Racism, Imperialism and 'Sorryspeak'

The discussion below could be repeated all round the world where there are indigenous societies struggling to come to terms with a modern world from whose corrosive impact there is no cure, from whose gravitational pull, there is no escape and from whose templates there are but the smallest of concessions to strangers.  Modern Societies do not have to be political despotisms to be totalitarian in their demands.  We, their long time slaves hardly notice the weight of the chains, or the pain of the lash that we bloody our own backs with, or the relentless labor that we must endure to meet our ever intensifying contractual arrangements.

The only people to embrace this foreign beast with fierce enthusiasm were people so already disciplined to the most extreme social and economic demands, that they could not tell any change in the pace of their lives when the transition came.  Japan moved from a feudal medieval state to modern imperial power in forty years.

For stone age peoples, it was like being hit by a bolt of lightning; when thousands of years of history bridged and arced in but a moment of such violence that even the hand of friendship would melt that of the other.

When I was a child of around seven, my teacher read me a story, probably originating in the iron age, of a princess who is allowed to marry a young prince, but on the understanding that if he struck her with iron three times, she would die.  The story is about unintentional blows in an environment awash with iron implements and objects, and the dooming of the young woman, much to the deep distress of her husband.

The impact of the age of metal on the age of stone would have been much less benign than the 'fairy tale' would suggest, but it speaks volumes for the fragility of the old order that was being displaced.  How much more shocking then is the meeting of the fully fledged age of mechanized industry and the world of stone?

It has been over two hundred years since the first impact of Europeans in what has become Australia.  The relationship between what is now a multi-cultural society and indigenous peoples is still an intractably unresolved issue.

Read on.................



A Sorry Story


Can you imagine the Israelis apologizing to the Palestinians for taking their land, pushing them into refugee camps for the last 60 years and brutally repressing them all that time?  I don't think so, but our government, on 13th February 2008, made an unprecedented apology to the original inhabitants here in Australia

Of course there isn't as much at stake for us. Indigenous Australians are in no position to demand their land back beyond mainly symbolic gestures and limited forms of land rights. And we aren't offering compensation, yet.

In 1995, the then Australian Labor Party led Federal Government gave The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) the task to investigate institutional racism and the aboriginal assimilationist  policies of governments from the 1930s through to 1970.

There was a prima facie case that the effects of the policies and practices of that period had left behind a great deal of 'unfinished business'

The Commission's investigation led to accusations that the then social welfare authorities systematically removed particularly 'half caste' children from their aboriginal parents and either fostered them to 'white' families or institutionalized them. All contact between the children and their natural parents was deliberately cut off.

The hearings into these practices produced a litany of distress and failure.

Trying to hide the childrens' cultural and ethnic roots from them didn't work. And those who were institutionalized all too often found themselves in depressingly underfunded, overcrowded, over disciplined and under supervised environments that too often added sexual interference to the usual Dickensian abuses. Long term psychological damage was often the result.

This week, after 10 years of debate and procrastination, our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologized to the aboriginal community for what the Report described as 'stolen generations' that were the victims of an institutional attempt at ethnic and cultural 'genocide'.

It is hoped this apology will allow a healing process to take place that will enable 'the stolen generation' to move on......

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report 'Bringing Them Home....' was a watershed in trying to deal with the legacy of racism.  The report's powerful language lent great weight to its extremely damning findings. Since then, these have become an assumed part of the national agenda in subsequent dealings with aboriginal communities, despite the obstruction and misgivings of a deeply conservative federal government being in power virtually since the report came out.

However, in June 2007, the 'Little Children are Sacred' report from the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse came out. Its findings of widespread child abuse were so serious it triggered a major military, police and social welfare intervention to stop it immediately.

What this report didn't trigger, was a re-assessment of the assumptions and agenda of the earlier 'Bringing Them Home' report. It should have.



The 'Bringing them Home' report was organized and run by an institution with a very powerful set of ideological prejudices and agendas. Its 'inquiry' was in effect an inquisitorial expose of what it already regarded as the sins and heresies of an already defeated, discredited, decommissioned and/or mostly dead generation of aboriginal administrators, church missions and government policy makers. A more sectarian and ideologically fundamentalist group of inquistors would be hard to find.  Its proceedings were dressed up with all the legal trappings of a Soviet Show trial. HRAEOC was an administrative rabbit left in charge of a very edible and defenseless lettuce.

Thus it came to pass at the 'Bringing Them Home'  Inquiry that outraged human rights academic advocates could provided the right amount of 'anti-racist' intellectual respectability and authority without anyone ever questioning their values, the balance or selectivity of their judgment, or their unarticulated agendas. The inquisitors and their principal expert witnesses were apparatchiks grown out of exactly the same ideological mould. There was no one there in the procedings to contradict them or to in any way hold them to intellectual account, or challenge their version of social reality and its history.  The people, instrumentalities, and the colonial and post-colonial values that were 'on trial' were in effect defenseless.

