The Best Australian Essays 2015 (24 page)

With the 2007 federal election on the horizon, Brough launched the Northern Territory intervention. It borrowed some features of the proposed Cape York Welfare Reform, particularly the concept of income management. However, unlike the Cape York proposals, Brough's Northern Territory proposals were put forward on the basis that they would apply to all welfare recipients, regardless of whether they were irresponsible or not. Its details were not clear to me until they were announced. Clearly it was Brough's and Howard's intention to produce some shock and awe with their announcement, akin to the asylum-seeker intervention when the
Tampa
came over the horizon in 2001.

On 5 July 2007, I wrote to Brough about his proposed approach with the NT intervention:

I explained that there were two practical problems. First, it would punish everyone, irrespective of their behaviour. ‘Consequently,' I added, ‘the measure will have limited, if any, impact on rebuilding social norms as it does not provide any signals as to what behaviour is unacceptable for motivation to curb that behaviour.' Second, it would build resentment among even the responsible adults towards the government's intervention.

I also quoted to him a recent editorial from the
Australian
:

Brough responded to my letter, saying that he would persist with ‘blanket coverage' of welfare quarantining:

Brough's insistence against the advice that I attempted to provide would become fatal for the entire initiative. It gave fuel to the anti-intervention campaign that started immediately and has raged to this day. It was a wrong principle that came to colour the entire enterprise, and by his insistence Brough ended up discrediting the concept of income management. Even though the Cape York Welfare Reform pilot proceeded the way we had designed it, people both within and outside these communities equated the Cape York trial with the intervention – to our program's great detriment. It made our reform challenge in Cape York all the more difficult and undermined the cause of reform. The anti-interventionists were mostly wrong in their arguments, but they were able to discredit genuine reform principles because Brough had given them ammunition to do so. The intervention fizzled out, and with it any momentum for change.

V

Indigenous Australians now live in a world dominated by liberal capitalism. There is nowhere to escape it. No society today, however traditional, is unaffected by it. There is no longer any splendid isolation of traditional societies from liberal capitalism's gravitational pull and inexorable pressures. Even in the remotest places where its only presence is provisioning by the welfare state, redistributive welfare is obviously part of the same paradigm.

How peoples prosper or fail in the face of the seductive charms and liabilities of this new condition is now a question that Indigenous Australians share with all societies and peoples around the planet. It may be trite to say, but it must be said, that Indigenous peoples in contemporary times have
material needs
.

Indigenous peoples are, after all, human, and subject to similar rules for advancement and pauperisation as other humans, and are driven by the same basic motivations. Of course, our culture and traditions are not without influence here, and the ingrained and long-held influence of our inherited culture cannot be ignored or wished away. But the imperatives of liberal capitalism are so unavoidable and powerful because they are
culture blind
at their essence. Whether you are European, Chinese, Indian, African, Pacific Islander or Australian Aboriginal, they are equally ruthless. The allocation of winning and losing positions in this pyramid of advantage and disadvantage, happiness and suffering, justice and injustice, is now subject to forces and phenomena beyond the ken of traditional societies. There are now currents at play and forces to contend with that have no precedent in our traditional past.

If we don't understand these rules, we won't even hold our present position; indeed there is evidence that our societies can crumble. I am primarily motivated by a conviction that, in Cape York, the Hope Vale of today is socially and culturally weaker than the Hope Vale of my father's day. While materially there has been a revolution largely driven by the redistribution effects of the Australian welfare state, there has been a corresponding breakdown, and many important things have been fractured and weakened in these past decades.

We are no longer talking about splendidly isolated tribes. Opportunities for sustenance in our traditional economy are limited and can only ever be a partial and increasingly marginal part of it. We are dealing with the aftermath of a devastating and complicated history, and there is no framework for understanding our current condition and future policy.

VI

Think about it. Just before Australia entered into one of the greatest mining booms in history, which lasted the best part of two decades, the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision recognised the land rights of Aboriginal people. The legislative protection of native title under Prime Minister Paul Keating's
Native Title Act
in 1993 and its subsequent expansion three years later in the Wik decision should have meant that traditional owners across the continent were now in a prime position to partake in the economic development of Australia. Never before in the history of Australia were its Indigenous peoples better placed.

It didn't happen. Australians all over benefited from the mining boom. There seemed to be no end to the dividends and growth. The confluence of the rise of China and India and the advanced state of Australia's resource industry gave rise to an extraordinary period. It put the nation in a commanding position when the global financial crisis hit in 2008. But did the traditional owners whose rights were recognised in the Mabo decision truly share in this boom? The answer is no.

