. Now that has risen under the Howard government to 40 per cent. The Nelson reforms are likely to see this increase to 44 without a 30 percent surcharge, or up to 56 per cent if all universities apply the surcharge (Bessant et al 2006, p. 331).

One outcome of having students gain their higher education on credit means that all (but the BMW set) are saddled with debt for a long time after graduating. This means that many will postpone establishing a family, buying a home and doing all the other things that many take for granted. At the last New Zealand election the Labour Party promised to stop charging interest on student fees for graduates who stay in Aotearoa (Otago Polytech Students Association 2005). There was a lot of discussion as to whether this was affordable (Farrar 2005) most of which ignored the cost to a country of training skilled workers only to have them leave. Clearly, many graduates left New Zealand as a way of avoiding repaying student educational loans.

I was recently at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory where the administration has been forced, by economic necessity, to reduce by one third the number of subjects it offers. In 2005/6 the Federal Government will provide less than 40% of Australian universities’ funding and, in return for that money, the Howard Government is intervening more and more in the industrial, administrative and academic life of universities (Department of Education Science and Training 2005 [a]).

The rise of managerialism, the application of competition policy and the commodification of knowledge have placed considerable pressure on the older conception of universities as places of light, liberty, learning, reason and debate. Such changes have been “accompanied by a reconstitution of student identities from liberal learning-citizens to customers-cum-consumers of education commodities who, on enrolment enter commercial contractual arrangements with ‘deliverers’ of ‘educational services’ (Bessant et al 2006, p. 333)”.

The Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system is under even greater pressure than universities. The spectre of Howard’s new Australian Technical Colleges with their aggressive industrial relations policies will be used to pressure TAFE management to cut staff wages and conditions (Department of Education Science and Training 2005 [b]).

The impact of social policy on student support workers

It is easy to separate what is happening in the rest of the world from what is happening in our workplaces. Sometimes we don’t see the connection between the changes in the system of income support and the problems that students are having with their studies. Some of my students badly need access to dental services and, prior to the Howard Government abolishing the low income earner dental scheme in 1997, would have been able to get it – now they just have to put up with the pain. We can’t afford to ignore what is happening out there whilst trying to fix up what is going on in our work places. As criminologist, Paul Wilson, often remarked “Decisions made in the boardrooms affect what happens in the bedrooms”.

The racism which has influenced our treatment of Indigenous Australians since 1788 is an ever-present feature of Indigenous students’ experience of the tertiary education system. The racism which allows the Howard Government to incarcerate asylum seekers in Baxter or to use SAS commandos to prevent those rescued by the Tampa arriving at Christmas Island, is an ongoing feature of Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers once they obtain refugee status. Refugee students tell me they frequently encounter racism in my university and on the streets.

The divisive class attitudes which allow the government to decide who are and who are not the “deserving unemployed’, the “deserving students”, the “deserving single parents” are present in TAFEs and universities around the country. The denigration of the young and sometimes the old in workplaces up and down this country can be found in the hallowed halls of academe. Few of our tertiary institutions adequately service rural students, let alone those who live in remote parts of Australia. Though women now constitute the majority of university students, gender discrimination is alive and well in tertiary education. Attitudes about being able-bodied, attractive or demonstrating sporting prowess (which are so much a part of Australian life) don’t fit well with the need to provide appropriate educational access to students with disabilities. When the government claims that it intends to cut the number of Disability Support Pensioners by a third, it is hardly surprising that many in the community and in our sector come to believe that a third of Disability Support Pensioners are malingerers, or in some other way undeserving. Of course, not all people with severe mobility impairments are socially and politically perceptive. One woman at my university, who receives a Disability Support Pension uses the disability car park and the lift which we fought to have installed to assist staff and students with mobility difficulties. She drives a car with the personalised number plate “Tax Sux” – which leads me to believe that she has not thought through the role of government revenue in the provision of social services.

Student support workers are going to find that, if student unions are decimated as a result of the Howard Government’s assault on them (Crombie 2005), they won’t have a power base when they want to pressure academics to give students with disabilities special consideration. Uncooperative teaching staff or staff who believe that students with disabilities or severe disadvantage should not receive special consideration will just dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate with counsellors. Such an outcome will prevent students competing fairly with their fellow students.

The extent to which TAFE and university budgets are cut will determine how many staff are employed to maintain counselling and other services. If the abolition of student amenity fees leads to the closing of campus child care services this will make it even harder for parents of young children to undertake or complete their studies.

There are less obvious impacts on our institutions which will eventuate if the present Government prevails in the longer term. We can’t say we were not warned. In 1996 Howard told the Australian people he wanted to replicate the New Zealand experience and too few of us had read Jane Kelsey’s (1995) account of the destruction inflicted by economic fundamentalism upon New Zealand’s productive capacity and society more generally. In 1999 and 2000 Howard clearly set out his particular amalgam of social conservative and neo-liberal agendas. It should have been obvious, that his fascination with imposing ‘work for the dole’ on young people was not going to be the limit of his assault on the social wage.

The most likely downside of continued economic fundamentalism and social divisiveness will be the breakdown in trust between citizens. The ease with which Howard was able to evoke feelings of downward envy directed towards the unemployed should have alerted us to this danger (Tomlinson 1999). There seemed no recognition in suburbia that “…if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night” (James Baldwin cited in Davis 1971, p.1). In a society, a TAFE or a university where there is no solidarity between people, the sense of what is reasonable or fair is lost and the various actors struggle competitively for their individual place in the sun.

There are more desirable alternatives

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher always suggested “There is no alternative” to her chosen policy. In the real world, however, there are always other alternatives to those which our “betters” have mapped out for us.

In the long term we don’t have to settle for the highly targeted, means-tested, obligating categorical system of income support. We could opt for a universal Basic Income paid to each and every one on the basis of citizenship or permanent residence.

The recipient would not be obligated to do anything in return for receiving the Basic Income, which is why, in Britain, this idea is referred to as a Citizen’s Income. At present, the only implemented Basic Income is the Alaskan Dividend (Goldsmith 2002) which is paid out of oil dividends and has been in operation for 20 years. Basic Income is being seriously considered by the government in Ireland, been partly implemented in Brazil and is being hotly debated in Germany, Spain, South Africa and Namibia (For further information see USBIG Newsletter Vol 6, No 35, 2005, Basic Income Earth Network[BIEN] 2005, Basic Income Guarantee Australia [BIGA] 2005). Various forms of universal income guarantee have been promoted in Australia since the early 1970s (Tomlinson, Harrington and Schooneveldt 2004) and across the Tasman (Universal Basic Income New Zealand 2005).

I have proposed a universal Basic Income as the long term solution to income maintenance because I believe that once a Basic Income is in place many of the other necessary social wage improvements will be easier to implement. I am mindful, however, that John Maynard Keynes noted that “in the long run we are all dead” and that the poor need to eat every day. So I will suggest some things we can do immediately to meet our obligations to ourselves and our students. First, we must work with unions to resist the Howard Government’s industrial relations changes and their attack on enterprise bargaining and award conditions. This will assist us to have greater bargaining power with our employers and indirectly assist our students to maintain their wage structures and conditions. Secondly, we must become active in the struggle for reconciliation between Indigenous and other Australians. Thirdly, we need to campaign for the end of mandatory detention of asylum seekers and the closure of the concentration camps. Fourthly, we must confront sexism, ageism, racism and discrimination on the basis of disability whenever we encounter them.

The next step in our day-to-day work with students is to attempt to show them how attractive Guy Standing’s concept of occupation is compared with going along with the Government’s mantra that “the best form of welfare is a job and any job is better than no job at all”(Andrews 2005[b]).

When he speaks about occupation, Standing (2002), equates it with a calling, a vocation or a craft lamenting that:

the ancient sense of ‘craft’ or vocation has been eroded, symbolised in part by the virtual collapse of apprenticeship as a system of training …For many workers, vocational training has been absent, while there has been a shift to job training and its surrogate, labour market training (pp. 46-47).

At page 255 Standing (2002) says:

We define ourselves by our occupation, a word that has a double sense in the English language – meaning taking possession of a piece of territory…and also a set of related activities learned or refined through a career…
A ‘job’ is a humbler word, conveying a set of tasks that might or might not be combined into an occupation. Often, it has had a pejorative meaning attached to it, implying a lack of permanency, a lack of accumulated wisdom and skill…A job is what one does, an occupation is what one is.

Perhaps if we successfully encourage our students to approach their learning as a step on the way to gaining an occupation then the challenges we face in this sector and in our societies will seem less imposing.

Standing (2002) condemns workfare programs as a labourist fetish (p. 272), pointing out that for much of the 20th century in many parts of the world employment or being prepared to take a job determines individual entitlements and status (p.xii). In addition, he regards workfare as a methodology of exclusion from income security rather than as a way to include unemployed people in the labour market (Ch. 8). Standing is an ardent advocate of introducing a Basic Income as a way of ensuring real freedom (see also Van Parijs (1997). Standing (2002) concludes his book by suggesting:

Dignified work needs basic security, or real freedom is denied. The ultimate paradox is that it requires the freedom to do no work at all. Dignified work can only exist when it is done for intrinsic reasons, not because a landlord, a boss or the state says it shall be so (p. 277).

Conclusion

As workers committed to our occupation, we need to be mindful of the immediate and long-term outcomes for our students. It would be a pyrrhic victory indeed if we were to succeed in assisting students with disabilities to get through their courses only to find that their student allowances or Disability Support Pension ceased, they were offered work under unconscionable conditions, which if they refused would mean they were refused Newstart or other forms of income support.

It is not a choice between fighting for the immediate best interests of our students and struggling to build a decent society in the longer term. These are interwoven issues. We need to do both.

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“Why don’t they buy their own houses?”

Parity Vol. 19 Issue 1 February 2006 pp.77-79

Back in the early 1960s, an Aboriginal singer from New South Wales, Dougie Young, wrote a song called “In the land where the crows fly backwards”. He explained that crows did so in order to keep the dust out of their eyes. The song contained the lines:

“The whitefella took this country from me
He’s been fighting for it ever since.”

In a very direct way Dougie Young captured the intrinsic dimensions of Indigenous homelessness: white invasion and continuing Aboriginal resistance to the occupation.

In the early 1970s, I worked with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in South Brisbane as they struggled with endemic homelessness and police harassment. Often, the police were drunker than the Indigenous people they arrested for “being intoxicated”. The community established the Born Free Club that provided shelter, entertainment and a meeting place. The Born Free Club currently runs hostels in the area and many of the children of the founders of Club are still struggling to ensure that people have a safe place to stay.

At Palm Island off the Queensland coast, on 19th November 2004, Mulrunji Doomadgee, and Aboriginal resident was walking along the road singing when he was picked up by the police and taken to the Police station. An hour later, he was dead as a result of severe internal injuries. Other residents of the island surrounded the Police station that was subsequently burnt to the ground. The Police responded by flying in their paramilitary wing. Old women and children were forced to lie face down in the dust whilst being stood over by heavily armed police who wore no identifying insignia.

On Palm Island, Indigenous residents live in overcrowded conditions. Ten to 17 people to a house is the general rule. When I was there a couple of years ago, I was told that 29 people lived in one house. The occupancy rate on Palm is in line with that found on many Indigenous communities in Northern Australia. As a result of the ongoing housing crisis, many Indigenous people in northern regions shift to cities in search of work and less crowded housing. Some make a successful transition but many, in the short term, don’t succeed in solving either their employment or housing difficulties. Those unable to access adequate shelter congregate in parks, along river banks or on foreshores –the places where native title might one day be found to exist but which, at the moment, are usually controlled by the local councils and the police.

From 1973-85, I lived in the Top End of the Northern Territory and was involved with both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in relation to welfare and housing issues. In late 2005, I returned to Darwin to see what was happening to Indigenous people sleeping in public places. Little has changed since the mid 1970s –they continue to be harassed by city council and police officers (Tomlinson 2005[a]).

In 1971, Frances Lovejoy estimated that it would take $3 billion to fix the backlog in Indigenous housing in Australia. In 2006, there would need to be at least $3 billion spent to ensure that all Indigenous Australians were provided with basic housing.

Historian Dr Ros Kidd and others revealed that, in 2006 values, the equivalent of $500 million of Indigenous peoples wages and social security had been misappropriated by Queensland governments and their agents during the period 1904 to 1970 (Stolen Wages Campaign 2006). After taking into account interest on the “stolen wages”, the real amount owing to Indigenous Queenslanders is in the order of $3 billion (McMahon 2005). The Beattie Government offered $55.4 million as total compensation for the stolen wages and had paid out only $20 million by the end of 2005, when it closed the fund.

Given the history of unpaid Indigenous wages throughout most of Australia, basic decency should oblige the various state governments to ensure that no Indigenous person was left without adequate shelter as a simple act of reparation. The withholding of wages in the past contributes in a very direct way to the deplorable housing situation facing Aborigines today.

Indigenous people have not been in a position to purchase their own homes at anything like an equivalent rate to non-Indigenous people. They have been forced to rely on public and private rental accommodation and, as a consequence of rental regulations, have not been as able to offer shelter to relatives and friends as they would have had they been able to purchase their own homes.

It is irrefutable that existing white privilege has been built on Indigenous dispossession. Yet, there is a general lack of knowledge about the reasons for Indigenous homelessness. Professor Henry Reynolds, in his book This Whispering in our Hearts, provides many interesting insights into this phenomenon. The “lack of knowledge” is not so much a failure to comprehend as it is a refusal to acknowledge the role of non-Indigenous people in causing Indigenous homelessness. If white Australians were to accept that their current affluent position is in no small part due to the way they and their forbears treated the original owners of this land, then they would have some stark choices facing them. Either they could accept the unfairness of the status quo or they could work to ameliorate the ongoing impoverishment of Indigenous Australians.

John Howard, Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine explain the failure of Indigenous people to overcome the insurmountable obstacles the State places in their path as being due to “welfare dependency and addiction”. I have dissected such nonsense in a paper entitled “Must be the Grog: Can’t be the Government” (Tomlinson (2005[b]). It would matter little if such fanciful notions about poor people generally and poor Indigenous people in particular were just the foibles of these men – but they are not. The constant press coverage of their pronouncements of the dangers explicit in generous welfare provision means that the population up and down the country imbibe such heady ideas.

It is not much of a step from there to arrive at the point where the non-Indigenous citizens believe that homeless people cause their own homelessness but that if governments were to provide assistance this would not only increase their “welfare dependence” but cause them to sink even further into a slothful existence. In 1971, William Ryan in his book Blaming the Victim pointed out the attractiveness of such a mechanism because it justifies refusing to assist poor people whilst legitimising the continuing privilege of the affluent.

The pressure on Indigenous people who live in rural and remote regions of Australia is increasing. The Howard Government is stepping up the requirements on Indigenous Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) workers to move off communities and seek employment in the towns (Karvelas 2004). The Commonwealth Government has entered into 100 Shared Responsibility Agreements with Indigenous communities which are designed to force more “mutual obligations” upon community members. It has made it harder for young people on remote communities to obtain CDEP work after leaving school and is attempting to coerce them into obtaining trade training in larger cities (Karvelas 2005[a]). All these requirements will make it likely that increasing numbers of Indigenous people will shift into towns even though they may not have had the occupational training to equip them for employment in urban regions.

On top of this pressure to conform to the obligatory compact, which nowadays passes for the social welfare system, smaller Indigenous communities were told by Senator Vanstone in December that they live in non-viable “cultural museums” that cost too much to maintain (Karvelas 2005[b]). Vanstone was speaking specifically about 1,000 communities of fewer than one hundred people – such homeland or outstation communities have frequently been established by their members to get away from the problems of larger settlements and townships.

The dog whistling worked a treat and, by early January 2006, prominent Federal backbencher, Peter Lindsay, was calling for the closure of Palm Island and the removal of its 3,000 residents to the mainland where they could be integrated into mainstream Australia. Mike Reynolds, a Queensland Government Minister, suggested that “Peter Lindsay wants to sell off their land to his rich developer mates” (Andersen 2006). Palm Island, with its idyllic beaches is certainly very well located to become an integral part of Great Barrier Reef playground for the rich and powerful.

There are, of course, alternatives to ignoring the ongoing homelessness experienced by many Indigenous citizens. Non-Indigenous Australians could come to a just treaty with the original owners of this land, make adequate reparation for the invasion, rape, genocide, stolen generations and ongoing occupation and, on the way, we might recover from our collective amnesia and begin to listen to “this whispering in our hearts”. Were we capable of doing this, we would be better positioned to address the social justice needs of other poor Australians.

Bibliography

Andersen, J. (2006) “Lindsay wants Palm closed.” Townsville Bulletin 5th January
http://townsvillebulletin.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,17733851,00.html
Karvelas, P. (2004) “Bid to lift black role in work program.” The http://theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,11794847,00.html
Karvelas, P. (2005[a]) “Blacks face leaving land for training.” The Weekend Australian.
23-24th April, p.6.
Karvelas, P (2005[b]) “Push to shut Black outposts.” The Australian 9th Dec http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,17509606,00.html
Lovejoy, F. (1971) “Costing the Aboriginal Housing Problem”, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1, March.
McMahon, B. (2005) “Aboriginal wage offer ‘insulting.’” The Courier Mail 10th Dec.
Reynolds, H. (1998) This Whispering in our Hearts. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards
Ryan, W. (1971) Blaming the Victim. Vintage, New York.
Stolen Wages Campaign (2006) http://www.antar.org.au/stolen_wages.html
Tomlinson, J. (2005[a]) “Homeless and in Darwin – No peace in the long grass”. Online Opinion. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3885
Tomlinson, J. (2005[b]) “Must be the Grog: Can’t be the Government.” Paper given at the International Conference on Engaging Communities, Brisbane, August. http://www.engagingcommunities2005.org/abstracts/Tomlinson-John-final.pdf

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2017 when will we learn?

I watched Obama drone on,
and saw the shattered bodies
collateral damage I was told.
How was he to know it was a wedding party
rather than a rebel stronghold,
from 40,000 feet they look the same.
How to apportion blame?
Yes it was a terrible shame.
But we’ve done it again and again.
I can still feel the pain
in those children’s tortured limbs.

Our indifference to Israeli cluster bombs
dropped on Gaza
our understanding of Israel’s hurt,
stung by Arab criticism of their military.
No wonder Israel had to tear down Arab houses
and build Israeli settlements on Arab land.
The judges in Tel Aviv ordered it.
It was ordained in Jewish scriptures.
It must be true, the Zionists told me so
and they should know.

My government sends soldiers and sailors
and aircrew to fight wars in foreign lands.
To kill and maim and drive insane
anyone who opposes our right to invade their land.
We are spending $50 billion to buy submarines.
We can’t wait to waste money on Strike Fighters.
The military and the police can have what they like
so long as they subjugate my fellow citizens.

In the Philippines they have elected a madman as president.
He thinks that ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands
of suspected drug dealers is justice and even justifiable.
In West Papua, Kopassus murders Papuans
for raising the Morning Star – their freedom flag.
The TNI shoot peaceful protesters on a whim.
This wholesale slaughter is ignored by my government
so that we can return asylum seekers and their boats
to Indonesia whenever we want.

Asylum seekers, arriving on leaky boats,
coming across troubled seas,
seeking to escape tyranny.
And what do we do?
My government incarcerates them
on distant Pacific Islands where they are molested
by armed guards and local thugs.
Their sanity is sorely tested by constant harassment.

My government disproportionately jails Aborigines,
It teargasses Indigenous kids locked in prison cells.
Aborigines die 10-20 years younger than other Australians.
We stole their land, we raped their women,
we stole their children and enslaved them.
Now we blame them for their poverty.

My government sends threatening letters to poor people.
Demanding that they pay back money they never received.
Ministers employ private debt collectors who threaten pensioners.
All the while government ministers greedily grab perks
to top up their $300,000 plus annual salary.
They need to rob the poor so that they can give
tax cuts to big business and subsidies to multinationals.

We used to have money to burn
but since the rise of neoliberals
we need to learn,
to strive and yearn
to promote greed
and stamp out need
blame the impoverished
for their failure to succeed.
Whilst absolving ourselves
for avoiding taxes
or not paying our dues.
Because we owe them nothing,
not justice, not humanity,
not dignity or unity –
this is neoliberal piety.

 

First published in Little Darwin 22/1/2017

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220 years of saving the children

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Wednesday, 20 February 2008

I finished reading the collection of essays Coercive reconciliation, edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, just prior to the parliamentary apology to the stolen generations. I read the first half of the book when the last government’s intervention in the Northern Territory was in full swing.

The Howard/Brough-Brough/Howard (it was hard to know whom was leading who on their sacred mission to save this generation of Indigenous children) was a time when only those wearing black arm bands were, what Padre Noel Pearson called, “naysayers”. Pearson and Warren Mundine, like so many white Australians who have never bothered to ascertain Indigenous Territorians’ perspectives, could not see through their white blindfolds and so could find little to criticise in the intervention/invasion.

Yes, the legislation rushed through the parliament by the Coalition Government (the Senate had a one-day enquiry into the more than 500-page Act) was racially discriminatory.

Yes, it would turn the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) – an Indigenous job guarantee scheme- into a “work for the dole” fiasco.

Yes, it would take half their social security payments from Indigenous families and quarantine them “in the interests of the children”. Few saw any irony in a government taking money from families irrespective of whether they were adequately providing for their children as a way to help them avoid passivity and paternalism.

Yes, it would cost millions to have a new generation of white welfare bureaucrats repeat the mistakes of the earlier white welfare and patrol officers who attempted to carry the white man’s burden in the Northern Territory.

And, yes the Labor party offered bipartisan support because they did not want to be buried under the avalanche of moral panic that surfaced in the wake of the announcement of the intervention.

Coercive reconciliation is an outstanding book which deserves to be read by every politician, bureaucrat, social worker, nurse, doctor, community worker, employee of Territory Indigenous organisations and others who have an interest in non-Indigenous/Aboriginal relations.

Like all collations of articles by a multitude of authors, it contains some chapters which are more appealing than others but the authors and editors have done a remarkable job of producing a consistent style. Many of the contributors will be well known to academics and practitioners who have an involvement in Indigenous affairs. I was glad I had not finished reading Coercive reconciliation before now as it places me in a position to assess its usefulness as a text from which to judge the performance of the Rudd Government’s efforts in Aboriginal affairs, at least in the Northern Territory.

The intervention was only announced on June 21, 2007 and the publisher, Arena, had Coercive reconciliation in the mail by September/ October. It was a remarkable feat just to get it onto bookstands in that time. Books pulled together so quickly usually abound in grammatical errors and proofing disasters: not this one.

It is a partisan text, not in the sense that it argues a narrow ideological line – the topics Coercive reconciliation contains are too broad ranging for that – but in the sense that it is critical of the rushed nature and extent of the intervention in Aboriginal communities without Indigenous involvement.

 This book does not make the same mistake. Nationally recognised Indigenous leaders such as Larissa Behrendt, Patrick and Mick Dodson, Michael Mansell, Pat Turner, William Tilmouth, David Ross and Tom Calma all contribute chapters criticising aspects of the intervention.

Professor Larissa Behrendt sums up the essence of the general Indigenous critique when she writes: “The discourse of a national emergency also works very effectively to ground the crisis firmly in the present, severing the issue of child sexual abuse from any consideration of the quagmire of past governmental neglect.”

In addition to these national leaders, several interesting chapters (written by Aboriginal people about their local community in the Northern Territory) are included in the volume.

Coercive reconciliation accepts that child abuse, overcrowding, lack of services, alcohol misuse, domestic violence and many other problems of which Indigenous Australians are all too painfully aware, are problems on which the government should focus urgent attention. It is not a book which excuses abusive behavior, whether that abuse is perpetrated by one Indigenous person on another, or by government on the Indigenous community. On the contrary, it is a plea for far more assistance to be provided in the form of improved health, community and police services, decent jobs, better housing and revitalised economic development – all of which should proceed on the basis of negotiation with Indigenous people in their communities.

Coercive reconciliation is a book which should be read now if people want to get an understanding of the situation confronting the Territory’s Indigenous population and an insight into the destructiveness of the Howard Government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities. And it should be read again in 18 months time to see if the Rudd Government has been able to move on from the glib Pearson/Brough clichés about “passive welfare” and the “real economy” and start to come to terms with the pressing social, housing, health and employment needs confronting remote Indigenous Australia and to start building on Indigenous enterprise and capacities.

Unlike many texts dealing with Indigenous issues, Coercive reconciliation provides an optimistic account of what Aboriginal people have achieved and can achieve in the future. It has several chapters which describe the successes of the wildlife ranger and health promotion programs.

Other chapters are more conceptual. Riamond Gaita points out “If there is no need for an apology, then there is no need for reconciliation, which is a form of political atonement … The real target of ‘practical reconciliation’ was not impractical, symbolic gestures: it was reconciliation itself.”

John Hinkson asserts that in settler-Indigenous relations, there is a denial of a shared humanity. He makes the point that “‘Innocent’ intentions have often justified what have later come to be seen as abhorrent institutional practices”, such as separating Indigenous children from their communities. Hinkson describes this process as “naïve unknowing” but accepts that others may interpret the lack of acknowledgement as having a more malign character.

An early chapter in Coercive reconciliation surprised me. It was written by a retired Chief of the Australian Army, Lieutenant-General John Sanderson, and seriously questions the way the army was used in the early stages of the intervention. The book concludes with an interesting chapter in which Jon Altman describes the existing economic system as it operates on many Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory with its mixture of government funding and Aboriginal entrepreneurial successes such as in art, tourism or seafood enterprises. He points to some interesting options for the future.

So, though you might never, never go, if you really want to know, then cough-up your $27.50 – this book is worth owning.

Coercive reconciliation, Altman, J. & Hinkson, M. (eds.) [2007] Arena, North Carlton.

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220 years: intervention or invasion? *

*Inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the wind.”
Written in 2008 not published.

How many times must a policy fail
before it’s tossed in the sea?
How many times must a people be jailed
before they’re allowed to be free?
How many times must a politician lie
pretending she just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is full autonomy.

How many times will governments try
before they get it half right?
How much blustering will Ministers do
before they stop being up tight?
Yes, ‘n’ how much trachoma must health workers see
before we restore people’s sight?

The answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is true humanity.

How much of their land must we take at a time
eroding their dignity?
How much of their welfare will we withhold
pretending there’s no poverty?
How many of their kids will we take till we learn
that respect is what sets a people free?

The answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is respecting dignity.

How many times will we dismiss it when they say
that too many people have died?
How many generations will we steal till we learn
liberating policies weren’t tried?
For how many years will we turn away
ignoring their justice denied?

The answer, my friend, is not blowin’ in the wind.
The answer is full autonomy.

The answer, my friend, is not pissin’ in the wind.
The answer is for all the world to see.

 

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A 44 year sentence

On the 1stof march 2018, an old white male judge imposed a 44 year sentence, with a 39 year non-parole period, on a young Muslim man who had, when he was 18 years old, supplied the gun to the 15 year old who shot a police accountant at Parramatta. The prisoner gave an Islamic State salute after the sentencing. Such a long sentence was imposed because the prisoner “had not shown contrition”. Assuming he identifies as a supporter of Islamic State then it is likely he feels that he is acting in support of his brothers who are fighting in the Middle East against regimes Islamic State opposes.

The ideologies behind such a long sentence is firstly the generally held view that whilst our government has the right to go and fight whenever and whoever they choose anywhere in the world that supporters of those whom we murder with guns and bombs, if they should fight back, are terrorists. The second obvious ideology is that the police are such a necessary institution in this country that anyone who attacks them deserves a harsher punishment for their crime than would apply had they committed exactly the same criminal act on a civilian. There is also another mechanism at play here and that is the intentional refusal to accept that police forces are seldom a neutral arbitrator – they invariably support non-Indigenous interests over indigenous ones. Police support capitalist interests over workers ones. Police generally support well placed and powerful interests over the interests of those with little power. In recent times, this last point has, in the case of domestic violence, not been as true as in the past. The other ideology in play here is the idea of “our” racial superiority over the Muslim hordes left over from the crusades.

On Friday, the 2ndMarch 2018 John Lawrence Senior Counsel said “Aboriginal people never get justice in this country.” He pointed out that there had been virtually “no consequences for those adversely named in the Northern Territory Royal Commission into Youth Detention.” He pointed to many of the senior staff of Corrections still being employed in exactly the same positions as previously. He went on to quote Eugene O’Neill saying “There is no present or future there is only the past happening over and over again – now. http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2018/03/bst_20180302_0806.mp3
It is an 8 minute podcast certainly worth a listen.

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A Cacky Budget

Treasurer Costello’s 2002-3 offering has been portrayed as a Khaki Budget. Because of his stated emphasis on increasing surveillance at home and killing abroad. A more realistic appreciation would lead to its portrayal as a tatty cacky attempt to cover-up the excrement into which Australia is sinking.

Certainly we are going to quadruple the expenditure on discouraging asylum seekers from entering our country. A lot of the increased cost is as a direct result of the Howard Government’s obsession with the Pacific solution and processing many of asylum seekers on Christmas Island. We will beef-up our capacity to sink refugee boats at sea. We will continue to tow unseaworthy boats to beyond our territorial limits. We will refuse to allow asylum seekers access to our courts by maintaining the fiction that Christmas Island is not part of ’Straya. It was costing us less than $100 million a year to process asylum seekers on shore. We could have reduced the cost to about $20 million by releasing asylum seekers into the community after initial security and health checks as is the practice in most of Europe. The $400 million we are wasting to pander to the  Howard/Ruddock refugee obsession could have been used to maintain disability support pension eligibility conditions and reinstate the free dental program for the poorest Australians.

’Straya is going to buy some new war toys so it can join the push with “Pretzel” Bush to go all the way with the USA. Australian military officials claimed recently they killed 300 Taliban without losing a soldier. Sounds more like a massacre than a war. No wonder the Howard Government wont sign up to International War Crimes Court. We will continue to blockade Iraq even though it results in the deaths of 6,000 Iraqi children each month. We might even get a chance to shoot up some of their towns in the name of stamping out terrorism.

In the mean time we will have to satisfy ourselves with downward envy. We will need to ignore the $3 billion subsidy to rich people’s private health insurance, the subsidy to private doctors insurance costs, the subsidy to highly paid superannuates, the $17 billion subsidy to industry and such like.  We will have to content ourselves kicking the wheelchairs out from under disability support pensioners and hiding jobs from the unemployed.

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A child’s question about abolishing native title

First published in Green Left Weekly 24/6/1998 p.28. Also Union song site 26/8/1998 http://www.mq.edu.au/boomerang/unionsong/u070.html

What did you do Daddy
to assist John Howard’s ethnic cleansing?
Did you just go around
donging dagos
bashing boongs
wacking wogs
and
slashing slopes?
Mr. Brown was a Storm Trooper
at the Met Bureau.

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A Chosen People

Why do we regard an ultra orthodox Jew as religious,
how come a Born Again Christian is righteous,
and a devout Muslim is fanatical?

Written 2002.

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A fixation with fruit

President Wahid is impaired.
Next he’s going to be impeached,
But that’s apples.

 Written in 2001.

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A glimmer of light

I thought I saw a shaft of light
come into Australian peoples’ sight
and hoped it’d lift the shadow of shame
as we refuse to let them use our name
when they try to apportion blame
to asylum seekers and refugees

Written 2003

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A hell of a place for refugees

We’ll sell them all to hell and damnation,
we’ll follow the true path of One Nation;
though Pauline’s come and gone
we haven’t moved along
because, we lack imagination.

We don’t think it’s fair
that they come over here
chasing blonds and prawns and beer,
they’ll get a flea in their ear
as we follow the true path of One Nation.

We will follow Johnny Howard,
he’s Australia’s leading coward,
then with every racist breath
we’ll consign them to their death
and sell them all to hell and damnation.

With indifference as our watch word
we’ll confront their desperate need
with indifference and our greed
ensuring they take heed
as we follow the true path of One Nation.

Don’t speak of right or ought
we’ve  got constipated thought.
If they presume on our humanity
we’ll inflict persecution and indignity
and sell them all to hell and damnation.

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A land of broken dreams

First published in New Community Quarterly, Vol 12 No 1, 2014

I visited a land of broken dreams
someone said “all’s not well it seems
the country’s splitting at the seams.
Asylum seekers on boats are pouring in
and we can’t find any room for them.”

I went to the national capital and spoke with the leaders.
They call themselves parliamentarians and they make the laws
They give instructions and public servants obey.
I asked “Does the voting public ever get a say?”
“There’s no need – they’d only get in the way.”
I asked where Craig Thompson used to sit
and why it took over 3 years to convict him
for using the Health Worker Union credit card to pay for prostitutes?
None seemed to know the reason for
but I was assured “No one’s above the law.”
I asked about the previous Speaker’s misuse of perks
someone winked and said “You’ve gotta know the lurks.”
I looked around at this motley crew
I doubted they would build the world anew,
they were very good at venting spleen
their partners probably kept their houses clean
but there was something quite obscene
in each eye an obtuse gleam.
All in all what was their downfall
was that they were could have beens,
might have beens, should have beens
and a fair sprinkling of have beens.

In the committee rooms of the Alice Springs football club
I spoke with people attempting to stop racism in sport.
Then wandered down to the RSL where I was told,
in no uncertain terms, that in this town racism is sport.
I walked down to the dried riverbed of the Todd
and watched white police loading Aborigines into paddy wagons
they had committed an horrendous crime with malice aforethought.
They had been drinking in a public place without a white permit.

I asked a young woman if she had a dream
“Yes,” she said “to live in a land which does not demean:
asylum seekers, the original owners of this land,
those with disabilities, people without work,
those who are old or young and those who don’t understand.”
“Is that all?” I asked with a whimsical look
“No.” she said as her small hand shook.
“I want my fellow citizens to respect everyone
irrespective of their gender, their utility, their status
or lack of it – to find a seat at the table for rich and poor
and for those without beauty or charm what’s more.”

I jumped on a plane and flew to Christmas Island
– a place named after Christ’s birthday –
I looked at the small jetty in Flying Fish Bay
it is here the Navy brings asylum seekers they apprehend
before the government decides where it will send:
the mother perhaps to Darwin to give birth,
the father to Manus and children to Nauru.
And all this from a government that says families are their touchstone.
Yes nice white families: mothers and fathers (both of whom work)
and two small children living in suburbia, attending the local church school.
Men, women and children fleeing war and political or racial persecution
might deserve the protection guaranteed by the Refugee Convention,
but they are not a family unit recognised by this Australian government
after all they are coloured; they may not be Christian and worse still
they may not be rich and might even be poor.
They are certainly not Australian families.

I was taken across to the other side of the Island
on the way we passed the refugee processing centre
where asylum seekers are incarcerated under 24 hour armed guards.
The guards call the place a “refugee processing centre”
and I thought about SPC Ardmona and wondered if asylum seekers
emerged dried, tinned, or just fitted with a mental health problem.
We drove on to the other side of the Island where I looked down
at the water where steep cliffs meet jagged rocks and crushing waves.
It was here that many desperate asylum seekers had lost their lives
thinking they were coming to a land which honoured the conventions it signed.
I thought about the SIEV X and the 353 people who drowned at sea
in a desperate bid to find a new life in Australia – to find liberty.
I thought about the Tampa and Australia’s “Pacific Solution.”
I thought about Australia’s broken promise to the world
I thought about petty meanness that has infested the minds
of every prime minister since Keating.
I thought about each prime ministers’ propensity to use asylum seekers
-arriving by boat- in any way to boost their flagging popularity.
The current crop of ministers has sunk so low as to refer to asylum seekers as
“Illegals” though they have broken no law in seeking asylum here.
I thought about how well Australia had behaved towards asylum seekers
when Doc Evatt was President of the United Nations General Assembly
and how our recent governments have broken Australia’s promise to ourselves.
I thought of leaving this land of broken dreams
but I’d rather stay and fight in the belief that we have not lost sight
of the need to right the wrong and end the blight.

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A letter home

I shot some Muslims mommy.
I shot some Muslims dad.
We are good…
we are always good
and they are always bad.

Sadam is a bad man mommy
and he’s got to go:
it is a fact I’m sure of that
George Bush told me so.

I never question orders.
I do just what I’m told.
We’ll control their country
their oil wealth and their gold.

I bombed some Muslims mommy.
I bombed some Muslims dad.
We are good…
we are always good
and they are always bad.

Complexity escapes us
we don’t understand,
we just do what soldiers do
as we invade their land.

Women and the kids it seems
they just get in the way
though we don’t intend it
we blow some kids away.

I maimed some Muslims mommy.
I maimed some Muslims dad.
We are good…
we are always good
and they are always bad.

I’m proud to be American
to be a fighting man
giving everything I can
I fight for Uncle Sam.

I’m missing home
don’t want to die.
I miss your love, it’s true
and I miss the cream and apple pie,
I want to come home too.

I nuked some Muslims mommy.
I nuked some Muslims dad.
We are good…
we are always good
but it is very sad.

Written 2002.