Its modus operandi was to call for 'submissions'. Anyone with a complaint against the old order could come forward, and without fear of cross examination, was encouraged by a suitably sympathetic 'court', to pour out an eye watering and overwhelmingly sad litany of suffering. And while there were certainly 'sensitivity' issues with some of the witnesses, the lack of cross-examination meant there was no attempt to cross check the oral evidence against official written records, if not still living people who had been involved at the time of their attempted assimilation into the dominant society.

For all the obvious reasons, indigenous society had not been traveling terribly well for a long time and child removal for social welfare reasons was much more common in the period under study, right across society.  In large part, the assimilationist effort arose from both welfare concerns around specific problematic individual families, as well as general concerns about the broader indigenous community and its perceived failure to integrate into the modern economy.  .

Further, some indigenous parents did give up their children either because of their own poverty and/or perceived opportunities they saw for their child, and this would undoubtedly have been the subject of considerable soul searching and possible sense of guilt. 

Whatever, the witnesses were hardly likely to say anything about their circumsances that might conceivably paint their own culture and family backgrounds in an adverse light.  And clearly, whether it be to protect victims and/or to further the inquiry's own political agendas, the inquiry process wasn't in the least interested in finding out if that were the case.  Afterall, the designated 'victims' weren't on trial.

And of course there was the central and most despised propositions of all; the systematic removal of 'half caste' children because of their then perceived likely capacity to racially blend into the dominant 'white' community.

Race was for Imperialist societies of the nineteenth and up to somewhat past the mid twentieth centuries, an understandable perception  Material culture and power seemed to them to be vested in a hierarchical coincidence of skin colour, with whites at the top, Indian browns and Asian yellows second, African blacks next and finally, by a long last, stone age indigenous populations of varying non white colours.  This was an almost universally assumed given until after the First World War.  Between the World Wars it started to become contested at the social and intellectual margins. The decolonising post-imperial world order after the second one started to make it unfashionable, as everyone in the former metropolitan societies started to make an unctious virtue of abandoning a world now lost to them and no longer making any material or ideological sense.  The final battles to overthrow racism that emerged in the 1960s led to its demonization as a social evil, especially in the face of the South African regime, which continued to stand out against the tide.

Racially based policy towards indigenous communities when assimilationism was being developed would have been an assumed given that almost no one would have questioned, at least in official circles. It would have been considered quite morally proper.  It was intended as a charitably motivated opportunity, and not without cost to the dominant society, to escape from a society that was seen to be despirited. demoralised and stuck.  It would have been considered a last ditch effort to rescue part of a generational cohort that was otherwise likely to end up the same way as its miserable parents.

The fact that the effort did not produce any tangible net benefits for its subjects was only knowable in the brilliant forensic light of hindsight.  What research I have seen comparing children who were taken into white society and those left behind indicates that there was very little difference, which neither flatters the assimilationist effort nor the indigenous families they left behind.  And this begs the question as to the allegations of abuse of the removed children in state and church institutions; whether they would have fared any better if they'd been left where they were.  But then indigenous society was not on trial, so it wasn't an issue,

Any 'ancien regime', particularly one involved in dealing with and managing a crushingly defeated native people, had to be, by its nature, problematic.  Its behavior would inevitably reflect the then existing attitudes and values of the territorial winners and their lack of understanding of a hunter gatherer Stone Age society that they had casually brushed aside.  And given the vastly different historical and cultural trajectories of the parties involved, the barriers to such understanding were overwhelming.  But that did not mean that it was totally without humanitarian judgment, or sense of welfarism or justice, at least within its moral frame of reference, even if in some circumstances, places and times, its application varied considerably, as one might expect in a complex and varied social and economic system.

Over time, colonial and post-colonial indigenous policy proved to be clearly ineffective and compounded the unfolding tragedy of dispossession and lack of material progress, which led to policy changes that in their turn did no better.  These outcomes offer the unforgiving prism of masterly hindsight plenty of easy and reprehensible targets to shoot down. HRAEOC didn't have far to look to find a litany of awful outcomes and abuses.  It is just a pity that that was all it was looking for.


The whole thrust of the inquiry was to systematically move the moral framework from the exercise of charitable works to racist 'theft' and abuse, by an ideological sleight of hand that was worthy of a Stalinist or Moaist Peoples' Court.

From time to time, socialist governments have found it necessary to destroy both regime opponents and failed factions within.  They developed a totalitarian language of condemnation that killed and embalmed its victims in disgrace.  The elegance of this technique is that accusers had at their disposal a phrase or word that was self explanatory, absolute in its authority, required little justification or evidence and would effectively destroy whoever it was aimed at. 'Reactionary Imperialist Collaborator!'  Bourgeoise Saboteur!'  Revisionist Traitor!'  'Left Adventurist Clique!'  'Rightest Revanchism and Deviationism!'  Petite Bourdeoise Defeatism!  Anything they didn't like, they had a devastatingly nasty and politically dangerous name for it.

