Emma and Pete's blog about things. Many things. Things with few parameters. We are two socialists recently moved to Darwin who travel to remote Aboriginal communities for work and play. We like pie. Making pies on Aboriginal communities can be a challenge given a) the decided lack of fresh produce in many stores and b) the hugely inflated prices in many communities. Among other things, we ponder this.
Earlier this year, I went to a fancy dress party dressed as a ninja. I drove us there, so I guess through the window all people would've seen was a head veiled in black with a slot for the eyes. In the 15-minute drive through Darwin suburb
s, I had a carload of young white men swear at me and give me the finger, another man in another car yell "go home", and third car speed past us while throwing a beer can out the window, which came flying back in our direction.
Anyone who thinks Australia is not a racist country need only try out this experiment (at the time I wasn't even consciously undertaking an "experiment" but it sure was a wake-up call).
I was pretty shaken by the time I got to the party. This is the daily reality for women who wear the veil in Australia.
The mayor of Palmerston has been stood down and placed on the banned drinkers list because he threatened his neighbours with some golf clubs because their dogs were too loud. The banned drinkers list is a small exclusive list of a few hundred people who are not allowed to drink, this existence of which means everyone has to hand over their licence to be scanned every time they buy take-away.
Maybe there will be a new law and order campaign based on this new interpretation of what one can and can't do in their own home. The slogans for such a campaign write themselves. "Are you now or have you ever been nude?" "If you see something, say something." "Be someone! Report domestic nudity today!"
I mean I know that there is a lot of nudity in the NT. The build-up is noted for such behaviour. Some places wait for the first sparrow of Summer. Canberra waits for the first magpie attack of Spring. We wait for the first nude drink-driving arrest of the Build-Up. This year, it was a couple. Romantic, I guess.
But if you think this is just the result of the NT News (a News Ltd. rag designed to drive out the local union-run paper of substance that preceded it), THINK AGAIN! Look at this from the ABfrickenC:
Good grief can you imagine if elephants reach cane toad plague proportions? Apparently, they can also have a bit of a problem with grog, destroying African villages to get to stills. I'd like to see the the banned drinkers register work there.
Maybe this is just a response to the "anything goes" planning department here in the NT. UTAS Prof looked at the massive development plans for Northern Australia and just said: "Fuck it! Introduce elephants! Mad Max-style anarchy can't come soon enough for these Territorian nutbags." Or maybe Tasmanians are just crazy.
Anyway, I'm off to get three forms of ID and a note from my doctor so I can have a drink.
Okay, so I'm now working at [redacted] and today I was sent out to do "site maintenance". Site maintenance is deadly dull and time consuming and sends me out to all the industrial estates of Darwin to do the minor stuff that the more senior members of my company fond too boring and time consuming to do.
(I always assumed growing up would suck, now I have evidence.)
Anyway, there's a company car. It's a little front-wheel drive automatic Toyota Corolla. I drive a big beefy manual Nissan Patrol. What follows is a result of that inexperience.
I reverse out of the driveway and into the street. I instinctively apply a little more gas to stop me from rolling down the hill and move to put it in drive.
ZOOOM. CRUNCH.
It turns out that a Corolla is quite a lot lighter than a Patrol and doesn't need help on the gas to stop it from rolling down a hill. Also, automatics aren't really meant for the quick gear change I'm used to. The car shot back and scraped along a hinge on a ute behind me. This left a nasty scratch on the Corolla and nothing at all on the ute.
I meet the ute guy walking from the take-away shop and after careful perusal of his vehicle he could see that it was remotely possible that I left some powdered paint on his car and then laughed his arse off at the nasty scratch on the work Corolla.
I check the car for damage that actually impairs the function of the vehicle and there appears to be none. I figure I should go earn some money for [redacted] before I get fired so drive into town and perform a site maintenance before coming back and telling the boss.
Boss is understanding and says that's what insurance is for but grows a little more peeved when he sees the extent of the damage.
I go and do more site maintenance jobs (I can't actually express how dull these things are but they do make one feel virtuous, like taking out the garbage or clearing out your email). I get back at 4.30 and take a call from the boss as I get to the office. He says someone called to tell him that one of our cars was driving around with a flat tire - my car.
Apparently front-wheel drive vehicles have very little weight in the back so you can drive for HOURS without noticing that a tire is flat.
Sara Hudson, a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies wrote a piece on the ABC supporting the NT intervention and attacking public land title in remote Aboriginal.
It's pretty much what you expect from a CIS shill. "Public bad, private good", corrupt land councils, etc., etc. But one part of her piece stood out to me as someone on remote Aboriginal communities at the moment. Here it is:
"The absence of private property rights has seen remote Indigenous communities become sad slums with no resemblance to prosperous suburbs in the rest of Australia. If it is lucky a community will have one store, there are no cafes, motels, caravan parks, retail shops, hairdressers or the other services that abound in mainstream Australian country towns.