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A people betrayed

Performed at Politics in the Pub Shorncliffe 20th April 1998 and at Green Left functions in that year.

Indon
Indon
Indonesia
a million died
in ’65
their leaders crucified.

Indon
Indon
Indonesia
Collective guilt?
No!
Mass amnesia.

Suharto’s rise
military prize
no surprise
Timor invaded in ’75
300,00 dies.

Indon
Indon
Indonesia
Transmigration
easing population
in Jararta.

Market crash
Kalamantan ash
we see forests burn.
We see people turn
Dita Sari
and Bulliman
political prisoner.

Xanana
for freedom yearns.
Indon
Indon
Indonesia.
Collective guilt?
No!
Mass amnesia.

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A ramble in the preamble

I’m grateful for your generosity
you have a huge propensity
a brain of such immensity
capable of intense dexterity
and lacking all pomposity
announcing with sincerity
this magnificent opportunity
though forced to jettison mateship
you recognised their relationship
I think you called it kinship
with land
could this recognition
get out of hand
I enquire with all humility
I ask with a sense of curiosity,
have they acknowledged your generosity?

Written in 1999 when Howard was considering recognising Aborigines in the Preamble to the Constitution.

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A sign that should be put up in government offices

 

Please do not ask for JUSTICE

as refusal may offend

 

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A triumph of indecency

Drafted February 23, 2019

A gulag is a place down by the shore
where we keep those refugees
who don’t matter anymore.
As Barnaby and Scomo are quick to reassure
“They are not really sick or dying –
just not breathing anymore.
And we don’t have to worry because
we’ve got many of our own
those, who are really poor.

It’s the drought that is killing fish
and not the theft of water
the oozing blue green algae
is just adding to the slaughter.

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A wise person told me

People will forget what you said
…..people will forget what you did
…..but people will never forget
how you made them feel.

Anon

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Aboard the Timor peace ship.

Aboard the Timor peace ship.

Green Left Weekly Wednesday, April 1, 1992 By John Tomlinson

In the wake of the November 12 massacre in Dili, Portuguese students organised the “Missao paz em Timor”. And so, on March 9, 120 people from 21 countries boarded the Lusitania Expresso in Darwin with the intention of laying a wreath at the Santa Cruz cemetery in memory of those who died on November 12. The aim of the trip was to make the world stop and think about the people of East Timor and the injustice which has been inflicted on them.

Indonesian military spokespersons had announced beforehand that we would be stopped from entering Indonesian waters, stopped from landing in Dili, refused permission to go to Santa Cruz, blown out of the water … There were also Indonesian newspapers reporting that the ship had a mine on board which was to be used by the organisers of the peace mission to blow it up in order to pretend that the Indonesian navy had sunk us.

In the late afternoon, with the sun sinking below our bow and 600 people standing on the Darwin wharf singing the Timorese national anthem, the Lusitania Expresso sailed for Timor.

On board were Italians, French, Canadians, Indonesians, Dutch, Brazilians, Australians, British, Portuguese, Indians, Japanese, Swedes, Germans and students from several African countries. The flags of many countries and of the United Nations were hung from an upper rail as a symbol of our truly international character. There were students and workers, men and women, old and young, a Portuguese ex-president and Australian parliamentarians, ex-servicemen and pacifists, and we were united.

The trip proceeded without incident until 8.45 on our second night out, when we had a report that the admiral in charge of the Timor Sea had threatened to shoot us out of the water if we tried to enter Indonesian waters. This was disconcerting, since he’d previously maintained that he only intended to turn us back. We were about an hour away from the Indonesian 200-mile exclusive zone and we had a report from the bridge that they had picked up two ships on the radar, which had a 24-mile range for ships. I went up on deck but could see nothing.

As I returned to the deck at 10.50, a boat light appeared on our port bow about three miles off, coming directly towards us. It was a large vessel, which took up a position half a mile astern and shadowed us all night. During the night it was joined by two other warships.

By dawn we were in sight of the mountains of Timor reaching out in the early morning sun. It was an Australian-supplied warship, Number 353, which at 7.40 a.m., when we were within 12 to 15 miles of Timor, twice ordered the Lusitania Expresso to turn around and leave Indonesian waters. We had reports that there were up to 14 Indonesian warships in the area. We were constantly overflown by a military plane and by two naval and one army helicopter.

At 7.45 we turned round and began heading 10 miles back to sea, where we were given permission to wait one and a half hours while we cretary general of the United Nations to intervene to allow us to proceed. The day before, he had called on Indonesia not to act aggressively towards the peace mission, and Xanana Gusmao, leader of the East Timorese resistance, said his troops would not fire on the Indonesians while the peace mission was in Timor waters.

As we turned away from East Timor, a short ceremony in Tetum, English, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese was conducted on the stern and the wreaths we had hoped to lay at Santa Cruz cemetery were thrown into the water. Many of us cried, disappointed that we had not reached Dili.

Silence fell as people just stood and stared as Timor disappeared behind us. Indonesian warships carried out manoeuvres which brought them within a quarter of a mile of us.

At a series of meetings on board, we decided that Australia should organise a further peace mission to East Timor, to leave Darwin on March 9, 1993. This peace mission is designed either to go to Dili to celebrate East Timor’s independence or — if Indonesia has not by then carried out a United Nations-supervised referendum — to again remind Indonesia of the world’s desire for it to respect the human rights of the East Timorese.

The Portuguese organisers have agreed to continue to work on the international component of the second peace mission, but this still leaves Australia with the task of raising $1.5 million. This will require the support of the Catholic church, the trade union movement and all Australians of good will. A million and a half dollars may sound a lot of money but it is only 8 cents from every Australian

 

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Aboriginal assimilation: the hub of the matter

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Friday, 29 May 2009

Since anthropologist Donald Thompson visited Arnhemland in the late 1930s and early 1940s missionaries and governments have not been able to keep from interfering in the lives of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Perhaps the worst form of intervention has been the forcing of Aboriginal clans to assemble at one point for the convenience of white administrators. This in the past led and continues to lead to internecine disputes between rival clan and language groups.

At one level the suggestion is that white “saviours” intervene in the lives of Aboriginal people to “protect” them from the ravages of other whites. But it can’t have escaped the notice of such “saviours” that removing Aboriginal people from their traditional lands opens the way for other whites to lay claim to recently vacated Aboriginal land.

When it comes to testing the bona fides of such “saviours” one only has to look at the record of police and other protectors in Queensland who, according to historian Dr Ros Kidd, stole the present day equivalent of $500 million from their Aboriginal wards.

Assimilation has been forced on Aboriginal people throughout Australia, including the Northern Territory. The process is allegedly employed to assist Indigenous people to accommodate to the demands of White Australians and thereby ready themselves for life in the mainstream. Even at its most benign level, assimilation separates the Aboriginal person from their culture, kin and belief systems – that is, assimilation separates Aborigines from their Aboriginality and hence any specific claim to separate treatment on account of their prior ownership of this country. This further privileges the white power holders. No serious commentator has ever suggested that the place Aboriginal people were offered was mainstream.

The Howard government, led by then Minister Amanda Vanstone, started the latest attack on the outstation movement by claiming that any community of less than 1,000 people was not viable and would be amalgamated with other communities or abolished. The NT Labor Government then did not support such a frontal attack on Aboriginal sovereignty. Now that the Rudd Government has handed control of such matters to the Northern Territory Government, and grossly underfunded the program, it has wedged the NT Henderson Labor Government to set up a process of 20 hub communities which will be funded to provide schools, hospitals and other services. In their crazy white minds, this will justify denuding even the larger of the outstations of resources such as schools.

All this comes on top of the Brough/Macklin Intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory which necessitated the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act so as to force Indigenous people to comply with the quarantining of half their Centrelink money. United Nations Committees have condemned such action as racist.

Macklin will now be able to insist that parents who wish to receive Centrelink payments must enrol their children in school, even if there is no school in their community. Parents will have to shift to hub communities or forego welfare payments that all the nice white people in towns and cities all over the rest of Australia get without such requirements. Alternatively, it will involve sending their children away to school in hub communities, leading to a new round of stolen generations.

The Rudd Government is in the process of destroying the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) before establishing an employment program to replace it. The CDEP, first introduced by the Fraser Liberal Government on the advice of Nugget Coombs, has managed to employ 30,000 and to provide necessary community services to hundreds of communities in the Northern Territory and elsewhere in regional Australia. These services will not now be provided in the Northern Territory outside the hub townships. This will further increase pressure on Aboriginal people in remote communities to drift into hub communities.

Much of the important cultural artifacts, the production of which the CDEP has encouraged in recent years, has occurred on remote outstations. Much of the Aboriginal spiritual revival has occurred on these outstations. The health profile of people on remote homelands is generally better than those living in larger communities. This is not a mysterious phenomenon; it is because people are more at one with their Aboriginal identity and more bush tucker is consumed in such communities (Anthony 2009).

Perhaps it would not matter so much that people from remote communities were pushed by economic factors to come into town if there was any hope that the hub communities could accommodate their needs. The absence of any proper plan to prepare for transmigration is the real betrayal in the NT Government’s plan to push Aboriginal people into these 20 hub communities. Vacant houses are not available in the hub communities for the new- comers to move into. There are no jobs awaiting the newcomers. Community services and schools are already over-stretched.

Just in case anyone is foolish enough to think that hub communities are a brand new idea then it is time to think again. Wadeye, formally the Catholic Mission 400km southwest of Darwin, is typical of hub communities. It is a town of 2,500 people and has been the site of constant upheaval for the last decade. As Mark Whittaker wrote in November 2007, youth gangs “are based loosely on ancient divisions between the town’s twenty clans and seven language groups, but also interwoven by marriage to make them more complicated. They had kept the town in a perpetual state of hostility as historic rivalries turned to modern squabbles.”

The whites in Darwin, Katherine, Tennant Creek, Nhulunbuy and Alice have amply demonstrated their racist intolerance of iterant Aboriginal families in their towns. Forcing people into hub communities where life is going to offer them very little will lead to many drifting to the white enclaves of the Territory frontier and in turn to increased criminalisation and social dislocation. Criminalisation and social dislocation combine and eventually lead to premature death of those subjected to these twin processes.

If younger families with children are forced by Macklin’s racist intervention to move into overcrowded houses in hub communities and young able-bodied people shift there in search of work, the old and people with disabling conditions will be left to fend for themselves on outstations without the kin support to make life tolerable. Their health will deteriorate and they will die earlier than they might have – so much for Rudd’s mealy-mouthed slogan of “Closing the Gap.”

Rudd is just the last of the colonisers who have waged a relentless race war for 220 years against the Indigenous owners of this country. The Labor Party in Canberra and in Darwin won’t stop foisting their ill-thought through plans on Aboriginal people until the last Aboriginal person gives up their last claim to land or separate identity.

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ACTCOSS

In the early months of 1987 I was appointed Director of ACT Council of Social Services where I remained until March 1993. Just before I started, Margi O’Tarpie, the outgoing COSS Director, had invited me to her place in Narrabundah for lunch. Over a couple of bottles of wine she shared some of the secrets of ACTCOSS’s soul. A real estate agent had agreed to pick me up from Margi’s to show me houses in Downer. By the time he arrived I had become so enamoured with the views of Narrabundah that I had decided I wanted to buy a house in that suburb. I went with him, in a somewhat intoxicated state, to see the only house in Narrabundah he had listed in my price range. Four walls, a roof and what more could you want. I signed up on the spot. The next time I visited the house I was a bit surprised to realise that it was not in Narrabundah Heights and there weren’t any views. I was soon to find out that this was of little concern because life as a COSS Director does not leave much time for sitting and looking out over balconies anyway.

When I started ACTCOSS was based on the second floor of the Griffin Centre next to the Welfare Rights Legal Service office. We were later to move down stairs to a shopfront on Bunda St. Irene Hannon, by then an energetic woman of indeterminate years, was typist, receptionist and resident ACT history keeper. Irene had worked as a volunteer and helped keep ACTCOSS afloat when they had been defunded. She loved her IBM golf ball typewriter. Anne Rawson was editor of ACTCOSS News and had a Cannon electronic typewriter with a 250 word memory. Ken Fraser was a project officer working on housing and disability issues and Dr Mary Edmunds was doing some part time project work. It was not long before Melissa Freeman joined us to help with secretarial tasks. Melissa was used to working with computers, she soon convinced us that ACTCOSS needed to join the computer world. Irene, though doubtful at first, to her credit mastered the new technology. Although for a year or so when things would go wrong with a program she was working on, Irene would relocate to the IMB golf ball and gleefully retype the whole document.

The first major campaign we became involved with was the fight to retain the police hostel Havelock House in public hands. The police had planned to shift out for several years and ACTCOSS had been campaigning to have the community take over the site to accommodate people on low-incomes. There had been demonstrations and arrests but the ACT Administration and particularly the Housing Commission did not want to hand it over to the community. The land on which Havelock sits was valued in 1988 at over $3 million. Eventually ACTCOSS won the public debate and set up a working committee, under the auspices of the Housing Taskforce, to run it until it could become an autonomous organisation. The hostel was subdivided into units that housed 108 people who received low-incomes.

ACTCOSS had a number of task forces each with a Chair selected from the General Committee and a project officer and volunteers from the membership who had a particular interest in an area of concern. Most of the Taskforce meetings were held in the Griffin Centre. Often people would belong to more than one task force. I remember one day running into one of our Taskforce members as I was coming out of one meeting where I had expected to see her as she was making her way into the next meeting. Deanne Proctor our long serving President was immediately behind me. I said to the missing taskforce member “Where were you” to which she replied “I’ll come next time”. Deanne, who was at that time Director of National Family Planning, quick as flash whispered to me “ I suppose every woman tells you that”.

The next major campaign in which we became enmeshed was the Child Poverty Campaign instigated by ACOSS following Bob Hawke’s promise that “By 1990 no Australian child will live in poverty”. Kass Hancock who had joined us as a project worker was given the job of running the Child Poverty Taskforce. I enjoyed one meeting in particular at which a Catholic Priest said he was troubled by continuing poverty in the ACT saying something like “I don’t know why they can’t pull themselves out of poverty. I was born poor but I dragged myself out of poverty.” Kass rebuked him, saying “Father, when you took your vows you pledged to accept not only poverty but chastity and obedience as well.”

The first time the Old Parliament House was given over to a community function was when Kass managed to get Kings Hall to set up a Welfare Maze structure to demonstrate just how many difficulties low-income earners encountered when attempting to navigate their way through the confusion of welfare programs. Over 800 people played the Welfare Maze Game that day. There were busloads of school children and members of the public pouring through the Maze. Janine Hayes, Leader of the Democrats, Ian Sinclair, Father of the House, David Connolly, the Liberal Shadow Minister for Social Security, and other members of the ACT and Federal Parliaments. Brian Howe, the then Minister for Social Security, visited but refused to enter the Welfare Maze saying “ I don’t want Tomlinson proclaiming that the Minister is lost in the welfare maze.” ACTCOSS followed this event with a two-day workshop on Poverty in the Territory. Fifty buses were fitted with huge stickers bearing the slogan “Child Poverty Canberra’s Hidden Problem.” Similar two metre by 1.5 metre signs were located on many bus shelters. The cost of the stickers and posters was met by private sector donations and the ACT Labor Government met the cost of putting them on buses and other places. The public response to the maze game was astonishing and we had hundreds of requests to run it again. This was not feasible so we produced a Monopoly like Welfare Maze board game that we sold to the public. It was also used in schools, TAFEs and universities.

The Federal Government funded ACTCOSS prior to self-government in 1988. Mrs Hawke was our patron. I had a long friendship with Netta Burnes who had been the Principal Private Secretary of every Labor Minister for Social Security from Bill Hayden to Brian Howe. Netta and I had been particularly fond of Howe’s predecessor Don Grimes. Brian Howe in the run up to the1987 election had begun to denounce social security recipients as “becoming dependent upon welfare’ or as being “welfare dependant”. After discussion with the ACTCOSS executive, I rang Netta and said that unless Howe stopped speaking about welfare dependency ACTCOSS would campaign against the Labor Party. Howe met with Deanne Proctor and myself and indicated he would refrain from the use of this term in the campaign. He did exactly that but returned to his depressing “dependency” rhetoric immediately after the election.

When the Canberra Casino was being proposed ACTCOSS opposed it. One of Howe’s senior staffers rang me and indicated that ACTCOSS would be defunded if we continued to oppose the development publicly. We did a deal in which I undertook not to initiate press contacts, but indicated that if approached by the press, ACTCOSS would continue to state its opposition to the Casino. Not surprisingly, given the amount of press coverage, which we received during that period, we had several opportunities to state the grounds on which we were opposed to increased gambling options.

During the late 1980s early 1990s ACTCOSS worked without success to convince the Federal Government to introduce a guaranteed income policy to provide real security within the Social Security system. We had much more success with the ACT Government in getting them to rethink their low-income concessions and to pay ACTCOSS to produce booklets that publicised those concessions. This process was part of the ACT Labor Party’s Social Justice strategy. ACTCOSS, not surprisingly, actively supported the increased concentration upon social justice in the ACT. We played a part in the improvements to ACT Hospitals. On several occasions we published a list of doctors who bulk billed. We worked with the Consumer Health Forum supporting Medicare and campaigning against the NSW Ophthalmologists refusal to treat public patients. On one occasion, I had written a health article in ACTCOSS News under the pseudonym of Dr. Colon Oscopy. A journalist from one of the ACT’s suburban newspapers rang to speak to Dr. Colon Oscopy. At the time, I was attending an ACOSS Board Meeting in Sydney. The journalist had rewritten the article quoting Dr. Colon Oscopy at length in the lead article on page one of the paper. I returned just in time to set the record straight which was just as well otherwise there would have been some very red faces at the paper.

One of the ACTCOSS taskforces chaired by Graeme Evans looked at the public / police interface, particularly accusations of police harassment in all its manifestations. This did not endear us to the thin blue line. At one stage in the campaign I had asked for and received an interview with the then officer in charge of the ACT Police Service to discuss with him accusations of police moving on young low-income earners from the ACT.  Upon being shown into his office I felt I was in a time warp, transported back to Bjelke Peterson’s Queensland of the 1970s. There was an overweight man whose uniform struggled to fit around his immense beer belly, “Always nice to speak with Social Security” he declared. I twice attempted to explain that I was from the ACT Council for Social Services but he seemed to think it was the same thing as the Department of Social Security. Explaining why I had come to see him I started by saying  “I’ve come to discuss moving on young homeless people by expelling them from the ACT.” “Yes, it’s been working well for years” He replied. “We drive them out to the New South Wales border and threaten to give them a thick ear – we call it the Gundaroo Express.”

“That’s why I’ve come to see you, ACTCOSS is concerned about the practice.” I responded. There was consternation, which increased when I explained that we did not want bigger and better floggings to make sure that these young people did not come back, rather we wanted the practice stopped.

ACTCOSS took an interest in the treatment of prisoners at Belconnen Remand Centre and insisted on the most stringent safeguards being in place prior to the construction of a private prison in the Territory. We worked closely with Welfare Rights and the ACT Legal Aid Commission.

Our interest in justice in the ACT extended to a desire to promote peace abroad. We opposed the first Gulf War in 1991; we were active in the struggle for a Free East Timor and generally wanted increased foreign aid. Many ACTCOSS staff and General Committee members demonstrated against the weeklong AIDEX arms fair. I was convicted and fined for hindering police trying to crash their way into a Kevin Carmody concert on the last night of AIDEX.

During the time I was at ACTCOSS  the Territory was governed by both Labor and Non-Labor administrations. The General Committee was comprised of members of all the political interests represented in the ACT Legislative Assembly. This gave us the capacity to discuss issues of concern with the government of the day, irrespective of their politics. One person, not on the ACTCOSS Board, who helped make life easier for me as COSS Director was Bill Harris, the Leader of the ACT administration for most of the time I lived in Canberra. Bill was described to me as an “unreconstructed Whitlamite”. We got on well at a personal level and whilst we did not always see eye to eye on issues, we were always able to discuss them – often over a good bottle of red.

At the party celebrating my leaving ACTCOSS the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follet, presented me with a large coffee plunger which the staff had bought as a farewell present. When I unwrapped the present I noticed that it was inscribed “ACTCOSS 1987-93” Rosemary was quite perplexed when I announced that I would not be able to use it if I had company. Rosemary asked “Why not?”  I replied “Well with that inscription they’ll think I stole it”.

The average life of COSS directors in Australia in the early 1990s was 18 months. This was and still is because never a day goes by when the organisation is not confronted with a new challenge which all too often becomes a crisis. Everyday seems like you are going 18 rounds with Mohamed Ali. The difference between a good COSS and a bad COSS as far as a director is concerned is the amount of support provided by the General Committee and the staff.  The 6 years I spent at ACTCOSS were some of the happiest and most productive years of my life. Every day we were handling real issues affecting real people. The support I received from most of the members of the General Committee and the staff made it possible to survive.  In 1992, I gave a paper a National Legal Aid Conference in which I set out the components of the ideal committee to run a community group [See the last section of this article]. On the whole the ACTCOSS General Committee came closest to this idealised version of all of the many committees with which I have worked.

We should be working to help the intended victims of Social Security rather than having to spend most of our lives assisting those whom the social security system just ran over accidentally.

The reality

Ok, we are not funded to address the big questions in our society like ending racism and class exploitation, housing the homeless, creating employment for the workless, finding meaning for the alienated, abolishing military machines, providing a decent guaranteed minimum income for all, developing universal affordable child care nor working towards a system in which we would aim to take from each according to their ability and provide to each according to their needs.

We will in the short term just have to be content to do what we can with what we have.  But if in the process we come to forget the larger agenda then it can really be said that community management has succeeded for the economically powerful but failed the people.

So what makes a good committee?

A good committee:

(1) pays attention to detail without getting lost in the minutiae,

(2) sets a clear agenda, sticks to it but not in such a rigid way that prevents community or staff inputs being built in as circumstances emerge, oversees what paid employees are doing,

(4) takes an interest in improving staff salary and working conditions.

(5) is involved and works co-operatively with staff, helps out when there are back-logs, assists with fund-raising,

(6) is supportive of staff efforts but prepared to be constructively critical, accepts that the capacity to be extraordinarily insightful after the event should be part of a review process not criticism. Backs staff in when things get hot,

(7) has the capacity to care about the issues and outcomes in hand without losing sight of the main game, is committed to social justice and natural justice,

(8) is directed to finding a way forward, conceptually orientated without being lost in some academic wank, basically accepts Glasser and Strauss suggestion, outlined in The Discovery of Grounded Theory, that it needs to express what it aims to do in language and concepts which will be understood by the bulk of community members,

(9) involves clients of the service in management, speaks the language of the community and is committed to simplifying conceptual complexity.  This is basically a process of doing with rather than doing for,

(10) is partisan with the community,

(11)  involves people with disabilities and disadvantage in management,

(12) is committed to a liberationist approach,

(13) is composed of members with a breadth of ideas,

(14) acknowledges the importance of funders without being captured by funders,

(15) publicly defends the organisation whilst working on constructive ways to improve it.

(16) is open to review without that degenerating into constant change,

(17) has an appreciation of difficulties without letting that circumscribe ideas of where the organisation might finish up,

(18) develops an appropriate/open/friendly complaints mechanism,

(19) finds legitimate ways of rewarding community members, and, finally and most importantly,

(20)     finds ways to rather than reasons why not.

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ALP in the Northern Territory

The ALP in the Northern Territory paid the price for its arrogance, incompetence, infighting, racism and it’s long term diversion of Aboriginal funds to prop up its flagging popularity in Darwin’s northern suburbs. The Territory Labor Party was allowed to get away with the diversion of monies because it, in large part, went along with the Howard/Brough Intervention into 79 remote Indigenous communities; it also went along with the Jenny Macklin extension of the Intervention under Rudd and then Gillard.

In the end Aborigines living in rural and remote parts of the NT gave up on Labor both at a Territory and at a Federal level. Warren Snowdon has been on a nice little earner and will retire on a very large parliamentary pension when he loses the seat of Lingiari at the next Federal election. I well remember being told by ALP heavyweights throughout the late 1980 and early nineties that the blue collar voters had nowhere to go – these apparatchiks then spent a decade trying to regain the trust of those who had morphed into Howard’s battlers. No doubt the intellectual flyweights running Federal Labor at the moment thought that Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory had nowhere else to put their vote.

Aborigines are a generous and forgiving people but they like the rest of us can see through humbug. The incoming leader of the Country Liberal Government, Terry Mills, acknowledged that he gained power because of the change of thinking in Indigenous communities. He appears less arrogant than many of his CLP predecessors and could be in power for a very long time if he pays attention to the aspirations and ideas of Aborigines living in remote communities. Major challenges he faces are to control the red necks in his party, turn the hysteria of their (anti-Aboriginal) law and order campaigns into a process of community harmonisation and develop his sobering-up rehabilitation programs in ways which help problem drinkers increase their self-respect.

Written in 2012

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Amerika: Home of the slave, land of the flea

First Published Union Songs 25/5/2005
http://unionsong.com/muse/unionsong/u299.html

Dresden, Cologne
Hiroshima, Nagasaki
nuclear weapons
Bikini Atoll
agent orange
Vietnam War
napalmed children
land mines
Diego Garcia
Chagos Islanders
President Allende
death squads
collateral damage
infinite stupidity
bunker busters
Tora-bora Caves
Abraham tanks
daisy-cutter bombs
depleted uranium
Fallujah, Samarra
cluster bombs
shocking awe
Guantanamo Bay
Abu Gharib
extraordinary rendition
installing democracy
star wars
death penalty
capitalist exploitation
massive inequality
endless extermination
and,
all the other things I love about
Amerikan Democracy.

 

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Amerika’s war in Iraq

First published in Al Moharer Vol. 203 No. 213 1/12/204
http://www.al-moharer.net/moh203/j-tomlinson203.htm

I hide in the rubble of your conscience,
each bomb you drop implodes your invincibility
as rats tire of eating decomposing bodies,
then turn and gnaw at your humanity.
Whilst maggots invade the ears of the dead
your words are drowned in your insensibility.
In the wake of the carnage survivors strive to survive:
smashed dreams, children’s screams – many barely alive.
If only your overwhelming military strength
was matched by an equally strong morality.
You are belittled by your assumed superiority,
exposed like a tarnished, peeling trinket,
you slyly confuse economic gain with liberty
as you try to impose your tawdry democracy.

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An academic’s dilemma

Some years ago I realised that giving academic papers at conferences or setting out a logical argument in academic journals was but one (and not a very effective way) of communicating progressive social justice ideas. This is so because even when people are convinced intellectually of the need to adopt an anti-war, pro-poor or non-racist stance they are often not sufficiently emotionally committed to get actively involved in the struggle for a better world. The important organising principle which has guided my community involvement is trying to find a way to bring people’s hearts and minds together to focus on the issue at hand.

I cast around looking for ways to do just that and now try to employ as many skills as I can bring to bear on each issue. Sure, I still try to set out logical arguments in journal articles. I am after all an academic. But I write poetry, plays, satire that I employ as part of campaigns. In the last few years of the Free East Timor Campaign rather than speaking at protest rallies I just read poems such as:

Tourism in Timor

Visit Militia City,
admire their home made guns,
count the dead
from your hotel bed;
daughters, mothers, sons.

Tour the burnt out suburbs,
fondle a hand grenade,
bury a battered body –
democracy, militia made.

You can bath in blood and gore.
Shoot the fleeing by the score.
See freedom delayed
and justice betrayed.
There is a whole lot more.

We’ll show you Kopassus compassion.
You can dig an unmarked grave.
Teach you how to kill the wounded.
It’s cheap you’ll save
and save.

(Kopassus is the Indonesian Special Forces unit responsible for the Militia in Timor on-going atrocities in West Papua)

I would like to sing songs in preference but, being absolutely tone deaf, this would simply inflict cruel and unusual punishment on the audience.

Australia automatically imprisons for indefinite periods asylum seekers who arrive on our shores without visas. Many stay locked up in detention centres in remote arid areas of our continent. Nine months after reading the following prose poem at a pro-refugee conference a woman came up to me and said how moved she had been by my poems and went on to tell me what she had been doing to assist refugees and asylum seekers.

Why are there no flowers in Australia?

A young asylum seeker secreted behind the shafts of razor wire at Woomera asks “Why are there no flowers in Australia?” What can I tell her that would make sense in such a desert landscape? Will the Wackenhut guards who confine would-be refugees be displeased with my answer? If I told her that there are wonderful flowers in Australia will that further wound her, knowing she is being prevented from seeing the blooms? Will she be bewildered trying to understand why the Government, which claims to be inspired by humanity and compassion, prevents her seeing Australia’s flowers?

Would it be kinder to tell her that the cleared red brown earth which she and her fellow inmates daily pound, the distant salt bush and spinifex (observable through the detention camp’s steel mesh) is the totality of vegetation she is likely to observe in this country? Or, should I tell her that about every 7 years the desert country around Woomera is deluged by rain and the desert comes alive with flowers? Will that news create so much excitement in this young woman’s heart that she will not be able to put up with the day-to-day drabness of the detention centre, the sameness of the daily routine of imprisonment and the meanness of spirit of her incarcerators?

I don’t know what to tell her. I would appreciate it if you and your readers would write to juvenile detainee number 433 and explain to her why there are no flowers in Australia.
Thank you.

Written circa 2001

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An open letter to Campbell Newman

Your new laws applying to members of bike gangs are counter productive. They will not make Queensland a more peaceful place. Locking people up 23 hours a day in solitary is going to do nothing to make Queensland a more peaceful state. It will just turn prison guards into torturers and will make the gang members more violent.

The sad thing is that the gang members and the guards will turn on each other or their partners or other vulnerable people. Franz Fannon wrote about this closed circle of violence in his book The Wretched of the Earth.  If gang members decided instead to shoot the crap out of members of your government I wouldn’t mind.

You’ll start this inane tough-on-crime strategy by directing it towards those you choose to call “outlaw bikie gang members” but eventually it will be imposed on many other categories of people. I’m glad I no longer live in your fascist state.

Dr John Tomlinson

NSW  16/10/13

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An open letter to Peter Beattie

Published in the National Indigenous Times on the 10 Jan 2005.

Dear Bjelke Beattie,

So far all I’ve seen is you and Police Minister Spence supporting the police who are to blame for the events which have erupted on Palm Island.

You seem, presumably because of your white blindfold, to have no comprehension of what the people on Palm are going through.

It is not surprising that no one on Palm believes the police stories about a man falling down one step and having four broken ribs, one of which pierced his vital organs.  His injuries are much more consistent with his having his guts kicked in by police boots.

It is not for nothing that the Queensland Criminal Justice System is so named.

As Premier, you have a responsibility to stop police killing prisoners.

You are not absolved of this responsibility just because you are frightened by the Police Union.

In the meantime restore services to the Island and stop the police engaging in the collective punishment of the residents of Palm.

 

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An open letter to the Prime Minister

Dear Mr. Howard,
It is great to see you’ve finally accepted your moral limitations. Some of my friends were a little confused when they heard you had ruled out a conscience vote on mandatory sentencing despite all the national and international pressure which was being brought to bear in an attempt to stop the Northern Territory Government killing indigenous juveniles who had committed minor property offences. Fortunately I was able to explain to my friends your reason for ruling out such a vote was that you have no conscience.
Yours sincerely

2007

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An overview of the legacy of the Howard governments – Book Review

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Wednesday, 7 April 2004

This timely book houses a collection of 12 essays that analyse Howard’s contribution to the Australian body politic. The book has become available at a time when the scales have fallen from the eyes of many Australians. For the second time since 1996 Labor looks likely to assume the Treasury benches. This book provides an ideal viewing platform to reflect upon the contribution that John Howard has made to the nation.

Those citizens who have bought Howard’s socially conservative, economic-liberal ideology lock, stock and barrel would, if they read such texts, claim Robert Manne’s edited collection to be biased in favour of left-wing elites. The book should come wrapped in a heavy plastic cover warning such citizens to stick to magazine stories of the life and times of Pauline Hanson, stock market summaries, and illustrated coffee-table books on social etiquette.

Ten of the 12 contributors to the collection hold professorial-level appointments, one is a visiting fellow at ANU and the 12th is a leading political journalist. It is not a book written by left-wingers for left-wingers.

The book thoughtfully surveys a broad range of issues including Australia’s politics, economics, education, ecology, social welfare, foreign policy and the treatment of asylum seekers and Indigenous people. The book starts with Manne’s substantial overview that encompasses many of his recent preoccupations: stolen children, refugees, the politics of race and foreign policy in our region.

Judith Brett and Helen Irving provide interesting but different perspectives on where John Howard sits on the conservative/liberal ideological spectrum. Mick Dodson revisits many of the struggles that Indigenous people have had with Howard and his Ministers since 1996. Dodson recalls the half to three-quarters of a million Australians who marched for reconciliation in 2000.

John Quiggin provides an excellent overview of the economic situation since the Howard ascendancy. Quiggan’s analysis is accessible to those without economic training and his writing style is far less convoluted than much of his academic writing. He writes with authority on unemployment, privatisation and public debt. Julian Disney’s account of the Howard government’s retreat from adequate social provision is overly even-handed: “on this side blah, blah but on the other hand blah, blah”. He does marshal a degree detail and some readers would probably call it a balanced account. For me, it was the most boring chapter in the book.

Simon Marginson also supplies the reader with a wealth of detail on present challenges faced by the higher educational system. His writing is lucid, succinct and enjoyable. His analysis adds to the current “user pays/public good” contest in higher education. Ian Lowe gives an insider’s account into some of the major ecological debates from Kyoto to the increasing salinity of arid Australia.

Tony Kevin provides an overview of some of the current foreign policy debates. M.C. Ricklefs analyses the Australian Indonesian relationship in considerable detail and makes numerous insightful remarks about some of the complexity that surround communications between these two nations.

There are two chapters that are a delight to read for two very different reasons. The first is William Maley’s thoughtful essay on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Maley writes in the finest tradition of polemical essayists blending the historical literature with contemporary detail. He links the horrendous outcomes faced daily by asylum seeker adults and children to:

  • the Howard government’s treatment of asylum seekers;
  • the government’s obsession with hiding asylum seekers away from the view of the public and the press; and
  • the failure to live up to the United Nation’s refugee convention, which Australia has signed, ratified and previously honoured.

He explains how we came to run detention centres in places as remote as Woomera and Nauru, how (until recently) asylum seekers (including children) were referred to by numbers not by their names. He discusses concepts such as the “banality of evil”, “ordinary vices”, “moral cruelty” and their relationship with Australia’s refugee policy.

Maley’s essay deals with a chilling chapter of Australia’s recent history. This is a must-read section of the book. He quotes Phillip Ruddock and Michael Wooldridge, Ministers in the first Howard government, proclaiming the cruelty of creating uncertainty in the minds of those granted refugee status that would occur if refugees were given only temporary protection visas. In 1998 Wooldridge said: “creating insecurity and uncertainty … is one of the most dangerous ways to add to the harm that torturers do.” Maley also notes that in 1999 Howard adopted Pauline Hanson’s suggestion that people arriving in this country without visas would, at best, be offered a three- year revolving Temporary Protection Visa.

Mungo MacCallum’s essay gets down and dirty. It is classical Mungo. He describes reasons why the “little Aussie battlers” are walking away from Howard, having realised that the only “little Aussie battler” Howard is interested in is himself.

Mungo details some of the duplicity in which the government has engaged in an attempt to prop up voter support. My favourite paragraph in his essay is:

Howard’s deferential biographer, David Barnett, states correctly that his hero has the memory of an elephant and the hide of a rhinoceros; what he fails to add is that Howard has the breadth of vision of a blindworm and the imagination of a damp lettuce. The man knows nothing but politics. Beyond a Ginger-Meggs devotion to sport and its (politically useful) stars he has no known outside interests. Intellectual pursuits are a waste of time – indeed, faintly suspect, as his attacks on the elites and the intelligentsia make clear. One suspects that the last non-political book he read was the Boy Scout’s Guide to Knots and the last time he was in a theatre was to have his tonsils out. (pp.60-61)

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Anti-VSU rally at QUT

We are now entering a period where there is a crisis of language and crisis of meaning.

Free trade does not mean freedom but rather the dominance of industrial superpowers over smaller nations.

Welfare reform does not mean improvement rather it means abolition of benefits.

Work flexibility means bosses screwing workers.

The Government is very cleaver in their use of language they say they have abolished the unfair dismissal legislation. Just imagine if they were forced to say they wanted to stop the fair dismissal legislation.

It is important for students to become members of unions in order to protect their rights at work. French students and workers recently brought France to a halt and overturned their government trying to introduce what the Liberals have got away with here.

Similarly the Government says it wants to ensure voluntary student unionism.  This is a cover for their desire to cut the number of students who are members of student unions.

Why does it want to cut the numbers of students in unions?

Essentially because student unions provide a potential source of power to relatively powerless individual students. The reason we support student unions are very similar to why we support industrial unions. Individuals cannot fight injustice by themselves and that is why we must organise. The government is organised.