We have 'Racism'.  It is a diamond encrusted solid gold gem of abuse that works everytime as soon as anyone gets too close to any ethnic group in ways that might 'Stereotype' them; i,e, critically evaluate them.  It instantly turns ordinary ethnicity into an untouchable ethnic artifact that is beyond criticism and any offense against this divine right, real or imagined, sanctions a tirade of ideological  grapeshot and outraged moral high dudgeon, against anyone with the termerity to 'cross the line'.

And the thing about 'racism' is that it doesn't have to actually exist.  For all but the most antedeluvian, the colour of a person's skin has long since disappeared as any sort of criteria of reproductive, social or political standing.  Long standing Australian multi-cultural immigration has made the movement of non Europeans into all strata of society, and the intermarriage of its children into European families so commonplace, it is hardly even noticed.  But 'racism' continues to be a culturally powerful boo word because it keeps on  being renewed by conflating it with 'class', 'lifestyle', 'culture', 'ethnicity' and 'tribality'.  This may be a totally dishonest crib, but it keeps this idelogical blade razor sharp, any moron can use it and it immediately shuts down rational discussion.  It is an excellent tool of authority and political obfuscation.

We are allowed to bemoan the terrible plight of indigenous people and all the well documented dysfunctionalities within many of their communities, as long as it is a justificatory excuse.  But as soon as anyone uses this very same material as a socially predictive and risk management device to increase their caution in dealing with this group, that is 'racism' rather than rational social judgement of a group which just happens to be black. 

Indigenous communities and their supporters like to use the idea of 'Community' as a very positive, unifying and culturally legitimizing entity which all community members naturally want to take some credit and honor, especially if one or some of its members have won some kind of accolade or distinction.  But if that community produces more than its fair share of problems, then it is not 'discriminatory' to point this out, just because it inevitably puts everyone in them, including the decent and upstanding people, in a poor light.  It seems to me that if you take community credit, you also take the community discredit as well, because the behavior of some reflects on the many.  That is what community identity means.  The community has a reputation which is the product of some of its members on both sides of the credit/debit equation.

Any social entity that has a higher than normal propensity to behave badly, particularly if that poor behavior becomes inter-generational, will suffer the same problem, and any representitives coming from it will have to fight their way through and past the wider community's negative expectations, to gain social approval and acceptance.  And for those who do manage that social hurdling exercise successfully; they aren't necessarily going to blame the surrounding community for this, so much as their own community brothers and sisters, who keep letting them down.


One can see, if one looks at the colonial experience in New Zealand, how a much more sophisticated, confident, militarily ferocious and well organized native people were able to engineer a quite different narrative in their dealings with the very same colonial power, administrators, people and values.  Maoris never were a defeated people in the way Australian indigenes have been, which gave the whole architecture of that colonialist and native discourse a far less asymmetrical quality and made room for more respectful and understanding interactions, right from the beginning.

And it should be noted, that if the fate of the Chatham Islanders in 1835 were anything to go by, had Maori war parties entered the Australian continent before the British and French arrived, they would have massacred every indigenous community they came upon, on contact. And this raises the whole question of how any ethnic or national group, that had developed the technology and power to project itself into the remotest parts of the world would behave in their dealings with 'primitive' indigenous peoples. 

Australian indigenes were sitting ducks whose only protection was their remoteness and the hostility of much of the coastline most accessible to the likely routes of sea contact. Once that was no longer a defense, they were done for!  And the longer it took for contact to take place, and the more technically powerful and resource savvy their future protagonists became, the deeper, more destructive and more rapid their penetration and takeover would likely be. 

To characterize such an invasion as a kind of common criminal enterprise is just nonsensical.  The whole history of human civilization has been the story of invasion.  To suggest that anyone capable of projecting their power as far as Terra Australis would have ever even considered turning the place into an island continent museum, for the protection of Stone Age culture, is not merely wildly unrealistic, but derisory.  The reality is, none of us own anything we cannot defend against those who would take it from us, as white Australia was all too painfully aware of when the Japanese arrived on their doorstep in 1942.

Aside from the from the fact that the Japanese Imperial Army was not even remotely cognizant of a western liberal conscience, Australian 'whites' regarded it as a criminal organization because they couldn’t get over the shock of potentially being on the wrong end of an alien Imperial regime, and worse, being regarded by it as little better than worms, or food for worms. 

The JIA was, from victory in the beginning to defeat in the end, as brutal and tough on itself as it was on those it attacked or defended itself against, just like the Maoris. To criminalize them was to import completely foreign ideological beliefs onto their behavior that they would never have countenanced, until they were forced to by nuclear weapons and the facts of an almost impossible to imagine surrender.

Australian indigenes got a ten thousand year holiday from all that, which was very lucky in some ways for them, but disastrous when it was over.  It could not help but be.

It would be far more appropriate to characterize what happened to them as analogous to some kind of Greek tragedy in which the fates determine most of the narrative and outcomes.  And to try, as the moral humanists have done, to suggest the destroyer character in such a drama is a morally deficient one, is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of what they are observing.

