Two steps back...
by Greg Barns
[ politics | opinion - april 04 ]
In 1990 Australia's aboriginal population celebrated the commencement of a bold experiment. The government of Prime Minister Bob Hawke created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), to allow Aboriginal people the right to govern their own affairs. Fourteen years later, Mr Hawke's successor, John Howard, has declared the experiment a failure and announced that aboriginal self-government in Australia is dead.
Mr Howard's move last Thursday to dismantle separate aboriginal health, education and welfare programs - the key responsibilities of ATSIC - is not opposed by the opposition Australian Labor Party (the ALP) which had also promised to abolish ATSIC, but the leftist Australian Democrats, which has among its seven members of the Australian Parliament the only aboriginal MP (out of a total of 226), has said it is opposed to the move.
Australia's aboriginal population is only 430,000, or 2.2 per cent of the total Australian population of 20 million. Aboriginal Australians were only granted the right to vote in 1967 and, unlike New Zealand, where there is a formal treaty between the indigenous Maori people and the government, or Canada, where the Inuit people govern their own province, such initiatives have been rejected by all sides of politics in Australia.
ATSIC representatives were elected by aboriginal people, and one of its early successes was the key role it played in ensuring the Australian Parliament passed legislation in 1994 to grant native title rights over land.
But in recent years ATSIC has suffered from a poor image. Its current Chair, Geoff Clark, has been convicted of assault and is facing a civil suit for rape. It has continually faced allegations of corruption and nepotism in the way it has spent its annual $A1.2 billion budget.
Senator Vanstone and Mr Howard have announced that they will work with Australia's eight state and territory governments to find new ways of funding aboriginal community, employment and welfare programs.
With the ALP supporting ATSIC's abolition, it is likely legislation to bring this about will pass through the Australian Parliament when it is introduced in July.
However, there is considerable controversy over Mr Howard's plan to appoint an advisory body to replace ATSIC. Mr Howard's critics say that the failure to replace ATSIC with another body, in which members are elected by the aboriginal community, will set Australia back 30 years.
It was the government of ALP leader Gough Whitlam that established the first elected aboriginal body in the mid 1970s. The ALP wants to see ATSIC replaced with some form of new elected national aboriginal body, as do the Australian Democrats and another party in the Australian Parliament, the Greens.
Mr Howard's conservative Liberal/National Party coalition government has never been comfortable with ATSIC since it won office in 1996. Mr Howard has opposed ATSIC's campaign for a formal apology by the Australian government for 200 years of ill-treatment by Europeans of aboriginal people. He also refused to accede to an aboriginal leaders' campaign for monetary compensation for those aboriginal children taken from their families by governments and church missions - a practice that continued into the 1950s in Australia and which was the subject of Philip Noyce's highly acclaimed 2001 film Rabbit Proof Fence.
Whatever the future of aboriginal self-determination in Australia, the nation's aboriginal people are less educated, less healthy and wealthy than the white population. The life expectancy of aboriginal men is only 56, whereas for white men it is 77. Aboriginal woman have a life expectancy of 63, but for white women, its 82. The infant mortality rate for aboriginal children is twice that of the white population, and only 17 per cent of aboriginal people finished secondary school, as opposed to 39 per cent of white Australians. Income of aboriginal Australians is only 60 per cent of the white workforce.
When ATSIC was created there were high hopes that Australia might at last be lifting its indigenous peoples out of material and political dispossession. In 1992, Australia's Prime Minister Paul Keating told his countrymen in 1992 that aboriginal people cannot "be denied their place in the modern Australian nation." Twelve years on and that noble goal looks remoter than ever.