The government has an agenda. That agenda is to silence any criticism. We must organise to ensure that no student is discriminated against.

The Guild supplies many services which students would not be able to afford if the guild disappears:

  • Access to legal advice
  • Educational officers to intercede on students’ behalf when they feel they have been dealt with unfairly
  • The Guild supports many clubs and associations which are all part of academic life
  • The Guild runs the child care centre – without that many would not be able to come to uni.

My Union, the NTEU, does not want to see university life impoverished by a Government that confuses cutting economic costs with social advancement.

This government does not care that on the way to riding roughshod over your interests:

  • child care services will be abolished,
  • sporting organisations will be weakened,
  • counselling and health services will be destroyed,
  • student’s access to legal services will be obliterated.

VSU will undermine your group strength – your voice – your education – your access to justice.

The Howard Government juggernaut does not care because it wants absolute power – absolute power for the rich who run the Liberal hierarchy.

If you want to know how you will be treated look at what they did with Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon Look at what they are doing to asylum seekers from West Papua. Look at what they are doing to Indigenous Australians Look at what they are doing to Single Parents and Disability Support Pensioners. Look at what they are doing to you.

If you don’t fight you lose.

19 May 2005

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Arundhati Roy – excerpt from her speech accepting Sydney Peace Prize

Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack. The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is at once so complete, so cruel and so clever – all encompassing and yet specifically targeted, blatantly brutal and yet unbelievably insidious – that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of ‘human rights’.

If you think about it, this is an alarming shift of paradigm. The difference is that notions of equality, of parity have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It’s a process of attrition. Almost unconsciously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for Americans, human rights for Afghans and Iraqis. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that.) Justice for white Australians, human rights for Aboriginals and immigrants (most times, not even that.)

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6594&sectionID=41

7 November 2004

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ASIO Bills

First published in Green Left Weekly No.606 November 17th 2004 p.21
also published in Al-Moharer No. 202 Vol.13 19/11/2004
http://www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/j-tomlinson202.htm

 

Don’t speak of rights, justice or oughts
we have castrated judges in neutered courts.
The only things they guarantee are silence,
lying politicians and ASIO’s compliance.
In nondescript brick veneered suburbs
fearful, frightened half lives led
by the misled, poorly read, brain dead.
They are not forced or coerced
they want to believe the bullshit they are fed.

 

 

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Asylum Seekers

In 1951, Australia was an important contributor to the introduction of the UN Refugee Convention which established that it was not illegal to enter a country to seek refuge from persecution.

After the Second World War we settled thousands of refugees and displaced people most of whom made a great contribution to our society. In the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser provided the leadership that allowed 70,000 refugees from Indo China to come to Australia. Hawke allowed 50,000 Chinese students to remain in Australia in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Keating introduced the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers arriving by boat. Howard implemented an offshore detention processing arrangement for asylum seekers arriving by boat.  Rudd abolished the policy before reintroducing it in 2012. The Abbott-Turnbull Governments are incarcerating over 2,000 men, women and children in offshore camps on Manus and Nauru. Asylum seekers and even those found to be refugees are being driven mad, suiciding, self-harming and daily becoming more desperate.

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Asylum seeking in Australia

Written circa 2000

Blood drenched dreams dangling
from the spikes of the razor wire –
so close to freedom.
Wild fearful eyes stare
into our collective consciousness
and sear our indifference.
Batonned discipline enforced
by Wackenhut guards –
Capitalism’s storm troopers.

Shayan Bedraie starves himself
in a vain attempt to communicate
his family’s need for asylum.
A Pakistani man immolates
in a vain attempt to communicate
his family’s need for reunion.
Daily thousands sigh silently at the razor wire
in a vain attempt to communicate
their need for freedom.

But enough of those people’s troubles,
let me tell you why I dislike Australia’s
policy of locking up asylum seekers.
The other day I was flying to Sydney –
a Middle Eastern family was on the same flight,
they had recently been granted a temporary visa.

One of the sons had a razor wire tattoo
engraved on his neck
a reminder of the Woomera concentration camp.
I can’t forget that young man,
with his tattoo accusing me of being indifferent
to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers.
It is true I did nothing to help
him, his family, his fellow inmates
but why does he accuse me:
after all, you did nothing to help either.
We all just turned away.
So if I am accused
you are accused
we are all accused
so long as we do nothing.

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Australian Conservatives

Frist published in New Matilda mid- March 2019

I have always had a grudging tolerance for the classical conservative position with its defence of the established order, a belief in the imperfection of human beings, the necessity of privilege and leadership. Associated with the conservative position is adherence to traditional values (such as the primacy of the extended family), the importance of work and of sexual restraint, the sanctity of private property and an abhorrence of utopian social change.

It will come as no surprise to those who know me, that I see myself philosophically wedged between socialism and anarchism. I acknowledge the importance of the collective yet am driven to promote individual freedom over State domination. Apart from small heterogeneous communities, anarchism can’t provide the social services which a socialist or even a progressive social democratic State can provide. In more than one sense, the ideals and spirit of socialism have never been implemented. Instead, various autocratic / authoritarian governments have made the false claim they were ‘socialist’.

Whilst, a philosophical commitment to sexual restraint is a dominant conservative preoccupation, the reality for many conservative heads of households has been much more like that portrayed in Flanders and Swann’s:

“Have some madeira, my dear
It’s really an excellent year.
I’m not trying to tempt you that wouldn’t be right
One shouldn’t drink spirits at this time of night
So, have some madeira my dear.”

Which invariably leads to his:
“putting out, the cat, his cigar and the lamps…
as he secretly carved one more notch
on the butt of his gold handled cane.”

Who gave court references for Cardinal George Pell, following his conviction on child molestation charges?
Amongst those who gave court character references there was a craven vice chancellor of the Catholic University, an ex-“socially conservative” prime minister who had a track record of being reluctant to sack ex-Governor General, Peter Hollingsworth, who had previously been an Anglican Archbishop, who was, at the time, enmeshed in his own sex scandal.

It takes a particular style of mysogenous, misanthropic troglodyte, with a total commitment to turning away from the obvious towards the promotion of arch conservatism to stand where these men found themselves. They can’t claim to have been blinded by God, and fear and light – it is just that they have lost sight of any sense of right.

Then, of course, there were the trainee galahs in the media such as Andreas Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen who despite, the twelve and true finding Pell guilty of five counts of child molestation, declared the Cardinal innocent.

Howard, Albrechtsen and Bolt are all part of a right-wing putsch determined to drive out decency and humanity from our nation. But are they conservatives in the classical meaning of the term? In Howards court reference for Pell he writes: “I am aware he has been convicted of those charges; that an appeal against the conviction has been lodged and that he maintains his innocence in respect of these charges. None of these matters alter my opinion of the Cardinal.”

“Cardinal Pell is a person of both high intelligence and exemplary character. Strength and sincerity have always been features of his personality. I have always found him to be lacking hypocrisy and cant. In his chosen vocation he has frequently displayed much courage and held to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time.”

I suppose that when Pell was rabidly denouncing gay sex, same sex marriage, abortion, divorce, adultery and environmentalism Howard considered him to be “displaying much courage and holding to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time.” Clearly as the same sex plebiscite established, Pell was neither reflecting the general will nor the wisdom of the time.

The schmozzle of ideas professed by Pell, Howard, Albrechtsen and Bolt seem to have little to do with sexual constraint or conservatism generally but rather more to do with a particular reading of a neoliberal, protofascist conception of conservatism. Such as I found when I had a discussion during the early 1990s with the Director of Catholic Social Services who argued that paying an income guarantee to every individual Australian, in their own right, would increase divorce, sloth and licentiousness.

When I pointed out that the Australian social security system demands that if one is in a relationship and the other partner has an income, even though he or she might refuse to share it equitably, the partner without an income is presumed to be supported by the other. I argued that such a situation is more likely to lead to separation because, once separated, both partners are treated as if they are individuals. I was met with a blank stare.

The Melbourne response and the downsizing of payouts for institutional sexual abuse
The Catholic Church is clinging to the Melbourne Response, the architect of this scheme is in prison for child sexual abuse, pending an appeal. The Coalition Government, despite protestations that it would implement the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommendations, has cut the top payment, has introduced a mean-minded range of other payments which fail to adequately consider the severity of the abuse suffered and has failed to get payments to all but a small number of victims.

There are certainly grounds to believe that the traditional conservative concept of sexual restrain is not riding this horse. An integral part of traditional conservative beliefs is the idea of “Noblesse Oblige” which implies that there is an obligation on the advantaged to assist those less fortunate than themselves – literally “nobility obliges”.

I am not unaware of the pitfalls of philanthropy, particularly following Danni Raventos and Julie Wark’s remarkable little book entitled Against Charity. But at least true conservatives temper their enthusiasm for riding roughshod over the interests of the less fortunate. The present Coalition Government has no such qualms, with their robo-debts, cashless welfare, excessive benefit breaching and payment suspensions imposed upon those forced to rely upon the State for sustenance. Perhaps, if these Australian conservatives had a sense of “There but for the Grace of God go I” they might find sufficient charity to temper their obsession with stamping out “dependency” upon the State.

What other conservative values are in abeyance?
Howard whilst prime minister, made much of his neoliberal economic fundamentalism, in addition to his “social conservatism”. He certainly was opposed to change at many levels apart from trying to rig his culture war debates and his determination to relegate moderates to the wilderness.

The dominant Australian conservatism is frequently associated with dividing the working class, driving a wedge between the working class and the unemployed, promoting business ownership, lowering taxes, boosting profits, denigrating those less fortunate than oneself, smashing unions and a preoccupation with oneself rather than being committed to any sense of the common good.

In the late 1980s, Brian Howe, allegedly on the left of the Labor Party, returned from a sojourn in the United States of America committed to stamping out “welfare dependency.” But it was Jocelyn Newman, who herself, upon retirement, received two parliamentary pensions and a military pension, took the anti-dependency rhetoric to new heights. She, aided by Patrick McClure of Mission Australia, produced for the Howard Government a report entitled The challenge of welfare dependency in the 21st century.

Howard had already done much of the groundwork in promoting downward envy, whereby taxpayers who were reasonably well off were encouraged to denigrate single parents, particularly lone mothers, those with disabilities, people without employment and others down on their luck.

The better off were encouraged to envy their less fortunate neighbours seemingly oblivious to the fact that the affluent had no need or entitlement to disability, parenting, or unemployment payments.  Many an aspiring Howard Battler was sucked into a whirlpool of righteous indignation about the payment of social security. Cocooned in state of ignorance many applauded US social commentators, likeLawrence Mead, who preached “tough love” without recognising the connection with domestic violence. They seemed oblivious to the social devastation and marginalisation that such policies caused. There was little recognition of the vicious paternalist and mysogenous nature of such policies.

There is a brutality embedded within the policies and practices of Australian conservatism which has succeeded in undermining our sense of social solidarity, humanity, egalitarianism and generosity. Now is the time that we should turn our attention to critiques of the Australian form of conservatism in the forlorn hope that those who hold such views are capable of turning away from greed, banality and brutality.

 

More Info

Australian Conservatives

Frist Published New Matilda mid-March 2019

I have always had a grudging tolerance for the classical conservative position with its defence of the established order, a belief in the imperfection of human beings, the necessity of privilege and leadership. Associated with the conservative position is adherence to traditional values (such as the primacy of the extended family), the importance of work and of sexual restraint, the sanctity of private property and an abhorrence of utopian social change.

It will come as no surprise to those who know me, that I see myself philosophically wedged between socialism and anarchism. I acknowledge the importance of the collective yet am driven to promote individual freedom over State domination. Apart from small heterogeneous communities, anarchism can’t provide the social services which a socialist or even a progressive social democratic State can provide. In more than one sense, the ideals and spirit of socialism have never been implemented. Instead, various autocratic / authoritarian governments have made the false claim they were ‘socialist’.

Whilst, a philosophical commitment to sexual restraint is a dominant conservative preoccupation, the reality for many conservative heads of households has been much more like that portrayed in Flanders and Swan’s:

“Have some madeira, my dear
It’s really an excellent year.
I’m not trying to tempt you that wouldn’t be right
One shouldn’t drink spirits at this time of night
So, have some madeira my dear.”

Which invariably leads to his:
“putting out, the cat, his cigar and the lamps…
as he secretly carved one more notch
on the butt of his gold handled cane.”

Who gave court references for Cardinal George Pell, following his conviction on child molestation charges?
Amongst those who gave court character references there was a craven vice chancellor of the Catholic University, an ex-“socially conservative” prime minister who had a track record of being reluctant to sack ex-Governor General, Peter Hollingsworth, who had previously been an Anglican Archbishop, who was, at the time, enmeshed in his own sex scandal.

It takes a particular style of mysogenous, misanthropic troglodyte, with a total commitment to turning away from the obvious towards the promotion of arch conservatism to stand where these men found themselves. They can’t claim to have been blinded by God, and fear and light – it is just that they have lost sight of any sense of right.

Then, of course, there were the trainee galahs in the media such as Andreas Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen who despite, the twelve and true finding Pell guilty of five counts of child molestation, declared the Cardinal innocent.

Howard, Albrechtsen and Bolt are all part of a right-wing putsch determined to drive out decency and humanity from our nation. But are they conservatives in the classical meaning of the term? In Howards court reference for Pell he writes: “I am aware he has been convicted of those charges; that an appeal against the conviction has been lodged and that he maintains his innocence in respect of these charges. None of these matters alter my opinion of the Cardinal.”

“Cardinal Pell is a person of both high intelligence and exemplary character. Strength and sincerity have always been features of his personality. I have always found him to be lacking hypocrisy and cant. In his chosen vocation he has frequently displayed much courage and held to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time.”

I suppose that when Pell was rabidly denouncing gay sex, same sex marriage, abortion, divorce, adultery and environmentalism Howard considered him to be “displaying much courage and holding to his values and beliefs, irrespective of the prevailing wisdom of the time.” Clearly as the same sex plebiscite established, Pell was neither reflecting the general will nor the wisdom of the time.

The schmozzle of ideas professed by Pell, Howard, Albrechtsen and Bolt seem to have little to do with sexual constraint or conservatism generally but rather more to do with a particular reading of a neoliberal, protofascist conception of conservatism. Such as I found when I had a discussion during the early 1990s with the Director of Catholic Social Services who argued that paying an income guarantee to every individual Australian, in their own right, would increase divorce, sloth and licentiousness.

When I pointed out that the Australian social security system demands that if one is in a relationship and the other partner has an income, even though he or she might refuse to share it equitably, the partner without an income is presumed to be supported by the other. I argued that such a situation is more likely to lead to separation because, once separated, both partners are treated as if they are individuals. I was met with a blank stare.

The Melbourne response and the downsizing of payouts for institutional sexual abuse
The Catholic Church is clinging to the Melbourne Response, the architect of this scheme is in prison for child sexual abuse, pending an appeal. The Coalition Government, despite protestations that it would implement the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommendations, has cut the top payment, has introduced a mean-minded range of other payments which fail to adequately consider the severity of the abuse suffered and has failed to get payments to all but a small number of victims.

There are certainly grounds to believe that the traditional conservative concept of sexual restrain is not riding this horse. An integral part of traditional conservative beliefs is the idea of “Noblesse Oblige” which implies that there is an obligation on the advantaged to assist those less fortunate than themselves – literally “nobility obliges”.

I am not unaware of the pitfalls of philanthropy, particularly following Danni Raventos and Julie Wark’s remarkable little book entitled Against Charity. But at least true conservatives temper their enthusiasm for riding roughshod over the interests of the less fortunate. The present Coalition Government has no such qualms, with their robo-debts, cashless welfare, excessive benefit breaching and payment suspensions imposed upon those forced to rely upon the State for sustenance. Perhaps, if these Australian conservatives had a sense of “There but for the Grace of God go I” they might find sufficient charity to temper their obsession with stamping out “dependency” upon the State.

What other conservative values are in abeyance?
Howard whilst prime minister, made much of his neoliberal economic fundamentalism, in addition to his “social conservatism”. He certainly was opposed to change at many levels apart from trying to rig his culture war debates and his determination to relegate moderates to the wilderness.

The dominant Australian conservatism is frequently associated with dividing the working class, driving a wedge between the working class and the unemployed, promoting business ownership, lowering taxes, boosting profits, denigrating those less fortunate than oneself, smashing unions and a preoccupation with oneself rather than being committed to any sense of the common good.

In the late 1980s, Brian Howe, allegedly on the left of the Labor Party, returned from a sojourn in the United States of America committed to stamping out “welfare dependency.” But it was Jocelyn Newman, who herself, upon retirement, received two parliamentary pensions and a military pension, took the anti-dependency rhetoric to new heights. She, aided by Patrick McClure of Mission Australia, produced for the Howard Government a report entitled The challenge of welfare dependency in the 21st century.

Howard had already done much of the groundwork in promoting downward envy, whereby taxpayers who were reasonably well off were encouraged to denigrate single parents, particularly lone mothers, those with disabilities, people without employment and others down on their luck.

The better off were encouraged to envy their less fortunate neighbours seemingly oblivious to the fact that the affluent had no need or entitlement to disability, parenting, or unemployment payments.  Many an aspiring Howard Battler was sucked into a whirlpool of righteous indignation about the payment of social security. Cocooned in state of ignorance many applauded US social commentators, likeLawrence Mead, who preached “tough love” without recognising the connection with domestic violence. They seemed oblivious to the social devastation and marginalisation that such policies caused. There was little recognition of the vicious paternalist and mysogenous nature of such policies.

There is a brutality embedded within the policies and practices of Australian conservatism which has succeeded in undermining our sense of social solidarity, humanity, egalitarianism and generosity. Now is the time that we should turn our attention to critiques of the Australian form of conservatism in the forlorn hope that those who hold such views are capable of turning away from greed, banality and brutality.

 

More Info

Australian decency ?

Published in Union Songs
http://unionsong.com/u365.html

also published in Al-Moharer 30/5/2006 Vol. 243
http://www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/tomlinson243.htm

also published in Green Left 21/6/2006 p.21
also published in New Community Quarterly Vol.4 No.2 Winter 2006

Refugee, asylum seeker
who’s the listener,
who’s the speaker?

Are you ventriloquist or faker
who’s the giver,
who’s the taker?

Compassion now, or racist pride
which is decent,
who has lied?

Come, citizen or overlord
were children thrown
overboard?

Welcoming the millionaire,
rejecting lonely, frightened, poor,
makes the whole world despair.

Can’t you see the tyranny,
won’t you show humanity,
or have we lost our decency?

A poem by John Tomlinson and Penny Harrington©2006

 

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Australian Liberal’s worst fears realised!!!

To Scumbag Morrison’s horror, the Coalition voters contracted a terrible ailment. The majority experienced a surge of decency. One of Australia’s most affluent electorates metamorphosed into a cantankerous mob demanding that asylum seeking children and their families incarcerated on Nauru be brought here for immediate medical treatment after languishing on this hell hole for 5 years.

Not content with that they insisted that discrimination against LGTBI people be stopped. The Ruddock Committee for Extending the Right of Religious Institutions to Discriminate Against People on the Grounds of their Sexual Orientation had reported to the Liberal Government 5 months ago. A leak from the government indicated that one of the perks which some religious organisations wanted to retain was the right to expel students from religious schools on the grounds of their sexual orientation.

Morrison at first declared that such policy was existing law; then he said it was the naughty Labor Party which enacted such laws. When it turned out that this was not the law uniformly throughout Australia and the ALP wanted the law repealed and Labor went further and said religious institutions should no longer have the right to sack teachers in religious schools on account of their sexuality. This was a bridge too far for Scumbag & Co.

A few weeks ago, on The Insiders, David Marr noted that the same religious schools, which had put up with paedophiles in their mist for 50 years, now wanted to be able to sack teachers on account of with whom they were in love. The conservatives within the Liberal and National Parties, under the cover of “the sanctity of religious freedom” are wanting to entrench the right of religious bodies to discriminate against people because of their beliefs and sexual orientation.

The good denizens of Wentworth weren’t fooled, by such Liberal shenanigans. In one of the most disciplined examples of thoughtful voting, I have ever seen, they selected the independent most likely to look after their electorate, asylum seekers, climate change, civil liberties and decency. For years, these same citizens felt Turnbull would eventually be able turn the Liberal towards more humane policies. His political assassination by the Dutton and Morrison camps is what invigorated the Wentworthians. They saw for the first time that permanent detention in offshore internment camps was no longer a nightmare it was the everyday face of the Liberal Party.

 

 

 

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Australian wind song

First Published by Al Moharer 14/4/2005 Vol.221.
http://www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/j-tomlinson221b.htm

and also by Union Songs 19/4/2005
http://unionsong.com/muse/unionsong/u296html

and also the Multicultural Council of the NT Newsletter April 2005

and also New Community Quarterly, Vol.3 , No.2 Winter 2005, p.16.

My words are written on a westerly wind
if you cannot see them listen to the message I send.
We came here as conquerors, when we might have been friends,
as want-to-be emperors – we should make amends.

My words are written on a westerly wind
you’ll know I am speaking when you see the trees bend.
The rich and the powerful who control all the wealth
got rich and powerful through corruption and stealth.

An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay
is something despised by rich men today.
My words are written on a westerly wind
They’re meant to inform, not meant to offend.

And those who arrive without nice shiny visas
are no longer welcomed as migrants or visitors.
Those who find no success in the flash-money rush
are flat-out surviving this dog-eat-dog crush.

My words are written on a westerly wind
please read them, or listen, please be my friend;
and let’s fight for justice and peace without end
and dance in the face of the westerly wind.

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Baxter at Easter

I saw the pricks pricking balloons
I saw them seizing kites
they were protecting ignorance
for the sake of all uptights.
They all wore coppers’ uniforms
they all had coppers’ minds,
barely a brain cell between them,
these are John Howard’s times.

When refugees are criminals
when we cannot see their face
fascism is ever present
racism Howard’s disgrace.

The Australian Government has built the Baxter Immigration Detention Centre in such a way that the detainees cannot see outside the concentration camp. The Government has imposed an air exclusion zone above Baxter in order to increase the sensory deprivation of the internees. At the annual Easter protest demonstrators attempted to fly kites and balloons over the Centre to show solidarity with the inmates.

First published Green Left weekly April 13th 2005 p.22

also published in New Community Quarterly Vol.3 No.1 p.3

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Bayonet

A bayonet is a weapon
wi’ a working man at either end.
Betray yer country.
Serve yer class.
Don’t sign up for war, my friend. Don’t sign up for war.

Alistair Hulett

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Be alert and very alarmed

Published in New Matilda on December 14, 2005

The Howard-Ruddock ‘We Did It to the Refugees and Now It’s Your Turn’ Acts have been rushed through the Federal Parliament.

If you should meet a nice ASIO person, then be alert and very alarmed. If you are questioned, you should state your name address and date of birth. You might also give your serial number in the Class War. In case you’ve forgotten, everyone’s number is ‘one.’

At this point, you should mention that you are relying on the protections provided by the Geneva Accord. It is then unwise to answer any further questions until you have had time to research the various Acts and regulations which are being used as the pretext for questioning you. It is equally unwise to refuse to answer questions as this will be used by the spooks against you. You need to make it clear that you are willing to answer the questions after you have completely clarified your legal situation.

Spooks Inc will probably refuse to provide you with copies of the relevant legislation and regulations. (By the way, inform them that you will need to have a copy of the Acts Interpretations Act, which has recently been updated, to assist you to understand what the other Acts mean.) You will, of course, require all the current ‘terror’ legislation plus drafts of foreshadowed legislation. The reason you need to have copies of the foreshadowed legislation is because it may subsequently be made retrospective.

Mr Plod will tell you that you can rely on your lawyer (who specialises in conveyancing, most of the time) to be fully on top of this ‘terror’ legislation arguing that, therefore, there is no need for you to have access to the legislation. Stick to your guns failing to know the law is not a defence in Australian courts, let alone the soon to be set up Kangaroo Courts.

It would be unwise to even answer the question, ‘How are you?’ with the response, ‘Ok.’ This is because, if you were to fall ill during a subsequent interrogation you could be charged with providing a false answer to an ASIO agent.

Of course, it is not wise to discuss any of the activities which might constitute your defence with anyone while you are being detained. Besides, saying anything before you have had time to read and digest all the relevant legislation is not smart.

Let your lawyer advise you, but keep your own counsel while incarcerated, because ASIO will be listening to every word you say. Lawyers don’t usually like going into court hearings without knowing the grounds you are planning to use as a defence, but you’ll have time to discuss that with them when you’re in the courtroom itself.

Make sure you indicate, to whichever macropod is presiding over the Wallaby Tribunal that you need to talk with your lawyer in the courtroom. ASIO is not yet game enough to place electronic bugs in courtrooms.

ASIO operatives, Mr Plods and their assorted hangers-on will, no doubt, tell you that by ‘not co-operating’ you are lengthening the time you’ll remain in custody. Such advice is designed to con you into saying something which can then be used against you, and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

The Industrial Relations changes and the Coalition’s War of Terror legislation are driven by a similar ‘control the powerless’ mentality. Howard and Ruddock want to silence all opposition. So, if we are picked up, then ‘silence should be our firm rebuke.’

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Beattie mania

First published in Al-Moharer 7/3/2007. http://www.al-moharer/tomlinson254b.htm

Flying squads with cattle prods playing God in Beattie’s racist state,
trained thugs high on the drug of righteous indignation.
How dare the Blacks or anyone oppose the Beattie nation?
You can’t let Aborigines get ideas above their station,
so we have cops for rich not poor, that’s why they’re above the law.
Like pigs in swill, they kill at will and face no condemnation,
they smash and bash with impunity because they have immunity.
From Daniel Yock to Mulrunji they’ve been on a killing spree.
Wake up now before it’s too late – it could happen to you or even me.

Written following the heavily armed police invasion of Palm Island after the police station was burnt down following the police killing of Mulrunji.

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Bed time stories

Written circa 2000

In Turkey hunger strikers are dying
to draw the world’s attention to the inhuman treatment of prisoners.
In Genoa police kill an anti-global protester.
In China the authorities step up the rate of executions
to show the rest of world they are fit to run the Olympics.
The US inflicts the death penalty on people with an intellectual disability.
Amerika refuses to sign treaties controlling green house gases
and on outlawing bacterial weapons.
At the Whaling Commission Japan buys the right to keep killing thousands of whales.
In Sudan the bombing of civilians continues.
In Sri Lanka the bombing of civilians continues.
In Ache the killing of civilians continues.
And in the Middle East the Israel Army fires five missiles into the car of a Hamas leader.
They continue to shoot rock throwing students and bulldozes Arab houses.
The government says it does this in order to establish their commitment to peace.
In West Papua the Indonesian Army wipes out another village for raising the Morning Star flag.
Six million people were made homeless by floods in India and Pakistan.
Throughout the world one thousand million people are on the brink of starvation.
In my country the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was found guilty of being in contempt of court.
Yet he is running a law and order election campaign jailing homeless Aborigines for sleeping in parks.
That’s enough good news for one day. Now go to sleep and if you are very, very good tomorrow night I will tell you about how hard the world’s 500 billionaires are finding it to make ends meet.

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Bertolt Brecht

“Neither Hitler’s concentration camps nor Stalin’s gulag could lay claim to Bertolt Brecht.
Perhaps he is now finally being undone, this time by scholars keen to deconstruct him. But then he guessed what his fate might be when he once wrote: ‘I fled the tigers, I fled the fleas;
What got me at last – mediocracies.”

anon Green Left, circa 2000.

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BHP – Share Prospectus

Performed at Politics in the Pub Shorncliffe 20th April 1998 and at Green Left functions in that year.

There is a company called BHP
drilling for oil in the Timor Sea ,
that’s why we can’t set Timor free
we’ve all got shares in BHP.

Don’t talk to me about democracy
human rights or humanity,
‘cause we’re drilling for oil in the Timor Sea
and we’re backing a company called BHP.

There’re always be a Liberal
while there’s a BHP
if freedom means as little to you
as freedom means to me.

I’m not worried about a political future,
just not that kind of political creature.
We’ll tell the voters “It’s for all of us”
and I’m sure they won’t create a fuss,
travel around the whole world wide
pretending that right is on our side
and our indifference we’ll try to hide.

There’re always be a Liberal
while there’s a BHP
if freedom means as little to you
as freedom means to me.

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Black and White Poverty in Brisbane in the 1970s

published on line in 2007 in Vintage Reds.
http://roughreds.com/rrtwo/indexy.html
url pdf http://roughreds.com/rrtwo/tomlinson.html

originally “Poverty in Black and White: Brisbane in the 1970s.”  Paper given at the Brisbane Labour History Association: Radical Brisbane Conference 7-8 September 2002 University of Queensland Union, St Lucia.

Abstract

This chapter will describe community work efforts undertaken with Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders living in South Brisbane and white single parents in Inala (a Western suburb of Brisbane) during the 1970s. The aim at that time was to assist both communities to confront repressive aspects of their poverty. The chapter reflects upon what was accomplished and attempts to show continuities with several difficulties facing both Indigenous people and lone parents in the 21st century.

Introduction

In 1970 residents of Brisbane, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, were about to enter tumultuous times. Twenty-three years of unbroken Liberal rule at the Federal level was drawing to an end whilst, at a State level, the Country-Liberal Party was consolidating its suppression of dissent (Masters 2002, Dickey 1988). The Vietnam War dragged on. The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Queensland Police Special Branch were ever vigilant in their efforts to ensure authority was not challenged: in schools, on the streets, at work and in universities.

Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders

During the 1950s, the official Federal Government policy was one of assimilation. The 1961 meeting of Federal and State Ministers in charge of Aboriginal affairs decided that assimilation:

means that all Aborigines and part-Aborigines are expected eventually to attain the same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community, enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hope and loyalties as other Australians (cited in Pittock 1969, pp.12-13).

In 1965 the definition was changed:

…so that now the policy officially seeks (rather than means) that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain (rather than are expected eventually to attain) a similar (rather than the same) manner and standard of living. The words ‘observing the same customs’, are omitted, and so too is reference to their ‘being influenced by the same beliefs’  (Pittock 1969, p. 13 italics in original).

Between 1965 and 1972 the Federal Government’s policy changed to integration and then in 1974, under the Whitlam Government, it became self-determination. The Howard Government considers the term self-determination inappropriate because it conjures the spectre of independent sovereignty. Instead, the Government prefers a limited form of self-management and practical reconciliation (a euphemism for their determination to continue with welfare handouts) rather than adopt a rights-based approach predicated upon a treaty (Koch and Karvelas 2005, Tomlinson 2003, Ch. 6, 2004).

Rosalind Kidd (1997), Charles Rowley (1972 [a], [b], [c] and Henry Reynolds (1998) provide useful academic accounts of the reality faced by Indigenous people in Queensland in the 1970s. More political accounts were written by the Black Resource Centre Collective (1976) and Daisy Marchisotti (1978), which built on the earlier work of Campbell, Cameron, Keats, Poulter and Poulter (1958) and Bennett (1957). The poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, particularly in We are Going, provide a sense of the depth of racism at the time. The 1967 Referendum had come and gone and little had changed in the day-to-day lives of Aborigines. The infamous 1897 ‘protection’ act, though modified, was still in place, controlling every aspect of Indigenous people’s lives. People, not exempted from the act, had their wages, place of residence, employment and even choice of spouse controlled by ‘protectors’ (O’Shane 1979). Paddy Killoran, the long-serving Director of the Department of Native Affairs, kept tight control of his staff and system of ‘protectors’.

There was a major division within organisations representing the interests of Indigenous people between those like the One People of Australia League (OPAL) with a ‘welfare approach’ and the rights-oriented approach of the Queensland Aboriginal Advancement League – which was associated nationally with the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) [Taffe 2005]. The Aboriginal and Islander Tribal Council (Brisbane) was formed on the 7th December 1969 with the intention of bringing together representatives of all the disparate progressive Indigenous groups operating in Brisbane (Tomlinson 1974 Appendix H). There was also to emerge a Brisbane Chapter of the Black Panther Party of Australia in late 1971. With the exception of OPAL’s welfare / housing activities these broader Indigenous organisations played little part in the issues which daily confronted Indigenous residents of South Brisbane.

South Brisbane: a brief history

The Brisbane River meanders through the city and forms the demarcation line between North and South Brisbane. South Brisbane at no time succeeded in rivalling North Brisbane as a commercial or social centre (Petrie 1904, Greenwood and Laverty 1959). Knight (1895) stated: “So marked indeed has become the contrast between the two divisions of Brisbane, that the south side has ceased to aspire to the position of first importance it for some years hankered after (p.58).” South Brisbane remained a separate municipality until 1925 when it was incorporated into the city of Brisbane. Changes to the transport system significantly affected the commercial decline of South Brisbane by the 1960’s (Tomlinson 1974 Appendix F). The area also had a large and diverse migrant population (Tomlinson 1974 Ch.6).

At the beginning of the twentieth century Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were generally excluded from inner Brisbane (both North and South). Certainly after sunset they were required to remain beyond the respective Boundary Streets in both parts of the city. Then, during the Second World War Black American soldiers were not allowed into the centre of Brisbane and South Brisbane became synonymous with Blackness – American and Indigenous. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders continued to live in the general area after the war and – despite ongoing attempts to get rid of them – they maintain a tenacious foothold to this day.

Why I was there

During the early 1960s, I had been active in anti-racist struggles, and with Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1964), Joe McGuiness (1991), Steve Mann and others had been involved in land and citizenship rights campaigns (Taffe 2005). I then spent three years working as a social worker for the Welfare Branch in Darwin, observing the remnants of a colonial frontier struggling to drag itself into the second half of the twentieth century.

Externally imposed colonial structures promote the interests of the ‘metropolitan’ country and ensure that the interests of the expatriate entrepreneurs and workers prevail over the interests of local entrepreneurs and those of the ‘natives’ (Fanon 1970, 1967, Cabral 1973). Australians who have not had the experience of living in the more northern or remote parts of this continent during the 1950s, 60s and 70s may not conceive of white / Black relations as resembling a colonial interface. But the language which governments of the day employed to describe their administration of Indigenous matters was not dissimilar from that of the British Raj, for instance, until 1966 the Queensland Government had a Department of Native Affairs.

In Darwin I had become disenchanted with the welfare approach to Indigenous issues and looked to community work and decolonisation as alternative approaches. Management of the Northern Territory Welfare Branch told me that community work would not be effective with Aboriginal people. So, in 1970, I began a research masters degree designed to look at community work with Indigenous people in South Brisbane. I chose this locality because many people (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous who did not live in the area) had described the Indigenous people there as “just a mob of metho-drinking no-hopers” (Tomlinson 1975 [a]). I thought that if I could show that this Indigenous community found community work a useful way to engage and improve things in their community then governments and welfare organisations would be hard pressed to continue to rely solely on welfare ‘solutions’ in their work with Indigenous people. In addition any successes they achieved in confronting the source of their oppression would make it harder for whites to continue to denigrate Indigenous people.

Indigenous people confronting their issues

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been fighting to retain sovereignty, maintain control of land, culture, families, and promote their political rights since at least 1606 (Sharp 1952, Rowley 1972 [a], [b], [c], Reynolds 1972, 1981, 1989, 1996, 1999, Turnbull 1974, Evans, Saunders and Cronin 1975, Robinson and York 1977, Roberts 1978, Lippman 1981, Goodall 1996 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission [ATSIC] 2001 [a] pp.27-34, Tomlinson 2003 Ch.6).

The Indigenous Community in South Brisbane

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw large numbers of Indigenous people leaving rural areas of Queensland, particularly missions and settlements. This was due to the fact that the segregation era of the ‘protection’ system was beginning to unravel and more attractive options were becoming available to Indigenous people in cities. As well, following the Arbitration Commission Aboriginal equal pay case in 1967, many farmers forced Aborigines to leave pastoral properties. Both non-Indigenous and Indigenous farm labourers found there was less demand for rural labour as a result of increased farm mechanisation. Many Indigenous people moved to the cities in the hope of finding a better life.

On arrival in Brisbane, Indigenous families frequently encountered racist attitudes when seeking accommodation and dealing with people in authority. Many had relatives or friends living in South Brisbane and such extended kin relationships sustained them till they could get on their feet. Others weren’t so lucky and were forced to camp out under bridges or along the riverbank in places such as ‘the Tank’ (a disused water reservoir). Drinking has been associated with homelessness and the Indigenous community was no exception (Beckett 1964, Tomlinson, 1974, Ch. 3). Drinking in ‘public places’ brings increased police surveillance. Substantial parts of the infrastructure of South Brisbane were dilapidated or in the process of being demolished. Businesses in the area were in decline; entrepreneurial business spirit was in decline. So Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders arriving in Brisbane found it hard to find accommodation and work. They were frequently confronted by racism, police brutality and white indifference at best.