"By romanticising Aboriginal communities and failing to reward individual aspirations, government has consigned them to derelict public housing and the aimlessness and boredom of lives on welfare."
Hudson is dead right here, you know. The number of Aboriginal women living in poverty who come up to me and say: "Gee, I wish there was a hairdresser or a cafe here - that would just solve everything" is numberless, in the sense that no-one says that.
People sometimes want more choice in the commmunity stores (although it has to be said that some stores make a real effort and it's really appreciated). People sometimes want more health resources (although again, many of the clinics are hardworking and pro-active). But they never seem to want hairdressers.
In fact, the only people who seem to want this sort of private business operating in these communities are those who are used to them, like visiting politicians who can't believe they can't get a decent cappuccino. That sounds like hyperbole, but in the early days of the intervention, that's precisely what one pollie said.
Like most capitalist ideologues who probably never actually had to run a business, Hudson doesn't get that some business and economic models don't work everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the North Shore Sydney cafes and hairdressers as far as the eye can see aren't gong to make it in, say, Patjarr, population 30.
They don't even work well in many "mainstream Australian country towns" anymore, because the population and money ssimply isn't there to support it. Having been in Laverton for a week, which is benefiting from the mining boom, I can tell you that that "mainstream Australian country town" can't support hairdressers or cafes either, regardless of how much private land ownership there is.
It also doesn't have much the way of ATMs, the community - oops sorry - town being too small to justify sending much cash there. This means everyone pays for things by card.
But Hudson has been sold the whole "tragedy of the commons" garbage and gosh don't she believe it. It's fun that people who romanticise the destruction of common title always neglect to mention its result - Dickensian London, with child slavery, crime, disease, poverty, etc., etc.
Such would also be the result of any similar moves in Australia. The ALP's "Hub Towns" policy, which would starve smaller Aboriginal communities in the NT of funds and "encourage" people to move into the larger towns, is one such modern form of the British Enclosure Act. The rise in Aboriginal people in Alice Springs has led to a rise in homeless Aboriginal people and the social problems that stem from that. But no one seems to put two and two together and realise that these small "unviable" communities are much healthier than urban decay.
I guess we now know the definition of "viable" - able to produce a decent soy latte for a visiting diginitary. Sorry Laverton, no infrastructure for you!
It's been four years since the intervention was launched and some in the media, like the SMH, are touting its successes. The SMH said the other day in its editorial that even though the intervention was racist and there were some errors, it saved women and children.
The SMH neglected to mention how many, because most stats show rises in domestic violence reports after the intervention and rises in malnutrition - but hey, this is an editorial, not a spreadsheet Poindexter!
It reminded me of what John Pilger quotes often, that the struggle for justice is often a struggle against forgetting.
To believe the SMH editorial, we have to forget the lies about child pedophilia rings. We have to forget that an assistant to a federal politican pretended to be a Mutitjulu-based youth worker, and that his long list of incidents that supposedly happened in one community, were actually spread out accross the whole of the NT. We have to forget that the first Basics Cards were just Coles and Woolies gift cards - despite, as Hudson will attest - there being no Coles or Woolies in remote Aboriginal communities.
We have to forget that Howard - why? intimidation? Brough's love of men in uniform? Howard's fear of the darkies? - sent the military in to implement the policy. We have to forget that this was a blatant election ploy from a man who always did blatant election ploys.
We have to forget the racism of a self-admitted racist policy.
We have to pretend, like the ALP likes to, that this is just a minor technocratic shift to the welfare system, along with some inadequate rises in child protection funding.
Sure it's paternalistic, but you can't have carrots without sticks, right? Or, in this case, dainty underfed, sick looking carrots without chainsaws, but that's not important! What is important is that this policy that has no evidence of actually working is expensive and that means that we can claim it as funding for Closing the Gap.
And isn't it more important that we can say we're spending more than ever before on that, even if it isn't closing any single social indicator?
The comments section of Hudson's article was full of the usual internet arseholery but Marlene Hodder, a tireless Aboriginal rights activist from Alice Springs, also commented. Here's what she said:
"In my experience some Aboriginal communities had been pleading for police for decades and were ignored. Others didn't want or need them but now have them. It didn't need an imposition of racist laws to improve people's lives. Nor did it need takeover of land or seizure of assets etc. And working closely with people living under income management (mainly women) it is almost universally resented and detested.
"Having sat with Centrelink clients trying to gain exemption from this demeaning regime when they became entitled to apply, I have witnessed Centrelink's tactics in pushing to keep people on income management at all cost. The staff had obviously been trained to work on the basis that Aboriginal people are incapable of managing their money and it was important to try and keep them on the scheme at all cost, even to the extent of bribing them with a $250 bonus every six months. Interpreters were often not used.
"I worked with two women,one fluent in several languages and her mother who speaks little English. Both had no idea how they came to be still income managed when they so desperately wanted to be 'free'. They had apparently agreed to stay on it 'over the phone'. In all the years of working with prescribed area people I have only met two people who liked income management. The vast amount of money being spent ($4,000 per person) income managing people could be better spent on lifting them out of poverty or on up-to-date banking services in communities."
