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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