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Colonial Ideology And Aboriginal Australians

By Ghali Hassan


02 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org

Forty years ago, Aboriginal Australians were recognised (by Anglo-Australians) as Australian citizens. Many Australians, including Aboriginal Australians, thought the days of racism and dispossession in Australia were numbered. They were wrong. Aboriginal Australians remain a marginalised community, unprotected from colonial ideology and laws that violate basic human rights.

On 17 August 2007, the Australian Senate passed the Howard’s Government’s The Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill, which aimed to address child abuse and dysfunction in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The legislation allowing for welfare changes, alcohol bans, the takeover of communities under five-year leases, restriction of pornography, the revision of the permit system, and other measures. In short, the legislation gives the Government’s agencies and the police the power to enter Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

The Government alleged that a new report, Little Children Are Sacred, has forced it to adopt urgent policies to deal with ‘child abuse’ that exists in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. However, the report’s authors, Rex Wild and Pat Anderson, have condemned the Government’s disregard for the recommendations in their report. They note that: “There is nothing new or extraordinary in the allegations of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory. What is new, perhaps, is the publicity”, and the Government’s political and ideological motives.

The Bill has no support outside the Government and the spineless opposition Labour Party. Both the Australian Greens and the Australian Democrats called it “racist”. The Greens leader, Bob Brown, condemned it as: “The most flagrant and racist approach” to a national problem. The Government plans to give the Australian Crime Commission wide powers to infringe on Aboriginal communities and “identify” those abusing Aboriginal children.

“The Government has turned its back on the indigenous people of Australia over the last 10 years. Now we have 600 pages of legislation brought here and the Government says, ‘We will suspend standing orders to ram it through the Senate’. This is government by the executive and Parliament is being sidelined. This legislation goes to the core of what this nation is, how we relate to the first Australians … This process is corrupting this Parliament. This is Prime Minister Howard corrupting proper democratic process, which means we must be informed. When you are dealing with people whose lives, future, and culture are at stake, then you must be informed,” added Bob Brown. Parliament is turned into a rubberstamp for fixing Government policies.

So, Prime Minister John Howard suddenly became concerned about the welfare of little Aboriginal children and wants to save them from violence. “In the process, the Government is overriding the Racial Discrimination Act, the Northern Territory Land Rights Act and various bits of welfare legislation. Yet the only person the Prime Minister is truly trying to save, at this late stage of his prime ministership, is himself”, wrote Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Alan Ramsey. This is the same John Howard who locked up the children of Muslim refugees in inhumane conditions, resulting in serious psychological damage to those children.

The primary aim of the legislation is clear: It takes away the rights of Aboriginals to make decisions over their land and community, and removes the Aboriginal right to control access to their land.

Aside from land held by others, but which Aboriginal people consider to be their country, fifty per cent of the Northern Territory is under inalienable freehold title – seventy per cent of the Aboriginal population lives there. The Bill’s real colour was uncovered when the Labour party tried to introduce an amendment that included three clauses to “automatically review it after 12 months”. It was dismissed out of hand.

As Muriel Bamblett, Chairwoman of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal & Islander Child Care (SNAICC), noted: “You would think that any legislation that is supposedly part of an emergency response to the issues raised by the Little Children Are Sacred report on child abuse in Aboriginal communities would have children mentioned throughout its scores of pages … There is no mention of children in the main bill, which supposedly addresses the emergency of child abuse. That is why the majority of Indigenous leaders, academics, and practitioners in social work and child protection are continuing to say that this bill has nothing to do with children.” The Government still have to explain why the takeover of Aboriginal land was part of the package, if its aim to protect children.

Furthermore, a paper prepared for Oxfam Australia by Professor Jon Altman of the Australian National University (ANU) revealed that:

1) There is no evidence that either measure is related in any way to child sex abuse;
2) There is some risk that the relaxation of the permit system might exacerbate the problem of child sex abuse;
3) The development of the proposal to abolish the permit system predates the release of the Anderson/Wild Little Children Are Sacred report and is based on an ideological position rather than any factual basis as there is no evidence that child abuse is any higher where the permit system exists;
4) These two land rights reform measures are at direct loggerheads with a number of other measures and are consequently likely to jeopardize the effectiveness of the overarching National Emergency Response and;
5) Abolition of the permit system will be unnecessary if compulsory leasehold of townships is implemented. [1]

Former Northern Land Council chairman and Aboriginal leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu was outraged by the legislation. He told a gathering of people: "We in the Northern Territory are about to be dispossessed of everything, everything that we've got left from the original dispossession of our land and lives. That I should go and change my lifestyle and become a white man is worrying -- worrying and sickening." Aboriginal dispossession, rather than child abuse, is the real aim of the legislation. “I feel very sad that [the] land is being taken away from Aboriginal society again and I don’t know why,” said Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, an Aboriginal elder from Papunya in Central Australia.