In the face of resistance from the white population, the Indigenous community in South Brisbane demonstrated that they were interested in struggling to confront the reality they faced. In South Brisbane arrest for drunkenness was virtually arbitrary. The police were often more drunk than the Aboriginal people they were arresting. I often saw police, after downing free drinks provided by the publican, walk out to Aboriginal men sitting quietly in the bar, tap them on the shoulder and say: “You’re coming with us.”
“Why?”
“It’s your turn.”
They were then taken out to the paddy wagon.

The most vicious arrest I witnessed was that of a frail old Aboriginal woman who had been drinking and was unconscious on the footpath outside the Palace Hotel. She was picked up by two policemen who dragged her to within a metre of the back of the paddy van (the door of the van was open) then they flung her into the van where she landed with a sickening crunch against the front wall of the van. I lodged an official complaint but was told that the arrest had been carried out in line with official police procedures.

In January 1972, a few days before an anti-racism conference was to begin in Brisbane, the two plate glass windows of the Born Free Club, on which posters advertising the conference had been placed, were smashed by rocks around which Nazi Party leaflets had been wrapped. Notes written on the back of the leaflets threatened the lives of two Indigenous leaders of the Brisbane Tribal Council: Pastor Don Brady and Dennis Walker (Tomlinson 1974 Appendix G). Members of the Nazi Party were subsequently suspected of attempting to set fire to the Club in which 20 people were sleeping at the time.

A detailed account of the self-help efforts of the South Brisbane Indigenous community in the early 1970s can be found in Community Work with the Aboriginal Citizens of South Brisbane (Tomlinson 1974, 1975 [a]). It was a community, which managed to set up its own organisation to confront discrimination. Indigenous people in South Brisbane financed a social club (the Born Free Club), which also provided housing assistance. The Club’s main income sources were: takings from pool tables, a jukebox and barbeques. The Born Free Club organised a major public march to protest against the ejection of Indigenous patrons from its lounge bar; this occurred despite the presence of hundreds of police in the area at the time of the march. The Club met with other business owners and managers and worked with them to end practices, which discriminated against Indigenous people. In 1975 I predicted that my research would lead to further experimentation by Indigenous community workers who, working with their own community, would be likely to have even greater success (Tomlinson 1975 [a] p. 137).

The Born Free Club now runs two Hostels in the South Brisbane area, assists people get access to income support and health services, it has a funeral program designed to help families get bodies back to traditional country for burial and other funeral-related matters. Its staff are active in rights campaigns such as the current stolen wages campaign being spearheaded by Indigenous leaders, supported by Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (Queensland) [ANTaR (Queensland)] and the Queensland Trades and Labour Council.

Single parents

In the early1970s, apart from the Widows Pension, there were no Commonwealth payments for single parents. Those who were not married had to rely on the State Department of Children’s Services (now Department of Families, Youth and Community Care) for financial support. There was no fixed schedule of payments. Discretion and arbitrary moral judgments were the order of the day. This was also true of Federal Social Security at the time: people could be refused pensions and benefits, for which they otherwise qualified, if they were “deemed to be not of good moral character” (Kewley 1973, Jordan 1984). The provisions dealing with “character” and “non-deserving” were not removed from the Social Services Act until 1974 (Whiteford, Stanton and Grey 2001, p. 26)

In 1970 I went to the head office of the Department of Children’s Services and asked what benefits they paid. I was asked on what basis I wanted such information. I pointed out I was a citizen – only to be told that such information was “classified”. It was only when I said I would not leave until the senior officer on duty was prepared to identify himself and declare, in writing that he could not tell me what benefits were paid by the Department that any information was provided. Clearly, these were times when the financial viability of single parents and their children depended on the whim of Departmental staff. There was no concept of rights, eligibility, appeal or guarantee of procedural fairness (Grassroots November 1971, April 1972, Client Power 1975).

Client Power

At this time the State Department of Children’s Services provided assistance to single parents who did not qualify for Commonwealth Social Security payments, such as widows pensions, and controlled the placement of children taken into care. The clients of the Department were not told how their benefit payments were calculated. People in equivalent financial situations were paid substantially different amounts. Tutors in the Social Work Department of the University of Queensland (Cathy Bywater, Lyn Trad and Marg O’Donnell) and social work students worked with me to help organise clients of the Department in order to generate enough power to be in a position to insist the Department at least treated clients in an equivalent situation in a similar manner (Client Power 1975, Tomlinson 1975[b]).

There were many actors in the tableau, which unfolded. There were the officers of the Department of Children’s Services, many of whom saw their role as being to carry out the orders of senior officers. The clients of the Department who felt there were many constraints on them brought pressure to bear upon these public servants. The majority of the staff of Children’s Services was either hostile or indifferent to clients’ needs, but the Department also employed some young social workers that were horrified by the injustices they saw daily. Most social workers working in other agencies averted their eyes from the excesses occurring at Children’s Services. The Australian Association of Social Workers Queensland Branch (AASW [Qld]) had suppressed evidence of widespread Departmental maladministration, which was having major adverse impacts on clients (Client Power 1975 [editors footnote 2]). The staff of the School of Social Work at the University of Qeensland was divided. Some lecturing staff attempted to undermine junior staff and students’ attempts to organise clients of the Department of Children’s Services. Other lecturers such as Harry Throssell were consistently supportive.

The group who contributed most to the change were poor women and their children who, though initially fearful, came to confront not only their uncertainties but also the Department’s Director and Queensland politicians in order to gain some concessions. This group, through their contact with Bill Hayden (subsequently the Federal Labor Party’s Minister for Social Security), played some part in the introduction of the Federal Government’s Single Mothers Benefit in 1973 (Whiteford, Stanton and Grey 2001, p. 26).

Setting up Client Power

I obtained the addresses of clients of the Department of Children’s Services from a source inside the Department. The Department made inquiries about this leak for months and subjected some younger social workers to frequent questioning. The Department approached some AASW [Qld] executive members who attempted to haul me before the ethics committee of the Association. Supporters of Client Power managed to get the matter brought before a special general meeting of the Association where the attempt to discipline me failed.

Many students and colleagues said they would help if “they could be sure that clients of Children’s Services will not get hurt by joining Client Power”. This sort of guarantee is not mandatory in casework services. Social Workers do not say: “I will only work as a caseworker in the Department of Children’s Services if you (DCS) can guarantee no one will be hurt”! Client Power at present is operating on the basis of taking the regulations and asking the department to live up to its own regulations. The fact that social workers could not be certain that individual clients acting in their own interests and demanding nothing but justice would not be hurt should have been sufficient to provoke some effort on the part of these social workers (Tomlinson 1975[b] p.119)

Too many social workers, now as then, spend their day helping clients adjust to an unequal and unjust society. Writers such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1971), Saul Alinsky (1969), Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1971), William Ryan (1971) and Bill Jordan (1973) inspired those associated with Client Power to try to change the way social workers interacted with their clients. This was to be a model where clients would be helped to see that the forces which impinged on them adversely could be confronted.

We visited clients of the Department in their homes and invited them to become involved. Inala, and later Redcliffe (a North Brisbane beachside suburb), were the main organising centres. Meetings were rotated around members’ houses. Office bearers were elected and members were encouraged to recruit other members. Initially, clients had little success at recruiting mainly because they did not want to publicise their low status, namely, deserted wife. Those they called on saw them as relatively powerless and were not attracted to the idea of ‘uniting in weakness’. Clients who were uninformed as to their entitlements tended to see the Department as all-powerful because of the arbitrary manner in which the department dealt with them.

After people had acclimatised to meeting procedures and discussing what was affecting them, they started to identify the things they had in common and the things they wanted to change. Some were prepared to intercede with Departmental staff on behalf of other clients when accompanied by student advocates. Later, the Client Power members advocated for themselves. A six page manifesto (a list of demands and compilation of grievances) was worked through with the membership and then, in 1971, it was widely circulated to politicians, Departmental staff and through progressive social work networks (Client Power 1975). There were demonstrations in the Department’s Head Office and outside Parliament. A three-hour sit-in by mothers, their children and students in the Head Office of the Department only ended when the Director agreed to negotiate with the members of Client Power.

The surveillance of single mothers

One of the most objectionable practices engaged in by officers of the Department of Children’s Services, was the surveillance of clients’ homes in the hope of catching them with a man. If they could find a ‘man in the house’ the officer would cancel the woman’s and her children’s payments.

One male officer according to our informant parked outside one woman’s home every workday for two weeks for at least an hour a day. He even questioned a Housing Commission employee who had been in the woman’s home to fix her stove for a quarter of an hour. He asked him what he had been doing in there. The employee returned and informed the woman. The same Welfare Officer on another day entered the woman’s home and stripped her beds and searched her bathroom for evidence of a man’s presence. He questioned her in detail about a razor, which she used for shaving beneath her arms (Client Power 1975 p. 128).

What was achieved

Many members came to see themselves as people asserting their rights rather than as petitioners waiting for a handout. One member said:

Until Client Power got going, if they did something nice to me I thought they were being kind, if they took money from me I thought they had it in for me… the Department granted one woman a concession she had been trying to get for five years – she rang up the senior clerk, not to thank him, but to abuse him for not paying it five years earlier. Many of the members have come to see that they have the right to try to control their own lives (Tomlinson 1975[b] p.119).

The success which these low income-earning women and their children achieved was most obvious in relation to their sense of taking control of their own destiny but it extended to expressing their common humanity with other single parents who were not entitled to Commonwealth income support payments.

A brief description of underlying issues in progressive community work

When working with any community it is important to identify the negative stereotypes that powerful people hold about that group and then investigate why powerful people hold such negative views about your community. It is important to look at the economic and social drivers that reinforce powerful people’s perceptions. For example, “Aborigines were ‘nomads’ they didn’t have any significant connection with the land, therefore it was a vacant land. We did not steal or invade the land it was never really theirs so we acquired it by discovery, settlement and development – terra nullius”. This, still repeated ‘observation’, manages in the one breath to rationalise the seizure of the land whilst simultaneously denying the theft of Indigenous people’s property rights.

It is then necessary to look at these negative stereotypes from the community’s perspective and to seek out the contradictions between the opposing views. Operating in line with the community’s view of the world, you act to negate the ideas of the powerful. Part of this process is identifying how your community sees itself and trying to understand how powerful people might respond to the community’s perspective of itself.

There are two underlying themes in progressive community work. They are:

  • Work with and not for your community, you are there to take direction from the community, and
  • Operate in solidarity not empathy.

Solidarity is much more than understanding how people feel – it is about the interconnectedness between their wellbeing and yours (the issues raised here are further elaborated upon in Freire 1972, Galper 1975, Bailey & Brake 1975, Corrigan & Leonard 1978, Tomlinson 1982).

The twenty-first century

The struggles waged by Indigenous Australians in South Brisbane and those waged by the women of Client Power during the 1970s have continuing relevance.

The dispute over wages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders stolen by the ‘protectors’ who were appointed by the Queensland Government or withheld by the Government itself cannot be justly resolved when the Government is offering only one-tenth of the missing wages by way of reparation (Kidd 1997). There is a also a continuing inadequate and insufficient supply of housing to Indigenous Australians. In 1970, the cost of the Australia-wide backlog in Indigenous housing was estimated to be $3 billion (Lovejoy 1971). In the 2001-2 Budget the Howard Government promised an extra $75 million over 4 years to assist with the housing shortfall. Geoff Clark pointed out that this “will make little dent in the $3 billion deficit in this area (ATSIC 2001 [b] p.2)”. At this rate of improvement in the availability of Indigenous housing, the Born Free Club hostels and other crisis accommodation centres will be needed forever. In the 2005/6 Budget spending on Indigenous affairs hardly kept up with in ation and the abolition of ATSIC means that non-Indigenous agencies now have total control of funding for Indigenous services.

There are now more Indigenous people in jail than in 1970 (Cunneen 2001) and more dying in custody (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] 2002 Ch.1). The latest Indigenous health statistics would shame any civilised nation. The Census figures show that the average age of death of Indigenous men in the early 1980s was 56. The latest available figures show that the average age of death for Indigenous Australian men is 56 years and 62 years for women. This compares with 76 years for non-Indigenous men and 83 years for non-Indigenous women. In Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory three-quarters of Indigenous male and two-thirds of Indigenous female deaths occurred before the age of 65 years compared with one-quarter of male and one-sixth of female total deaths in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [ABS and AIHW] 2003, p.183).

The Whitlam Government was the first Federal Government to take the issue of Indigenous education seriously. The Indigenous educational allowance, the Aboriginal Benefit Study Scheme, was starting
to address educational inequality until the Howard Government amalgamated the Aboriginal Benefit Study Scheme and the mainstream student study assistance program. The few economic and cultural advantages received by Indigenous students have dissipated – making it harder for them to proceed to tertiary studies. This has led to a drop in the number of Indigenous students attending university since 2000 (Wright 2005).

The need for Indigenous-owned and controlled legal, health, housing educational and community services is ongoing. It is also necessary to come to a just treaty, to negotiate land and other Indigenous rights issues while, at the same time, significantly reducing the socio-economic disparity between white and Black Australia (Tomlinson 2003 Chs. 5 and 6).

Clients of the Department of Children’s Services in the 1970s fought for their rights to be recognised, particularly their right to procedural fairness. Their struggle began just before the welfare state in Australia became more comprehensive, generous and procedurally fair. This period continued until Brian Howe became Minister for Social Security in the Hawke Labor Government. Howe started to tighten eligibility criteria for benefits and required welfare recipients to ‘reciprocate’ in some way (Tomlinson 2003).

The 1996 election of the Howard Government installed a socially conservative and economic fundamentalist regime. Australia today is a more unequal society than ever before (Argy 2005, see also the Australian Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union’s [LHMU] submission to the Senate Inquiry into Poverty 2003). In the financial year 2001-2, Centrelink issued 386,946 breaches against social security recipients – which meant they were forced to live on income substantially below the poverty line (Schooneveldt 2004). The Howard Government has imposed dole diaries, compulsory literacy classes, ‘work for the dole’ and other ‘mutual obligations’ on poor people. The Brotherhood of St Laurence and St Vincent de Paul 2003 report entitled Much Obliged asserts that people who become long term unemployed have so much of their time taken up just meeting the obligations imposed on them that they don’t have time to find work: the report concludes the mutual obligation regime “is failing the most disadvantaged job seekers. Overall the system operates…not as ‘welfare to work’ but ‘welfare as work’ (Ziguras, Dufty and Considine 2003, p.43)”. It is clear that (within the Australian social welfare system) there has been a major ideological shift from a social democratic noblesse oblige to a compelled conservative compact (Tomlinson 2002).

Since 1975 Australia has, as a result of the adoption of economic fundamentalist policies, become a dramatically less egalitarian society (Gregory 2000, Briggs and Buchanan 2000). Once again, we need to develop the sort of partnership between welfare recipients and progressive forces, which made the Client Power, story a success. The 1998 amendments to the Native Title Act in the wake of the Wik judgement, and the deceit and vicious treatment meted out to Asylum Seekers demonstrate the depth of racism, which inspires the Howard Government (Lock, Quenault and Tomlinson 2002). There is an urgent need to build a progressive union of men and women, rich and poor and Indigenous and non- Indigenous to confront this Government’s attack upon our national integrity and to promote the social and economic rights of all Australian citizens.

Bibliography

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Bennett, M. (1957) Human Rights for Australian Aborigines. Bennett, Brisbane.
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Briggs, C. & Buchanan, J. (2000) Australian Labour Market Deregulation: A Critical Assessment. Research Paper 21 [1999-2000], Parliamentary Library of Australia, Canberra.
Cabral, A. (1973) Return to the Source: Monthly Review with Africa Information Service, London.
Campbell, A., Cameron, L. Keats, L., Poulter, M. & Poulter, B. (1958) The Aborigines And Torres Islanders Of Queensland. Western Suburbs Branch United Nations Association, Brisbane.
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Corrigan, P. & Leonard, P. (1978) Social Work Practice Under Capitalism: A Marxist Approach. Macmillian, London.
Cunneen, C. (2001) Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
Evans, R., Saunders, K. & Cronin, K. (1975) Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race relations in Colonial Queensland. Australian and New Zealand Book Company, Brookvale.
Dickie, P. (1988) The Road to Fitzgerald. University of Queensland, St Lucia.
Fanon, F. (1970) A Dying Colonialism. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Galper, J. (1975) The Politics of Social Services. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
Goodall, H. (1996) Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in NSW, 1770-1972.Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, St Leonards.
Grassroots (1971-73) was a community newsletter circulating amongst progressive social workers and leftist in Brisbane.
Greenwood, G. & Laverty, J. (1959) Brisbane 1859-1959. Oswald L. Ziegler, Sydney.
Gregory, B. (2000) A Longer Run Perspective on Australian Unemployment. Discussion Paper No. 425, Economics Program Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, December. http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/ pdf/DP425.pdf
HREOC (2002) Social Justice Report 2001. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney. Jordan, A. (1984) Permanent Incapacity: Invalid Pension in Australia. Department of Social Security, Canberra.
Jordan, B. (1973). Paupers. Routledge& Kegan Paul, London.
Kewley, T.(1973) Social Security in Australia: 1900-1972. Sydney University, Sydney.
Kidd, R. (1997) The way we civilise. University of Queensland, St Lucia.
Knight, J. (1895) In the Early Days. Sapsford, Brisbane.
Koch, T. & Karvelas, P. (2005) “Howard’s new road to reconciliation.” The Australian, 21st May.
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LHMU (2003) Confronting the Low Pay Crisis: A New Commitment to Fair Wages and Decent Work. Senate Poverty Inquiry submission.
Lippman, L. (1981) Generations of Resistance. Longman, Cheshire, Melbourne.
Lock, J., Quenault M. & Tomlinson, J. (2002) Some Reasons Why Australia Should Abolish the Detention of Asylum Seekers. CPACS Occasional Paper No. 02/1, The Centre for Peace and Con ict Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney.
Lovejoy, F. 1971 “Costing the Aboriginal Housing Problem.” The Australian Quarterly. Vol. 43, No. 1, March.
McGuinness, J. (1991) Son of Alyandabu. University of Queensland, St Lucia.
Marchisotti, D. (1978) Land Rights: The Black Struggle. Communist Party of Australia, Brisbane.
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1971) “The Communist Manifesto.” In Mendel, A (ed.) Essential Works of Marxism. Bantam, New York.
Masters, C. (2002) Not for Publication. ABC Books, Sydney.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) (1964) We are Going. Jacaranda, Brisbane.
O’Shane, P. (1979) The Queensland Acts – Australia’s Apartheid Laws? Uniting Church World Mission Justice Fund and Australian Council of Churches, Brisbane.
Petrie, C.(1904) Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. Watson Ferguson, Brisbane.
Pittock, A. (1969) Towards a Multi-Racial Society. Quakers, Sydney.
Piven, F. & Cloward, R. (1971) Regulating the Poor. Vintage, New York.
Reynolds, H. (1999) Why weren’t we told. Viking, Ringwood.
Reynolds, H. (1998) This Whispering in Our Hearts. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.
Reynolds, H. (1996) Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards.
Reynolds, H. (1989) Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards. Reynolds, H. (1981) The Other Side of the Frontier. James Cook, Townsville.
Reynolds, H. 1972 Aborigines and Settlers. Cassell, North Melbourne.
Roberts, J. (1978) From Massacre to Mining. War on Want, London.
Robinson, F. & York, B. (1977) The Black Resistance. Widescope, Camberwell.
Rowley, C. 1972[a] The Destruction of Aboriginal Society. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Rowley, C. 1972[b] Outcasts in White Australia. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Rowley, C. 1972[c] The Remote Aborigines. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Ryan, W. (1971) Blaming the Victim. Vintage, New York.
Schooneveldt, S. (2004) “Do Mutual Obligation breach penalties coerce compliance with government expectations?” Australian Journal of Social Issues. Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 155-167.
Sharp, L. 1952 “Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians.” in Spicer, E. (ed.) Human problems in Technological Change. Russell Sage, New York.
Taffe, S. (2005) Black And White together. University of Queensland, St Lucia.
Tomlinson, J. (2004) “The inherent aw in the concept of ‘practical reconciliation’” Online opinion. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2056
Tomlinson, J. (2003) Income Insecurity: The Basic Income Alternative. http://www.basicincome.qut.edu.au/interest/e-books.jsp
Tomlinson, J. (2002) “How dare we?” in Carlson, E. (ed.) The Path to Full Employment. University of Newcastle, Newcastle, pp. 227-236.
Tomlinson, J. (1982) Social Work: Community Work/ Betrayed by Bureaucracy. Wobbly, Darwin. Tomlinson, J. (1975[a]) “The Blacks in South Brisbane Are Just a Mob of Metho-Drinking No-Hopers” in Throssell, H. (ed.) Social work: Radical Essays. University of Queensland, St Lucia, pp 137- 153.
Tomlinson, J. (1975[b]) “Client Power: Helping clients gain their welfare rights.” in Throssell, H. (ed.) Social work: Radical Essays. University of Queensland, St Lucia, pp. 115-124.
Tomlinson, J. (1974) Community Work with the Aboriginal Citizens of South Brisbane. Wobbly, Darwin. Turnbull, C. (1974) Black War: The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines. Sun, South Melbourne. Whiteford, P., Stanton, D. & Grey, M. (2001) Families and Income: Family Matters. No. 60, Spring/ Summer.
Wright, J. (2005) “More Youth, Less University Places.” Advocate. April, pp.16-17.
Ziguras, S., Dufty, G. & Considine, M. (2003) Much Obliged: Disadvantaged jobseekers’ experiences of the mutual obligation regime. Brotherhood of St Laurence and St. Vincent de Paul http://bsl.org.au/pdfs/MOreportV2.pdf

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Blood on the wattle

“So we must fly the Rebel Flag,
As others did before us;
And we must sing a rebel song,
And join in rebel chorus.
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting,
Of those that they would throttle –
They needn’t say the blame is ours,
If blood should stain the wattle.”

From Freedom on the Wallaby by Henry Lawson.

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Book Review: ‘Last Flight out of Dili’

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Wednesday, 8 February 2006

On January 12, 2005, East Timor and Australia signed a treaty to share equally the revenues of the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field in the Timor Sea. This brought prolonged negotiations to an end but left in abeyance for up to 50 years a final determination of the seabed boundary between these two neighbours. To the uninformed, this might sound like a fair agreement between David and Goliath but the real winner is Australia which will receive the benefits of processing the oil and gas in Darwin.

In addition, there are many who believe the bulk of the hydro-carbon resources in the Timor Sea rightly belongs to East Timor. The Australian Government recently withdrew from the jurisdiction of the World Court, in relation to the Law of the Sea, to avoid the possibility of an international juridical determination on a boundary between our two countries.

Last Flight out of Dili provides a good introduction to relations between Australia and East Timor over the last 30 years. It gives a backdrop against which the politics in our region can be gauged. It is a personal memoir rather than an attempt to present a socio-political analysis and it describes in considerable detail, David Scott’s dealings with East Timor’s Foreign Affair Minister, Jose Ramos-Horta as well as many Australian East Timor activists.

As a personal account, this book has all the directness and vitality that an acute observer of human nature like David Scott can muster. Yet by its nature, it leaves out parts of the story which he did not know. In relation to some of the significant events, David has also relied on what has been written by others and in particular on the Documents in Australian Foreign policy: Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor published by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2000.

He describes several internecine disputes among various factions in East Timor which erupted after the breakdown of the first Coalition Government of Fretilin and the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT) in early 1975. David Scott was there when the Fretilin Government declared independence from Portugal in late 1975. He does not gloss over the brief civil war which transpired just prior to the Indonesian invasion. He provides sketches of many of the bloody disputes between East Timorese factions which occurred at various times in the 24-year struggle against the Indonesian occupation.

Some of the disputes between pro-East Timor activists in Australia, particularly those between members of the Communist Party of Australia and more politically moderate citizens, are discussed at length. David conveys his personal antipathy to Communist Dennis Freney (who died in 1995): the storyline would not have suffered had some of the more indulgent comments about Dennis been omitted. There were, after all, many errors of judgment made by all the factions in Australia during the long fight to free East Timor.

Last Flight out of Dili provides an interesting account of what David Scott terms Australia’s “Four Betrayals”:

  • despatching troops into East Timor during WWII, which ended East Timor’s neutrality and provoked the Japanese invasion of that country, leading to the deaths of 40-60,000 Timorese;
  • Gough Whitlam’s “acquiescence” to the integration of East Timor into Indonesia;
  • not ensuring security in East Timor prior to the Independence vote in 1999; and
  • not protecting East Timorese people from the Indonesian Army and the militias’ onslaught after the vote.

Scott forensically demolishes Whitlam’s justification of his failure to respect the sovereignty of East Timor. He provides detailed accounts of his, and subsequent Australian prime ministers (and their officials), intentional misleading of the Australian public. Anyone who thinks that any Australian prime minister since 1974 has acted with integrity in relation to East Timor would be well advised to read this book.

In late 1998, Prime Minister Howard wrote to President Habibie of Indonesia supporting the idea that the East Timorese be allowed to vote, at some stage, to determine their future. Some commentators have criticised Habibie for his December 1998 “rash” decision to hold a plebiscite on integration or independence in 1999. David Scott provides significant evidence that there was nothing hurried or stupid about President Habibe’s decision.

Last Flight out of Dili is a memoir which is well worth reading. It is an informed personal account by an author who has played an important part for many decades in social welfare and foreign aid circles in Australia. He describes the extent to which the lives of many Australians and East Timorese were affected by the tumultuous events in our near north. This book provides an easily accessible basis for understanding some of the issues which will emerge between our two countries in the years to come.

Last Flight out of Dili: Memoirs of an accidental activist in the triumph of East Timor by David Scott. Pluto, North Melbourne.

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Book Review: Conflict, politics and crime: Aboriginal communities and the police

Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police by Chris Cunneen  (2001) Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.

When I first picked up Conflict, Politics and Crime I thought that Chris Cunneen had gone to a lot of trouble in writing a book for the smallest reading audience in the world – honest cops who wish to improve their understanding of their interaction with Indigenous Australians. On reflection, I realise that this book should have many more readers than this.  Cunneen meticulously documents the role of police, politicians, human service workers and white Australia interactions with the original owners of this land. Human service workers in particular need to understand the interrelated role they and the police played in the dispossession, the incarceration, the criminalisation, and the stolen generations. The history of the police on the frontiers, the history of the social engineers and the history of human service careers are interwoven. More importantly, if human service workers are to play any significant role in limiting the number of Indigenous children taken by white Australia in the next stolen generation they will find this book a valuable companion.

Cunneen sets out to examine commonly asserted views on policing in relation to what actually happened and is happening when police and Indigenous Australians come into contact.  Cunneen asserts that “liberal explanations of policing essentially see the police role as a neutral bureaucratic response to individuals who are suspected of violating the criminal law….The law itself is seen as an embodiment of the popular will formulated through the democratic processes of the parliamentary system and thus as an impartial and universal force for justice” (p.17). At one level this book is a negation of that comfortable suburban view of policing and justice.

Though it is a carefully reasoned analysis of the interrelationship between police and Aborigines, it is likely to be dismissed by those with a white blindfold view of white and Indigenous relationships as a simply rendition of a black armband account of our history.  Such a dismissal would say more about the powers of observation of the reader than those of the author of this book. For a considerable length of time Cunneen has been investigating the interacions between Indigenous people, police, deaths in custody, over-policing leading to inordinate levels of Indigenous incarceration and criminatisation yet under servicing of Indigenous victims. He is a careful observer and he presents an argument which deserves consideration.

Essentially Cunneen’s thesis is that the present disproportionate levels of incarceration of Indigenous people derive out of a combination of the colonial legacy – particularly the brutal role of police on the frontier, the police’s role in enforcing the ‘protection’ system (ch.3), the on- going determination of mainstream society to subordinate Indigenous rights, police culture, racism, the propensity of the police to use terror against Indigenous people and Aboriginal resistance to such impositions (pp. 42-43, 180-190).  Cunneen considers:

of foremost importance in understanding police violence against Indigenous people is the role of the police as a state institution with ‘legitimate’ access to the use of force. That institution has been called upon almost continuously to enforce economic dispossession and to police a racially discriminatory social and political divide. (p.109)

He sees an historical continuity in the role of police beginning with the invasion of Indigenous land and the subsequent dispossession to zero policing and mandatory sentencing of today. Cunneen’s analysis goes beyond single causal explanations and attempts to link historical, structural features of colonialisation with present day socio-economic marginalisation, systemic racism, politico-judicial policy, local policing practices and Indigenous resistance (p. 25).

Cunneen assembles the standard depressing statistics which show increasing rates of Indigenous incarceration, increasing numbers of Indigenous deaths in custody, inordinate arrest rates for Indigenous people, the disproportionate incarceration rates for young Indigenous people in juvenile facilities all of which he links to the failure of the police and other authorities to exercise their discretion to proceed on summons, to provide bail, to utilise diversionary options, or to seriously engage the Indigenous community in a justice process.

Cunneen, in Chapter 5, surveys a number of police killings of Indigenous people, the polices’ use of violence, terror, paramilitary forces and abuse of rights. In Chapter 7 he considers the gendered nature of policing in colonial and present day Indigenous society and attempts to account for the fact that, though most Indigenous populations are over policed, Aboriginal women who are subjected to domestic violence seldom find police willing to intervene on their behalf.

Chapter 8 examines the policing of contested space. Part of the discussion in this chapter will be familiar to youth workers who daily confront low income young people’s contests with police and private security guards over the use of public space in cities. However they may not be as aware of many of the public space questions which daily confront Indigenous Australians which he describes. Cunneen also looks at the cultural divide which separates Indigenous and mainstream Australia in terms of a spatial paradigm.

The attempts by police management to co-opt, incorporate, recruit and otherwise involve Indigenous people in their processes is reviewed in Chapters 9 and 10 revealing the failure of the police as agents for the State to come to a realistic understanding of Indigenous aspirations for justice. Throughout the book he points to a succession of Australian state, territory and federal governments’ failures to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Perhaps the reason these governments have found the task so daunting is as Cunneen notes “The Royal Commission formulated a specific recommendation on self-determination which provides the context for the other 338 recommendations (p.241).”

 

Reviewed by JT, not sure where published

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Bounty hunting

Hey Premier Bligh
decision day’s nigh
welcome aboard, come talk with me:
oh what the heck
let’s walk the Bounty’s deck
and tell me about the deficit
was the loss caused by ineptitude
or just the usual Party shit?

You can drown the Mary River,
you can kill the Eastern Cod
you can split an infinitive;
but can you make it right with God?

Now with the Mary River Turtle
you can flood her nesting sites
you can ignore nature’s beauty,
close your eyes to her delights.

The Mary River Turtle needs protection
to save what remains of her habitat.
She’s threatened – she’s endangered
It’s the truth and that is that.

You may know him as Ceratodus
or the Queensland Lung fish
he’s swum the mighty Mary
for a hundred million years
if you build Traveston dam
it will end in tears.

 Written in 2009 not published.

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Brief look at leaching the poison out of mutual obligation

Noel Pearson’s (The Age  7 May 2002) continuing denunciation of Aboriginal people of Cape York for “substance abuse” and “welfare dependency” has a familiar ring to it. Such an analysis formed part of the stated justification for Archibald Meston’s advocacy which led to the 1897 Protection Act in Queensland. Opium and alcohol were the offending substances at the time. The Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act continued to control every aspect of the lives of Indigenous people living on missions and reserves until 1975.

Dr. Roslyn Kidd and the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action have recorded how the government and protectors controlled Aboriginal workers’ bank accounts and helped themselves to approximately $ 30 million from these accounts. Professors Rowley and Reynolds have demonstrated how the containment of Aborigines on such missions and settlements assisted farming and mining expansion onto land previously controlled by Aboriginal people.

In 1963, encouraged by Oodgeroo and Joe McGuiness, I visited Pearson’s home community of Hopevale and some other communities on the Cape. The initiative-sapping aspects of the Protection Act were obvious in every community visited. At this time, people had to get their local protector’s permission to withdraw money from their own bank accounts, leave their community or to have their children or partner visit them. Such interference in people’s lives eroded their autonomy and undermined their initiative. Several Aboriginal people I encountered told me about enterprises they had wanted to establish but had been prevented from setting up by their protectors. No social security payments were made. People who could not find work on the reserves or on neighbouring properties had to rely on rations doled out by their protectors.

Pearson is correct when he points to the absence of viable Indigenous-owned enterprises in much of Aboriginal Australia. But his analysis totally misses the mark when he asserts that the absence of “a real economy in these regions” can be laid at the feet of either substance use or reliance on welfare payments. Throughout most of Aboriginal Australia the only “work” on offer to 80% of the population is a form of work for the dole called the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP). For Pearson to claim that passive welfare is the problem denies the everyday existence in Aboriginal communities, where they work for their welfare payments, and have done so since the mid-1970s.

Widespread substance use exacerbates social tensions, interferes with labour productivity and increases domestic violence. It has long been acknowledged that in most communities in the Cape region these problems are having a considerable impact on the quality of life. The real issue, which is not being addressed, is dealing with the causes of such symptoms of social dislocation.

Government agents have been present on the Cape for well over a century. They imposed protection from substance use for 80 years. Government and church prohibition did not solve the problem. Government ‘protection’ did not solve the problem. Run-down community health, housing and educational facilities did not solve the problem. Dispossessing Indigenous people of their land did not solve the problem. Allowing multinational mining conglomerates access to whatever part of the Cape they wanted, despite Aboriginal protest, did not solve the problem. For instance, on the 15th November1963 an armed police party shifted the Mapoon people from their land and burned their houses to facilitate bauxite mining.

Given the longevity of government intervention on the Cape, one possible explanation of many difficulties which confront Indigenous people living there is that the present social problems are, at least in part, caused by the way the government has intervened in the past. Governments are reluctant to accept that they share any blame for present failures. The rebuttal often is that governments acted with good intent – therefore the blame must lie with the Aborigines: “Can’t be the Government, therefore it must be the grog and welfare dependency”.

Sanitising the history which accorded Aborigines passive civil rights cannot and should not be used as a convenient attempt to justify the new age mutual obligation ideology.

There are, however, solutions which Australian governments in partnership with the Indigenous people of Cape York could implement. The solutions will vary from community to community but will have some similar components. Adequate housing, education, health, sanitation, water, transport and power infrastructure must be provided as an act of reparation for past injustice and neglect. Employment at decent wages, in socially and ecologically meaningful occupations, needs to be created. People and their culture must be respected. Social security needs to be provided for those unable to work. Adequate funding will need to be provided to ensure appropriate municipal government functions are carried out. Land ownership issues will need considerable reworking.

This solution will not be able to be implemented without significant expenditure. However, the necessary expenditure will provide improved outcomes for Indigenous people on the Cape. Government will benefit by not having to waste money addressing social problems which present policies cause. The current “el cheapo” solutions have not worked. The only people who will lose from adequately funding Indigenous organisations to reinvigorate their communities are those who want to continue to denigrate Aborigines.

Written in 2000 not published.

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Building a land fit for heroes

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Wednesday, 16 March 2005

The Howard Government has set out on an extraordinary adventure which has the potential to tear apart the social fabric of this nation. Howard and his leading ministers have waged a clever and at times subtle campaign in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the electorate. Individually, the items on their agenda are not too surprising, and are in line with some of the Government’s strategy to convert Australians to the true path of the Liberal Party’s particular amalgam of social conservatism and economic liberalism. Many members of the Coalition are avidly counting the number of sleeps till the Government has control of the Senate.

The main components of their agenda are:

  • an escalation of the number of Australian troops in Iraq;
  • a frontal assault on the trade union and arbitration systems;
  • a reinvigoration of the abortion and other conservative social issues debates;
  • the privatisation of Medicare;
  • an expanded imposition of “mutual obligation” to include single parents,
  • unemployed people and disability support pensioners;
  • the insistence that government funded agencies don’t criticise governments;
  • a destabilisation of Indigenous institutions and an extension of the obligations forced on Indigenous community members; and,
  • a continuing preoccupation with locking up asylum seekers in concentration camps.

The confusing jangle of reasons provided by ministers for each of these policies makes it difficult to understand they are connected and provides the illusion that each of them is a stand alone policy. Public mystification is increased by the proliferation of supporting statements by pseudo “experts” from well-funded right-wing think- tanks, a compliant media controlled by rich white conservative owners, a tamed ABC and a government willing to prevaricate, dissemble, distort and lie whenever the occasion requires.

The Labor Party is regularly wrong-footed on many of these issues because it:

  • invaded Iraq in 1991and maintained the sanctions against Iraq until it lost office;
  • lauded economic fundamentalism and started the deregulation of the labour market;
  • invented the mandatory detention policy for asylum seekers;
  • bleated about “welfare dependency” from 1987 till 1996;
  • started social security cutbacks;
  • toyed with Medicare co-charging;
  • cutback funds to welfare organisations which criticised its government; and,
  • announced, in 2004 , it would abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) if it won office.

Some Labor members are as reactionary as members of the Coalition on abortion and other social policies (such as gay marriage). Howard, the master of the wedge, frequently gets shadow spokespersons coming and going and he will be able to continue doing this for as long as Labor refuses to resile from many of its past reactionary policies.