Sure, there are always varying situational balances that exist between individual discretion and 'historical forces' in such narratives.  Indeed, I think we could confidentially say that had the Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish,  Dutch and French, let alone the Maori, got to Terra Australis first, or, as in the case of the Japanese afterwards, the outcomes for indigenes would have likely been much worse in some ways, possibly better in others, but nonetheless terrible, regardless of who it was.
 
The only choices aboriginals had were whether they were going to be fried, boiled or baked, at either a high or low heat.  And if they were really 'lucky', they would be served up with a small side dish of balming humanitarian sauce.

Thus, whatever the truth (and there was plenty of it) of the accusations made against the British colonialist and post colonial order, the 'trial' process was not about a balanced sense of judgment having regard to all the larger historical dynamics of European in genereal and local colonist society in particular , or the configuration of the interests, parties and the range of standards, understandings and values that were pushing the post-colonial agenda at the time.  Nor was the balance of the historical views that informed the inquiry questioned or tested by any historian who might have held a contrary view.  Nor did it allow for a diversity of experiences, practices and outcomes within the post-colonial system, precisely because of the complaint based nature of the inquiry.

Just as surely as a Soviet Show Trial that pre-condemned people who had been following now failed, defunct and disappeared Party policy, it had everything to do with being propaganda exercise for discrediting and condemning a regime, its ideology and its acolytes, and entrenching a new orthodoxy, with a very powerfully elaborated and historically revisionist testament to its power and credibility.

Of course, like all show trial victims, the guilty parties, the old state instrumentalities and church missions; they were forced into a corner to try to work out whether it was better to 'confess to their crimes' or try to cobble together a few fig leaves of 'acceptable' defense that might at least minimize the extent of the blame about to be heaped on them. They knew that the ideological certainties and assumptions of the earlier period were no defense at all, for they were the source of the very racist and assimilationist crimes for which they stood accused.  They were completely trapped inside a circular argument they couldn't possibly escape.  Their guilt was built in.

And it has to be said, that the churches, even by show trial standards were pusillanimous in their defence of the thousands of people who over the 1930-1970 period devoted themselves to the welfare of aboriginal children in their care; who didn't sexually interfere with them, who disciplined them fairly and consistently according to the standards of the time and loved them as best they could, in conditions that were often not easy, as they were never exactly swimming in money.

Nor did they defend the uniformly widespread and ancient tradition of total separation of adopted/removed children from their birth families.  The fact that this is no longer done or approved of doesn't mean it wasn't considered an entirely right, legitimate and proper thing to do at the time.  It was seen as a  necessary way to protect the child and give it as normal a life as possible, given its origins, which were likely considered either disgraceful or otherwise deeply negative.  That this is no longer believed to be true is totally after the fact!

I think the position of the churches in this inquiry was one of the worst possible betrayals of its dead brothers-and-sisters-in-Christ, unforgivable moral cowardice and an exemplar of how show trial victims turn on their old comrades to try and save themselves.

Well before this trial, long standing research had clearly demonstrated that colonial and post colonial policy towards indigenous peoples had been unsuccessful in bringing them into the fold of the settler society, from beginning to end.  Not one attempt at intervention had had any effect in advancing the condition and circumstances of this ethnic group.  The trial conclusions were foregone.  It had the predictability of a film script.  The report could have been written before the inquiry without ever having to go to the trouble of getting witnesses to confirm it.

Whatever was left of the wreck of paternalistic assimilationism and the rest was ceremonially burnt to the water line. And the lesson was no one in their right mind would ever question the integrity and autonomy of aboriginal society again.  Aboriginal culture was turned into a sacred site. Anyone with the temerity to test these boundaries would necessarily be in league with dark, sorry, unacceptable forces.  The deadly and intimidatory accusation of racism was in effect a bullet proof defense system against all comers; a defense system that mandated critical silence from without and moral impunity from within.


It would be just as much an unreasonable propaganda exercise to accuse the modern human rights movement of not being there to take care of matters as the terrible drama of indigenous dispossession unfolded.  Where were they in the early 1800s, except for a miserably few aboriginal advocates, who clearly were willfully uninformed as to the correct perspectives necessary to start a mass movement of outrage at the injustices and the lack of self-determination and land rights for indigenous people?  They didn't get anywhere?  Why not?  They obviously weren't trying hard enough and were derelict in their plain duty.  Why wasn't the moral message made clear enough? 

Had they done a half decent job, the ideological cataracts in the eyes of the European colonial and post colonial masses would have been peeled away, and they would have risen up against the imperialist oppressors and made anti-racist justice, truth and virtue possible, with pigs flying over the victory parade, led by the liberated aboriginal tribes in all their native sartorial and painted glory, carrying placards celebrating the towering truths of the American and French revolutions.  So why didn't it happen?  Why did they fail in breach of their manifest historical destiny?  The conscience of British and colonist liberal and radical society did almost nothing, with painfully few honorable exceptions.

