Justice, not paternalism

Sam Watson

Federal health minister Tony Abbott announced on June 21 a proposal to impose a “form of paternalism … based on competence rather than race” on Aboriginal communities. His proposal would give “administrators” wide-ranging powers to run communities, eradicating any semblance of Indigenous self-determination.

Abbot’s outburst is totally symptomatic of the Howard regime’s final solution to race relations in this country. Since Howard was elected in March 1996, his corrupt and rotten government has gradually dismantled the Aboriginal political leadership, further stripped the Aboriginal nations of valuable resources and services, and continually used the Packer/Murdoch mass media to marginalise and dehumanise Aboriginal people.

Abbott argues that a “sense of guilt about the past and naive idealism of communal life may now be the biggest obstacle to the betterment of Aboriginal people”. He and fellow attack dogs have made an art form out of blaming the victim.

The problem of Aboriginal disadvantage, says Abbott, “is not the lack of spending, although it could always be higher, but the culture of directionless in which so many Aboriginal people live”. Yet Howard and previous federal administrations have consistently underspent on Aboriginal health, housing and education. They and their state counterparts have consistently refused to engage with Aboriginal leaders and work out an equitable and reasonable form of compensation to Aboriginal people for past injustices, such as theft of lands, destruction of cultures and stolen wages.

Abbott, Howard and their ilk refuse to acknowledge that the entire Australian economy is based on Aboriginal land. They refuse to acknowledge that white Australia owes the Aboriginal nations 218 years of back-rent and damages for illegal armed invasion and loss of life.

The pathway forward is to re-empower the traditional leadership structures and resource those remote communities to the same extent as white Australian suburban communities. Every Aboriginal child born on this land must have the same access to goods and services that every white child has.

[Sam Watson is an Indigenous activist based in Brisbane and a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive.]

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