It is important to understand these Coalition policies are connected and to identify the potential longer term losses likely to accrue from their implementation. Short term winners can easily become long term losers in the policy stakes.

The Howard Government has used the bombings of the World Trade Centre and Bali to severely limit Australians’ civil liberties and has conned us into going along with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by asserting that it is all part of a so-called “war on terror”. Initially many citizens believed if Australian soldiers went overseas and killed people the nation would be safer. The use of military and paramilitary police to subdue civil populations here and overseas is the most extreme aspect of the present Government’s control activities.

The Government’s determination to revoke the requirement that smaller firms act fairly when dismissing workers may make some employers happy but such happiness might be short lived. There is a looming shortage of skilled labour due to the failure of government and business to adequately expand education or train the workforce. Employers who unfairly sack employees might find that other workers, whom they want to retain, leave in sympathy with their sacked comrades. It is true that arbitrarily sacking a worker might instil a fear in others that they too might be sacked unless they increase production. However, fear is a very poor motivator in the workplace and frequently leads to reduced productivity. Still the Government believes such changes will have a general disciplining influence upon the workforce.

Government attempts to demoralise and downsize the Arbitration Commission, to abolish State Arbitration systems, and to cut back on workplace health and safety agencies springs from a desire to have no opposition to its pro-employer stance. Attempts to crush the trade union movement derive from the same source.

The revitalisation of the abortion and other socially conservative debates might warm the cockles of the ideologically driven supporters of the Coalition. It may even result in a retreat to the mentality of the days of the back-yard abortions but as such it would amount to a pyrrhic victory. It comforts the misinformed and religious fundamentalists while simultaneously creating the situation of apparent compliance and actual resistance. Yet the Government believes this will move the population in the direction of its social conservatism.

Policies which undermine Medicare and promote private health insurance cover have been sold to the public in terms of shortened waiting lists for those who can afford to go private, thereby removing the pressure from public hospitals. This speedy access for the rich to elective medical services reduces Commonwealth funding to public hospitals in two ways. First, the Commonwealth-State Medicare funding is decreased in proportion to any rise in the percentage of privately insured patients. Second, the $3 billion Federal subsidy which is paid to private insurers could be spent sorting out public hospital waiting lists. The further we proceed down this “American health system” path the more likely it is that public health services will decline and we will find that gaining access to a public hospital will be near impossible for less-well-off people.

The number of social security breaches by recipients peaked in 2000-2001 when 386,946 breaches were made. Some of the poorest Australians, mainly unemployed recipients, had their social security payments reduced or cancelled resulting in increased homelessness and despair. Once the Government has control of the Senate after July this year, it will move to reduce by a third the number of disability support pensioners and will impose further obligations on lone parents. Many families will have their lives disrupted but this will provide the Howard Government with sufficient funds to give tax cuts to the rich. It is the moral equivalent of making a living stealing money out of blind men’s cups. And we are morally complicit by allowing the Government to do this.

Since the 1960s, governments have attempted to discourage criticism from welfare agencies by threatening to cut their funding. The Howard Government has honed such “don’t criticise the government” policies to an art form. This means that potential sources of social justice advocacy are silenced.

The Government and Opposition both declared they wanted to abolish ATSIC. The Opposition intended to replace ATSIC with an agency controlled by elected representatives in line with the spirit of the ATSIC Act. The Government selected a group of well-to-do Indigenous people to advise it four times a year. Former Social Justice Commissioner Bill Jonas deplored replacing a body elected in a national Indigenous poll with appointed advisors. He saw this as being in breach of Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination which Australia has signed and ratified. It certainly increases Government control of Indigenous matters.

The Government is in the process of “mainstreaming” Aboriginal services as part of its stated policy of “practical reconciliation”. Indigenous people, the Human Rights Commission, the Aboriginal Medical and Legal Services and a host of anthropologists, welfare workers and scholars have pointed out that it was the past failure of mainstream agencies to service Indigenous people adequately which is the major reason for their current poor health and low socio-economic position. Mainstreaming services to Indigenous Australians without offering them a choice of Indigenous service agencies is cultural imperialism and simply a way to sanitise governmental neglect. It also removes a potential source of advocacy for Indigenous people. However, it does pander to the social conservatism of Coalition supporters.

The Howard Government’s commitment to incarcerating asylum seekers has driven it to argue in the High Court that people, like Peter Qasim, who has been in refugee concentration camps in excess of six years and who can’t be returned to Kashmir, should be confined indefinitely. The Government continues to detain children in such camps despite the fact that doing so risks causing permanent mental health problems. The preoccupation with incarcerating asylum seekers makes it difficult for Government’s ministers to explain the treatment meted out to Cornelia Rau in the punishment cells at Baxter.

Australians who want peace abroad and social justice at home need to draw the connections between each of these policies as part of the struggle to build a united opposition to the Howard juggernaut. We need to show how a diverse group of people is adversely affected, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, by such policies. We need to show how the social fabric of the nation is being destroyed and we need to build a coalition of resistance – to build into that resistance the idea that the struggle for one is the struggle for all. For too long:

We held our wallets to our chest
and said that I’m alright Jack
and to hell with all the rest.
[Eric Bogle]

If we can mobilise the 50 per cent of employees who are in casual, part-time or in precarious employment, the 3 per cent of the population who are Indigenous, the 25 per cent of workers who are trade unionists, the 40 per cent of families who receive family allowances, the 20 per cent who are in poverty, the 5 per cent who are officially recognised as unemployed, the 10 per cent who are recently arrived migrants and refugees, the 5 per cent with severe disabilities, the 5 per cent who are gay or lesbian, the 10 per cent who vote Green, the 38 per cent who vote Labor, the socially progressive, the environmentally conscious, and all the other decent people in this country we would have a majority and could in Eric Bogle’s words: “Build a land that’s fit for heroes and for you and me as well.”

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Can you recall?

First published Al-Moharer 1/11/2004 Vo.13 No.198.
http://www.al-moharer.net/moh198/j-tomlinson198.htm

also by Green Left Weekly 3rd November 2004. p.25. Issue 605.

also by Synaptic Graffiti Collective 20/4/2005
http://scart69.net/synapticgriffiti/Pages/can yourecall.html

Awarded the monthly Westender Bent Books Poetry Prize for November 2004

I remember that smell,
from when I was a good German.
I had a lovely uniform,
with lightening strikes on the collars –
I was stationed at Buchenvald.

I too, can remember that smell
I was a guard at Auschwitz.
I remember the sad faces
of the frightened, hungry children.

I also remember that stench,
my father told me about it,
when they killed the Palestinians
and drove others from Jerusalem:
but I also smelt it in Jenin and Balata,
Gaza, Ramallah and Khan Yunis –
when it came my turn to serve.

That miasma haunts my nostrils
since I hid in a church in Rwanda.
The priest had said it was safe,
and yet he led them in,
with hate in their hearts and
machetes in their hands.

I too, can remember that smell
in the cemetery of Santa Cruz
when they fired on students.
And at Suai where they murdered
as many as they could –
even the priest and the nuns.
Their red and white bandannas
and their TNI weapons –
just after we voted to leave Indonesia.

I also remember that stench
from Biak, to the New Guinea border
where Kopassus kill and torture.
The TNI shoot people
for raising the Morning Star
their flag of independence.

I smelt that fetor
in the daisy cutter, cluster bombed
buildings of Baghdad;
and the detonated tombs
of the Tora Bora caves.

I remember the odour of death
in the shell-shocked ruins of Grozny,
and in the cities of the disappeared
throughout Chechnya.

From the smoke stacks of Auschwitz –
to the shallow graves of West Papua,
to the burnt out houses of Darfur,
to the corpses rotting in bulldozed refugee camps in Gaza,
the smell is the same,
the same dreadful smell,
is the same.

 

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Can-do Campbell

The majority of members of the Newman Government are ecological philistines. The opening up of National Parks and Conservation areas in the North of the state in order to graze starving cattle instead of organising culling or fodder drops lacks foresight. Starving stock are gobbling up future generations’ heritage. The dishing out of thousands of gigalitres of water rights in the north and western parts of Queensland will endanger ecosystems and repeat the mistakes of the Murray-Darling river systems. Putting farmers in the box seat when it comes clearing vegetation will in many cases destroy much of the capacity of the land to provide important habitat for endangered species. We will soon be back to the days of “If it moves –shoot it. If it doesn’t – chop it down.”

written prior to July 2013 – not published

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Challenging state aggression against Indigenous Australians

Sub_Action

Chapter in

Subversive Action: Extralegal Practices for Social Justice, edited by Nilan Yu and Deena Mandell, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Toronto, 2015.

In September 1973, a 7 year-old Aboriginal girl, Nola, was collected from her white foster parents in Darwin and returned to her family who lived on a remote Northern Territory outstation. For years her Indigenous parents had unsuccessfully sought her return. I was the social worker who handed the young girl to her father and was subsequently suspended from the public service. My suspension resulted in the first strike by social workers in Australia. I will describe Nola’s return to her family and reflect upon the initial aftermath of Nola’s reunion with her community and the impact it had on social workers and others involved.

In the latter part of this chapter, I will discuss the relevance of Nola’s return to the on going struggle of Indigenous Australians to retain custody of their children and look at some wider social justice policy issues.

Setting the scene

After working as a social worker in the Department of Social Security in Brisbane for 6 months, in 1965 I transferred to the Welfare Branch (1) of the Commonwealth Department of the Interior in Darwin. The population of the city at the time was about 20,000, many of whom were public servants or armed services personnel. Significant sections of the population had Greek, Asian, continental European or Aboriginal origins and many families combined some or all such origins. People of total Aboriginal descent (2) lived mainly on Bagot Reserve opposite the air force base or on the fringes of the town. About a kilometre down the road from Bagot Reserve, the conservative Aboriginal Inland Mission ran a series of cottages in which a foster couple would care for children of part-Aboriginal descent (Cummings 1990). It was run along lines not dissimilar to the Kalin Compound of the 1930s described by Xavier Herbert in his semi-biographical Poor Fellow My Country. Children of part- Aboriginal descent were separated from their mothers by police or Welfare Branch officers and taken to Kalin Compound to be raised as whites in large dormitories – their Aboriginal mothers were not allowed into the Compound. Speaking Aboriginal languages was forbidden. Some mothers managed to keep in touch by talking to their children through the back fence.

The full extent of government and institutional policies of removing children of partial Aboriginal descent from their Aboriginal communities became known in the 1990s as the ‘stolen generations’. The century long policy of removing children of part- Aboriginal descent was finally revealed by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families in their Bringing them home report in 1997. But this is getting ahead of the story….

In 1965 the Federal Liberal Coalition Government was firmly committed to the policy of assimilation. Assimilation was defined at the 1961 meeting of Federal and State Ministers in charge of Aboriginal Affairs:

The policy of assimilation means in the view of all Australian governments that all Aborigines and part-Aborigines are expected eventually to attain the same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community, enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians. (cited in Pittock 1969, pp.12-13).

In 1965 the definition was changed in response to pressure:

…so that now the policy officially seeks (rather than means) that all persons of Aboriginal descent will choose to attain (rather than are expected eventually to attain) a similar (rather than the same) manner and standard of living. The words ‘observing the same customs’, are omitted, and so too is reference to their ‘being influenced by the same beliefs’. (Pittock 1969, p. 13) (italics in original).

After 23 years of unbroken rule by the conservative Liberal coalition, the Whitlam Labor Government was elected in December 1972. Whitlam had campaigned using the slogan ‘It’s Time’ and not the least of the foreshadowed changes were in the area of Aboriginal affairs and social welfare more generally. Gordon Bryant, who for years had been an executive member of the Federal Council of Aboriginal Advancement, was made Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. The incoming government spoke about introducing Aboriginal Land Rights and replacing the policy of assimilation with one of integration and self-determination. It was considered that under such policies Indigenous Australians would be free to choose the aspects of other cultures they wished to adopt and those of their own culture they wished to retain.

In Darwin, in 1965, I found the Government’s policy of assimilating Aborigines was dramatically on display in the five stages of galvanised iron Kingstrand housing on Bagot Reserve. The first stage was a tin shed with a dirt floor and external fireplace, gradually evolving to a concrete floor, then a concrete floor with a floor covering. The advanced houses had internal stoves and cupboards to store food and clothing, floor to ceiling walls, beds and mattresses and even toilets. The superintendent of the Reserve was supposed to assess the level of understanding of European sophistication incoming Indigenous families had ‘achieved’ and assign them accordingly to one of the stages. Families would progress through the various stages. The actual process of assigning people to a house was much more haphazard than that. There was an added contradiction in that families were encouraged to eat in a communal dining hall.

During the 1960s the long-serving Director of Welfare, whose brother-in-law was a federal minister, closely supervised the minutiae of life on Aboriginal settlements.

I had come to Darwin fully convinced that an individual (neo-Freudian or psychodynamic) casework approach was the most useful approach. In 1968 I returned to work at the Department of Social Security in Brisbane, convinced there was little that individual casework had little to offer Indigenous people in the Territory. The 3 years I spent in Darwin convinced me that the focus of social work should be directed towards working with the community to solve the issues they identified. The senior people in the Welfare Branch rejected such an approach. After returning to Brisbane I undertook an Honours degree in Anthropology and Sociology and a Research Masters Degree in Social Work that involved working with the financially impoverished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community of South Brisbane.

I transferred back to the Welfare Branch in May 1973 after it had been moved to the newly established Department of Aboriginal Affairs. An energetic Canberra public servant had been installed as Director of Welfare. It appeared that exciting times lay ahead.

The story of Nola (3)

Nola was born in September 1966 at an outstation on the Cadell River, 50 kilometres from the Aboriginal settlement at Maningrida in Arnhem Land. She had arrived some weeks prematurely and was taken by her mother, Nellie, to Maningrida hospital and then flown to Darwin hospital. Initially Nola suffered intermittent bouts of ill-health and spent her first 8 months either at a government-run children’s home or at the hospital, depending on her state of health.

The hospital’s senior social worker made several requests for the Welfare Branch to locate an Aboriginal family with whom Nola could be fostered. The Branch at the time would only place children of Aboriginal descent with close relatives and often would refuse to pay foster allowance or would pay a lesser amount than they would pay a white foster family. The justification provided to me at the time was that it was common for Aboriginal families to take in children of relatives and in any case it cost less to raise an Aboriginal child in an Aboriginal family than in a white one. There was no active attempt to recruit Aboriginal families into the foster program and the Branch found no Aboriginal family for Nola.

The hospital’s senior social worker wanted Nola out of the government run home because she feared that Nola was not receiving sufficient individual attention and could become institutionalised and so she recruited a white foster family, Mr and Mrs Brown. It was several months before anyone from the Welfare Branch called on the Browns to see how they were managing with Nola. On 4th July 1967 the hospital’s senior social worker wrote to the Director of the Welfare Branch as follows:

It is again stressed that the need for long-term plans for Nola is imperative, so that when she is sufficiently robust to return to Maningrida, adequate arrangements are available for her care. The possibility of arranging for her to be cared for at Maningrida by another Aboriginal woman could perhaps be kept in mind, depending on her own mother’s ability to care for her. (File No. AW363)

Nola’s father Jack had initially agreed to the temporary fostering of Nola but in early 1968 when she was about 18 months old Jack considered she should be well enough to come home and demanded that Nola be returned to her family. The superintendent of Maningrida, John Hunter, urged Nola’s return. But reserve superintendents, whilst being the Welfare Branch’s senior personnel on the spot, were under the control of the Branch’s Director. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Director of the Welfare Branch ignored superintendents’ views unless they concurred with his own.

In July 1968, on the second visit by an officer from the Welfare Branch, the Browns were advised that Nola would shortly be returning to Maningrida. Mr Brown approached the acting Director of the Branch, Ted Evans, who instructed that Nola was not to be returned to her family until a full review was carried out. There was nothing on file to indicate the need for a review. The senior officer at Maningrida had urged Nola’s return. A review was not carried out. The welfare officer who had been visiting the Browns was told she would not need to visit so often. She had made only two visits to the foster child in 13 months. For several years, following Ted Evans’s direction, the only contact the Browns had with the Branch was the receiving of the fostering payment.

In 1969 Nola’s brother Jack John was born. He too did not thrive, and was brought to Darwin where he stayed until early 1973. The Nursing Sister and Superintendent Hunter reported that on his return to his family Jack John progressed satisfactorily and suggested that if Nola was to be returned it should be as soon as possible.

In May 1973, I had been promoted to a class 2, acting 3 social work position in charge of welfare services in the top half of the Northern Territory. In June of that year Elizabeth Lovett, the class1 social worker who had been working with Jack John and Nola, brought their files to my attention. I put plans in place to ensure that Nola had some contact with her 12 year old brother Leo who was brought in from Maningrida. When Elizabeth Lovett informed Mr Brown that Leo was coming to town so that Nola could have contact with members of her family he said he did not think that was a good idea as Nola had ‘No time for the Aboriginal race’. Despite such advice the visit went ahead.

Mr Brown feared that despite his earlier success in convincing Ted Evans to stop Nola’s return to her family, the situation had changed and Nola might really be going home. He therefore contacted Gordon Bryant, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. The Minister’s secretary asked me to meet the Minister in Alice Springs. The Director of Welfare told me to stay in Darwin and he went to Alice Springs in my stead to discuss the case with the Minister. Gordon Bryant ordered that Nola should not be removed from the Browns but that Jack should be assisted through Aboriginal Legal Aid to initiate an action in the Supreme Court against the Branch to regain custody of Nola.

I discussed the options open to us with several social workers (but not Miss Lovett because she had to work closely with the Browns). It was agreed that if there was public consternation I would be the ‘fall guy’ who acted alone. I met and discussed the case with Bill Ryan, the Director of Aboriginal Legal Aid, and with one of Aboriginal Legal Aid’s lawyers. We were looking to reunite Nola with her natural family and for a way to do it that would distance the Minister and the Director from any direct responsibility for the return of Nola. In addition, Bill Ryan was the son of a Gurindji mother and a white father. Methodist missionaries on Croker Island had brought him up and as a result he was strongly opposed to Aboriginal children being raised in non-Aboriginal families. I had known Bill before he became Director of Aboriginal Legal Aid when he had worked with the Welfare Branch as a welfare officer.

Weighing on my mind was the obvious public service and political pull the white foster family had already displayed. There had also been a couple of court cases in the previous decade where Northern Territory Aboriginal parents had not been able to regain custody of their child after a relatively short period of separation (for details see Tomlinson 1978, Ch. 6). Another major influence was the considerable number of Aboriginal children who had been removed from their Aboriginal communities on one pretext or another, being brought up in a white environment. We were determined that this would not happen to Nola.

My commitment to challenging European views about what was in Aboriginal people’s best interests began in 1963 whilst an undergraduate student I had spent a month visiting several Aboriginal communities in North Queensland at the suggestion of an Aboriginal leader associated with the Federal Council of Aboriginal Advancement (Taffe 2005). I sat with community leaders and discussed the issues that troubled them most. The taking of children, low wages, poor rations, white police and superintendents refusal to listen to them and the racial discrimination they encountered from other Australians topped the list. By the time I returned to the Territory I had worked full time for two years on a community work project with the Indigenous community of South Brisbane and was committed to work with the Aboriginal community on the issues that troubled them. I was then and am now indebted to the many patient Indigenous people who made a considerable effort to teach me to understand events from their perspective. Recovering children from the white system was a major priority and we hoped that Nola would be the first of many to return home.

A plane ticket was organised to bring Jack in from Maningrida supposedly so he could initiate lodging his Supreme Court action against the Branch. There was no doubt in the mind of those associated with the plan that Nola and Jack would return to Maningrida in an Aboriginal Legal Aid chartered airplane because we trusted Bill Ryan to carry through on the plan.

Elizabeth Lovett collected Nola from the Browns’ house and informed Mr Brown that Nola would be seeing her father. When Jack, Leo and Nola turned up at the agreed meeting spot, I was meeting Jack for the first time. Jack said to me, ‘I have my daughter back. Now I will take her to Maningrida’. At this point I should have declared that his statement formally terminated the fostering arrangement and that Nola was back in the custody of her parents who were her legal guardians. (Prior to this point of time, this declaration would not have effected Nola’s return to her family because the Branch’s Director would not have let it happen and there would have been no way of getting Nola back to her community. I don’t know why I did not seize that opportunity. I suppose it was confusion about involving Elizabeth and the desire to stick strictly to the agreed plan. So I told Elizabeth I would take Nola back to the Browns and the plan unfolded as we had agreed it would.

I took Jack, Nola and Leo to rendezvous with Bill Ryan and then filled in a couple of hours to give Bill – along with Jack, Leo and Nola — time to be on his way to Maningrida en route to Cadell River (Nola’s home community). Later I went to the Browns’ house and told Mr Brown I had left Nola at Bagot Reserve and subsequently could not find her. I left a note at the Director’s house saying something similar.

Everything was pretty quiet for the next 13 days and it appeared we had been successful. By 13th September, Superintendent of Maningrida, John Hunter, had advised the Branch’s head office that Nola had taken to Maningrida ‘like a duck to water’. Crown Law advised (according to a file note) that it would not be possible for the Branch to have Nola returned to Darwin ‘…in view of the fact that the custody of Nola apparently lay with her mother and natural father’ (File No. AW 363).

The Press

After the fortnight’s lull all hell broke loose. The story broke on the front page of The Australian under the banner ‘Aboriginal girl abducted from Foster Parents’ (4). In the stories that followed, Nola was supposed to have been raped, married to an old man, stabbed with a spear and all of this was supposed to have occurred at the hands of her own people. None of these allegations was true.

Around the world many journalists wrote of Nola and her return to Cadell River. Most accounts were lurid regurgitations of the original line run in The Australian. American and Dutch people sent the Minister money to buy her back, believing that Nola’s family only wanted her back so that they could sell her. The libellous statements printed by the media would have been inconceivable had they been made describing whites because they would sue for libel.

By far the most comprehensive and accurate journalistic account of Nola’s removal from her European foster home was written by Gerri Willesee and was published on 12th November 1973 in a most remarkable place: Woman’s Day (pp. 2-5 & p.13). Willesee had (a month after Nola’s return) spent a fortnight living in Nola’s community at Cadell River as well as speaking with her European foster parents in Darwin. Willesee described the outstation as a hive of activity, with art and craft work, hunting, fishing, cultural ceremonies and a 30 hectare fruit and vegetable garden. She wrote that ‘Despite Press reports to the contrary, there is no communication problem between Nola and her family. Nola is slowly learning Burera (her Aboriginal language) and her brothers all speak English as well as she does (p.5)’.

Willesee makes the point that ‘The loss of Nola has been made worse for the Browns by their belief in many completely untrue stories about Aboriginal people and customs’ (p.13).

The aftermath

On 5th October 1973 five public service charges, (institutional charges outside of the civil and criminal justice systems) were laid against me and I was suspended from duty. The charges related to refusing the directions of the Minister and misleading the Director of the Welfare Branch. On 8th November 1973 I was reinstated but demoted to a class 1 social work salary. On 2nd January 1974, following the Branch’s refusal to reinstate me to my original position, the Branch social workers, with the exception of Elizabeth Lovett and one other, staged the first social work strike in Australia. It lasted 3 weeks. (Elizabeth felt that I had erred in not giving the Browns an opportunity to say goodbye to Nola.) The striking social workers had several other demands, namely: replacing the grocery voucher system of welfare relief with a cheque system, codifying the basis on which determinations of granting or refusing welfare assistance were made, employing more social workers, introducing 50 new Aboriginal welfare officers to work along side the social workers and –giving foster payments to Aboriginal families looking after children other than their own at the same rate as other foster parents. In the short term none of these demands were met.

Gordon Bryant, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, instructed his Departmental Head in October 1973 that in future ‘… there should be no placement of Aboriginal children with European foster parents except in an emergency and then only for short periods’ (Telex ABAUS85262 to ABAUS AA62471 on 22/10/73). (Whilst this was one of the demands of the strikers, this instruction has never been fully implemented.) This Minister also issued the Aboriginal Legal Aid Service with the instruction that henceforth ‘…it must confine itself to its role of legal assistance to Aboriginal people and general subjects such as land rights.’ Bryant’s instruction limiting the Aboriginal Legal Service power to support political and social initiatives, which had been set down as part of the Service’s original charter, interfered with Indigenous Australians capacity to become truly self-determining.

That Bryant, who had for so many years championed unpopular Aboriginal causes, argued that an Aboriginal girl should stay in the custody of a white foster family when her natural parents were legally entitled to have her returned, presents a bit of an enigma. He was under attack from many public service and parliamentary opponents and was soon to lose his portfolio. He became Minister for the Australian Capital Territory in late 1973.

After Bill Ryan announced he had been involved in transporting Nola home, several white Aboriginal Legal Service board members launched an attack on him and the directions the Aboriginal Legal Service had recently taken. Ken White (2005), an experienced journalist who worked in Darwin at the time, in a chapter entitled ‘The Abduction of Nola Brown’, details some of the activities of the two white lawyers working for the Aboriginal Legal Aid at the time. He suggests that after witnessing the ferocity of local white opinion about the return of Nola, the lawyers joined in the criticism of Bill Ryan. Some of the whites associated with Aboriginal Legal Aid called a meeting of the governing council when Bill was out of town. The governing council decided to replace him with a more compliant Director less likely to upset the wider community.

Following the uproar in the press about Nola’s return to own community, most States of Australia undertook detailed reviews of all the Aboriginal children in foster care. This was only the start of the process and it took determined vigilance by Aboriginal child care agencies and other Aboriginal individuals and agencies to keep the various State-run children’s departments from slipping back into running a white fostering system for Aboriginal children. Ken White (2005 p.70) notes that even after Gordon Bryant’s instruction that Aboriginal children should only be fostered with Aboriginal families the Adoption section of the Welfare Branch in the Territory interpreted the instruction to apply only to children of total Aboriginal descent.

Nola returned to her traditional country and from reports I received over the years was happy to be with her family. She eventually married and had children, none of whom needed to be looked after by the State.

It’s all in the past people say

It is important to ask whether what happened to Nola was something that happened only in the Northern Territory in the sixties and seventies or whether it occurs elsewhere.

There are two parts to this question and the Bringing them home report clearly shows that the removal of Aboriginal children from Aboriginal communities, particularly those of partial-Aboriginal descent, occurred in many parts of Australia throughout the 20th century and most probably before that. The film Rabbit-Proof Fence dramatically recounts such removals in Western Australia whilst dealing with the senior administrators of the removal policy in a most sympathetic manner.

Given the widespread nature of the policy of such removals, one has to ask what it was that drove whites to remove Aboriginal children from their communities. The motivations driving these removals were no doubt varied: sometimes it was missionary zeal and sometimes a desire to ‘save’ the children from the impoverished living conditions their parents were forced to endure following their displacement from traditional land. At other times white fathers had disappeared and Aboriginal mothers had died or become incapacitated. There was a clear government policy to remove Aboriginal people from their land to make way for white settlers. It was believed that eventually Aboriginal people would die out and that removing children of partial-Aboriginal descent would remove one obstacle to the extinction of an Aboriginal presence.

The second part of the question is: Could it happen in the second decade of the 21st century? The short answer is that Aboriginal children are being fostered in white homes now because of the failure of governments to attract sufficient Indigenous families into the foster care programs and to adequately fund them. As fostering costs rise, governments are becoming more interested in allowing foster families to adopt children.

Welfare workers in New South Wales are removing Aboriginal children from their homes in numbers far greater than during the Stolen Generations and the recruitment of Aboriginal staff has done nothing to stem the tide… 4,000 Aboriginal children are now in state care in NSW.

This compares with about 1,000 Aboriginal children in foster homes, institutions and missions in 1969.

Black children are being removed at 10 times the rate of white children…the primary reason for removal is not abuse but neglect (Overington 2008 p.1).

In addition, half the children in custodial institutions in Australia are of Indigenous descent. Aborigines comprise only 3 per cent of the Australian population. ‘Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show the national rate of Aboriginal juvenile incarceration has risen to a startling rate of 31 times the non- indigenous rate, up from 27 times in 2008’ (Robinson 2013). The Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda puts the rise in young Indigenous people being in prison and juvenile detention down to over-policing of Aboriginal kids and harsh sentencing by country magistrates (ABC Summer Breakfast 2013). I would argue that widespread racism directed towards Aborigines has to be recognised as a major contributor to a situation where, for example, 70% of the juvenile prisoners in Western Australia and nearly all juveniles in Northern Territory prisons are Aboriginal (Robinson 2013).

Social workers are employed in the child welfare, court and corrections system, they are implementing policies that are resulting in increasing numbers of Aboriginal children being taken out of Indigenous communities. This is happening because they are not questioning the directions of their superior officers. They are unmindful of the importance of the Nuremberg Judgement, which stated that following orders does not absolve one from responsibility for one’s actions. They should be working along side Indigenous leaders to maintain children in their own communities. Social workers are citizens who should not divert their eyes from what their country is doing to Indigenous Australians. There are many governmental policy failures involving Indigenous Australians in the first 2 decades of the 21st century, listed below, which Australian social workers should attempt to address.

I go along with the suggestion often attributed to Thomas Jefferson that “When injustice become law, resistance becomes duty”. However, there are limits as to what an individual or a group of social workers can do. The need to maintain the capacity to continue working in the profession means that being criminalised has to be avoided. But this does not justify connivance or silence. Speaking out and refusing to obey directions, may mean your promotional prospects are greatly diminished but your dignity is enhanced and you will be able to face yourself in the mirror the next morning.

Challenges facing Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians have some similar difficulties to other poor Australians in obtaining adequate health, disability, educational and other services. The present government admits that there is a 17 year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and other Australians. Australia is the only developed country in the world not to have eradicated trachoma, a disease almost exclusively confined to the Indigenous population.

Australia will, in 2013, start to introduce a national disability program. By its nature it will commence in the cities so people living in rural and remote regions will be the last to see the benefits flowing from this program. Aborigines, in particular, but also other rural and remote dwellers, have more disabilities and poorer health than city dwellers (Tomlinson 2003 Chs. 6 & 7).

Shortly before the 2007 election, the Conservative Government launched an ‘Intervention’ into 73 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, ostensibly to safeguard Aboriginal children from sexual abuse or neglect and to protect women from being assaulted. The police and the army were sent into remote Aboriginal communities. The Government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act in order to quarantine half the social security payment made to Indigenous people. The amount quarantined was placed on a ‘Basics’ card that could only be used for approved purposes at certain stores. Compulsory town leases and health checks were also imposed. (Altman and Hinkson 2007).

Labor came to power in 2007 promising to continue the Intervention for a year before reviewing it. A committee was set up, headed by Aboriginal leader, Peter Yu, that recommended winding back most of the compulsory aspects of the Intervention except where it could be proven that Indigenous people were incapable of handling money. Labor ignored the report; rather, Labor has moved towards providing incentives for the use of the Basics card whilst allowing people to request they not be required to have a Basics card. At the same time this government has expanded the parts of the Northern Territory and elsewhere in Australia where Aboriginal and other ethnic groups are cajoled into a paternalistic administration of their social security. It has reinstated the Racial Discrimination Act and so cannot specify any particular ethnic group that is forced to participate. What it does instead is select geographical areas where particular ethnic groups predominate and legislates to force all residents of those areas to participate in its paternalistic form of social security.

Some Aboriginal people have supported the introduction of the Basics card but many are critical (Concerned Australians 2010). Between 2007 and 2011, I wrote 7 articles opposing aspects of the Intervention for the e-journal On Line Opinion(5). In these articles I pointed to the long history of colonial intervention allegedly aiming to save Aborigines, particularly children, from their community when in fact governments and others were pursuing other ends.

Many have asked why governments from the 1970s with their billion dollar budgets dedicated to Indigenous affairs have not been able to lift Aborigines out of poverty. Professor Altman (2010) suggests that despite the assertions of this and previous governments that they are implementing evidence-based policy, they are actually imposing ideologically driven policies which link Indigenous violence to economic marginalization, inadequacies in Aboriginal culture and ‘passive welfare’. Altman further asserts that right-wing think-tanks, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, are closely linked to senior public servants driving the Intervention (pp.266- 7).

The Northern Territory Government report, which the Conservative Government claimed had inspired the Intervention, was released on 15th June 2007. The 500 pages of legislation, which supported the Intervention, were introduced on 7th August, passed without amendment and given Royal Assent 10 days later. It would not be possible to draft 500 pages of legislation in that time. Altman is correct; there is a powerful group of neoconservatives in the public service and on both sides of politics, in the media and in right-wing think-tanks, working hand in glove. These racist forces are driving both the government and the opposition.

It is the task of all anti-racists, including social workers, to confront and expose them if Indigenous Australians are to receive anything approaching social justice.

Acknowledgement:

I wish to thank Penny Harrington for her extensive editorial assistance and continuing encouragement.

Footnotes:

(1) This Branch had several name changes post 1973 but throughout this chapter it is referred to by its original name.

(2) Since the 1980s people of Aboriginal descent who identify as Aboriginal and who are accepted by their community as being of Aboriginal are considered to be Aboriginal. The terms “total Aboriginal descent” and “part-Aboriginal” are used here to denote a distinction that was widely maintained in the Northern Territory in the 1970s.

(3)  Many people of Aboriginal descent do not use the Aboriginal name of those who have died. As some of the people referred to in this story have passed away, the Aboriginal names of people of total Aboriginal descent are not mentioned here.

(4)  The author was Jim Bowdich who had lost the editorship of NT News to Murdoch’s News Limited in 1972. As part of the sweetener, Bowditch was appointed a News Limited stringer for The Australian in Darwin, paid for any stories the newspaper accepted. His wife was of part-Aboriginal descent.

(5)  The articles dealing with the Intervention are categorized by the journal as relating to ‘Indigenous affairs’.

Bibliography:

ABC ‘Summer Breakfast.’ Australian Broadcasting Commission. January 9, 2013.
Altman, John, and Hinkson, Melinda, eds. Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia. North Carlton: Arena. 2007.
Altman, John, and Hinkson, Melinda, eds. Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of NSW. 2010.
Bowditch, Jim. “Tribe takes girl, 7, from family to be child bride.” The Australian. September 20, 1973.
Concerned Australians. This Is What We Said: Australian Aborigines give their views on the Northern Territory Intervention. East Melbourne: Concerned Australians. 2010.
Cummings, Barbara. Take this child:  1990.
Herbert, X. Poor Fellow My Country. Sydney: Collins. 1975.
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Bringing them home. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.
Native Title Act 1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Title_Act_1993
Online Opinion ‘Tomlinson author’ http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=1984
Overington, Caroline. “Aboriginal foster generation exceeds Stolen Generations”. The Australian. November 24, 2008.
Pittock, Barry. Towards a Multi-Racial Society. Sydney: Quakers. 1969.
Rabbit-Proof Fence 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit-Proof_Fence_(film)
Robinson, Natasha. “Black sentences soar as juvenile jails become a ‘storing house”’. The Australian. January 5, 2013. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national- affairs/indigenous/black-sentences-soar-as-juvenile-jails-become-a-storing- house/story-fn9hm1pm-1226547889340
Taffe, Sue. Black and white together FCAATSI: the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 1958-1973. St Lucia: University of Queensland. 2005.
Tomlinson, John. Is Band-Aid Social work Enough? Darwin: Wobbly Press. 1978.
Tomlinson, John. Income Insecurity: The Basic Income Alternative. 2003. http://www.basicincome.qut.edu.au/interest/e-books.jsp
White, K. True Stories of the Top End. Briar Hill: Indra. 2005.
Willesee, Gerri. “Nola – Black Beautiful and Happy – Is home with her own people.” Woman’s Day. November 12, 1973.

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Change: Reform or Reformism

“Have you rehabilitated yourself?”
(Arlo Guthrie Alice’s Restaurant)

Change – means to alter.

Busharama 2002

  • The White House today announced it has frozen the assets of all Pretzel manufacturing companies in the US and has arrested the managing directors of all Pretzel companies until it can rule out the possibility that they conspired with Bin Laden in an attempt to assassinate President Bush.
  • An unnamed  White House source said that “It is daily becoming obvious that the quality of American Presidents is declining. We thought it was bad enough when we found out Gerald Ford couldn’t walk and chew gum simultaneously but  President Bush hasn’t learnt to eat and breathe at the same time.”

Reform – (Macquarie Dictionary)

  • re-form verb. to form again.
  • reform noun. 1. the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, etc.: social reform. 
  • Reform 4. to restore to a former and better state; improve by alteration, substitution, abolition, etc. to cause (a person) to abandon wrong or evil ways of life or conduct. 6. to put an end to (abuses, disorders, etc.)  7. to abandon evil conduct or error

reformation

  1. the act of reforming.
  2. the state of being reformed.

 

Reformism

noun:

  • the policy of bringing about reform within the means and limitations of the existing system , usually without radically changing the current political system of government.

Do politicians always use the words: 

  • change
  • reform, and
  • reformism

in line with the Dictionary’s definition?