That sounds fair enough, doesn't it?  Yes I know the human rights industry didn't get going until after WW2, but that won't be any excuse under the forensic glare of the judgment of history!  After all, these social justice values are timeless, universal and self-evident.  Why isn't the human rights industry on trial for its numerous and egregious failures to act when it had the chance, when the issues were so clear, right from the beginning?


Beyond all that, there was an even greater unarticulated, more, unspeakable silence, that always attends a show trial; something that is beyond the silence about the regime or its informant ideology, but the silence about the people for whom the ideology is supposed to be for; the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized and the dispossessed.  We hear lots about their oppression in the bad old days, and how this legacy has made it absolutely impossible for them to improve themselves in the brave new world they were promised when the old regime was overthrown.  This is because show trials have very little to do with them really, other than to provide fabulous new regime excuses for non delivery of promised outcomes and an opportunity to continue to use the old regime as a fall guy.
 
The Wretched of the Earth are just props to be trotted out to provide just the right amount of pathos that will destroy those in the dock, ensure as little introspection as possible and facilitate regime re-enforcement at the top.

Thus no one had to go into what was going on in indigenous society that would explain its extraordinary passivity in all respects to not only its admittedly dreadful colonial and post-colonial experience, but anything that had happened ever since.  We heard nothing by way of any criticism that this supineness wasn't good enough and augured extremely badly for the future, no matter how many sorries were offered or monies thrown around.  Nor was anyone going to to be allowed to suggest that parts of that society were so badly damaged, they had descended into being communities of the damned in ways that brutally mocked attempts to turn the culture into a sacred site.  Nor could it be explained why the dominant secular society, that had largely abandoned its own Christian fairy stories had to have such an exaggerated regard for the dreamtime culture, as if it were either some fantastically expensive museum piece, or, a salving 'spiritual' balm for its own existential barreness.

In 1995, when the show trial was put on notice, the situation was that amongst the indigenous poor and the downtrodden, after thirty years or more of community consultation, self determination, civil rights, land rights, bank vaults of money and godknowswhatall, they were flatlining on just about any measure and somebody was to blame.  And of course it couldn't possibly be their fault, or the fault of the people now in charge, or their informant ideology, could it?  No of course it couldn't!  Show Trial Time!

And the fabulous thing about show trials is that they are a blood sport that everyone loves to watch, because audiences know for sure that it is going to end in executions.


The difference between what HREOC and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission were doing in roughly the same period, was that the latter was dealing with the recent living past of a regime which had continued to enforce the old European racist assumptions long after they had ceased to be legitimate in the rest of the world. 

My own parents had a choice when they migrated from Britain to Australia in 1958, of going to South Africa.  They had relatives there.  Both had come from colonial backgrounds.  Both felt that in an age of decolonization, the South African regime was behaving in ways which were no longer acceptable, or sustainable enough for them to want to bring their children up there, even though it afforded an extremely comfortable lifestyle for whites like them.  And this was subsequently confirmed in their minds after the Sharpville massacre in 1961. 

The white South Africans had to create an increasingly isolated police state with a high level of violent repression, in the face of an increasingly resentful non white population and increasing international disapproval.  It became a pariah state.  At the same time, Australia was making the transition to a more appropriate model of behavior towards its own indigenous population, in line with the changing global values.

By the time I reached university in the middle 1960s, one could search the whole place from top to bottom and find absolutely no one who was willing to support the old racist order.  It was well and truly over, except for remnants that one could clearly see were being steadily mopped up by the increasing tide of disapproval.  And by 1966, the White Australia Policy was well and truly on its way out, by a process of steady and relentless marginalization.


So what was HREOC really doing in digging up the grave of the racial agenda in Australia from the colonial and post-colonial period, in its hearings between 1995-7?

Sure, the last victims of the old order were still living with the effects of the old regime and they deserved a voice to express the pain, personal disruption and loss that it had caused.  And it would consolidate political support for ongoing remedial action to support and compensate those victims into the future.  But it was much more than that.  This was not just an exercise in compassion and adjusting the historical narrative of the successors to the old white settler regime, to take greater account of the indigenous experience of it.
 
Underpinning this essay is a suggestion that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was there to consolidate the power of a mainly bureaucratic and academic clique that was increasingly taking over the social welfare, legal and education system.  It needed to be able to ‘prove’ that any history lived in the absence of its perspectives would inevitably be disastrous to the disadvantage and dispossessed.  By inflating the indigenous narrative to at least an equal and a major discrediting component of the white settler one, they were re-enforcing the perception that they were the morally necessary, ‘natural’ and only possible legitimate successors to the post colonial political establishment.
 
It is also being suggested here that the lack of indigenous progress under the aegis of this clique since the breakup of the post colonial regime, needed to be blame shifted so that none of the rest of its agenda could be questioned.  Even if it wasn’t structurally sound, this wonky indigenous brick in the wall of its legitimacy had to be re-pointed with some rock solid excuses.
 
What is being further suggested here is that the power of this clique is and has been every bit as malign as anything we have ever seen, whether it be in relation to indigenous affairs, or any other area of policy that it has colonized.