Only a few individuals in the Australian Aboriginal community welcomed the “emergency” Bill. This small minority of middle-class Aborigines is created and nurtured by successive Australian governments (and the Anglo-Australian elites) to be used against the Aboriginal majority. As American sociologist Stephen Steinberg writes: “The existence of these black elite did not prove that racism was abating (though illusions to this effect were common even among blacks). On the contrary, the black elite itself was a vital part of the [institutionalised] system of oppression, serving as a buffer between the [white Australian] oppressor[s] and [the] oppressed [Aborigines] and furthering the illusion that [Aborigines] could surmount their difficulties if only they had the exemplary qualities of the [Aboriginal elites]”. When it comes to defending Aboriginal rights, the Aboriginal elites are the worst oppressors. [2]

The Government’s legislation seems to target child abuse in Aboriginal communities in Northern Territory which has no more than 40,000 children, while ignoring children in non-Aboriginal communities – where 80 per cent of child abuse is said to happen. Aboriginal children in Northern Territory constitute only 30 per cent of the total Aboriginal population. Child abuse is not confined to Aborigines; it is a widespread national problem which needs a national strategy.

There is no history of violence against children among Aboriginal tribes before white settlement. What the white settlers (Anglo-Celtic convicts) have brought with them is not only the gift of colonial dispossession, but all the paraphernalia of violence, diseases, drugs, alcohol, and destruction of Aboriginal society. Modern Australia lacks tolerance and compassion. Australia as a “tolerant society” is a manufactured delusion, a façade used by Anglo-Australian elites to breach tolerance with intolerance. Despite its detrimental effect on Aboriginal communities, the “emergency” Bill has the support of the majority of Anglo-Australians, possibly due to misconception that violence is common in Aboriginal communities.

The reality is that the problem of child abuse is exacerbated by the rise in poverty and racism in Australia. A new report by the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) reveals, ‘the number of Australian living in poverty rose from 7.6 per cent to 9.9 percent between 1994 and 2004’. The report compared Australia with the rest of the developed world on issues, including education, health and housing. Australian Aborigines are being left behind and will be the first to be effected by the rise in poverty. The report argues that in order to protect children in “an emergency context” the Government should “address community safety and access to essential services including housing, health care and education” that are contributing to child abuse and violence. [3]

Statistics show that Aboriginal Australians – only 2.7 per cent of the total population – are three times as likely to be unemployed. And with the arrival, in large numbers, of Asian immigrants, mostly “bogus” skilled workers, Aboriginal Australians who are already at the margins of Australian society are further marginalised. Australian employers, regardless of their businesses, can bypass unemployed local Australians (mostly Aborigines and Muslims) and ‘import’ foreign workers on special visas (e.g., 457 Visa). Foreign workers proved to be amenable to low wages, substandard working conditions and exploitation. (For more on this, see: Mathew Moore, “A lonely death among pines”, SMH, 29 August 2007).

Demonised in the media and despised by mainstream Australians, Aboriginal Australians have become destitute. Aboriginal Australians are by far the most alienated and marginalised Australians today. Aboriginal Australians continue to be overrepresented in the prison population. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Aboriginal Australians represented 20 to 22 per cent of Australia’s prison population in June of 2005, a disproportionately high rate of incarceration. Aboriginal Australians are 13 times as likely to be incarcerated and twice as likely to be victims of violence or to be threatened with violence. Health conditions are disastrous in remote Aboriginal communities, access to primary health care services by Aboriginal Australians remains worse than any other sector of Australian society. The 20-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains deliberately unaddressed and unchallenged. In sum, living conditions for Aborigines have gotten steadily worse and Aborigines are worse today than in 1967. The system generates violence and child abuse.

Finally, the problem in Australia is that the Australian Constitution is not designed to protect basic rights of individuals, let alone Aboriginal children. Without a bill of rights to protect basic freedom, Australia will continue to have laws that violate basic human rights.

As the majority of Aboriginal Australians and experts proposed, the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill is a racially and ideologically motivated take-over of Aboriginal land and should be vigorously opposed by all concerned Australians.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.


Endnotes:

[1] Altman, J. (2007, August). The ‘National Emergency’ Land Rights Reform: Separating Facts from Fictions. Briefing paper prepared for Oxfam Australia. Canberra: CAEPR, ANU. PDF

[2] Steinberg, S. (1995). Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon Press.

[3] Australia Fair (2007, August). A fair go for all Australians: International comparisons, 2007, 10 essentials. Australian Council of Social Service: Sydney, Australia. PDF



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