Ok where are we up to?

If we are really attempting to usher in a

  • major,
  • significant,
  • radical change

which will, if achieved, substantially improve the conditions for members of your community.  Then, and only then, should you talk about reforming the system.

The Tax ‘reform’ Package

  • IF THEY LIE ON THE COVER  can you believe anything on the inside?

Save our ABC

  • Ill informed response:  “Why? I did not know the alphabet was under challenge.”

The Politics of Social Services  by JEFFRY H. GALPER, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1975
READ – CHAPTER 5

We suggest that the reformist approach to social change cannot be successful in solving the basic problems that we face. The fundamental reason for this failure is that reformism accepts, works within, and ultimately supports the very values and institutions that must be challenged and changed if we are to develop a humane society.

Reformism is frequently equated with incrementalism.  This is the notion that planned change in a society will and should occur through modest changes, each a small departure from previous practice.

However, incrementalism ought not to be taken as a defining characteristic of reformism. With very few exceptions, all change, including change that could be called revolutionary, consists of relatively small departures from previous practice.

Revolutions themselves are as often the public and symbolic recognition of a variety of changes that have taken place in the society over time as they are the moment at which the change actually occurs.

Revolutionary change will necessarily have many incremental aspects.  Radical change strategies conceptualize and utilize incremental changes quite differently from the way that reform strategies do.

Nonetheless, the incremental nature of change efforts does not necessarily distinguish reformism from other approaches.

Radicals who do not understand the necessarily incremental nature of radical work may disparage their own efforts when the results are not cataclysmic. It is important for radicals to realize that, by and large, only small changes are possible at any one time.

It is the nature of these changes, as well as their “size,” that distinguishes them from reformism.

Reformism also ought not to be equated with strategies of change that are nonmilitant or peaceful. Some efforts at reform, historically and currently, have been quite militant and have utilized conflict and even violence as a strategy.

For example, union struggles for higher wages may be militant and may involve violent conflict, but they are not, as a consequence, revolutionary.

In addition, reformism ought not to be characterized as a strategy that is “reasonable” – in contrast to radical change which has been labelled “unreasonable”. The appeal to reason has too often been an appeal to compromise principles of social justice and human dignity for the sake of some more easily achievable but unfulfilling or destructive outcomes.

What equating reform with feasibility has meant in practice is that reform, like politics, has come to be seen as the art of the possible. However, what is considered possible often bears (only a) remote resemblance to desirable change and should not be graced with the label of reform.

What then are the distinguishing characteristics of reform? Reform is “a movement aimed at removing political or social abuse,” or an effort “to make better by removing faults or defects,” or by “putting a stop to abuses or malpractices or by introducing better procedures.”

A radical analysis points to underlying causes and unifying themes in the approach to social problems and social change.  Whatever the particular point of entry, the radical is always trying to reach the more basic dynamics and more basic strategic levers for change in the whole society through the particulars with which be or she is engaged.

That is why I keep talking about:

  • racism
  • ageism
  • urbanism
  • sexism
  • classism, and
  • the way we treat people with disability as central features which structure/organise our society.

The radical engages in particular struggles also, but does so with an eye toward creating greater political consciousness and political organization in the process, with the long-term aim of changing the system that produces the particular problems.

The liberal philosophy in which reformism is rooted does not contain a developed vision of the good society or a means for achieving such a society. As a consequence, reformism tend to focus, on the moment, on ongoing processes, and to see the future as being simply an elaborated version of the present.

The underlying limitation of reformism is that it fails to understand that social problems are rooted in the social structures of society and, consequently, confuses dealing with the symptoms of problems with dealing with the problems themselves.

Because reformism accepts the basic values and structures of the society, it has no way to work back from manifestations of problems to the causes of problems.  Furthermore, it shares liberalism’s belief that desirable social outcomes can emerge from the competitive interplay of the disparate units of society.

This belief in the beneficial effects of competition and the negotiated settlements of interest groups is a fundamental part of the ideology of reformism.  Because it is not a critical ideology, it is not adequate to the tasks before us.

Staying together in the struggle

  • The final reason why radical political consciousness is so essential is that in the absence of this consciousness, the gains that reformist groups seek may result in a loss of resources to other equally exploited groups and in the failure to consider dilemmas common to all.
  • As long as the analysis and struggle are at the level of trying to obtain some resources for a particular group or in a particular area of need, a victory will most likely mean the redistribution of scarce goods to one group and away from some other equally needy group.

Pluralist  Crap

The entire functionalist school of Amerikan political science/ sociology

  • pontificated about democracy being built on competition amongst the various “plural” interest groups.
  • Not much in advance of Hobbs
  • life is nasty brutish and short
  • the struggle of one against all.

To the extent that reformers support these struggles, they support the historical technique of the forces of the status quo that keep the disadvantaged in society fighting with one another.

  • For example, efforts by reformers and by clients to create changes in the welfare system have aggravated the tensions between interest groups in the society that, hopefully, will someday come together to make common cause against the larger patterns of economic maldistribution in the society.

A critical question for all of us is how the achievement of a more decent society can be pursued in the context of day-to-day life.

Reformism tends to isolate change efforts from one another, to play them off against one another, to fail to work from the specific case to the general issue.
Reformers often want to do things TO people
or to do things FOR People.
Radicals want to do things
WITH people.

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Children’s tears

The river’s fast it’s wide and deep
It’s filled with tears the children weep.

I stopped on the West Bank awhile
long enough to see angels smile.
The stones thrown were meant to test
The bullets fired ripped through my chest.

Travelling to West Papua
I tried to raise the Morning Star.
Kopassus fired on the unarmed crowd –
bodies draped in a bloody shroud.

As bombs rained down – I ran
through the villages of South Sudan.
Children’s hunger and their fear
here, there, everywhere.

The river’s fast it’s wide and deep
It’s filled with tears the children weep.

Politicians pray for peace
and for all the wars to cease
but this is just duplicity
it can’t hide their hypocrisy.

And the ones who made the bombs
it is you who fills the tombs.
You’re the ones who get the gold
for each and every weapon sold.

Money made from your arms trade
guns and bomb and hand grenade
may buy you your latest thrill
but remember – weapons kill.

The river’s fast it’s wide and deep
It’s filled with tears the children weep.

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CHOGM cancelled because of Christmas

As part of a briefing for CHOGM Buckingham Palace staff advised the Queen that the Howard Government had, under changes to its Migration Act, excluded a number of islands from Australian territory for the purposes of that Act. Her Majesty enquired as to which islands had been removed. She was advised they included Ashmore, Cocos and Christmas.

The Queen then rang Howard to tell him that as Australia had cancelled Christmas she wasn’t coming to CHOGM.

Written 2007

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Colin Powell and Ari Fleischer responding to remarks by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix that his teams had not yet found a smoking gun in their six weeks of inspections in Iraq

 

When we came down the stair today
We saw a gun that wasn’t there
It wasn’t there again today
That’s why we must blow Saddam away.

Written 2003

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Community management

Paper given at the National Community Legal Centres Conference, Canberra, 2 May 1992

The terms ‘community’ and ‘management’ have the capacity to be contradictory. Perhaps we should start by trying to get some understanding of what is meant by these terms.  For conservatives the community is a naturally evolving arrangement of individuals brought together in an unplanned manner – organic.  Liberals and social democrats see communities providing a balance of rights for individuals as various pluralist interests compete.  Socialists often speak about community interests and the will of the majority as meaning virtually the same thing.  These brief descriptions are elaborated on in “Towards a socialist concept of community”. In that paper I set out a far more sanguine view of the ‘helpfulness’ of communities than the descriptions provided today.

This leaves us with the problem of defining what we mean by management. In the stereotypical 20th century Australian firm management is control of the workers by authority figures.  Management in some community agencies is collective. In others it is more like typical business management, and in other agencies it is virtually non-existent.

If we are going to talk about community management we need to have some concept how community leaders and /or community representatives are derived from the community. This has been a contested issue for community workers since the 1940s.  Do they somehow naturally emerge as the conservatives would have us believe or are there more deliberate processes involved?  It is even possible that some community representatives are selected by community centres (even staff of centres) not because they are representatives of, or leaders in the community but because they’ll fit in with the prevailing ideology and management style of the community agency.

Now, I have not been able to check this out, but there has been a rumour circulating in some quarters for a while that some community representatives have been chosen for no other reason than that they’ll support the chairperson and/or the chief executive officer of the agency. I know this would not happen in any of the centres represented here today – but…

Whether your centre’s management style derives from a Stalinist or a collectivist base or anything in between there are issues such as consent, approval, compliance and opposition. This is not to say that every centre is a hotbed of unrest as lawyers struggle with clerical staff and social workers with administrators: while the community representatives strive to enhance their individual power at the expense of staff and other representatives on the management committee,or that staff only come together to protect their perquisites. But it does happen in many agencies.

Why do we want community involvement?

Irrespective of whether the centre grew out of a community-based struggle to develop the service or was plopped in there by some well meaning government initiative – designed to prop-up an inadequate local membe. Funding bodies (government or non-government) get that warm inner glow when they can be conned into believing that the centre has considerable community support. The easiest way to con the funders is to point to the involvement of the community in the running of the centre.

The other reason why we as workers in community centres want community representatives involved in our centres is that most of them provide useful insights into how we are perceived in the area. Provide insight into ways we could improve our service, emerging needs in the district, innovative ideas for handling old problems and often a huge amount of unpaid work for the centre. The perception of what constitutes useful advice and what is just bloody-minded interference is occasionally dependent upon whether one is the giver or the receiver of the pearls of wisdom.

Whose centre is it?

Well it’s not just the staff’s, nor just the management committee’s. Saying it is the community’s is not an answer because without the committee and the staff and the funding bodies it would not exist.

Why have the centre anyway?

The provision of the service to the community is the raison d’etre for any community-based centre. That’s cool. But the greatest temptation for any profession – legal, social work administrative – is to deny or fail to recognise that a problem exists until there is a professional solution “discovered ” for it.

Let’s look at the merry-go-round. People ask for services, centres ask for funds, funders ask for accountability (fiscal, political, social) which often results in funders having control of both the clients and the community. The issues which are selected will depend on taste, fashion and style of the centres and the funders.

Whose agenda?

After the Black Deaths in Custody report many citizens have become aware that Aboriginal people in this country, with the exception of those who were flogged to death, have not received a fair crack of the whip. This insight seems to still be eluding most state and many federal politicians. Now I’ll accept that we cannot un-rape, un-murder, un-plunder all the Aboriginal victims of the last 200 years but we could put in place equitable national land rights legislation, recognise Aboriginal sovereignty, and pay adequate restitution for our theft and violence as part of the process of building a national reconciliation between the original owners of this land and the invaders.

But we as a nation will not do this even though we realise that the present Australian racism is a direct result of our exploitation: what we will do is try to limit the extent and intensity of police violence against. Aborigines by better funding of legal aid services. We will refuse to accept that violent police are simply agents of economically powerful white interests and of the invading community generally. This is just one example of the way in which community centres accept the prevailing definitions of good taste, fashion and style as they attempt to define problems and community solutions.

The greatest social security fraud in Australia’s history is not some petty amount of money knocked off from the Department of Social Security by someone who was not entitled to it – but the Social Security system itself. Our national income maintenance system is sold to the Australian people as a comprehensive safety net, as adequate to sustain the needy and as caringly administered.

We know that the levels of payment of Social Security are grossly inadequate, we know that through the increasingly targeted administration of benefits, the extended waiting times, the pitiful youth rates etc. that many people in severe financial hardship are denied benefits and that those who are granted payment are forced to eke out an existence at or below the poverty line.

We do not work in centres adequately funded to pressure governments to introduce universal income guarantees set at levels capable of sustaining the entire population in dignity – instead we work in centres funded to support the unintended victims of the system – those who have been excluded from payment incorrectly.

We should be working to help the intended victims of Social Security rather than having to spend most of our lives assisting those whom the social security system just ran over accidentally.

The reality

Ok, we are not funded to address the big questions in our society like ending racism and class exploitation, housing the homeless, creating employment for the workless, finding meaning for the alienated, abolishing military machines, providing a decent guaranteed minimum income for all, developing universal affordable child care nor working towards a system in which we would aim to take from each according to their ability and provide to each according to their needs.

We will in the short term just have to be content to do what we can with what we have. But if in the process we come to forget these larger agenda then it can really be said that community management has succeeded for the economically powerful but failed the people.

So what makes a good committee

A good committee:

  • pays attention to detail without getting lost in the minutiae,
  • sets a clear agenda, sticks to it but not in such a rigid way that prevents community or staff inputs being built In as circumstances emerge, oversees what paid employees are doing.
  • takes an interest in improving staff salary and working conditions.
  • is involved and works co-operatively with staff, helps out when there are back-logs, assists with fund-raising. etc.
  • is supportive of stair efforts but prepared to be constructively critical, accepts that the capacity to be extraordinarily insightful after the event should be part of a review process not criticism, backs staff in when things get hot.
  • has the capacity to care about the Issues and outcomes in hand without losing sight of the main game, is committed to social justice and natural justice,
  • is directed to finding a way forward, conceptually orientated without being lost in some academic wank, basically accepts Glasser and Strauss suggestion outlined in The Discovery of Grounded Theory that it needs to express what it aims to do in language and concepts which will be understood by the bulk of community members,
  • involves clients of the service in management, speaks the language of the community and is committed to simplifying conceptual complexity. This is basically a process of doing with rather than doing for.
  • is partisan with the community,
  • involves people with disabilities and disadvantage in management.
  • is committed to a liberationist approach,
  • is composed of members with a breadth of ideas.
  • acknowledges the importance of funders without being captured by funders.
  • publicly defends the centre whilst working on constructive ways to improve it.
  • is open to review without that degenerating into constant change,
  • has an appreciation of difficulties without letting that circumscribe ideas of where the centre might finish up,
  • develops an appropriate/open/friendly complaints mechanism.
  • finds legitimate ways of rewarding community. members, and, finally and most importantly,
  • finds ways to rather than reasons why not.

Some Issues

In the time left to me. I’d like to explore a couple of these points in more detail.

Hopefully none of us work in centres where there are boards like there was on a NSW blind society a few years back – where the Chairperson was happy to go on the ABC’s AM program and argue that there was no place for visually impaired people on the board because they weren’t experts in blindness like the doctors, teachers, social workers and community representatives who constituted the existing board. In this particular case there were a couple of people with a severe visual impairment who were so lacking in appreciation of what was being done for them that they had the temerity to also appear on AM, stand for election, and horrors of horrors – win.

But many of us work in centres where the existing management committees don’t oppose people with disabilities or disadvantage being on the management committee. Some might even encourage such persons involvement. They might even sincerely desire it. But you don’t get a Lamborgini just by wanting it. Nor do you get people with disabilities or disadvantage onto management committees just by wanting it.

It is necessary have a significant number on the management committee committed to put in place a support process which will:

  • recruit members of the community who experience disadvantage or disability.
  • provide resource staff to support such people on the committee.

It is easy enough to alienate any community member who gives their time voluntarily but patronising people from disadvantaged backgrounds or people with a disability will always anger and usually result in people dropping out.

If your centre really is a community centre aiming to blunt some of the obvious disadvantage in your area then what better way to identify the issues and problems involved than to have people who are living, it help you fight it.

So having heard this pearl of wisdom (didn’t I tell you it depends whether you are, providing advice or receiving it) you are all going to rush back to your centres on Monday morning and proclaim “Bloody Tomlinson reckons we’ve got to put on resource people to work with people in the community so that we can-get Aborigines, migrants, people with an intellectual disability, he psychiatrically distressed. and the poor -onto our management committees.The administrator will look at you and wonder whether you are setting yourself up for some long overdue stress leave. Just to reinforce that you’ll go on to say “and what’s more that bastard says that once we’ve got them on the management committee we’re going to have to find appropriate support people to ensure that they are enabled to play a creative role on the committee.”

Well unless you know where the fish are biting and reckon you need some stress leave this is not quite the way to go about it. The lawyers and the social workers and your existing community and staff representatives might feel that they are in fact providing some useful advice and might be a trifle milled at your coup attempt.

It takes time to get the necessary resources in place to provide adequate support for those representatives from your community who are not rich enough to volunteer their time, who don’t have the physical strength to drag their body up the three flights of stairs to where the committee meetings are held, who haven’t-got the money to pay for a baby sitter for their visually impaired child, or who can’t see any point in coming to meetings when they can’t read and understand the minutes with out help. Maybe you won’t get all you need to make the process work smoothly but unless you are sincerely committed to the process and have staff and management committee support for the process, don’t do it. A half-hearted effort will not enhance your centre and will result in just another alienating experience for the people you try to involve.

Power differentials

The final point I wish to address is one of power differentials on committees. It matters not a dot whether it’s lawyers, doctors, administrators, or just a self-opinionated fools who believe that the answer always comes out of the lips of one section of the management committee at all times. If this happens you’ve got a problem. Now doctors are experts at medicine and one person in ftve is in hospital because of some mistake made by doctors. Lawyers know a lot about the law – ask the innocent in jail about that. Administrators have the inside running on how to make offices work ask the staff rep. When it comes to self opinionated fools ask the electors of Wills.

No profession and no individual has all the answers to even the basic questions in an individual’s life. The community worker or the social worker will see aspects of community life and difficulties, lawyers will have a different slant on it, the administrator will identify other facets, the community representatives will know about the local community or community of interest. Other stall will also have something to contribute.

The art – and it is not a science – of good community management is to pool the combined wisdom of the management committee rather than seeing one profession or faction as the font of all wisdom.

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Compelled

The current trend is towards the compelled society. Mutual obligations and breaching  recipients for minor “failures” for those they can’t criminalise. Jail for those they can criminalise.

The more detailed the requirements, the more extensive the range of requirements, the greater the likelihood that people may not be able to totally comply with every single aspect therefore they may be placed in a situation where they are technically in breach – have no access to other funds  and have to choose between continuing to receive a benefit for which they don’t totally qualify  or go without income.

Written circa 2004

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Competing views of the benefits of higher education: who gains the most?

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Tuesday, 20 April 2004

The student sit-in at the Queensland University of Technology and student protests at Griffith University did not deter the councils of those institutions raising the level of Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) by up to 25 per cent. The Howard government’s education legislation, which came into effect in December 2003, allows universities to determine the level of HECS payable for each of their courses.

The Government and Opposition have opposing conceptions of the best way to expand university education. Education Minister Brendan Nelson proposes an extension of the user-pays system for students coupled with further deregulation of university management, whereas the Opposition has argued for increased government spending and increased access to university education for students on the basis of “merit”. The Government intends allowing an expansion of full-fee paying places up to 50 per cent of approved student places.

Nelson’s vision for the future is far more compatible with the general direction of economic fundamental managerialism that has been the prevailing ideological force in Australian politics since the early 1980s. Labor’s prescription for fixing the economic woes in the tertiary-education sector is compatible with social democratic thought. In Simon Crean’s 2003 Budget reply speech there were also lingering reminders of the Whitlam government’s desire to provide free universal education for all who would benefit from it. Mark Latham claims to share similar educational aims. The Labor/Liberal divide on education derives out of differing conceptions as to who benefits from receiving an education.

Minister Nelson’s “user pays” plan for tertiary education is founded firmly on the belief that the individual student who succeeds in gaining a university degree is the prime beneficiary of the education. This is because university graduates on average are more highly paid than those who don’t get to wander the hallowed halls of academe. Coupled with this conception of who benefits from gaining a university education is the typical utilitarian liberal view about obligations that flow from the receipt of such “benefits”. Such views derive out of the liberal understanding of implied “contract”. That is, liberals believe that those who receive the benefit have a duty to meet the associated obligation.

Minister Nelson has further argued, in relation to the obligation of graduates to repay the government for the education they received, that those who have never been to university should not have to foot the educational bill for those who do. This suggestion is popular with many struggling to meet the living costs of suburbia. The other two prongs of Nelson’s approach to education also are compatible with the economic fundamentalist mindset and they are that individuals should help themselves and should self-insure against risk.

Labor’s vision of who should pay and who gains from university is grounded in a very different understanding of the benefits that flow from education. It is most crassly put in the statement that “education should been seen as an investment not a cost”. Clearly there are benefits that can flow from education but education is also very expensive – though, as the commonly repeated remark reminds us, “education is not nearly as expensive as ignorance”.

Jenny Macklin, Labor’s Shadow Minister for Education, is aware that the person who gains a university degree is a direct beneficiary of that education and may well receive a higher income than a non-university trained citizen. Social democrats generally believe that those who directly benefit from a societal contribution have an obligation to return something to the society. Labor introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) scheme during 1988 in an attempt to recoup part of the cost of university education from the student who received the education and Labor has no intention of abolishing that scheme now.

While acknowledging the advantages that generally accrue to the individual graduate, social democrats believe that other benefits flow from both technical and university-level education to the employers of graduates, citizens who gain from access to improved products and services and to the society more generally. They are committed to increasing the level of education in society because they believe that an informed society is better equipped to make decisions about the future directions for a country than one that is largely uneducated. It was this belief that inspired the expansion of the Schools of Arts, Mechanics Institutes and Worker Education Associations throughout much of Australia during the 20th Century and which in turn led to the expanded TAFE, community college and university systems.

Acknowledging that the society generally benefits from having an educated workforce provides social democrats with the basis on which to justify the government’s contribution towards educational costs. What was widely acknowledged during the Whitlam period but has more recently receded from the public consciousness is the fact that, even if tuition costs are met entirely by the government, students and their families make a significant contribution to their own education. First, they forgo the income they might have earned while they are gaining an education. Second, they buy books and other equipment required for their study. Finally and most importantly, they contribute their time and mental labour to gaining and analysing knowledge. Many students also assist, without payment, fellow students who are struggling with academic pressures. In short, even in what is commonly referred to as a “free education” students and their families make a huge contribution in terms of time, effort and money to their society.

Upon graduation some of them will contribute to finding a cure for cancer, heart disease, AIDS, SARS and hopefully Malaria, Ebola and other diseases reeking havoc in the third world. Some might work to save this country from environmental degradation. Others might help governments move towards introducing more humane social services systems. Still others might write the great Australian novel, play or opera. There will be many journeymen who keep the engineering firm going, maintain accurate accounts, nurse in hospitals, teach in schools, or who find other ways to make a contribution to Australia’s development.

If the Australian community had a better appreciation of the benefits that derive from education, then taxpayers might be more prepared to educate every Australian who would benefit from further educational opportunities and to search for an equitable method of paying for it.

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Con Census: Tuesday’s farce is just the latest in a long line of outrages

First published in New Matilda.
Posted on August 14, 2016

Breaching your privacy is core government business these days.

The Turnbull Government with all its usual arrogance dismissed the calls for greater privacy protection for individual data and to postpone or reverse decisions to hold identifying data in excess of four years.  It had intended to add to the personal data collected in the census whatever other information it had collected on individuals from Centrelink, Medicare, health departments and God knows where ever else – a sort of ‘Australia Card’ on steroids.

You don’t have to be paranoid to believe that slime bags, like the Attorney General George Brandis, not only want your metadata, but anything else they can collect in order to facilitate keeping their captive populations servile.  From ASIO, ASIS, Borderfarce, and secret police, the various shadowy defence force intelligence units are all out there engaged in surveillance of one kind or another.  Add CrimTrack, the pseudo spooks who hide in security/intelligence units in universities and in right wing think tanks – they might not contribute much in terms of actual information but can be counted on to obfuscate, deflect attention, explain away and cover-up the front line agencies infelicities of style or sheer brutality.

Should you have any doubt about the level of viciousness of what these spooks are capable, you only have to look at how they treat refugees and asylum seekers incarcerated in our off shore concentration camps in Nauru and Manus.  They combine to cover up the violence our governments inflict in our name, they hide the sexual assaults of women and children. They turn back asylum seeker boats and even handover asylum seekers directly to troops of the countries from which they fled.

If this was not the case then why is it necessary to have laws that make it an offence to describe what is happening in these concentration camps and on vessels at sea. Why do they do everything they can to prevent journalists getting to Manus and Nauru?  Ministers in the last four Australian Governments have authorised the carrying out of crimes against humanity and they should be taken before the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, and made to account for their cruelty to asylum seekers, arriving by boat, in Australia.

They should also be held to account for the continuing discrimination and subjugation of many Indigenous Australians in rural and remote Australia. They should have to answer for what was done in the Northern Territory Intervention.  Now I know that many of you will say they didn’t mean to do it, that they are just hopeless, that they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pub.  And to you I say yes, they are hopeless and yes, they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pub.  But I would add that simultaneously they are overwhelmingly a mean-minded bunch of lying bastards who should be tarred and feathered.

http://newmatilda.com/2016/08/14/con-census-tuesdays-farce-is just-the-latest-in-a-long-line-of-outrages/

 

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Concentrating on incarceration in Darwin

They go with their families to the Mindil Beach Markets
grab some food, watch some Aboriginal dancers
and then wander over the sand hills to the beach
to see the sun setting over Fannie Bay.
It is almost as if they are just like other Territorians.

The next day they put on their uniforms
and drive to Don Dale juvenile prison
where they strap children in restraint chairs
and put hoods over their heads for hours on end.

Other young people they place in solitary,
yes solitary confinement for weeks at a time
with no running water in their cells.
Sometimes they smash young children to the ground
or strip them naked or both.

They have even been known to
spray tear gas into their cells,
when the children have no chance of escape.
The Chief Minister sometimes says he didn’t know
but at other times says he was told
and that he had seen most of the footage.
97 per cent of juvenile prisoners in the NT
are of Aboriginal descent.

There are others who do similar jobs
those who run the adult prison
where 84 per cent of inmates identify as Indigenous.
The Prison is 70 kilometres down the track,
no public transport runs to the prison.
This makes it near impossible
for families from the bush
to visit their relatives locked up there.

There are still others who work at Wickham Point.
It is an asylum seekers prison outside of Darwin
where people who have arrived by boat
are warehoused until the Minister for Immigration
can find a reason to send them
to concentration camps on Manus or Nauru.
Sometimes he has to be content with
returning them from where they fled.

Both Labor and Liberal Territory governments
have supervised such regimes.
Both Labor and Liberal Federal governments
have funded such regimes.
Lawyers, advocates, and reporters have spoken out
but they were ignored until
the Four Corners program showed the TV footage.

Have we become so morally bankrupt
that stories of atrocities against minors,
violence against the first nation people,
the poorest people in this invaded land,
and gross mistreatment of asylum seekers,
fleeing persecution and war,
can be brushed aside with such nonchalance?

Many of the people who do the bashing
are poor whites with few other opportunities
who do the bidding of “their betters” unquestioningly.
They can’t afford to lose their job,
they have families to house and feed.

But the people they scar and maim,
those they terrorise, have families too.
Many of those who oversight
such a callous disregard of vulnerable people
are supposed to be addressed as the Honourable.
What a farce.
There is nothing honourable
in what they do.
There is nothing honourable
in their dereliction of duty.

Written 1/8/2016.

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Concentrating on the camps

I stare through the dust and flies
at the remnants of the lies
they told about Woomera:
and about why they needed Baxter
and why they must keep Manus open
and how Nauru is saving us.

Written in 2004 but not published.

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Concentrating on the contradiction

Written 14/3/2002 not published

At 8.25 am the Parliamentary and News Station of the ABC reported that the Israeli Army had ordered its troops to stop inscribing numbers on the arms of the 1000 plus Palestinian prisoners it had seized when it invaded refugee camps on the West Bank. The decision to stop the practice was inspired by an Israeli Member of Parliament who reminded the Army that the practice of inscribing numbers on the body of detainees was reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

At 8.30 am on the ABC Radio National Religion Report, Jeremy Jones – a leading member of the Australian Jewish community  -was arguing that Australians, when referring to the detention centres in which Australia holds asylum seekers, should not refer to them as concentration camps because such terminology evoked images of Nazi concentration camps. He was not at all phased when reminded by the ABC presenter that the term concentration camps was first used in the British Parliament to describe the detention of Boer women and children by Lord Kitchener during the Boer War in 1901.

Tyranny wherever it occurs must be resisted. Ideological commitment has the capacity often to blind us to the things our governments do in our name. Semantic quibbles are a distraction. The Australian Government’s holding of asylum seekers behind razor wire in concentration camps in remote parts of this country is a crime against humanity.

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Coppers kill

Please remember all those that coppers kill,
we are bashed, maimed and shot
for a copper’s thrill.
We’ll remember every mother’s son
and while we do that, they haven’t won.

Written in 2007 not published

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Creating change

“It is from the champions of the impossible rather than the slaves of the possible
that evolution draws its creative force.”

Barbara Wootton

In a World I Never Made. Allen and Unwin, London, 1967: 279

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Creative leadership

Management where I work confuses:
activity with productivity,
stupidity with ingenuity,
compliance with integrity.
The rest of us just hang on to the rim
in the hope that
as the fluid swirls round
we won’t get sucked into the vortex
of their inanity before
disappearing into their brain drain.

Written in 1998

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Darwin

Chorus:
I left my heart in Darwin.
Yer, I left my heart in Darwin.
I left my heart in Darwin, when I left.
I thought my heart was gone when
I left my heart in Darwin
When, I left my heart in Darwin
When I left.

It’s the sun sets at East Point
and the barbies on the beach.
The yachts that swing at anchor in the Bay.
It’s the driving monsoon rain
and every battler’s pain.
Airfares home, always out of reach.

Chorus

It’s the losing two horse race
when you were off your face
betting on a colt, when you should have bet the grey.
Then in the next race
betting on the mare
she trundled home some time late next day.

Chorus

It’s politics and land rights,
country roads and bouncing cheques
keeping uranium buried in the ground.
Well we had a night with Tracy,
it was rather racey,
I was drunk and didn’t make a sound.

It’s the flocks of Magpie Geese
and the tourists that we fleece;
Whistler Ducks, goannas, crocodile.
Catching Barra from the shore
just near the Border Store
is sure to make the bloody tourists smile.

Chorus

It’s the red and orange sky
all the friends who said goodbye
while walking on the beach at Fannie Bay.
For every mate who said “Hooray”
someone else said “Gi’day”
when you walked along the beach at Fannie Bay.

Chorus

When will we understand,
just who owns this land
from Alice Springs all the way to Fannie Bay.
My friends who owned this land
before the white man came
own Kakadu and Uluru and now can have their say.

Chorus

There’s no beg your pardon.
You’re going to leave your heart in Darwin.
You’re going to leave you’re heart in Darwin, when you go.
Oh, there’s no beg your pardon.
You’re going to leave your heart in Darwin.
You’re going to leave you’re heart in Darwin, when you go.

                                                                (with Peter Hancock)

 

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Deliberations in the Australian Cabinet

How many have to die
before you’ll try
to save those left?
The vote’s been taken
a people forsaken
as we play around
with diplomatic niceties;
please pass the cucumber sandwiches.
The United Nations’ compound under siege
the Red Cross is at a loss,
it can’t explain
what happened to its refugees.
The militia have been asked to refrain,
but it’s all in vain;
please pass the cucumber sandwiches.
We could send in peace keepers
to try to halt these grim reapers.
But it’s a ploy which might annoy
our friends the generals,
and what would it achieve,
it’s hard to believe,
it would alter their behaviour.
We never offered to be their saviour:
and now, even Bishop Belo
a fine fellow, nevertheless
has caused distress
by decrying what has happened,
please pass the cucumber sandwiches.

Written 1999

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Democracy in safe hands

Queenslanders have for some time watched as Premier Beattie metamorphosed into Peter Bjelke, but it was the police killing of Mulrunji Doomagee on Palm Island which revealed the true extent of the transmogrification. Clearly, in the Premier’s mind, the police were not only in the right but were to be given unfettered powers to deal with the troublesome natives on Palm Island.

In a return to pre-Fitzgerald days, the Queensland Government acted as if it was an entirely natural event for a happy, singing, intoxicated Aborigine to enter police custody and within a couple of hours to have four broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and liver and to be dead. The ungrateful Palm Island residents had the hide not only to question the police version of the events, but to burn the police station and court house. The police and Government responded with paramilitary force, electronic stun guns and exquisite racist indifference to the cultural sensitivities of the Indigenous residents. Pregnant women, young children and old people were forced to lie face down in the dirt whilst being stood over by police armed with military style weapons.

Eighteen people have been arrested and charged with various offences to do with the fire at the police station. The Police Union is so supercharged with righteous white superiority that it launched a public appeal for the police who lost property in the fire, called on the judicial system to charge the 18 arrested with attempted murder, and pronounced on “the innocence” of the police stationed on Palm Island at the time of the killing of Mulrunji Doomagee.

The Peter Bjelke Government, although having a massive majority on the floor of the parliament, is cowed by memories of the Police Union campaign in the seat of Thuringowa, which brought down the Goss Labor Government and so have capitulated to the demands of the Police Union officials.

It really is time for Police Union to be brought into the Cabinet in order to take over the Premiership, the Police and Justice Portfolios and Treasury. Such a move could foreshadow even more innovative ways of advancing democracy in the land of banana benders. Given that it would be far cheaper to have the Police Union appoint parliamentarians than to run an election amongst the voters, such an innovation could result in massive savings to the people of the Sunshine State.

written in 2005 not published

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Disabling policies

Published  circa 2000 in New Zealand
www.wairaka.net/ubinz/JT/IncomeInsecurity/jDisablingPolicies.htm

The current Australian system of targeted income support is supposedly designed to assist those in ‘need’. In 1908 the first Federal income support legislation passed through the parliament made provision for pensions for people with a severe disability and those who were aged. Since that time sickness and other benefits designed specifically to assist people experiencing disabling conditions have been introduced. This chapter develops the argument that the manner in which such payments are constructed exacerbates the difficulties confronting people with a disability. That is the system of income support is itself disabling because income support programs specifically targeted to assist people with a disability lead to uncertain and inequitable income outcomes (Oliver 1996, p.76).

Issues affecting people with disabilities include: the relationship between disability, impairment, inclusion, exclusion, production, citizenship and income. Some people with disabilities earn sufficient income from work to support themselves. Others are forced to rely upon income support and other services from the State. Still others get part of their income from the State and the rest of it from paid employment. Those who are forced to rely in whole or in part on income support or other services from the State are required to meet eligibility criteria. Some are saddled with a range of means and asset tests whilst others are not. Since 1908 it has been assumed that the old are assisted because they are thought to have made a contribution to society and are no longer able to support themselves. Those who were paid an Invalid Pension (now a Disability Support Pension) are presumed to have been incapable of making a contribution. It has become increasingly obvious that even where people suffer similar impairments they may have different capacities to labour. In the case of Blind Pensioners** (included under the Disability Support Pension but without a means and asset test applying to the applicant) the assumption is not that they cannot work but that they can work. In relation to other Disability Support Pensioners, payments from the State are made in inverse proportion to the other means and assets. The underlying assumption for other Disability Support Pensioners is they need assistance because of their incapacity to work. As will be seen later in this chapter the decision to grant a more liberal means and asset tests to Blind Pensioners is a central contradiction in income support policy in Australia (Jordan 1984). Before considering this contradiction a brief analysis of how disability is seen and understood will be provided.

**This term is used in Australian Government Departments to distinguish people who are deemed ‘legally’ blind who receive the Disability Support Pension from other Disability Support Pensioners.

The individual model of disability

The individual model of disability locates the ‘problem’ of disability with the individual and identifies the cause as stemming from that individual’s functional limitations. Oliver (1996) contends that these two points are underpinned by “‘the personal tragedy theory of disability’ which suggests that disability is some terrible chance event which occurs at random to unfortunate individuals (p. 32)”. He rejects such accounts of the construction of disability suggesting instead that “It is not individual limitations….but society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of disabled people are taken into account in its social organisation (p.32)” which leads to disability. Oliver sees disability being created by “all the things that impose restrictions on disabled people ranging from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination (p. 33, p.129)” whether that be inaccessible buildings, transport systems, segregated education or workplace practices which exclude people with disabilities.

Thomas (1999) is critical of the Oliver’s model of social disability. She suggests it sets up an untenable dualism wherein disability belongs to the ‘social’ whilst impairment is left to languish in a modernist medical discourse (p.140). She considers that the systems of classification currently employed in Britain and Australia to determine the extent of a person’s disability has some advantage over the purely medical model in that “Disability is no longer conceived of as the illness or impairment itself (Disability = Impairment), but as the consequential impact of illness or impairment on the activities of daily living” that is, impairment leads to disability (p.148).

Thomas (1999), who builds upon Oliver’s perceptions by adding a gender analysis and her understanding of biography, is also critical of professionals and agencies who adopt the individual perspective. She notes that, although often well meaning, professionals “are almost always guided by the perspective…that rehabilitation – or restoration to as near as normal functioning as possible – must be the desired goal, and that people with impairment are dependent, limited, objects of pity” (p17). Thomas approves Mason’s description of the experience in one disability self advocacy group:

we began to challenge the traditional view of disability as an individual health problem. We challenged the effects of ‘internalised oppression’, recognised by all marginalised groups as a major tool of the oppressive society; we challenged the conditioned hatred of ourselves and each other as disabled people; we challenged the desire to assimilate (p.27).