After the extremely salutary final moral destruction of the old white racist colonial order, the new one was now able to continue to assemble itself behind an almost impenetrable facade of ethnic inviolability.  It unfolded a following decade of unpleasant rumors, denials, repentant self-flagellation and excuse making; a decade of acquiescent silence, bureaucratic obfuscation and pretense; and a decade of pervasive fear of being accused of racism; all of which paralyzed criticism and insulated the fantasies of the entrenched 'progressives' who were now completely in charge.

The widespread and egregious abuse of children inside many aboriginal communities that was exposed by the 'Little Children are sacred' report finally broke part of this spell, to the extent that mainstream society broke through its inhibitions against interference.

But the question is, why isn't anyone asking what 'Bringing Them Home' was all about if this was what we had sent them home to?

When the 'progressive' apparatchiks threw out the externally imposed disciplines of paternalism, the world view of missionary religion and the directional focus of assimilation, did they just throw out discipline, faith and focus of any sort? Did they merely throw aboriginal society to another pack of wolves by offering it license rather than freedom?

Were the tyrannies of racism, paternalism and assimilationism merely replaced by the tyrannies of life without boundaries?

Would any reasonable person knowingly leave a child to the mercy of communities that are locked into a cycle of abuse and dysfunctional behavior that keeps repeating itself from one generation to the next with little hope of change or escape?  Is indigenous 'culture' so sacrosanct that no outsider can presume to criticize or interfere?

And worse, were those awful racist assimilationist observing not necessarily terrible different scenarios fifty to sixty years before?

Apparatchiks of the new regime can blandly get away with announcing the failure to deal with dysfunctional and self-defeating behavior, failure to deliver better health outcomes, or reduce the enormous imprisonment rate of indigenous people, as if it had absolutely nothing to do with 'their' clients or the system of service delivery.  The client group are now such officially declared totally helpless victims that they are absolutely not responsible for anything that happens to them.  The service delivery system is weighed down by the crushing weight of cast iron excuses that makes any funding level, any bureacratic procedure and any remote community delivery system insufficient to manage the overwhelming and insoluble needs of the clients.
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This is a classical example of the ideological version of the emperor’s new clothes.  It is a testament to the enormous propaganda success of the New Order that the extraordinary fatuity of this isn’t immediately recognizable by everyone, instantly.  And in a way it is, for as with the naked emperor, everyone is too frightened of him to point out the screamingly obvious.

Who is going to call a significant proportion of aboriginal society to account for its abject failure to join into a modern, tolerant, prosperous and opportunity rich multi-cultural society that attracts amongst its migrants people whose histories of suffering and loss put the indigenous tragedy into some sort of perspective?  Can anyone point to another place on the face of the planet that would be even vaguely likely to give indigenous people in Australia a better chance to make good than they already have here?

If the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, Lebanon, Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq and Sri Lanka can take their place and make good in this evolving multi-cultural experiment, what is the matter with indigenous Australia?

If we have had to say sorry to aboriginal society for the surely traumatic things that have happened to them since industrial society crashed in on them, then it seems to me that it is incumbent on a good many of them to apologize to their own children and each other for continuing to make such a terrible mess of managing their part in recovering from these blows, moving on and doing what needs to be done, for themselves.

If aboriginal leaders like Noel Pearson, who are powerful advocates for energetic and disciplined self help can't get traction and action to start making the right moves and very soon, we all just might find ourselves being forced to go back to the future.

Underneath the satisfaction that we have at last started to do our bit in at least symbolically taking responsibility for the sufferings of indigenous people is an overwhelming question.

What are we going to do about a 'generation' (meaning a significant proportion, whatever that is; say 10%, which we now know was the rough percentage that were stolen by those nasty colonial white guys after the 'Bringing Them Home' enquiry exaggerations were toned down a bit) of children who haven't been educated, or fed properly, or have been made to live in squalor, filth and indolence, or allowed to become chronically unhealthy with disease conditions that should have and could have been easily fixed if anyone could be bothered, or had to endure the effects of alcoholic violence and emotional neglect, drugs, petrol sniffing, ubiquitous pornography, early onset sexual interference and all the rest of the obscenities that we keep hearing about?

Who is thieving the lives and futures of a whole 'generation' of kids here? Who is destroying the fabric and viability of whole aboriginal communities and their 'culture'? Continuing to blame the 'invaders'  or 'racism' for it all just won't wash anymore. Playing the helpless victim is in the end a self defeating mind game. All human beings have some responsibility for themselves, no matter what has happened to them!


The time has come for some excuse free honesty and a resolute refusal to tolerate the most recent layer of ideological cant that has characterized the discussion of indigenous affairs since the 1960s, If we want to avoid repeating an already baleful history.

If we fail to do that and the mis-styled 'progressives' who have defined and further perverted the process of inter cultural dialogue are allowed to continue to dominate it, there will be produced yet another 'generation' of indigenous children whose reasonable expectation of a loving, secure and disciplined upbringing will have been betrayed, again.

