Closing time
To meaningfully close the gap with Indigenous Australians, we must simplify the focus areas down to three practical targets. By Andrew Laming.
When Noel Pearson wrote “Radical Hope” for the Quarterly Essay in 2009, many hoped it would turbo-charge the Rudd apology with practical action. Twelve years on, nothing much has changed. Annual statements to Parliament are filled with excuses and Pearson’s Cape York interventions remain on life-support.
For 230 years, our continent’s original landlords would see themselves as having been accommodating hosts to the tenants and squatters who have arrived since 1788. Though a couple of centuries late, the movement has begun to re-assert Indigenous control over public land. National park co-management followed by handover is an example. Future governments can then lease back the right for non-Indigenous citizens to enter. Call it rent seeking, but that is precisely what landlords do.
This process inevitably moves to agreement over private land title. Tenants will have to strike financial agreements with the landlord, as occurred in eastern Europe after the Soviet Union collapsed. In Baltic states after 1990, aliens were forced to find the pre-Soviet owners of land and strike financial agreements to stay in their homes.
Each key step in Australia’s nationhood silenced indigenous Australians when it mattered. Mostly this was unintentional omission. Privileges like nationality, voting and land rights were granted late, painfully and typically on our terms.
Jacque Derrida wrote extensively on the South African reconciliation, describing the violence as ‘excessive and powerless, insufficient in its result, lost in its own contradiction.’ Australia’s journey wasn’t South Africa, but apartheid aside, Derrida might also argue of similarities.
That is why the heart of the 2007 apology was a plea for forgiveness. The Danish philosopher Svend Brinkmann described true forgiveness as not being instrumentalised for another purpose; like feeling better about ourselves, moving on, for compensation, or to improve social cohesion. Indigenous hospitality has been true hospitality, because they relinquished control over their space and did so unconditionally. That is why the apology failed; it possessed external and instrumentalised purposes for both sides. One party wanted to get on with life; the other saw it as a concrete step in the justice war.
Just before the apology, Social Justice commissioner Tom Calma wrote of a 25-year path to converge health and life expectancies. This led to the 2008 Health equality summit and the signing of a Statement of Intent, with states signing up by 2010.
The original seven gap targets ignored economic development. There were two in health, four in education and one for employment. They were comfortable targets that didn’t hint at any interruption to the flow of welfare. Western money poured in from the top in the form of community grants for families to fight over, while Centrelink money poured to individuals, so they could humbug. This was a lethal assault from two directions on the traditional kinship structure which the West didn’t recognise. Senior men and women were reduced to another customer reference number.
Next came the six state partnership agreements and one with the Northern Territory. COAG committed $4.6billion to these gaps, with annual spend increasing to $33billion, though just a fifth of this is targeted, rather than mainstream. The Commonwealth was the ATM, increasing funding by 23% in a decade, but at service delivery, little changed operationally.
By 2012, overrepresentation in the criminal justice system emerged as a new target area, but the aim was to reduce incarceration rates, rather than offending itself. The Redfern Statement in 2016 called for a representative body, followed by a Special Gathering in 2018 and a ‘Refresh’ of closing the gap to include States. The number grew to 15 goals along with additional timeframes. Since then, a sixteenth has been added to achieve a sustained increase in Indigenous language.
The first two health targets are uncontroversial. Target three pursues school enrolment but ignores attendance or performance. Target four (early years thriving) aims for 55% of children being developmentally on track but at these perilously low levels, subsequent gaps won’t budge. With academic outcomes ignored, too many children graduate with mid-primary levels of literacy and numeracy, meaning gaps only close by pushing youth into competency-based certifications.
Target nine aims for a curious 88% securing appropriate housing. That means little more than more public housing; inflaming a globally unique dynamic where a culture has been created that remains utterly reliant on others to provide their shelter. There is no meaningful move towards a private housing market, let alone payment of a sustainable rent, or household responsibility for maintenance or repairs.
Outcomes 10, 11 and 12 aim to reduce incarceration, youth detention and out-of-home care, but they ignore the causal agent completely; which is offending. Closing the gap on administrative or judicial decisions like incarceration simply drives different decisions. Instead of reducing all violence, only the violence against women and children gap is measured. Being blind to male on male violence is a missed opportunity to intervene early.
Failure to break these national gaps down to region, council and community level has let local actors off the hook. There is more focus on bureaus of statistics than on service providers. Thousands of latter-day middle-class Australians identifying as Indigenous each year, skews the data far more than anything happening to transform lives in remote Australia. The time spent acknowledging elders past and present should be devoted to making concrete changes on the ground.
That is why I propose simplifying the 16-gap boondoggle, to just three. They are based on the characteristics of functional communities around the globe. Closing these three gaps with the rest of the world sets the conditions for every other gap to also close. The goals are that four out of five;
Families be independent of government income replacement and housing,
Children meet global education standards and transition into the economy, and
Jobs are outside the public sector; in particular the evolution of a private services sector which currently doesn’t exist.
Every ethno, geo- and demographic group will have ‘gaps’ with others. Indigenous Australia can forge a path to a functionally happy and healthy society without being driven by mainstream comparison. While these are exclusively decisions for Indigenous Australians, I argue it isn’t about western outcomes or national averages. Moving beyond racial analysis, our nation should strive to optimise outcomes everywhere. Indigenous Australia isn’t a deficit with gaps to close, but in plenty of instances, can surpass and inspire us to do better ourselves.
Andrew Laming is federal member for Bowman.