Thomas says “Like sexism or racism, disablism can operate can operate consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, and may be acted out in social interactions between individuals or may be institutionalised and embedded in organisational structures (p.40)”.

Perry (1995 p.29) notes that people with equivalent levels of impairments often have widely different employment histories. Whether the disabling aspects of experiencing an impairment derive out of the impairment per se or arise as a result of the society’s response to the presence of an impairment is not an inconsequential matter.

The social model of disability

The way any social issue is conceived will substantially determine what is observed, which problems are identified, how such problems are prioritised and what solutions are sought. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in relation to disability. Paul Abberley (1999) wrote:

The traditional approach, often referred to as the medical model, locates the source of disability in the individual’s supposed deficiency and her or his personal incapacities when compared to ‘normal’ people. In contrast to this social models see disability as resulting from society’s failure to adapt to the needs of impaired people (p.45).

He further argues that if observers consider disability as social rather than biological in origin then those wishing to assist would have to develop a view of what it would mean for people with impairments not to be disabled before they would be able to develop policies which were capable of combating social exclusion (p.47).

Many writers representing the views of groups excluded and marginalised from mainstream society are wary of inclusion. The standard advice such writers give to people offered inclusion is that they should ask: on whose terms, and at what cost, but above all they are advised to remember that inclusion is much more than being made complicit in an indecent act. South Australian disability activist David Morell (1998) considers;

‘inclusion’ in the ‘community’ is not enough. Indeed the very concept does not make sense. The ‘community’ itself is so full of oppression, separation, exclusion, diverse interests and conflict for many of those who are already ‘included’ in it as to render the uncritical use of the concept positively misleading and pursuit of the goal of inclusion disempowering (p.17).

This point is reinforced by Abberley (1999) who contends that:

just because a main mechanism of our oppression is our exclusion from social production, we should be wary of drawing the conclusion that overcoming this oppression should involve our wholesale inclusion in it….

 a society may be willing and in certain circumstance become eager to absorb a proportion of its impaired population into the workforce, yet this can have the effect of maintaining and perhaps intensifying its exclusion of the remainder. We need to develop a theory of oppression which avoids this bifurcation, through a notion of social integration that is not dependent upon impaired people’s inclusion (p.53).

Both Morell and Abberley would concur with Armstrong & Barton (1999) when they contend that, “Inclusion necessitates the removal of the material, ideological, political and economic barriers that legitimate and reproduce inequality and discrimination in the lives of disabled people” (p.214). Armstrong & Barton go on to suggest:

pity and concern are directed at some groups… only rarely are issues relating to social exclusion and discrimination presented as ones concerned with human rights. Instead, a ‘needs’ discourse is adopted, suggesting that difficulties … can be overcome by technical solutions … a ‘needs’ discourse is disempowering because it focuses attention away from the possibility of individuals, groups and communities taking responsibility for undertaking action themselves to bring about change (p. 215).

The intensity of the inclusion debate within disability circles is a symptom of the way English speaking societies regard ‘normality’. Employment and being ‘able bodied’ are widely regarded as closely linked. The central requirement for payment of unemployment benefits is that applicants have to establish they are ‘ready, able and willing to work’. The eligibility requirement for sickness benefits is that applicants have to establish they are temporarily incapacitated for work and for Disability Support Pensions that one is more or less permanently incapacitated for work. Whether seeking work or income support it is necessary to establish one’s capacity to carry out employment tasks. The system of production and society more generally is geared around ‘ability’ or ‘capacity’ to labour. Disability activists assert that this ‘ableist’ ideology plays an important part in centring society around the ‘normal’, ‘able bodied’ lifestyle which in turn relegates to the margins those experiencing impairments in functioning.

This connection between working, impairment and disability has changed over time. Thomas (1999 pp.129 -133) notes that during the Elizabethan period the poor law administrators only regarded those who were totally incapacitated for work as disabled. She and Gleeson (1999) suggest that it is the increasing commodification of the relations of production since that time which has led to disability becoming a societal rather than simply an employment artefact, that “disability, as a form of social oppression, belongs to particular times and places and is not a ubiquitous, transhistorical phenomenon” (p.131). Gleeson responds to this historical materialist insight by demanding that politics “seeks to change the underlying structures and institutions that oppress the everyday lives of disabled people” (1999, p.16).

Rather than concentrating efforts upon removing the disabling structures and institutions which exacerbate employment entry difficulties and inhibit other forms of social inclusion, the Australian Government has concentrated upon increasing the income support uncertainties by tightening eligibility requirements and compelling participation in the unpaid economy as a prerequisite of payment of income support (Reference Group on Welfare Reform 2000 [b]).

Compulsion, the unpaid economy and the benefits which flow to the market economy

The unpaid economy embraces both private and public spheres. It was estimated to have made a $16.6 billion contribution to the Australian economy in 1995/96 (Moyle & Gibson 1997 p.43). Though a significant proportion of this widespread volunteer effort occurred in households much also took place in institutions caring for the aged and for people with a disability or in other social welfare, charity and religious organisations (Moyle & Gibson 1997 pp.38-43).

Else (1996), Mutari, E. Boushey, H. & Fraher, W. (1997), Gardiner (1997) and other feminists have pointed to the unpaid work which takes place in the home which has traditionally been carried out predominantly by women. This is particularly so in relation to inter generational caring. At least as far back as the mid 19th. century Marx recognised the important contribution such unpaid work within the family made to the economy through the reproduction of the working class (Engels 1978). Prolonging the length of intra family dependency, through cutbacks in income support particularly for the young and by increasing nursing home costs which impacts on those who are frail aged or others who experience significant impairment, has placed increased pressure on those family members who care for relatives and / or for those who are forced to provide income.

If volunteer effort in the welfare industry is recognised at all, it is in relation to the way such unpaid work provides services or allows the agencies to increase the amount or duration of services. Following Putman (1993) and Cox (1995) public ‘volunteering’ and now ‘enforced participation’ was marketed by the Liberal Government as building social capital (Howard 2000). Such statements particularly as they relate to compelled ‘participation’ are an ideological smoke screen which allow governments to continue to cut welfare expenditure, further separating the working and workless, and adding to the stigmatising impacts on the recipients of income support.

Spasmodic recognition is given to the contribution which volunteers make to the economy, principally by cutting the costs of necessary services, thus assisting the market economy by undertaking tasks which would otherwise be done by fully remunerated workers (Lerner, Clark, & Needham, 1999 p.12). Such savings result in lower outlays from the budget, lessening the pressure on corporate giving, and create the image of a society which is more caring than the quantity of funds put into care services warrants. As well as assisting those who are directly helped, such volunteer effort improves the quality of life and the satisfaction of the truly included.

In Australia and New Zealand, since the mid-1980s, ‘volunteering’ has been given increased emphasis as a result of governments’ commitment to an ‘active society’ (Cass 1988) Participation in ‘volunteer’ effort became increasingly compelled through ‘work for the dole’ regimes under the Nationals in New Zealand and the Liberals in Australia. Welfare advocates (Bradford 1997) have pointed to the connection between ‘work for the dole’ schemes and court ordered Community Service Orders applied to those who have committed an offence. Bradford sees the compulsory aspects of ‘work for the dole’ schemes as having the potential to discourage or displace genuine volunteer effort, her claims are supported by Gorz (1999 pp. 98-100). The combined effect of compelled participation, cutbacks in welfare funding, the heavy involvement of charity, church and local government agencies in running ‘work for the dole’ programs delivers benefits to the market and this has led to the perception that the process is not about building social capital – rather it is about creating social capitalism (Davis 1998).

The Howard Government’s extension of ‘mutual obligation’ requirements from the unemployed so as to include Disability Support Pensioners and lone parents who receive Federal income support twists the obligation tourniquet a further notch. Even people whom Commonwealth Medical Officers have found are unlikely to be able to obtain employment in the foreseeable future, due to their substantial impairment, are required to establish their utility to the State before they can be assured that their income support will continue. The very people whom employers and the State have excluded from the workforce, on the basis that the system of production has no place for those who experience such impairments, are enveloped in a ‘mutual obligation’ nightmare. Those who experience disability have always had to cope with finding their way between self-help and self-responsibility as a result of the inadequacy of support services and the various Australian reciprocal obligation schemes. Under the ‘mutual obligation’ regime they are being pushed towards taking increased responsibility to establish utility and worthiness before they will receive income support.

Running in parallel with the demand that those with disabilities make a contribution to their society is the move away from a citizenship / rights focus to a customer focus and this is having a range of effects.

The consumer paradigm also defines people with disabilities predominantly as users of services, paid for largely through public funds, and does not emphasise the way that people with disabilities contribute to the economy. The State is complicit in this assumption through its failure to ensure that people with disabilities are enabled (empowered) to contribute to their potential by the provision of assessable workplaces and jobs, and so limits their citizenship (as participation) whilst simultaneously undervaluing the contribution they do make (Bleasdale & Tomlinson 1999 p.56).

The ideological contradiction implicit in compelled participation

The traditional liberal position is notable for its reliance upon individualism, freedom from constraint, self-help, property and the free play of market forces. “Least government is best government” (Stretton & Orchard 1994, p.1). Market liberals who dominate the Liberal Cabinet have pursued individualism and freedom from an interfering government for the well off sections of society. These two features underlie the push towards individualised work contracts, the weakening of the Arbitration Commission, and the demand for a deregulated work place. There is almost an obsession with stopping government interfering in the lives of well off citizens. However when it comes to those who are forced to rely upon income support the Government insists they negotiate with Centrelink or its agents extremely detailed activity agreements which set out when they will participate, the manner of their participation with whom they will engage and for how long.

A rights orientation and the connection to special rights

Prime Minister Howard and his then Minister for Family Services Jocelyn Newman, when they spoke about citizens who received income support, attempted to link ‘mutual obligations’ to receipt of ‘entitlements’. This is a far cry from conceiving of the welfare system as existing to help people cope with the diswelfares of the market (Titmuss 1976). It is even further removed from viewing the system of income support as an absolute right of citizenship or permanent residency. Though many disability activists claim to adopt a rights orientation they often find themselves enmeshed in a discussion of ‘needs’ as part of a ‘special rights’ debate. As was seen earlier in relation to Indigenous people such claims can lead to disputation centred round differing evaluations of need and at worst a backlash.

Clearly, to treat unequals equally is as unjust as treating equals unequally and many people experiencing profound impairments have needs some of which are quite different from those of ‘able bodied’ people. Such recognition lies at the heart of the difference between equality and equity. People with severe mobility impairments might ‘need’ a wheelchair and those who are blind a white cane. It is possible to guarantee all blind people a white cane and all those who can not walk a wheelchair. However, it would be more useful to incorporate in legislation an extended conception of the ‘right to freedom of movement‘ so as to encompass more than the removal of politically repressive obstacles. This expanded right would include removal of all impediments to free movement plus the provision of equipment and services which enable those with mobility impairments to move freely. The advantage of such an approach is that whilst it takes account of individual needs arising out of impairment, it installs a right to freedom of movement which is a general right of citizenship available to all. Expressing rights in a general rather than a specific context is not an argument to ‘mainstream’, ‘broadband’ or any other euphemism for neglecting ‘special needs’ through meeting the lowest common denominator of need. Rather such an approach is based upon the recognition that:

  • genuine inclusion requires acceptance and valuing of diversity,
  • separation seldom equates to separate but equal, often becoming portrayed as separate therefore special, consequently engendering envy, and
  • if the benefits are expressed as a universal entitlement they are more likely to be widely supported and as a consequence harder to remove (Goodin & Le Grand 1987).

The income maintenance system interferes with independence

Oliver (1996) argues that “professionalised service provision within a needs-based system of welfare has added to existing forms of discrimination and in addition, has created new forms of its own including the provision of stigmatised segregated services (pp.74-75, p.67)”. This is also true of income support programs generally but has particular application to payments made to people on the basis of their experiencing disabilities.

The intense concentration on providing income support or services only to those who individually meet eligibility requirements is designed to limit expenditure. This policy is sold to the public as:

  • cost efficiency, ensuring the maximum effort is directed to those in greatest ‘need’,
  • ensuring the ‘needy’ not the ‘greedy’ are helped,
  • encouraging self-sufficiency or at least discouraging ‘dependency’, and
  • ensuring that those in need through no fault of their own are assisted.

Even when payments designed specifically as income support for people with disability are created, the State continues to distinguish between various categories of disability by privileging some recipients. The two most common forms of publicly provided income support available to the general population are sickness benefits and Disability Support Pensions. Those who receive Disability Support Pensions are guaranteed a minimum income for a couple of years whereas those receiving sickness benefits have to provide regular doctor’s certificates. This may appear unremarkable in the case of an acute one off illness or injury but those who have irregularly occurring episodic conditions, such as bi-polar disorders, are subjected to payment delays and waiting period uncertainties which often impact on them during their most vulnerable periods.

There are differentials in rates of payment which advantage pensioners. Many people on sickness benefits have almost identical health profiles to many receiving Disability Support Pensions. There are other differences such as eligibility to fringe benefits and access to services which vary between each payment. Some who receive the Disability Support Pension would be advantaged by being serviced by employment agencies which only those on sickness benefit have access. Equally many sickness beneficiaries would be advantaged by having access to services restricted to Disability Support Pensioners. Even those who receive a Disability Support Pension are not treated uniformly as can be seen in the way Blind Pensioners are treated.

Blind Pensioners

Among the ranks of Disability Support Pensioners are some who are blind. Blind Pensioners are not subject to a means or asset test and are also entitled to a payment for their first child irrespective of their means. Payments for a spouse and / or any other children are subject to normal income provisions applying to all other Disability Support Pensioners. Blind Pensioners’ special conditions have an interesting history and their treatment presents a contradiction which, when examined, reveals perhaps more clearly than any other form of benefit, the conglomeration of values which underlie much of the social welfare thinking in Australia.

Foremost among these organising principles is that those who determine eligibility for Disability Support Pensions have a preference for physical over mental conditions. The creation of categories demands certainties about conditions and boundaries. Physical features are more readily assessable than are mental ones. Physical conditions which can be observed either directly, or indirectly through a piece of medical technology, are easier to assess than are medical conditions which cannot be detected by existing medical technology. The more certain an assessor is that the applicant fits within the eligibility boundaries, the more readily the assessor accepts that the applicant is ‘in need’.

Those who determine eligibility are firmly attached to concept of worthiness; they refuse to accept that social handicaps could constitute ‘total and permanent incapacity’; yet, they accept that social handicaps contribute towards disability and they rely on Commonwealth Medical Officers to make objective, consistent determinations about applicants’ capacity to work. The degree of sight which a person has can be reasonably accurately measured compared with many other medical conditions. Limited sight might in some circumstances not be such as to constitute ‘total and permanent blindness’ but some people with lessened sight might experience (other) physical, social or mental conditions which, when taken together with their loss of sight, could make them ‘totally and permanently incapacitated’. Such people are not paid a Blind Pension but are paid a Disability Support Pension.

People can obtain a Disability Support Pension for impairments as diverse as being a quadriplegic or suffering from schizophrenia. What is it that is particular to blind people which motivated the legislators to create a separate category? Thane, writing about the British experience, suggests that one of the major pressures on government of the day in the 1920s was brought to bear by the war blind. This was not the situation in Australia where, as early as 1912, the Fisher Government was moving to grant blind people an advantaged position compared with other Invalid Pensioners (Kewley 1973 pp.91-93). This process accelerated until in 1954 the Menzies Government abolished the means test for Blind Pensioners (Kewley 1973 pp309-311) and this policy has remained in place ever since.

If it was a special compassion extended to blind people which led to these arrangements, then there is a major contradiction to explain. Aborigines, the group which on a per capita basis suffers the most blindness were until the 1960s specifically excluded from any social security payment. They are also the group with the least income. If it was compassion which led to the privileged treatment of the blind, then it was compassion tempered with institutional racism.

Kewley asserts that it was not a belief that blind people were unable to earn – and therefore had a greater need for income than other incapacitated persons – but, in fact, just the opposite. He says the amendments advantaging the blind arose out of the desire:

to provide them with every inducement to earn something towards their support….. The dual purpose of this provision was to discourage those already at work from leaving it with a view to obtaining a pension, and to encourage others to undertake training for some occupation (Kewley 1973 p 93).

Jordan (1984) cites the treatment of blind people in the first decade of this century when blindness was not considered sufficient evidence of ‘invalidity’; and the consistent refusal at least until 1936 to pay blind musicians and beggars a pension whilst they continued to work the streets, as a sufficient refutation of the suggestion that it was compassion which led to the advantaged treatment of Blind Pensioners (Ch. 3). He agrees with Kewley that discrimination in favour of the blind derives from wanting to encourage their greater capacity to work and have a ‘normal’ life.

The constancy in legislative amendments allowing blind people more generous allowable means without affecting their pension would support this interpretation. It does not answer the question as to what it is that allows governments of all political complexions to exclude blind people from the strict asset and income tests that apply to other Disability Support Pensioners who also have an incapacity to work.

The advantaged position of Blind Pensioners compared with other Disability Support Pensioners occurs in part because lack of sight is seen as a medical as opposed to a mental condition. Unlike bad backs or mental conditions, blindness can be ‘objectively’ measured. The public feels sympathy for blind people. It is a handicap which is not seen as self-induced; does not necessarily result in disfigurement; historically the blind have been seen as a special worthy category; and many blind people do work, that is, they are not seen as ‘bludgers’.

When attempts are made to sieve the assumptions underpinning the preferential treatment of Blind Pensioners compared with other pensioners who are also regarded as being totally incapacitated, the complexity of such an exercise becomes apparent. Promotion of the work ethic is in the forefront, closely followed by the notion of rewarding the worthy at the expense of people experiencing less valued handicaps. This is itself part of the ‘less eligibility’ debate; the history of which can be directly traced to Elizabethan poor law administrations. The preference for physical over mental or social handicaps is part of this debate – usually manifested in the suggestion that many non-physical conditions are the result of malingering. The failure (until the 1960s) to pay Aborigines, even those who were non-nomadic (Kewley 1973 p.258), and until the 1970s those who were nomadic, exposes the institutional racism of the welfare industry in Australia. So a policy which on the surface may have appeared to have arisen out of values such as equity and humanism is, on reflection, extraordinarily circumscribed. If humanism were the driving force behind the treatment of Blind Pensioners it would be expected that equivalent humanism would be apparent, for example, in the treatment of Disability Support Pensioners who were paralysed from the neck down.

One obstacle to moving towards equal treatment of Blind and other Disability Support Pensioners is that to increase benefits to the blind costs comparatively little compared with making those same benefits available to all Disability Support Pensioners. Once Disability Support Pensioners received special treatment then other categories of pensioners and even beneficiaries would argue they too should receive similar treatment. There is a clear logic in the removal of income and asset tests on people who are deemed to be legally blind as the intention is to remove any financial disincentive to taking employment. Surely there is an even greater logic in removing similar financial disincentives on unemployment beneficiaries who have to establish they are “fit able and willing to work’. If governments accepted this proposition then much of the opposition to introducing a Basic Income would evaporate. This central contradiction in income support policy in Australia will be further pursued in Chapters 9 &10.

Further divisions within the ranks of those experiencing severe disability

Those who received their injuries during wars are assisted by programs run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those injured on the roads by motor vehicles are frequently entitled to payment from insurance companies. Many of those injured at work also get assistance from insurance companies. Some people have private accident and illness insurance. Some are entitled to superannuation payments. All this is a far cry from the proposals for compensation and rehabilitation put forward by Woodhouse (1974) which if they had been adopted would have led to a more consistent and unified minimum income guarantee for those who suffer impairment whether at work, at home or on the roads. As it is now, massive income uncertainty follows in the wake of severe injury.

Because some have privileged outcomes whilst others can finish up without any income after being breached by Centrelink, the possibility of building a broad fighting front to push for reform in the way people with impairments are treated is a pipe dream. The usual point of organisation is centred on the specific type of impairment, such as mental health, acquired brain injury, intellectual disability, or spinal injury. Peak bodies occasionally build relatively weak coalitions which aim to amalgamate disability service sector workers, clients, and supporters across the wider disability sector. These peak disability bodies are frequently poorly connected to the trade union movement which itself is generally distracted, by the struggle to improve work place safety or worker’s compensation provisions, from joining the broader struggle to improve basic services to all those who have disabilities.

The forces arraigned against the State are a long way short of that which is necessary to ensure the removal of all barriers which prevent those with impairments being ‘included’ in a manner which does not disable them.

The effect of disabling policies on people with disabilities

The overall impact of the failure of the State to find a way to include those who experience a disability within a universal income guarantee program isolates those who receive government provided disability income support from other citizens. The confusing array of the various forms of income support – occupational, State provided, road accident insurance, and self-financed insurance – creates divisions between people with a disability. Those who receive State provided income support are further demeaned and isolated through the imposition of compelled participation (Reference Group on Welfare Reform 2000 [b]).

The creation of artificial divisions between groups of people who are experiencing similarly severe degrees of impairment inhibits solidarity by distorting focus and obscuring the points of unity. The separation of people with disabilities from other income support recipients leads to the view that some are provided with special rights on account of their special needs further alienating them from potential allies. The differential treatment of some Disability Support Pensioners, for example the blind, divides them from others who receive the Disability Support Pension.

The payments reward illness and impairment because once the illness or impairment disappear so too does the payment. All this takes place in a context where the Disability Support Pension, the sickness benefit, a substantial part of the income component of worker’s and road accident compensation is paid not to compensate for the extra costs of living with an impairment but just to cover the day to day living costs. The extra costs which result from having an impairment are covered by other specific programs

The entire raison d’etre underpinning separate payments for those experiencing severe impairments is to recognise non-capacity to labour because of illness or impairment. The reality is that the actual differences in payment forms results from how or where the injuries occurred. People’s citizenship is undermined through such processes because they deny similarities and potential unity between people. Such separation processes also demean people because they deny people’s desire to contribute and their need for relevance irrespective of their impairments.

The construction of income support policies, as they have been implemented in Australia, means the point of focus around which people with disabilities might organise is non-capacity. Any community work activist knows it is hard to organise around:

disability,
ill health,
unemployment,
illiteracy, or
innumeracy.

It is unlikely that people with severe mathematical deficits are going to rally under the banner “The Innumerate Don’t Count.” It is easier to organise around positives. It may be possible to organise a small group of people with a specific interest, particularly if they have specific needs and have been specifically discriminated against. Even if the organiser is able to mobilise all of them, they are never going to constitute a sufficient number of people to exert the degree of pressure necessary to bring about a significant shift in the way income support services are organised for all people with disabilities. They might succeed in obtaining short-term advantage for a small group of people. The creation of small scale specific segregated service programs, having numerous ways of obtaining the income support necessary for day to day survival separates the unwaged from each other, from the low waged and also from the majority who work full time. The existing government income support programs designed to assist people with disabilities demean, isolate, separate and marginalise all income support recipients. These various income support programs operate by creating artificial distinctions in relation to insignificant differences in day to day living costs which all income support recipients confront irrespective of whether they face disability, disadvantage or a combination of both. It is the intentional mystification of the features which are common to all income support applicants which constitutes the denial of unity to those who experience impairment or are in other ways marginalised which adds to their disablement.

Relevance to income support

The multitude of income support forms, which range from private insurance, occupational cover, veterans entitlements, to social security, unnecessarily complicate people’s lives. Each of these forms of income support are supposed to help people manage after they have acquired an impairment. It is acknowledged that people with similar disabilities often have very different work histories. Considerable resources are put to determining levels of impairment as a surrogate measure for determining capacity to work. A large amount is spent, by the various funding bodies, on surveillance of people who have been injured in an attempt to identify people who are no longer entitled to be on the particular payment they are receiving. Huge discretion is given the medical and human service benefit determiners to determine which payment applicants receive. The current income support system often becomes part of the disablement process.

A substantial part of this interference in people’s lives could be avoided if a Basic Income was in place. People would be provided with sufficient to live on as a right of permanent residence – not because they had a proven impairment. Medical and human service workers could then concentrate their efforts towards providing the necessary services associated with helping people manage their impairment. Unions and government could cooperatively concentrate upon workplace safety. Government and motoring organisations could concentrate on road safety. People with disabilities could take up casual or permanent part time work without it endangering their access to income support if they subsequently leave work.

Introducing a Basic Income would add little to the cost of providing for all Australians who have sickness or severe impairments as compared with existing categorical benefit arrangements.

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Discrimination against Aborigines: the facts

 

Wednesday, July 8, 1998 Issue No.324 Green Left Weekly. 

Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party claim that Australian Aborigines receive “special treatment” not afforded to all other Australians. The “privileges” they receive, she says, “discriminate” against non-Aborigines and should be withdrawn. Native title, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, targeted health, welfare and education funding and, as of last week, the Race Discrimination Act must all be abolished in the name of “equality”, she says.

In the following, abridged from a longer article, JOHN TOMLINSON reveals the facts — that indigenous Australians continue to suffer gross discrimination and the lowest living standards in the country.

In the aftermath of the High Court’s Wik judgment, the prime minister’s 10-point plan to extinguish native title on pastoral leases makes political sense only if indigenous Australians are conceived of as separate from and of lesser importance than other Australians.

Governments during the 1950s and 1960s maintained Aborigines as “natives” by institutionalising them on segregated reserves.

Aboriginal people who resided off reserves, and who were not assimilated into white society, were relegated to fringes of country towns and ghettos like Redfern and South Brisbane. They were assigned a welfare/charity role that encouraged their being pitied as “victims of their own inadequacies”. In rural areas the women were exploited sexually and the men utilised as seasonal workers. In both city and rural areas, they were marginalised.

Indigenous issues were perceived by the general public to be of little political importance until the period leading up to the 1967 referendum. This is the historical background that generates current perceptions of indigenous Australians.

Health

The life expectancy of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders is about 15-20 years lower than that of their non-indigenous counterparts in WA, SA and the NT. In most states and territories, their babies are two to three times more likely to be of low birth weight and about two to four times more likely to die at birth.

According to the National Health and Medical Research Council (1996), between 1988 and 1994, the gap between Aboriginal and total Australian mortality rates widened, especially for women. About 30% of maternal deaths occur in Aboriginal women and Torres Strait Island women, who constitute only about 3% of confinements.

Governments claim to be promoting dramatic solutions, yet Access Economics has shown that health expenditure on each indigenous person is lower than that provided for the non-indigenous population, and the level of underspending on indigenous health has stayed remarkably constant over the last 20 years. During the 1990s on Cape York, women were dying at a younger age than in 1979.

In 1979, the first recommendation of the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Health was that the highest priority be given and immediate action taken to provide clean and adequate water supplies to all Aboriginal communities. By 1996, an ABS survey estimated that 7% of rural indigenous households still did not have running water. There are at least 100 Aboriginal communities in remote Australia which do not have access to clean drinking water.

Indigenous Australians die younger and are more frequently sick, essentially because in many places they do not have access to clean running water, decent nutrition and adequate housing with safe sanitation systems. None of these essentials is beyond the capacity of Australian governments to provide. The failure to provide them can only be explained as institutional racism.

Last December, the Howard government promised several billion dollars in loan guarantees to assist the International Monetary Fund to prop up the economies of Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea.

On January 21, the day following the government’s announcement that it had put aside an additional $300 million to provide insurance assistance to Australian exporters trading with South Korea, the federal health minister, Michael Wooldridge, was presented with a report commissioned by the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Pharmaceutical Manufactures Association. This stated that a prime cause of the appalling Aboriginal morbidity and mortality figures in rural Australia was limited access to and the high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Wooldridge (at the time visiting rural areas of the NT) responded, “It is difficult for a commonwealth government to do much about fruit and vegetables in local stores”.

Incarceration

Aboriginal people are 27 times more likely than other Australians to be in police custody and 11 times more likely to be in prison. On October 17, 1996, Amnesty International’s London Office published a condemnation of Australia’s inordinate incarceration rates for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991). It recommended many ways of keeping Aborigines out of custody in order to decrease the number of black deaths in custody. The most recent follow-up report (1996) establishes that Aborigines are being incarcerated at a greater rate now than in 1980-1989, and more Aborigines are dying in custody as a result.

Although Aborigines represent only 1.4% of the adult population, they accounted for more than 25% of all deaths in police and prison custody during the year to June 1996.

Police killings of Aborigines have a long lineage. Officially sanctioned police punitive raids did not end with the 60 to 100 Aborigines slaughtered in the Coniston massacre in 1928, but continued in the north of SA at least until the early 1940s. Police and settlers continued to kill and maim small groups of Aborigines in remote Australia until at least the early 1980s.

In cities, with the notable exception of incidents like the killing of David Gundy, the police content themselves with severe bashings of indigenous Australians. The police are the front line of social control: they selects individuals to be criminalised and, in large part, determine who will be jailed and killed. They are an essential element in political marginalisation of indigenous people.

In recent times, many Australian state and territory governments have adopted “law and order” policies — such as “truth in sentencing” and mandatory jail sentences for minor offences — that have led to a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous people in custody.

‘Protection’

The system of having a “protector” of Aborigines never led to the consistent protection of indigenous interests.

From its beginnings in the early 18th century, the protection system too often led to dispersal and dispossession of the original inhabitants. Throughout much of rural and remote Australia, the protector of Aborigines was the local police officer.

So, even for those not confined to the government or church-controlled reserves, the state was omnipresent. The local protector controlled much of the lives of those indigenes not exempted from the status of ward.

Aboriginal workers who were paid had, by law, to pay into bank accounts held by their protectors a fixed percentage of their wages. In Queensland, money held in these accounts was transferred to a special Aboriginal welfare account. When this account was eventually wound up in the 1980s, there was a $30 million shortfall. None of the protectors have been charged.

This leakage of funds from Aborigines’ bank accounts was part and parcel of their administration from the earliest days.

In the early 1960s, following dysentery epidemics on the reserves of western Cape York, the government said it had insufficient funds to upgrade the health clinics on the reserves, but did see its way clear to borrow from the Aboriginal Benefit Fund account $100,000 which it lent to the Redcliffe Hospital Board to build its cityhospital.

The absence of upgraded health facilities at places like Weipa and Mapoon was used by the Queensland government in its efforts between 1959 and 1962 to force Mapoon people from their land and facilitate Comalco’s bauxite mining. The government claimed the absence of decent health facilities meant the Mapoon people were endangering their children’s health.

Land rights and miners

At the 1983 election, the federal Labor Party set out five principles that were to underpin its national land rights policy, including inalienable freehold title, mining vetoes or else the power to set conditions, fair royalties, compensation and sacred site protection.

In 13 years of Labor administration, little progress was made towards implementing these promises. After two years of Liberal-National administration, the idea that such principles might underpin the government’s approach to land rights is a receding pipedream.

In the wake of the High Court’s Wik judgment, pastoralists and miners claimed that native title would bring economic development in Australia to a halt. This language is designed to weaken the bargaining power of the indigenous owners of this land in order that whatever “contribution” miners are forced to make to indigenous communities, in return for not obstructing mining, is a lesser amount than it would have been otherwise.

The dispossession of indigenous people to make way for mining companies has a long history. In the 1950s and ’60s, 93% of land which had been officially reserved since the 19th century for the Aborigines of Mapoon, Aurukun and Weipa in Queensland was alienated. In 1962, the people of Mapoon were taken by boat from their land by armed police who burned their houses. They were deposited at Bamaga on the very tip of Cape York or at Weipa Mission.

Weipa people, a short distance south of Mapoon, had their 6000 square kilometres of reserve land decreased to 124 hectares in 1957, the rest converted into a mining lease for Comalco.

Three hundred kilometres to the west, a transnational conglomerate’s subsidiary (Century Zinc) in 1997 beat into submission the Waanyi people. Murrandoo Yanner, coordinator of the Carpentaria Land Council, has been convicted twice for unlawful assembly, and faced continual harassment by mining company officials, police and other state government officers.

Century Zinc now has the go-ahead to mine, despite the fears of conservationists and indigenous people about ecological damage to dugong feeding and breeding areas in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

After the signing, the Queensland government proudly announced that, since the Aborigines had agreed to allow Century Zinc to mine their land, they could now be provided with the kind of social infrastructure that white Australia takes for granted.

The total project is estimated to be worth $9 billion. The mining company offered $60 million as compensation. Of this, $30 million is to be controlled by the Queensland government to develop social infrastructure.

Employment, infrastructure and development

In 1963, I visited Yarrabah, near Cairns. Housing, whilst basic, was nearly sufficient for all the residents. The Aborigines had run a sawmill and built most of the houses. But the mill closed, and by the time I returned 15 years later, there was a shortage of houses; the houses which were being built were fabricated largely by contractors.

This erosion of indigenous people’s capacity to develop their own territory has been repeated many times.

Sometimes it takes the form of protectors stealing money from the personal accounts of indigenous people. In the NT, in the 1970s and ’80s, it often took the form of the manager of the community store defrauding the community by overcharging or just absconding with the funds.

Sometimes indigenous people were displaced from employment, and therefore income, by an influx of European employees. At Maningrida, in the mid-1970s, this led to major Aboriginal unrest, which resulted in the community reclaiming their jobs and control.

Perhaps the most credible explanation of why many indigenous communities lost heart is presented in the documentary Lousy Little Sixpence (1997). This film points out that the NSW Aboriginal Welfare Board early this century removed the right of Aborigines to own and use land on reserves.

At Cumeroogunga Reserve, Aborigines had been granted land, and cleared and ploughed it, only to have the AWB sell it to white farmers. Events of this nature occurred all over Australia.

As well, there was insufficient investment in technological or social infrastructure in Aboriginal reserves to ensure they became productive.

The administrative skills of most people sent to manage reserves were not high. Aboriginal initiative was stifled. The reserves were welfarised, many run like British Poor Law work houses.

Disputation was treated as rebellion, and inordinately repressive powers were given to superintendents to jail people, remove people from a reserve and divide families. Anger, frustration, intimidation, depression, alcoholism and disputation became an everyday feature.

The mechanisms of control on reserves shared many common features with the repression carried out in other outposts of empire by the colonial authorities.

Widespread unemployment and failure to pay award wages to indigenous workers guaranteed that their communities remained impoverished and underdeveloped. When indigenous workers got seasonal jobs away from the reserve, they had to pay a fixed percentage of their money into the bank accounts held by the protector. Those who worked on the reserve were generally paid a training allowance, if they received anything other than rations.

In 1967, many workers on training allowances in the Top End of the NT were receiving less each week than a Darwin family living on welfare assistance. Many of these trainee workers were the sole breadwinner in their families.

Eventually training allowances were replaced by the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), a work for the dole scheme that applied only to indigenous people. Each community was paid on an estimate of how many participants would be attracted to the CDEP in their area.

Some communities found that there were more people wanting to work than there were places. As a result, it was not uncommon for CDEP workers to receive less than they would have had they been in receipt of unemployment benefit. In other communities, people got slightly more than unemployment benefits.

Either way, when coupled with widespread unemployment, it meant that in many communities, more than 90% of the people who received any income survived on social security levels of income. This ensures underdevelopment because the communities do not generate sufficient economic activity to create award-rate jobs.

Prior to the 1960s, very few people of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent were paid social security. It was the late 1970s and early 1980s before Aboriginal people in many parts of remote Australia got anything like the same access to social security entitlements as other Australians.

Today, despite many examples of financially successful indigenous businesses — usually in association with the people regaining some or all of their tribal land — a disproportionate number of indigenous Australians live in poverty.

Perhaps indigenous poverty has been exacerbated by the failure of governments, developers and many other institutions to come to a determination of indigenous people’s rights over land.

In Broome and Darwin, it is assumed that Aboriginal people’s relationships to country are mere encumbrances on development, or that their silence on land-use matters indicates concordance with the views of the dominant public.

The minister for Aboriginal welfare in the NT told the federal parliament in 1952: “If any part of a native reserve has ceased to be necessary for the use and benefit of the natives, it may be severed from the reserve and, if mining should take place on the severed portion, royalties will be paid into a special fund to be applied to the welfare of the natives”.

Not much has changed 40 years later at the Lockhart River Aboriginal Reserve. An environmental impact statement lodged in the Queensland Mining Warden’s Court by the company wanting to mine 200 million tonnes of the high grade silica in Shelburne Bay denied the Wuthathi people any current interest in the area on the basis that “a lack of physical presence in the area constitutes a dereliction of interest”. Many Wuthathi people lived less than 80 kilometres away and regularly accessed the area to gather “bush tucker”.

The ‘stolen generations’

White Australia attempted to complete the process of dispossession by taking indigenous children from their communities.

The prime minister refuses to apologise on behalf of the government for the actions of all Australian governments during the period of the stolen children because the present government, he says, was not responsible.

Against the recommendations of the Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997), the Howard government has steadfastly opposed compensation to the children or their families, again on the grounds that this government was not responsible. As academic Adam Jamrozik commented, the Howard government was not responsible for the second world war either, but it continues to pay war pensions.

