Cast adrift beyond the mainstream - The Centre for Independent Studies
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Cast adrift beyond the mainstream

There is little doubt that the experiment with land councils and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission has been a failure.

The federal Government's decision to return the administration of programs assisting Aborigines to mainstream departments is the correct one. There is a need to treat indigenous people as normal Australians by providing them with better governance than is now the case. They are no different from other Australians in terms of their aspirations for a better life.

There is a need to deliver or have delivered to communities the range and level of services that could be expected in any equivalent-sized community elsewhere in Australia . There is a lot of commentary about the need to protect culture by well-meaning people who are more interested in protecting their positions and preventing any change.

The reality is that indigenous culture is where communities are now, and I know that there is no desire to return to the past or for indigenous people to become exhibits for tourists and film-makers. Tiwi Islanders, with whom I have worked, are no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers but community dwellers who value hunting, camping and fishing as recreational activities.

The level of funding presently provided by the Government would be more than adequate if it was correctly targeted and if present governance structures were simplified to remove duplication and waste in the system. If a study were conducted on the total funding provided to the 120,000 indigenous people living in isolated communities it would demonstrate clearly that funding is not reaching its target.

The past 30 years of activity under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act has achieved little for most indigenous people. I have no difficulty with the right of indigenous people to own their land but the great failure has been in accepting the responsibilities that flow from these rights.

I know the Tiwi Islands are sometimes used as an example of a successful land council. However, the reality is that very few real benefits, if any, have flowed to the four residential communities on the islands where 99.9 per cent of Tiwi Islanders reside. The services in those communities are still almost exclusively funded and provided by state, territory and federal governments with little or no contribution from the land council.

The layers of governance that have evolved in the past 30 years, with land councils, local community associations and, until recently, ATSIC regional councils and ATSIC imposed on top of governments, have created a series of bureaucracies that are often administered from city offices and work in isolation from each other as well as from the local people.

The indigenous leaders of each group are led, or sometimes misled, by highly paid non-indigenous managers who not only live off the system but who protect their benefits by avoiding any kind of co-operation or involvement with other groups in the community.

This leads to great bitterness, conflicts within and between communities, and contributes to the poor living standards in remote communities. Efforts by the Northern Territory Government to set up regional authorities to overcome such inefficiencies are to be commended.

As the first of these to be established in 2001, the Tiwi Islands local government has a constitution with many flaws but one valuable and significant feature is that it provides for the unity of the traditional owners and democratically elected community representatives as one local government body for the islands.

Possibly the most important issue that needs to be addressed is that of education. There are several lost generations who are unable to perform the most basic functions of literacy and numeracy and the early demise of older educated generations is resulting in a limited pool from which leaders or employees can be found.

Given such weak foundations, present employment and training programs are failing to move Tiwi islanders into real jobs. Jobless and living on welfare, Tiwi men and women have even less of normal Australian lives than similarly disadvantaged communities in mainstream Australia, largely because their system of governance prevents investment and enterprise. It is no wonder that such a life leads to alcoholism, substance abuse, crime and violence.

Among the many changes needed to bring Aborigines such as Tiwi Islanders to mainstream Australian living standards, three reforms are:

A simple local governance structure with commensurate service deliveries needs to be established for remote communities to end funding from the multiple Aboriginal organisations that are now exploiting both the Australian taxpayers and remote communities.

All Aboriginal children, like all other Australian children, must be educated to Year 10, encouraged to finish Year 12 and-or undertake further training or tertiary education.

Aborigines must be able to fill productive jobs and thus enjoy a meaningful life with decent nutrition, housing, health and recreation. Only by ending welfare dependence will alcoholism, other substance abuse, crime and violence recede to the low levels characteristic of the rest of Australia.

John Cleary is a former Liberal government minister in Tasmania and author of Lessons from the Tiwi Islands: The Need for Radical Improvement in Remote Aboriginal Communities, published today by The Centre for Independent Studies.