What the human rights apparatchiks actually delivered was only half the liberationist package.  Rights by themselves aren't liberating at all, unless the capacity to meet the obligations that give life and potency to them is trained in and constantly met by the vast majority of adults who are their supposed beneficiaries.  Without good social and self-governance, rights simply turn into an irresponsible sense of entitlement and self indulgence that further wastes the already dispossessed and marginalized.  And if a consumerist sense of sacred entitlement to anything that you feel like is added to this nitrous mix, the results are just bound to be devastating.

Since the nineteen fifties, there has been an increasing shift of social control away from traditional social authority, and its appropriation by the marketing and propaganda arms of consumer capital.  I suggest that the main reason for rise of the libertairian bureaucratic and academic clique in the first place was that they were given the job of directly demolishing traditional mores, social controls and disciplines that would get in the way of the 'liberated' consumer consciousness.  Their offer of rights that required no up front obligations and disciplines for them to be delivered, meant that consumer entitlement and social entitlement could be conflated, self and social regulation declared obsolete, and the pervasive presence of the market could quietly fill the vacated space, making a virtue out of loss of control in the face of its propaganda apparatus.

This has been a brilliantly rolled out process of change which has been almost unprecedentedly totalitarian in its effects and has meant the reduction of social consciousness to producing and buying products and services.  But this has been done at the stupendous cost of demolishing the system of social and existential reproduction that lies outside the market place. 

The terrible irony of this is that the Orwellian prediction that liberty would become slavery has been fulfilled in ways that the despotism of the past could not have dreamt of accomplishing.  Freedom becomes not just a dreadful cliche, but a mask for the most powerful social apparatus ever devised, that has laid waste to the uncommercializable parts of ourselves.  And the humanitarian libertarchs are one of its primary handmaidens.

Indigenous society isn't the only victim of this deadly package, but it is far more vulnerable and quickly affected because it has been so traumatized and weakened.  That doesn't mean that certain of the more vulnerable elements of non indigenous society aren't right behind them in the social and self-governance demolition derby stakes.  And beyond that, the dominant society generally is starting to fray under the same pressures.

Today's generation of aboriginal parents (and a lot of non aboriginal ones as well) need to accept that the negative loop of inter-generational failure has to stop and even if there is not much that can be done for many of today's adults, at least their children will get a fair shake at taking their place in Australian society in accordance with their talents, inclinations and ethnic needs, like the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

And no matter how expensive the program to accomplish this is, if it goes some way to fixing the damage of 200 years plus of displacement and dis-empowerment, then it will be cheap in the long run, especially if it leads to the eventual disbandment of the aboriginal bureaucracy, that costs ridiculous amounts to run, engages in vast and often meaningless administrative ritual and delivers so relatively little on the ground for the money invested.

My feeling is that child withdrawal strategies need to be re-looked at, but this time in the context of what we now know about institutionalization and the power of ethnic roots. Unlike their predecessors, these strategies will need to be very well funded if they are to have any chance of working. If aboriginal parents and communities are kept in the loop, and offered the chance to give their children opportunities and protection that they never had, they may well embrace a high quality boarding school environment for their children to be educated in.

The brightest aboriginal students ought to be sent to the best schools in Australia.

Instead of using an expropriation model of generational change that was attempted from the 1930s onward, an equitable 'lend-lease' system might work. Instead of an adoption/fostering/state ward system, community based safe houses, regular short stay multi-ethnic family mentoring and where necessary, negotiated joint custodial solutions might be acceptable and clearly offering indigenous communities a genuine hope for the future.

Underpinning this needs to be awareness that whatever it is that remote aboriginal communities deliver to the people that live in them, they are not a sustainable model of permanent lifestyle as currently administered.

While accepting that they may be the only possible place to live for many of those currently living there, the ongoing arrangements for public maintenance of these settlements needs to be grandfathered for this generation of adults, on the understanding that its children will never be permanent social welfare residents there.

If their children want to return to live there, they will have to be able to afford to buy, maintain and pay rates on their living quarters and land (or a market based rental), pay taxation towards providing community infrastructure and support themselves from their own private resources.

It needs to be impressed on everyone that inter-generational welfarism is not an acceptable or viable outcome any more.

We owe aboriginal society an invasion debt which can only be satisfied by providing practical, sufficient and long term assistance to struggling communities to enable them to accomplish successful generational change, which will enable the next generation to take its proper place as a culturally vibrant group of citizens, not just of a multi cultural Australia, but the world.  Aboriginal communities owe themselves a debt caused by defeatism, despair and dis-ingenuity; and in particular a debt to many of their children who they have failed to properly provide for, protect or educate.

When it comes to the history that has brought us to this point, nobody is coming out of it smelling sweetly and nobody can escape that history without taking their share of the responsibility for it. Unless everyone comes to the party, we will all remain stuck like a cracked record.


And above all, the human rights libertarian laissez-faireism that has characterized most of the prevailing dealings between the now multi-cultural society and indigenous peoples, needs to be unceremoniously dumped in favor of a much more disciplined and conservative set of attitudes that emphasize high standards of behavior from everyone and a willingness to ruthlessly discipline people who would try to undermine them.  This cannot be solely imposed from outside any affected community.  If necessary, there has to be a bitter and difficult internal struggle until the garbage has been either recycled or thrown out.

