‘Colonialism’, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell, is like ketchup. “It can be put on practically anything – and demanding evidence makes you a ‘racist’.” There’s nothing ‘colonialism’ can’t be used to hand wave away, not least inconvenient questions about why so many colonies are such shitholes, or why so many formerly colonised are wallowing in poverty, crime and violence.
‘The trauma of colonialism’ is the pious excuse trotted out whenever anyone dares ask why it’s almost always Aboriginal kids running amok in the streets of Darwin or Townsville, or why their parents are too busy drinking and fighting to make them go to school. Does this excuse actually wash, though?
Because the plain truth is that most Aboriginal Australians don’t live in remote communities or towns like Darwin. The majority of Aboriginal Australians – or, at least, those who ‘identify’ as such – live in the cities and big regional towns, and they’re doing pretty well.
Were 1788, and the train of colonial occupation that followed on from that, the primary cause, then you wouldn’t find such wide variation among Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians in urban areas and regional centres are hard to distinguish from the rest of the population in those places for levels of wealth, health, education and life outcomes.
The human crisis that produces and reproduces the Gap is much more clearly locatable. It is in the remote outstations of homeland settlements, and around some towns in isolated parts of the Australian interior. It is where there is no economic life outside the government provision of welfare and social services, and no jobs other than those government creates. These places, where basic social order and safety have largely vanished, have been described by Noel Pearson as worse than Third World countries.
Ah, but that’s because of colonialism. It’s all Captain Cook’s fault – or is it?
Let’s face it: 1973 and 1974, not 1788, better explain this long-scale traumatic hurt and human damage. Those are the years when the new policy of self-determination, and the remote homelands ideal, properly took hold.
In other words, it’s the very policies pushed so hard by the left that are the cause of ongoing Aboriginal misery in remote Australia. The idea of ‘self-determination’ – treating Aboriginal Australians as if they were a separate country within a country – was first mooted by the Australian Communist Party in the 1930s. The communists wanted to model Aboriginal communities on the ‘self-determining’ Soviet Socialist Republics.
In the 1950s, Australia’s commonwealth minister for states and territories Paul Hasluck shared the views of Canada’s Pierre Trudeau: that separatism was a bad idea. Hasluck also repudiated the idea of ‘protection’ as paternalistic and separatist. Hasluck therefore won back Aboriginal civil rights that had been denied under protection.
But when Hasluck quit politics in the late ’60s, ‘self-determination’, a new form of separatism, took hold.
Like multiculturalism – another buzzy, yet originally nebulous word that became policy without public debate about what it meant – self-determination germinated under the Coalition, was supercharged under Gough Whitlam, and then became orthodoxy. Even to question it was to be tarred with hankering for the bad old days of assimilation. Yet self-determination produced failure on a vast, indeed cataclysmic scale.
In practice, all it achieved was to turn Aboriginal communities into sinkholes, and remote-living Aboriginal Australians into little more than living museum pieces to stroke the vanity of the left.
Activist bureaucrats such as Herbert “Nugget” Coombs enthusiastically endorsed the idea that Indigenous communities in remote regions should be established largely outside modern capitalist Australia. After Whitlam’s 1972 election victory unemployment benefits were made available to all Indigenous people, even if they lived in communities where there were no jobs. It proved to be one of the most poisonous policy decisions of the 20th century.
In the 1950s and 1960s Aborigines had been employed at remote settlements and missions in government-run enterprises, which enabled them to work and live there. Piggeries, orchards, chicken runs, vegetable gardens, sawmills, bakeries and butcheries flourished. After 1972 young people knew they could get paid more money by not working – “sit-down money”, or the dole. The enterprises collapsed.
Paul Kelly can sing all the twee Kumbaya songs he likes about Vincent Lingiari and Whitlam, but, after all the photo ops were done, harsh reality set in.
The fate of Vincent Lingiari’s Gurindji people illustrate this tragedy all too vividly. Writer and historian Charlie Ward describes how welfare payments, infrastructure development wages and “unprecedented amounts of funding” from the government fundamentally compromised Gurindji autonomy in the years after Whitlam had poured a handful of sand into Lingiari’s open palm in 1975. Younger generation Gurindji refused to work in the Gurindji-operated cattle operation, rejecting their elders’ traditional authority.
A society that “had masterfully sustained itself by hard work and self-motivation” fell apart, chiefly “as a result of government assistance given under policies of Aboriginal self-management”.
As always with the left, it’s all care and no responsibility.