How could this have happened? Under Mabo and Wik, native title potentially existed over large swathes of the continent, particularly in the regions where resource-extractive industries were located. Native title laws gave traditional owners rights to negotiate access to land and resources. But the Ten Point Plan amendments to the
Native Title Act
, introduced by the Howard government in 1998 with the urging of the mining industry, had severely weakened the rights of native title holders. Once Senator Brian Harradine sold out the Wik people in the final hours of that bitter debate, the leverage of native title holders was severely compromised. The mining industry had dealt themselves out of the 1993 negotiations around the
Native Title Act
by taking an extreme oppositional stance, refusing to acknowledge that the High Court's decision had fundamentally altered the assumptions upon which resource industries had operated unfettered for the previous century. Even the pastoralists, led by the former head of the National Farmers' Federation, Rick Farley, had been more sensible and constructive in their approach to these negotiations.

With the election of the Howard government and the advent of the Ten Point Plan, the mining industry was more seriously organised to target native title leverage. The weakening of key provisions of the
Native Title Act
compromised the ability of traditional owners to extract fair outcomes from their negotiations with miners and diminished their capacity to participate in the burgeoning boom. That is why on the ledger of what was generated out of the boom and what Indigenous people gained out of the boom there is simply no comparison. Miners 1000 points, native title holders 10.

Individual groups with strong leverage did manage to extract successful deals. Indeed, in the latter half of the boom, canny Indigenous entrepreneurs and organised communities began carving out more of a share in mining and mining-related opportunities. Particularly in Western Australia. So when Professor Marcia Langton points out the emergence of a middle class from mining-related employment and business, it is the result of these individuals and groups getting organised despite the diminution of native title rights occasioned by the 1998 amendments.

Today there's much to be optimistic about in relation to the entrepreneurs and businesses that have emerged these past ten years. Many companies have been constructive in supporting this emergence. But the aggregate story is one of an enormous swindle perpetrated against Aboriginal Australians. Our people simply did not take a fair share of this boom, and our position as a whole did not measurably improve notwithstanding the fact that this extraordinary economic development happened on our doorsteps. Too many communities were unable to participate in the advantages and the opportunities. The fact that various groups extracted royalty revenues in their negotiations with companies did not of itself improve the social and economic strength of these groups. The best results have come where Indigenous communities and entrepreneurs have established businesses that have employed their own people. The dilemmas of the so-called resource curse also emerged in this period. Some communities grappling with the social impact of royalty revenues and the disputations around these royalties must often pause to wonder about life before resource conflict.

*

Now a new incarnation of
terra nullius
has emerged: the assumption that while the indigenes have symbolic title, and these homelands may in name belong to their traditional owners, they are foremost
the conservation heritage of the nation, and of the planet
. Decisions about the future of these lands are no longer the prerogative of their putative owners.

While more than 20 per cent of the continent is held under various forms of Aboriginal title, a vast and ever-increasing proportion of these lands is being locked away under conservation agreements, covenants and regimes. Lands yet to be restored to traditional owners through unresolved claims are already subject to conservation caveats and limitations. Indeed, like development interests, conservation interests are asserted prior to the settlement of land claims in order to make them a condition of such settlements. If tribes do not agree to these conservation arrangements, they don't get settlement of their claims.

Therefore not only do traditional owners have to concede the lands already lost to their possession under the 200-year reign of the old
terra nullius
, but they also have to make concessions in respect of any remnant lands. They get the leftover land, but subject to the limitations that mean giving away Aboriginal land is a cost-free, electorally convenient exercise. Aboriginal land is a cheap giveaway for electioneering political parties.

Conservation as it is conceived today means locking Aboriginal people out of development. This is how Aboriginal groups now end up surrendering their lands and closing off future opportunities for their people. The chief difficulty for Aboriginal people is we have not understood how the concept of ‘land (and natural resource) management' has come to take over ‘land rights'.

And what about the much-vaunted future carbon-trading economy? When Aboriginal lands are locked up pre-emptively through prohibitions on vegetation clearing and other means, Aboriginal landowners have been stripped of the one asset they might have to trade in that market.

More than 98 per cent of Cape York retains its native vegetation. It is probably the region's largest economic resource. Its greatest value could possibly lie in its long-term preservation, but this value is being destroyed.

Contrast the traditional owner in Cape York with the white pastoralist in Central Queensland. The lands in Cape York have hardly been cleared. Meanwhile, the pastoral properties in the mulga country were cleared by ball and chain sometime over the previous century. The pastoralist enjoyed the returns from the old, dirty economy of the past. Those who had no foothold in the past have no foothold in the future.

VII

Following Brough's announcement of the NT intervention, I urged a meeting with Galarrwuy Yunupingu, which I attended in his homeland. I witnessed Yunupingu at his best. In situations like this, I have encountered few people with more compelling power and presence then Yunupingu. I allude to this meeting only to recount Yunupingu's rehearsal to Brough of his history of dealings with prime ministers and ministers of Indigenous affairs during the course of his public life as an Aboriginal leader. He started with John Gorton and followed through with Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke. He gave an account of his dealings with each, and with all of Brough's predecessors. It was a long, sometimes hopeful but ultimately depressing, history of personal interaction and experience.