I couldn't have said it better.
The problems in remote Aboriginal Australia are difficult and ongoing. In some of the more remote places, colonisation happened as recently as just 50 years ago and, for some, as late as 1984. The damage that colonisation does takes generations to even begin to heal, even if everything were done right and with respect and with the communities rather than against them.
Anyone who tells you we just need to "get tough" on the symptoms of this damage is just choosing to avoid thinking about the problem. It's a non solution that pretends to be simple but usually just means an embarrassing back-down later and more damage done.
Meanwhile, the nice folks at the CIS will continue to peddle their market fundamentalism from their nice cafes and while ordering champagne at the hairdressers and wonder what the poor people are doing today.
And now, music. In honour of Hudson's First World solutions to Fourth World problems, I bring to you MC Frontalot's "First World Problems".
Now while our capitalism is in a minor kerfuffle,
you have to hustle. Before the fates come, reshuffle.
Rustle up another couple grievances and air 'em.
You can laugh about it later (maybe needed while despairing).
For the moment though, you ordered half caf, didn't get it;
there was no TV set when you jetted; internet resetted
itself just as I was in the middle
of tournament play, and so I suffered from transmittal
interruption. Completely ruined my day.
MC Frontalot's a jackass, that's all I'm trying to say.
The April 2 Australian reported that ITEC Employment and its related entity Community Enterprises Australia (CEA) are preparing a submission to the federal government that will argue “the pendulum has swung too far in favour of the jobseeker”, in relation to changes to the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) on Aboriginal communities.
CEA is the largest CDEP provider in Australia, according to the article.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the pendulum swinging “too far in favour of the jobseeker” meant, perhaps, people were finding work.
In fact, under Labor’s changes to CDEP, many Aboriginal people on communities have been shifted from doing meaningful, essential community service work, funded by a Centrelink base rate plus hourly top-up wages, to receiving “income support payments”, which are effectively Newstart payments but recipients need to work for them (a more honest name is “work-for-the dole”).
The changes are part of Labor’s “reformed CDEP”: a way of keeping its 2007 election promise to not scrap CDEP as the Howard government said it would, while taking control over CDEP out of the hands of communities and watering it down to a work-for-the-dole scheme. Unlike CDEP, income support payments, like Newstart, can be quarantined onto the Basics Card. (As part of the NT Intervention into Aboriginal communities', introduced in 2007, 50% of Aboriginal welfare recipients' payments are put onto this voucher-type card, that can only be spent on approved goods such as food, clothing and medicine.)
Between April and June 2012, all those participants currently on the “old CDEP” scheme (ie those who were employed by CDEP before the reformed scheme was introduced in July 2009), will be moved onto an income support payment (work for the dole. When making enquiries about this to Centrelink, I was optimistically told “Unless, of course, they have found a ‘real job’ by then”.
Labor has not created more meaningful, salaried, “real jobs” on communities. Swinging the pendulum too far in the jobseekers’ favour has not, it seems, meant government investment in community-controlled employment programs.
Despite the apparent pendulum swing, and despite Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s promise “to ensure that every Australian who can work, does work" (quote from her speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia conference in February), no money has been found to, say, pay the garbage collectors on communities, currently working for the dole, the award rates they would be paid if they worked in Darwin.
While Labor’s plan is for the eventual wind-up of the old CDEP, keeping Aboriginal people on work-for-the-dole programs is all too convenient- not to mention cheap- for Labor to move to create fully paid, equitable employment on communities.
According to CEA and ITEC Employment, the problem is “Centrelink is not penalising Aboriginal people in bush areas on the dole who avoid mutual obligations”, the Australian reported.
The job service providers’ submission will reportedly call for the “restoration of CDEP ‘wage-like’ payments”.
Many Aboriginal workers across NT communities, who have found themselves providing essential services for not much more than the Basics Card and lose change, are also campaigning against the scrapping of CDEP. They argue that, rather than close it down and shift people onto unemployment lines, the money should be spent converting CDEP positions into salaried jobs at award rates.
However, I don’t think Aboriginal workers campaigning for Jobs with Justice have found an ally in CEA and ITEC. According to the job service providers, restoring CDEP “would allow providers to implement no work, no pay principles on the ground in the communities”, as opposed to the “‘weakened’ compliance regime” that is work-for-the-dole.
CDEP was an initiative led by Aboriginal communities in the 1960s and ‘70s, in an attempt to combat the negative effects of “sit-down” money. However, coming from job service providers who stand to make much money from winning government contracts, and who are bemoaning the softening of penalties against Aboriginal people on welfare, we should be very cautious of this particular call defending CDEP.
Once again, discussion is focused on carrot-and-stick tactics for punishing Aboriginal welfare recipients. This distracts from where the spotlight should be: the government’s complete unwillingness to work with communities to take positive steps towards creating real, fairly paid, community-controlled, employment.