The real policy question is justice in the present, rather than guilt in relation to past activities.

This is not an endorsement of Pauline Hanson’s call for “all Australians to be treated equally”. Rather, it is a demand that we are all treated equitably. Given the great disparity in wealth, income, health, housing, incarceration rates and age of death of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, to treat indigenous and non-indigenous people equally would not be justice.

The race war begun in 1788 continues.

[John Tomlinson teaches in the School of Social Science at Queensland University of Technology. An updated version of this paper can be found on this website entitled “The intentional underdevelopment of Aboriginal communities”.

http://johntomlinsoncollectedworks.com/socialstruggle/indigenous-issues/the-intentional-…inal-communities/ ‎]

 

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Doris Lessing 1971

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

“We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture.

“The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be.

“You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors.

“It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements.

“Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

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Dutton’s Emergency Deportation Bill

Drafted March 3, 2019

Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison, with Abbott lurking in the background, today announced that they have prepared a Bill to fast-track deportations from Australia. They called upon Naughty Mr Billy Shorten and the crossbench to back them to the hilt at the Budget sitting on the morning of 1st April 2019.  Peter Dutton said it was crucial to act swiftly if the economy was going to be saved and negative gearing protected.

Scott Morrison said it was “A fair dinkum deportation policy unlike anything which the Labor Party has the wit to invent.”  He said it was the Deportation 2.0 policy specifically designed to rid Australia of wastrels, beggars, incompetents, those not pulling their weight and bludgers.

Dutton has unveiled a list of undesirables he intends to deport forthwith, they include:

  • people who have not consistently voted Liberal in State, Local and Federal elections,
  • those who aspire to write essays, short stories or books with literary merit,
  • anyone publishing satire or articles critical of the Coalition government,
  • people pandering to the unfortunate,
  • anyone who does not provide a paid holiday for visiting overseas au pairs,
  • citizens who whinge too much about the Banks, Insurance companies or sexual abuse,
  • people who have applied, more than once, for social security,
  • people of retirement age who are neither self-supporting nor have relatives prepared to maintain them,
  • those who ask too much of government unless they are farmers or business owners,
  • the sick, the disabled, the old or any other who is in any way a drain on the taxpayer, and
  • anyone who did not celebrate Australia Day on 26th January.

Dutton, announced he had a crack team of Borderfarce Black Shirts ready to descend on to these miscreants. He said, “The guard dogs have been stationed in secluded spots in suburbs, Christmas Island detention centre has been reopened, contracts have been signed with Paladin and Aeroflot.  As soon as the Labor Party stops being a party pooper we can get rid of them from our shores.”

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East Timor

John first visited East Timor in 1974 in the run up to Fretlin’s declaration of independence from Portugal. After the Indonesian invasion of East Timor he was charged with “Counselling and being concerned with the illegal export of goods to East Timor.” He was active within Australia time of the in the struggle for the independence of the people of Timor Leste from the time of the invasion until the withdrawal of the Indonesian army and militias in 1999.

He was a member of the delegation of the East Timor Peace Mission on the Lusitania Espresso which was prevented from entering East Timorese waters by Indonesian warships, helicopters and air craft.

Many of the poems about Timor were read at demonstrations others were published in Green Left and other progressive publications.

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Efficiency

You reckon you’re efficient.
Why then did it take you three years
to drive that child
you’ve held in your detention centre
Insane?

Written in 2005 not published

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Emu and the Kangaroo

The Emu and the Kanga are on your coat of arms
and you say you didn’t really mean to engender harm.

But how come the emu and the kangaroo are on your coat of arms?
Who gave you permission to put these totem figures there?
Did you ask, did you wonder how come they are here?

And you try to tell me brother that you really meant no harm?

Written in 2009 not published.

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End war

I may not be a poet,
I’m a wordsmith without words
I want to beat the ploughshares
into swords.
I’m a peacenik not a pacifist.
I stand with the oppressed,
I side with the distressed,
I struggle for the poor
and the homeless;
and I hate the dogs of war.

Written 2002.

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Environment

There can be no economy without a sustainable environment. The time has long disappeared when the captains of industry can simply treat the pollution they’ve spewed out into the waterways, the commons and the air as an externality that is someone else’s problem.

Sustaining the environment is in everyone’s interest. We can no longer behave as if we are living on a river and that pollution is only a problem for those living downstream. We live in a finite system – a contained system – an interconnected system. Rather than living on a river we are living on a lake.

Any idiot: be they a Federal environment minister or a Queensland environment minister (who approves a mega mine like Adani’s Carmichael Mine believing they can grow rich on the royalties without destroying the Great Barrier Reef), has an intellectual deficit sufficient to be certified as incapable of rational thought.

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Equity and simplicity

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Friday, 4 December 2009

I’m not the goose plucker, I’m the goose plucker’s son
and I’m only plucking geese till the goose plucker comes.

Ken Henry may have been asked by the Rudd Government to carry out a review of Australia’s tax system but he has not been given a blank sheet of paper to write down his favourite tax proposals. He will be forced to meet the economic and political constraints which drive one of the most controlling prime ministers in the last hundred years.

In addition to pleasing his political masters Henry has to present a tax blueprint which working families can understand and in large part accept. This necessitates him not traversing “the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove where there are none to praise and very few to love”. In every meaning of the phrase, the Henry Review will be “rooted in the past”.

As well as attempting to keep Mr and Mrs Suburbia content or at least somnambulant, there are other dragons he must slay. These others are fearful beasts who guard their piece of the economic turf as if it had been placed directly into their hands by their god “Mammon”. These fire-breathing scaly reptiles come in all political hues from: captains of industry, mining company lobbyists, the CFMEU, teachers’ unions, the Australian Medical Association, to nature conservation groups and the churches.

Paul Keating warned that it was unwise to get between a state premier and a bucket of money. The warning, though apt, applies to a much larger group of industry, political, trade union, university, church and even welfare lobbyists who have received money in the past.

My tax plan

Given it’s the season to be jolly, this goose plucker’s son will proceed as if the task was to fill in a blank piece of paper with a tax plan which has a reasonable claim to be based on equity and simplicity. In addition I would want it to be efficient and to recognise that there are both positive and negative forms of taxation.

There are many forms of tax and in the minds of the general public, a tax is more likely to be considered popular when being paid by those who can afford it. Excise tax, which is considered a tax on sin (alcohol and cigarettes) is generally popular but there was an inordinate amount of hissing when the Rudd government tried to place a higher tax on alchopops than other alcoholic beverages. Here, perceptions about its complexity and unfairness held up the tax for a year in the labyrinths of the Senate.

Resource taxes are imposed in many countries. In 1795 American Thomas Paine argued that all citizens had the right to an equal share of the natural wealth of their country. The beauty about resource taxes is that they are imposed on profitable companies at the time when they are making a profit. Such resource taxes can be invested to pay a Basic Income in the future.

In Mongolia the government has recently announced it will pay all its citizens a Basic Income from the money it makes from exporting hydrocarbons and other minerals. Alaska has had a partial Basic Income for over 20 years paid to every resident who has lived there for six months. The Alaskan fund derives from oil royalties.

Some resource taxes like carbon emission taxes, are imposed to try to make polluting industries pay a contribution meant to deal with externalities which emerge as part of the mining or manufacturing processes. If such taxes are not imposed, the general public has to pay for the clean-up from general revenue.

Payroll taxes are a tax imposed on those who employ a substantial workforce. I am generally opposed to taxes on labour because they may cause some employers not to hire as many workers as they otherwise would. The one tax on labour which I feel must be paid by employers is workers compensation, because if employers pay the premium they are more likely to implement greater safety precautions in their work places, especially when higher premiums are incurred as the number of accidents increases.

Sales tax, consumption tax (GST), or valued added tax (VAT) are all variations on a theme. The GST or VAT taxes are generally more preferable to sales tax because they are simpler to understand and harder to avoid than sales taxes. Those who spend the most pay the most tax.

At first glance it might appear that a graduated income tax paid in inverse proportion to the amount of income earned would be a fair tax. However poor people have little opportunity to claim deductions whereas owners of a business and other highly paid employees have many deductions they can claim. The sheer complexity of the income tax legislation makes it very difficult for bureaucratically unsophisticated workers to claim deductions and the amounts involved are hardly worth the bother. Rich people seldom pay anything like the amount of income tax they should given the amount of income they receive, they tend to see income tax as a voluntary contribution rather than a compulsory requirement.

All forms of welfare are a form of negative tax. Unfortunately welfare benefits are surrounded by an array of confusing, demeaning, and disempowering regulations. Whether people get the appropriate benefit to suit their circumstances is in the luck of the draw. Few recipients of social security would have an accurate idea of how much they should be paid. Because of the extreme complexity of the Australian welfare system even Centrelink staff seldom know what amount people should be paid. Even more confusion occurs because eligibility for Social Security in Australia is calculated according to family composition not individual entitlement.

Private superannuation contributions (whether organised through industry funds or banking/insurance conglomerates) is a form of negative tax. The government taxes superannuation contributions at a concession rate and does not tax superannuation when it is withdrawn, provided certain guidelines are followed. Either way, the tax foregone on private superannuation disproportionately favours the rich. The greater the contributions one makes the less tax paid.

If equity was the desired end of Australia’s superannuation schemes then we would have introduced a social insurance superannuation scheme as was suggested by Hancock in 1976. Such a scheme would have been more like those operating in the bulk of European countries.

Rudd recently announced that the Productivity Commission will devise an income support and service delivery scheme to assist people with significant disabilities. No doubt they’ll suggest something like a privatised superannuation scheme rather than a disability social insurance scheme Woodhouse recommended in 1974 which would have provided a government run service like the Accident Compensation Corporation in New Zealand.

Conclusion

My ideal tax regime in Australia would include a flat income tax rate of 10 per cent for everybody and a flat rate of GST set at 30 per cent. Quite high resource taxes would be levied on extraction industries and water and carbon taxes would deal with their impact on the environment. There would be land taxes and family homes would attract an annual 1 per cent home owner tax on the home equity in excess of $700,000. Such a scheme would be reasonably simple and treat people equally. But without one final element, such a tax regime would not be fair.

To make the tax system equitable the existing pension and benefit system of income support would need to be abolished and replaced by a system which would guarantee that every permanent resident was entitled to a Basic Income paid at the rate of the age pension. This Basic Income would be paid to individuals irrespective of marital, employment or other social status. In order to pay for this, the preferential tax treatment of superannuation would need to be phased out and the $30 billion in subsidies to industry would need to be scaled back. Subsidies are, after all, just another form of negative tax.

Such a balanced positive and negative tax regime would not impede wealth accumulation. It would guarantee every permanent resident an income above the Henderson poverty line. It would provide a firm foundation on which to build social justice in Australia.

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F….ing Global Solutions !

In my country asylum seekers are incarcerated
by F….ing Global Solutions,
on the orders of our F….ing Government.
What does the F stand for?
It could be Fighting.
It could be Fudging.
It could be Frightening.
Oh, when the Fuck will you get it?

Written in 2004 not published

Global Solutions was the name of one of the companies the Australian government employed to supply guards to run on shore and off shore concentration camps housing asylum seekers.

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Fighting

Dear Comrades
the bosses are upset
the workers have not yet
found the will to down the swill
that they’d feed us.

You’d think the workers would be grateful
but they claim they’ve had a gutful
of the bosses’ crap.
Now what do you think of that?
Peter Reith* would lay a wreath
on awards and our conditions
but if we fight to get what’s right
we’ll give those Liberals a bloody fright:
if we in solidarity unite
they’ll not control the workers might.

*Peter Reith was minister of industrial relations in the Howard Liberal Government.

Written Oct 1997

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For Olive Brown

Land rights, decent health and equal sharing of our wealth.
Too much to ask Australia?
Or is it.
It’s 1993
the U.N. Year
of the Indigene.
Rape, killing, theft,
chopping down what’s left.
In our town
an Aboriginal Embassy
talk of reconciliation
but no thought of sovereignty.

Too many friends have gone
but the struggle will go on,
for land rights, decent health
and equal sharing of our wealth.
There is no way to make amends
or say goodbye to absent friends;
Roy Marika in Gove,
Fred Hollows in Sydney,
or Olive here.

Read at a memorial service for Olive in Canberra.

 

 

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Found and lost

First published on Union Songs website 29/1/2006 http://unionsong.com/u341.html
also published Al-Moharer Vol. 239 6/2/2006 http://al-moharer.net/mohhtm/j_tomlinson239.tml
and also The Word 2006.
and also New Community Quarterly Vol.4, No1 Autumn 2006 p.83

Angels dancing on my conscience
devils playing with my mind,
fanciful ideas: daydreaming nonsense,
portentous thoughts defined.

Authority’s extended licence,
pleading hands and deeply lined,
jumbled ideas all out of sequence
to asylum seekers we are blind.

Tangled lives and lost embraces
anguished times and razor wire
happy yet distorted faces
terrified but with hope afire.

Despatching people willy nilly,
preventing them from reaching shore.
Welcoming the gold encrusted,
rejecting desperate frightened poor.

Sending planes to watch ships sinking
doing nothing for the drowning,
we can’t claim that’s good thinking
I can see the gods are frowning.

Then at last gaunt undertakers
clean their best your cold remains,
leaving you to meet your maker
and justify such moral stains.

Angels dancing on my conscience
devils playing with my mind,
fanciful ideas: daydreaming nonsense
reality is hard to find.

 

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From Mabo to Pearson

  • This is all the protection which the Howard Government thinks that Aboriginal property rights deserve.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu said:

My father “would think that no people could be more disadvantaged than the Yolgnu when they had to watch, powerlessly, as bulldozers tore down sacred trees and built huge mines on our former hunting grounds. And having lived through those times – when I could not vote and was only educated through the charity of the missionaries – I challenge any one to say we were better off before our rights were recognised. P.13” The Australian 3/6/2002

The Age 26/9/2002 noted: It was Indigenous Affairs Minister Philip Ruddock who posed the question yesterday: What should teachers do when hungry kids turn up at school? But the minister offered no answers, instead leaving the floor to Mr Pearson, who is well-known for his aggressive denunciations of the welfare mentality among Aboriginal communities.

“If it’s an isolated problem then the community leaders have got to bring the parents to account,” he said. “If it’s so bad and widespread and it doesn’t look likely that you could get these individual parents to fulfil their responsibility, then a breakfast program might be an appropriate solution.” But you don’t want provisioning by government through a breakfast program that lets the parents off scot-free. “If you, as a slack parent, are receiving money on behalf of kids and you’re spending it on grog or something, well the elders need to be given the power to say, ‘Well, we’re taking $50 out of that income and we’re putting it into the breakfast program because your kids are using that program during the week’.”

John Howard said, “I regard a treaty as a recipe for separatism” (cited in Marcia Langton Inaugural Professional Lecture Uni of Melb 2002)

John Howard has argued that practical reconciliation not self-determination is what Indigenous people need.

Why does white Australia need to maintain:
“The public debates about the place of Aboriginal people in the nation have focussed on the problem of how to incorporate Aboriginal people into the ambit of the nation state. By various means: assimilation, intergration, self-management, self-determination, reconciliation and throughout the years, the call for a treaty could also be heard. (p.1)”(Marcia Langton Inaugural Professional Lecture Uni of Melb 2002)

Without a rights framework that works, there is no ability to create and protect the rights to economic self-sufficiency and Indigenous peoples, families and communities will only be dependant on welfare. Even worse, they will remain dependant upon the benevolence of the government. This should not be read as a rejection of the right to access welfare. Rather, it is a criticism of policy made in a reactionary way without a view to larger, long-term, goals and aspirations. As can be seen by the contents of the Native Title Amendment Act 1998 (Cth), the days of governments actively truncating and extinguishing Indigenous rights are far from over.

In an address on The Relevance of the Rights Agenda in the Age of Practical Reconciliation: Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies and the Director of the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. Delivered at the University of Sydney, 17 December, 2001, said:

Australians need to make some Choices as to how Indigenous people are going to be treated:
Genocide  cultural genocide (assimilation) paternalism (integration, self-management)
Reparation
Liberation (self-determination, treaty, independence, Indigenous Sovereignty)

The last word should go to the Mad Monk TONY ABBOTT, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS Speech: 25/9/2002. Grass Roots Capitalism Corporate Leaders For Indigenous Employment Conference, Canberra

It’s in these (remote) settlements that life expectancy, housing quality and literacy levels, along with school attendance and the maintenance of public order, often approach third world standards…..It’s tempting to conclude that this is entirely the consequence of dispossession and racism. We have to acknowledge the history but we can’t undo it….

I would say in reply:

that existing white privilege has been built upon past Indigenous dispossession and unless you alter that you are simply reinforcing past injustice. If you are the beneficiary of past injustice, it is incumbent upon you to make reparation to those who have been wronged otherwise you are an accessary after the fact. This makes you complicit in the original act of dispossession.

• More Abbott:

Australian society is far from prejudice-free (and still has a strong tendency to typecast people) but the problems of Aboriginal communities owe at least as much to welfarism as racism….  The immediate economic benefits of employment are comparatively minor compared to the improvement in physical and mental health and reduction in crime which accompanies the shift from welfare to work. Given the history of dispossession, a sense of Aboriginal entitlement is understandable and justifiable. The problem for all rentier classes, however, whether it1s low rent on welfare or high rent on royalties, is that aimlessness which tends to breed alienation, despair and self-harm.

I do hope he’s warned the Packers

Garrarrwuy Yunupingu in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra in February 1997 summed up the desperation which many Indigenous people feel when he said:

Same thing you mining companies. You dig my country and you make your money and you go laughing all the way to the Swiss bank, but you leave me a hole and the pollution. No thanks, but you take all the goodness out of my land and you leave me nothing. But I’m not disappointed. I might be a bit angry with you, the way you treated me and being unfair. But I’m still sitting there nursing the hole and the pollution you left me behind.I will not go away from that hole and that pollution because it is my right to die in that land. (p.21). Land Rights News Vol.2, No. 41

You might like to read more in Chapter 6 of my e-Book which can be found on the Basic Income Guarantee Australia website:
BIGA http://www.basicincome.qut.edu.au/interest/e-books.jsp

• More Abbott

Two years ago, Noel Pearson opened a new debate on the importance of economic participation if Aboriginal people are to regain their self- respect and autonomy. This is vital to the reconciliation process, less, perhaps, because Aboriginal people will continue to resent lower incomes, on average, than other Australians but because the general public will find it hard to see past an “Aboriginal problem” as long as too few Aboriginal people have “real” jobs… A sure sign that reconciliation has been achieved will be the presence of Aboriginal people as leaders of non-Aboriginal organisations…
This aspect of reconciliation is more important than gestures such as treaties, apologies and constitutional acknowledgements…. Australians naturally warm to people who are doing it tough but having a go. That is why Pearson’s message has struck such a chord. Pearson has stressed Aboriginal distinctiveness but not Aboriginal separateness.
One of the biggest obstacles to economic advancement is the fact that Aboriginal communities are still largely socialist enclaves in a free society.

Dankeschon mein Fuhrer

I knew Karl Marx’s was the problem… all along …honest …I never thought it was anything to do with racism or dispossession or white theft of their savings or genocide or colonialisation or the non-payment of wages or the taking of children or rape of the women… honest.

 

Lecture 2002

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George Quade and others

You took Cape York. You stole my hope.
You plundered land from me.
Then blamed me for my ignorance
of what you’d hope you’d be.

In place of tribal trust
and quiet serenity
you missionised
you civilised
with Christianity
and police and grog
and squatters dogs
and your degeneracy.

In the falseness of the day
you hid the lies of night
Black skins / white skins
a timely oversight.

Still you wonder why it is
I feel that I’ve been used
as you rip apart the land I love
a wilderness abused.

 

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Get over it you Black bastards

Tony Abbott suggests that Aborigines should move on from the Tent Embassy because relations between Indigenous and other Australians have improved in the last 40 years. Using the same logic, would he dare suggest to the RSL that they demolish all the monuments erected to acknowledge the sacrifices made by service personnel in the two world wars? Only the Indigenous community can decide if and when the Tent Embassy no longer has any meaning for them.

Written just after invasion day 2012 – not published

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sabastio-gomes-santa-cruz-cemetary

Getting to Dili

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Tuesday, 4 October 2005 – edited 2016

Frenetic writing during the previous month, last minute cleaning up in the first light of morning and remembering to turn off the hot water system dissipated as I emersed myself in unnecessary anxiety as to when the cab would turn up to take me to Brisbane airport. The taxi arrived early and soon I was enjoying a last fag on the footpath outside the terminal. Finally it seemed real that I was heading to Darwin en route for East Timor early the following day. My partner, Penny, was flying in from her home in Sydney and we were to have three weeks together. We had gone to some lengths to ensure we were to travel on the same flight to Darwin.

I was edging my way forward towards the booking counter, when Penny tapped me on the shoulder, saying, “You won’t believe this but I’ve got to go back to Sydney”. On the flight from Sydney, Penny had been reading her Lonely Planet Guide to East Timor and had discovered that before you can get a 30-day visa you must have a valid passport which does not expire for more than six months. Her Australian passport had only four months to run. She had a British passport which she had left in Sydney. As we parted she said, “I’ll see you at the Fannie Bay Motel which I’ve booked by email”.

At Darwin airport I inquired at the information counter for directions to the Fannie Bay Motel only to be told there was no hotel or motel of that name. I had lived in Darwin for 15 years between 1965 and 1985 and had revisited it several times since. I knew the old Fannie Bay Hotel had been wiped out in Cyclone Tracy but I knew the suburb where we were to stay and headed off to locate the motel Penny had booked.
After several unsuccessful attempts to find the right one I eventually managed to reach Penny on the phone at her home and she found her records which gave me the street address of the motel. The website name is different to the one on the building and in the phone book. Yes, they did have a booking for us – so I checked in. Then I headed off to the outer Darwin rural area to drop off some gear with an old mate, Robert Wesley-Smith, with whom I would be staying for a month after the two-week sojourn in Timor.

Upon returning to the motel I settled down with a few beers to await Penny’s arrival on the 11 o’clock flight. She had an hour’s wait for a cab because there was an American warship in town and the time the sailors had to be back on board coincided with her aircraft arrival time.

The ringing of the alarm at 4.15am next day, though necessary if we were to catch the flight, hardly added to our sense of enjoyment. The choice was between instant coffee or abstinence, we chose the latter. A quick shower and we were on our way. The Air North ground staff would not allow Penny to take her small backpack into the cabin. She grabbed her camera out of the backpack and then watched it disappear with her suitcase down the baggage escalator. About ten minutes later she realised that she had left $500 in the backpack but no name or address information.

The one and a half hour flight from Darwin was uneventful. The first high point was the arrival of a packet of potato crisps and a drink. I was excited to see the south coast of East Timor. The last time I had seen it was in 1992 from the deck of the Lusitania Expresso, the international peace ship which had travelled from Portugal in the wake of the Dili massacre. We had intended to lay a wreath of flowers at the Santa Cruz Cemetery in Dili. Indonesian warships, aircraft and helicopters turned the ship around at the 12-mile limit.

Flying over the tall mountains of East Timor with their deep ravines and dry river beds is impressive in anyone’s language. From the aircraft windows we could see Mount Ramelau, the highest peak in East Timor. The Timorese say that first rays of sun shine on Ramelau before touching any other part of East Timor. On clear nights, the lights of Darwin are said to be visible from the top of the mountain.

Soon we were on the tarmac and making our way to pay the $30 fee for our visas. The temporary building where visitors go for visas had dangerous broken steps which drives the message home that this was a poor country with much yet to be done. Most of the luggage came off, then a second lot which had my bags. I assured Penny hers would arrive shortly – they didn’t and customs ushered us out of the luggage area. Penny eventually convinced the airline to hand over her luggage. Up to this point it seemed that this was the trip from hell.

A Timorese cab driver had stayed with me while Penny was luggage-hunting and soon we were on our way to the Hotel Turisimo where we booked into an air-conditioned room overlooking the water. Turisimo survived the Indonesian military and militia rampage which occurred in the aftermath of the 1999 independence referendum. This was in no small part due to the negotiation skills of Joao the gardener who has been with the hotel for 35 years and still works there. There has been some building construction but the ambience of the place seems little changed since I was there in 1974.

On the drive from the airport there was less evidence of destruction than I had expected but after a day or so wandering around Dili the signs of the devastation inflicted by the Indonesian TNI and the militias are still quite evident. Even in central Dili, burnt-out buildings lie abandoned and the footpaths are a hazard because military vehicles have crushed sewer covers and ripped up sections of the pavements. People in wheelchairs are safer taking their chances on the streets and they do.

I had a sense of there being some unfinished business from 1992, and we took a taxi to Santa Cruz Cemetery where I hoped to find the grave of Sebastian Gomes, the young man who had been taken by Indonesian soldiers from the church at Motael where he and other students had sought sanctuary. He was subsequently murdered by Indonesian security forces. It was his funeral which had brought all the young people to Santa Cruz Cemetery on the day of the Dili massacre. Over 500 people were killed by the Indonesian m
litary at the cemetery over the following two days.

Penny and I had inquired at Xanana Gusmao Reading Room about how to find Sebastian’s grave – the young man we spoke with there assured us it was not far from the shrine. When we got to Santa Cruz Cemetery we found that it is jam-packed with graves of all sizes and descriptions; some are quite elaborate, many have been constructed by family members with materials available to them, rather than by tradesmen. Some graves were unmarked and some were family plots. Some had flowers on top of them from recent visits and several Timorese families were tending graves.

We proceeded down past the shrine along the most easily accessible path, past workmen doing repairs to some of the graves and clearing up around them.

sabastio-gomes-santa-cruz-cemetaryDown towards the back of the cemetery I looked over to my right to see a simple cross painted white with Sebastian Gomes’ name in black and a record of the date of his death. In the early morning sunshine it was like a beacon. We made our way over to his grave, trying to walk along the borders of other graves. I was surprised how overwhelmed I felt. I recalled much of the film footage I’d seen of the massacre and thought about all the people who had died. I was thinking of the mayhem which would have occurred as people tried to flee the soldiers, and remembering the disappointment we felt on the Lusitania Expresso when Shirley Shackleton cast the wreath from the stern of our retreating peace ship which we’d intended to lay at Santa Cruz. I was thinking about the 300,000 East Timorese who died in the struggle for independence from Indonesia.

As I stood there staring at the grave I was thinking just how impotent repression is in the long run. The Indonesian navy might have been able to turn around an international peace mission at gun point, yet I was standing in Santa Cruz Cemetery some 13 years later, and East Timor was free. I thought of many of the others who had been on the Lusitania Expresso who had been here before me and some who will come later. I remembered others, and Jack Broadman, who was run over and killed as he left a Free East Timor rally, who wouldn’t make it back.

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Giving comfort to the enemy

Published in New Matilda, 24th Jan 2006
https://newmatilda.com/2006/01/24/giving-comfort-enemy/

The Australian government late last year passed legislation making it an offence for citizens to give comfort to the enemy. This is presumably because they believe they are not the enemy. Yet, it has been a reasonable libertarian position that the government is the enemy of democracy. I presume that libertarians will now believe that the government is no longer the enemy, democracy has no enemies or we had to do away with democracy in order to protect it from the enemy, or perhaps all three.

The Federal government has made it an offence to spread disaffection against all manner of posh people including that rich old lady who lives in England and believes she is our Head of State. It is also now illegal to spread disaffection against the people who believe she is the head of our government and any of their rich hangers-on, whether they give a toss about who is head of government, so long as the basis for their accumulating wealth is not questioned.

Before this recent legislation it might have been possible to question the legitimacy of the invasion of this land, the dispossession of the original owners, even the continuing occupation. I suppose that such debates have been “washed away by the tide of history”. At least the legal situation is now clarified and the descendants of the original owners, who we have not been able to incarcerate, have been given fair notice that any murmurings of discontent will remove all previous obstacles to jailing them.

Asylum seekers, who are experiencing all the amenities of the Baxter Holiday Resort – for people we don’t want but can’t deport – had better not complain about being slowly driven mad or they may find that they too are accused of spreading disaffection. Such an accusation (proof is no longer required) could mean that even if they are found to be refugees, they will be denied a permit to stay.

One of the problems that some people are having is that they are not entirely sure what the government has agreed to do with our allies. Are Australians expected to support torture in Abu Gharib, Guantamo Bay, Diego Garcia and Bagram in Afghanistan? Are we expected to support the CIA’s special renditions of terrorist suspects? Are we expected to support aerial assassinations of villagers in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the West Bank and Iraq? Will we take part in bombing Iran and Syria? Will we support the ongoing suppression of West Papuan people by Kompassas troops? Loyal citizens should not be troubled by such questions: our government would not do these things if they were wrong.

May be, the government is not being hard enough on those who would spread disaffection or comfort the enemy. At the moment, a police officer, or some other official, has to suspect that someone might, at some time, do something, say something or think about doing something which might in some way cause offence. The legislation would be far easier to administer if these officials had only to assert that they had a slight feeling of unease about the person, the members of a religious group or an ethnic group before they could be rounded up and jailed. New South Wales, after all, has given its police the power to lock down entire suburbs.

The present legislation is useful in that the Commonwealth officials don’t have to tell the accused person what they are suspected of having done or are planning to do. Given the lengths to which some lawyers are prepared to go in an attempt to establish the innocence of some suspects, this added secrecy is vital. Clearly, the guilty know what they’ve done – so they don’t need to be told.

Despite the substantial steps taken so far, the legislation needs to be enhanced in two significant regards. Two new offences should be added to the existing armoury. The first should be “failing to plead guilty as charged” and the second “attempting to prove innocence”. Both should carry mandatory life sentences.

 

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Government and Opposition

Brian Manning concluded his address at the 45th Anniversary of Gurindji Freedom Day at Daguragu (previously known as Wattie Creek) by reading this poem:

Wild horses can’t drag me,
and you’ll never tempt me
to get into line and pretend
you have the truth – the answer:
I’ll resist you to the very end.

I’ll not praise your lying jugglers
presenting half lies and distorted images as fact.
You’ll not hear me rabbiting on about people smugglers.
I am prepared to wait until the final act.
You will not catch me wearing budgie smugglers.

When leaky boats arrive I see asylum seekers
brought here by poor Indonesian fishermen.
I’m not interested in your sticky beakers
or the really amoral who’d return them to Malaysia
or Manus or Nauru or to wherever they fled:
such people care little if they end up dead.

You’ll not hear me musing on “the simple dignity that work brings”
nor the need to cut the number of pensioners with a disability
because they are doing what they can to the best of their ability.
I’m aware of the struggle poor people face: of the outrageous slings:
of the uphill climb just to get their hungry children fed,
coping with the daily grind, finding the shelter of a nice warm bed.

So to the Government and Opposition I want to put the proposition
that “It’s Time” to find a way to embrace all who live in our land:
to share and care and do what’s fair, giving all a helping hand,
to come to a just resolution of Indigenous people’s claim,
to be generous to the first peoples and end the old blame game,
to close immigration detention centres and lock the door,
to end the gross disparities between rich and poor,
to end poverty and malnutrition and what’s more,
to help end world starvation and stop every war,
to comfort the afflicted and bandage every sore.

http://chriswhiteonline.org/2011/09/2003/

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Greed is (not) good

ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate

Posted Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Governments around the world are falling over themselves to engage in a Keynesian-style pump-priming of their economies. Until the mid-1970s Keynesian economics dominated fiscal thinking in Australia and much of the English-speaking world. Then came the neo-conservative economic fundamentalist-drive, led by Milton Friedman: Thatcherism in Britain, Reaganonomic supply-side economics in the United States, Rodgernomics in New Zealand and John Howard’s fiscal conservatism in Australia. In Australia, there were some promoters of economic fundamentalism whose grip on reality was so loose that they called their beliefs “economic rationalism”. There was no shortage of overpaid economists prepared to deride counter-cyclical pump-priming of the economy or anything else which sounded reminiscent of Keynesian thought.

There were always a few, like economic journalist Kenneth Davidson and Economics Professor Frank Stilwell, who clung tenaciously to a belief that Lord Keynes had a substantial contribution to make to modern economic thinking. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s the “greed is good” crowd, as aptly portrayed by Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street, proliferated. In the run-up to the 1993 election, John Hewson, who led the Liberal Party to defeat, repeated the mantra that “greed is good”.

The problem, which the elevation of greed to a moral virtue creates, is not so much the intense personal rivalries, or excessive competiveness it engenders as the lack of solidarity and downward envy (see Tomlinson, J. (1999) “The Politics of Envy.” Union Song Site) which emerge in the minds of those who are attracted to such a debilitating philosophical position. It matters not one jot whether it is:

  • President Clinton enforcing time-limited welfare assistance on supporting parents;
  • John Howard introducing “Work for the dole”, with more severe breaching regimes for supporting parents, or restricted eligibility conditions for Disability Support pensions; or
  • Jenny Macklin’s Intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Once people come to accept the corrosive belief that because they don’t get government assistance to help raise their children or cope with a disability then no one should. And if they do then it should be doled out like charity from the parish poor box. Such people forget that they get tax cuts and government superannuation subsidies which the poor don’t get, nor do they seem to notice that they aren’t poor and they don’t have a disability.

It is not so long ago that our Treasurer was running around telling anyone who would listen that the inflation genie was out of the bottle. Then he argued that, because of the resources boom, Australia was well placed to avoid the worst of the world’s recession. In the wake of the downturn in international trade and the slowing of demand for our minerals, it would now seem that we may not be as well insulated as we once thought. Share and house prices are falling, unemployment is rising, inflation is falling, we are heading for budget deficits, business confidence is low and ordinary workers are worried about the coming economic downturn. Those with private superannuation investment accounts have seen the value of their savings shrink. They look at an older generation of retirees who have indexed superannuation pensions and wonder how it is that many of the recently retired were conned into investing in accumulation accounts. Worse off still are those who have invested in developers or retailers who have gone into receivership.

In 1976, the Hancock Committee recommended to the Australian Government a national superannuation scheme which would have been a taxpayer-funded social insurance superannuation scheme similar to that of New Zealand and several countries in Europe. Hancock’s idea was not embraced and superannuation was put on the back burner until the Hawke/Keating government introduced a compulsory private superannuation scheme. Many of those currently seeing their private superannuation savings dribble away might reflect on the advantages of universal payments over individual investment accounts.

During the Howard years those who looked closely at the social security system in Australia witnessed just how easily various categories of recipients could be scapegoated. First it was the young unemployed who were subjected to the euphemistically named “Mutual Obligation” regime. Eventually all recipients were subjected to the regime. The many categories of social security benefit with their differing rates and eligibility conditions make it nearly impossible to generate solidarity across the entire range of recipients. Downward envy was cleverly employed by Howard and his associates to divide those in paid work from those outside the labor market.

During times of war and economic depression/recession many learn or relearn the lesson of Aesop’s fable about the four oxen and the lion and remember that “united we stand, divided we fall”. Instead of having many types of welfare payments, retirement incomes, student allowances, family payments, privatised superannuation, tax cuts and rural assistance schemes, all with their different levels of payment, we could have a system of Basic Income which paid every permanent resident an above poverty line income. This would ensure there was a financial floor beneath every individual and family in Australia without imposing a ceiling beyond which no one could rise.

In addition to ensuring economic security, because a Basic Income is an equal payment which is paid unconditionally as a right of residency/citizenship, such a universal payment enhances egalitarianism and feelings of social solidarity.

Whether it is President Obama calling on the US Senate or speaking to the population at large he is asking all Americans to make a sacrifice in the common interest. Similar mechanisms are in place in the Australian context when Prime Minister Rudd speaks about fiscal stimulus measures to support the economy. Leaders around the world when they speak to their people about the need to work together to escape the current recession are evoking the spirit of Aesop’s fable. President Obama explicitly criticised Wall Street banking executives for awarding themselves $20 billion in bonus payments at a time when the tax payer is bailing out failing banks.

Greed does not even seem to be good for rich banking executives. They don’t seem to understand that it has been their behaviour which has, at least in part, led to the current economic meltdown. Unless a more egalitarian solidarity begins to emerge then the chances that US bankers and their physicians will heal themselves is slim indeed. Alaska has a small Basic Income scheme in place and it is the most egalitarian of the states of the United States.

The idea of introducing a Basic Income for every person on the entire planet seemed very optimistic a couple of years ago, but if the US is going to cure its Wall Street bankers of their excessive bonus problem then it could find that a worldwide Basic Income might help. Bankers might just come to see that humanitarian ideas are productive rather than being an obstacle to sustainable growth and capital accumulation. The real advantage which a worldwide Basic Income delivers is healthier populations which could increase production of more tradable products and more self-sustaining food production. This would increase world trade and with that help lift many nations out of this recession.

I fear, however, that the lack of trust and the fear that someone else is getting something for nothing will stand in the way. That is, the “greed is good” mentality still lingers in the minds of the power elites. Too many of them think it’s all right for privileged individuals to get something for nothing – that is how they’ve lived their entire lives – but it is abhorrent that poor people should get justice, equality, decency, and humanity; let alone something for nothing.

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