Those who have to deal with indigenous society have to stop their own excuse making, insist on responsible behavior as a condition of giving support, refuse to collaborate with or indulge poor performance, and back to the hilt any community movement to enforce reasonable standards of conduct, even if that means being really tough.  And it will be tough because there some very entrenched defeat and disablement strategies that need to be overthrown and broken, on all sides.

This comes from a consciousness that simply won't tolerate the second and third rate and won't listen to the seductive blandishments of corrupt behavior.  It is prepared to take risks to confront the unacceptable by becoming very hard line.  It is prepared to model honest virtue and integrity, even if that means great sacrifice.  And when that has been set in place and rights properly mesh with met responsibilities and obligations, then and only then can we begin to hope to see any empowerment at all, whether it be in an indigenous or any other community.

It is time to recognize that the human rights culture that has informed not just indigenous, but the broader society, needs to be disestablished and its legitimacy and social license withdrawn.  We were all sold a pretty little ideological pup that has now turned into a recalcitrant and dangerous mongrel whose rabid bite destroys everything it touches.  It is particularly dangerous because it approaches as if it wants to lick the objects of its attention, but when it gets in close, it savages its victim with the abrasiveness of its tongue.  Its intentions are good, but the loss of control that accompanies this disease damages its capacity to deliver on its benign promises, and so it predates instead, infecting its victim in the process.

In the end, if it is allowed to get big enough, a culture of rights unaccompanied by a vigorous system of social and personal governance, is a destroyer of worlds.  The removal of that governance is its disease, and it is a thoroughly vicious one.

And in this, parts of indigenous society are small, albeit ravaged and deeply disabled players, in a game that keeps screwing them even as it keeps telling them that it is all good and for their benefit.  That is the ultimate betrayal of all.


Addendum:

This has been added as a result of correspondence from a reader.  I enclose the original commentary and questions, and then my response:

From Ness

Thank you for this detailed and enlightening read. My ignorance of Australian affairs is regrettably profound, so while I had heard of the controversy much of this was new to me. (Was there not a similar programme of uprooted aboriginal children in Canada which ended comparably?)

One concern I had as to the essay's projected demand for responsible behaviour in reward for social support, was wondering who gets to define and/or police such behaviour (the government? the aboriginals? Are these different sets by definition?), and how closely it would be tied to government purse strings.



The answer to your question is really tricky, because it is really obvious all round that trying to impose a unilateral solution of any sort just won't work. All sides in this equation are badly compromised.  But a really good start to any journey that is likely lead anywhere other than another hopeless imbroglio, is brutally honest dialogue.  As I have pointed out, the anti-racist people have created another level of ideological cant that has simply re-enforced another layer of failure.  Along with the honesty is equally brutal negotiation where no one indulges anybody by giving them outs and excuses to avoid some firm bottom line outcomes to the negotiations, which have to end in the integration of indigenous society into the multi-cultural mix that is emerging in Australia. 

Implicit in this is that the representatives of the multi-cultural entity, as the party that is paying for this exercise, is going to have the larger (though not the only) say in setting boundary benchmarks.  By far the largest exercise would be to include everybody in the indigenous society to clarify what they want for their children and how they want aboriginal culture to be preserved within a multi-cultural context in ways that do not disable their participation in the modern economy and the broader society. 

Being stuck in a kind of intercultural netherworld is an inter-generational issue.  Because the problems are so deep seated and intractable, there has to be a kind of year zero where anyone born after a certain date has to go through a certain agreed process, with benchmarked standards, special funding to reach them and agreed remedies if the benchmarks are not reached.

I would imagine that the outcome would be something like an agreed distribution of indigenous people throughout all occupations that parallels other non European, perhaps non English speaking immigrant populations, over a two generation period of say 40-50 years. 

What I think would also assist in this process is if indigenous studies, including the adoption of a piece of 'country', is requisite for all non-indigenous people, so that they can get an appreciation of the Australian hinterland, which presently most urbanized non-indigenous people know absolutely nothing about.

To some extent the whole exercise would be a large experiment prompted by a sincere feeling that after over two hundred years, it is realy time for indigenous society to come in from the cold, get their piece of the action of whatever is left of modern times and feel that their part in the history of the island continent is a valued and living contribution by their co-citizens.  I can see a day when spending time in ones 'country' is more exciting and challenging than being in the scouts or military cadets, whether one is indigenous or non indigenous.

Democratic societies are not good at long term solutions.  But I think pretty much everybody wants to see the problems of indigenous society fixed and for them to take their rightful place in the broader society.  This is a non partisan issue.  Everyone is concerned at the lack of meaningful engagement between the indigenous society and the successor immigrant society.  We want them to have the same chance at happiness and fulfilment as any other group of citizens.  And I for one am getting impatient, as well as frustrated with the latest round of failure.