April 2 is Close the Gap Day – an annual reminder of the commitment to eliminate the massive difference in average life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
A sign of the initial success of this campaign is the growing number of governments and political leaders who have signed on to it, making a public pledge to prioritise this fundamental issue and promote policies and devote resources to achieving the goal. The harder part is ensuring these pledges are followed through and close attention is paid to assessing progress.
Of course it’s one thing to aim to achieve something, but quite another to reach agreement on how to achieve it.
The differences of opinion over the effectiveness of the Northern Territory intervention shows the importance of ensuring enough evidence is collected to impartially assess progress. Unfortunately, that issue has been extremely polarised from the outset. Almost every opinion and piece of evidence is immediately assigned in the pro or anti camp and added to the stockpiles of weaponry each side seeks to wield against the other.
There’s nothing wrong with differences of opinion of course; contests of ideas are an essential part of developing the best policies. But when winning the ideological contest becomes more important than achieving the policy outcome – an outcome which in this case is supported by almost everyone – than it makes it much harder to get progress.
When it comes to the NT Intervention, the evidence and information I’ve paid most attention to is that which comes from people and agencies actually working on the ground in the relevant communities – particularly those have been there working hard against the odds since well before the Intervention appeared.
Even in those cases, there seems to be significantly different reports coming from different communities. This is perhaps not as surprising as it might seem, as there are wide variations in the circumstances, resources, histories and local leadership across communities.
This article from the SMH by Irene Fisher, from Sunrise Health Service in the NT, and Larissa Behrendt, an academic and Aboriginal woman based at UTS, presents evidence of a significant rise in anaemia and low birth weight in babies in the period since the Intervention started. Sunrise Health Service covers 112,000 square kilometres of the Northern Territory east of Katherine so they are well placed to assess the affects. The article suggests some of the problems stem from the compulsory welfare quarantining which is applied to almost every Aboriginal community in that region.
By contrast, this report from the ABC quotes federal Minister Joe Ludwig saying figures show that ninety per cent of quarantined income is being spent on essentials. What may be significant in these figures is that they also include Western Australia and Queensland, not just the Northern Territory.
In the case of the income quarantining being trialled in parts of Cape York in Queensland, the process is not compulsory. It is only applied after a decision made by a body called the Families Responsibility Commission, which includes significant input from local Aboriginal leaders. This report from the ABC’s AM program earlier this week indicated that “about 30 people across the communities have been placed on conditional welfare management, while hundreds more are on voluntary welfare management.”
This is a big difference from compulsory quarantining of the income of every single Aboriginal person in a community. Even with the small numbers who have been subjected to compulsory income management on Cape York, it has only occurred following a defined process which involves the person affected and with key input into the process from senior local Aboriginal figures. That’s a big difference to a bunch of people in Canberra just telling you your income is being quarantined no matter what.
The report also suggests an increase in attendance rates at primary school and a higher proportion of money being spent on food and clothing.
It may be that there are lessons that can be learned from the different approaches being taken in Cape York compared to the Northern Territory, despite the significant differences between (and within) the two places. We’d certainly have a better chance of assessing those lessons if we could do so without having each piece of information being assessed for its usefulness in a political battle, rather than in the context of a fundamental human rights struggle.
2 Comments
I can’t see how it can work. Governments have proven over and over they have no idea what to do about the problems in Aboriginal communities, yet they continue to refuse to involve the people most qualified to know. The communities themselves.
The difference between success and failure of quarantining programs, alchohol prohibitions and ‘rights’ restricting programs is whether the order comes from a local Indigenous controlled authority, or a centralised ‘top down’ whitefella authority.
If the prohibition is instigated by the community leaders, that decision has more legitimacy in the eyes of the community than if it comes from blow ins or outsiders, whose authority lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the colonised.
My hope is that this new representative body being discussed by HREOC will have a multiplicity of jurisdictions with strong delegated powers to make binding decisions on local issues, and a weak peak body whose purpose is to front the media and lobby governments – but does not give them decision making power to avoid nepotism.
Each community is different. No one size fits all approach as Rudd promised in his apology.