I think the most important point to make here is that everybody involved with the Aboriginal situation agrees on one thing:
This problem can not be solved with money.
Australia is an a very wealthy nation, and the number of Aborigines is tiny, and the number with difficulties just a small fraction of that. If the problem could be solved by throwing aid money at it, it would be solved in about 2 years. I have seen the figures on the amount of money spent to promote Aboriginal welfare over the past 40 years. I can’t remember the exact amount, but it amounts to several million dollars fo4r every Aboriginal person who lived during that period. Clearly if the issue could be solved with money then it would have been solved by now.
That is why foreign aid agencies don’t get involved. Because there is nothing for them to do. The same reason they don;t get involved with homeless people and drug addicts living in the USA. And you do realise the USA has far more of those people than Australia has disadvantaged Aborigines. Right?
So why doesn’t money solve the problem? Three reasons. The first is general corruption and incompetence of governments and public servants of all races. The second is the complexity of the problem. The final is the delicacy of the problem.
Aboriginal problems are horrendously complicated and have a huge number of causes, but at the end of the day the problem is that Aboriginal culture as it is now does not promote success in the modern world. Throwing money at the problem can achieve one of two goals.
It can be used for education and information that aims to change Aboriginal culture. This has been done to death and is being done to death. Aborigines, particularly young people, are saturated with messages designed to get them to abandon the most inhibitory aspects of the culture. It probably works in the sense that it stops the problem getting any worse, but it has plateaued, and there is no evidence that more education will produce better results. Furthermore, many of the destructive aspects of the culture are also the most beneficial, so it’s damn hard to change them. The most obvious example is the concept of communal success, where the success of one member of a community or family is be shared by all. That’s a wonderful concept, but it also means that when one person succeeds, for example in getting a good job, the wealth is often dissipated amongst numerous unemployed people. The result is that success doesn’t build on success, and the situation for the community doesn’t improve.
The second way money can change culture is through forced aculturation/assimilation. It might work, but it shouldn’t be attempted.
So money can’t address the root causes of the problem.
So money might be able to address the symptoms of the problem. It might be able to provide houses for example. But anybody familiar with the latest Aboriginal housing fiasco or the ATSIC corruption scandals of the late 90s knows why that doesn’t work. One of the biggest problems is that there is no fixed accountability for Aboriginal governance. Aborigines aren’t self-governing, yet the Communities are almost all controlled by a self-governing body, elected by community members that is answerable only to the commonwealth minister. Furthermore this same body controls much of the funding that is available for off-community projects as well.
The result of this bizarre little situation is that nobody is accountable for nothing. One of the Communities I was staying at had the pump that supplied the drinking water break down. The Aboriginal body, ATSIC at the time, said it wasn’t their problem because water was the responsibility of the local (read County) government. County government said water supply was the responsibility of the state, and they could only help with treatment, the State said Aboriginal affairs was a Commonwealth reposnsibility, the Commonwelath minister said he couldn’t interfere in ATISIC autonomy on the matter. And so around it went. More recently there has been a scheme allocated umpteen million dollars to build houses for Aborigines in Northern Australia. When the last review was done there had been something like 12 houses built for the people managing the project at a cost of about 3 million dollars a house, and no houses at all built for Aborigines who were homeless, unemployed or in poverty. The cause was the same.
These are just two examples, but they are frighteningly typical of the situation created because nobody can take control of the situation. The fact that the Aboriginal body members are elected by poorly educated, usually clannish people also produces the types of result you’d expect. Think Boss Hogg and you’re getting a pretty accurate picture of many Aboriginal councils. There were a series of scandals in the late 90s that led to an investigation of the then ATSIC, which revealed that corruption was rife. I won’t bore you with all the stories of corruption uncovered, but we had things like ATSIC councillors people setting up real estate and building companies, then getting people to apply for home loans for the houses they would build, knowing the loan would default. Because ATSIC guaranteed the project, they got paid for the project even though it never got beyond the foundations.
So the corruption and incompetence surrounding Aboriginal issues makes it almost impossible for money to achieve anything. So why not quash the corruption? Because of the third problem: the delicacy of the situation.
Nobody wants to address the problem because it’s too sensitive. Aborigines have to have some degree of self-governance. When the previous government announced plans to abandon ATSIC following the corruption scandals there were howls fo aoutrage. So ATSIC was abandoned in name and still exists in a new but functionally identical form.
When the extent of domestic violence, child neglect and child rape was uncovered by a report several years ago, the Commonwealth government implemented what it called “The Intervention”. Federal police and defence force staff were mobilised to provide medical care and protection to community members. Pedophiles and repeat violent offenders were arrested and tried. People found to be neglecting their children in order to buy drugs or alcohol were given the equivalent of food stamps instead of cash. And the result was howls of protest despite the almost incomprehensible severity of the problem.
Nobody is really prepared to tackle the problems because it is political suicide. No matter what solution is suggested, it is portrayed as racist and paternalistic. The only solutions that are able tomake headway are those proposed and implemented by the Aboriginal councils and communities. But as noted above, the structure of those communities means that it is almost impossible for them to implement change.
That’s it in a nutshell. Oh, there are plenty of problems that derive from those, like the fact that you can’t get health professionals to stay in most communities because of the high levels of violence. But those are symptoms of the root problems of cultural dysfunction, corruption and delicacy.
So the problem isn’t money. The problem has buckets of money thrown at it. If someone could show a way to make serious headway into the problem the money would be found in an instant. Butt he problem isn’t money, because the problem can’t be solved with money.
