Royal commissions are increasingly prompted by vulnerable people being treated badly. Recent commissions have highlighted the bad behaviour by churches, financial institutions and, in the Northern Territory, by detention officers. Forthcoming commissions will reveal bad treatment of the elderly and of people who are mentally ill.
Experience suggests that the commissions disclose only a fraction of unacceptable behaviour committed, and that the cultural attitudes that entrench it outlast the proposed reforms. The reasons for their comparative ineffectiveness can be illuminated by reflection on reforms of the 19th century.
During that century philosophers and social reformers who turned their attention to the harsh treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill and the poor generally focused on methods of dealing with them rather than on their humanity. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design for prisons, for example, did away with corporal punishments and over-crowding by keeping prisoners in single cells constantly under visual and oral surveillance from a central point. This would prevent the prison from being a school for crime and encourage self-reflection.
The principles were further refined in the design of Special Prisons, of which Port Arthur was one, where solitude was intensified by systematic sensual deprivation. The technology was splendid and its benefits for people prettily described. The problem was that it made human beings worse, not better.
The 19th century also saw the expansion of institutions for the mentally ill, where patients were typically restrained. They were a response to the practice of keeping people at home. In institutions they were also subjected to intrusive medical experimentation based on bad theories.
The workhouses, too, designed to cut costs, prevent people from starving and encourage people to work, meant that families were separated, forced to wear special clothing and to work hard for poor food. As in prisons and asylums people were routinely subject to the beatings and other arbitrary punishment that the reforms strove to change. The inhumanity of the places corrupted the good intentions of their devisors.
In all these cases emphasis on technological solutions to human problems was not accompanied by a proper respect for the humanity of the people affected by them. They were the objects of policy whose responses were defined in advance, and not unique subjects each with their own history, desires, feelings and demanding of respect.
"These 19th century attitudes still govern public penal and welfare policy today. Policies and practices may be conceived with good general intentions. But they are not tested against the human dignity of the people whom they affect."
Bentham himself spoke famously of reference to innate human rights as 'nonsense on stilts', and made the criteria for ethical judgment 'the greatest good of the greatest number'. The good of people who were poor, found guilty of crimes or were mentally ill was inevitably outweighed by the perceived good of society, which in practice was defined by the good of its wealthiest and most powerful members. The damage done to human beings could then be ignored or regarded as necessary, if regrettable.
The attitude was captured neatly by the 19th century poet Arthur Hugh Clough in his satirical take on the Ten Commandments: 'Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / Officiously to keep alive.' 'Officiously' here means that it is not part of one's official responsibilities to preserve life.
These 19th century attitudes still govern public penal and welfare policy today. Policies and practices may be conceived with good general intentions. But they are not tested against the human dignity of the people whom they affect, but only against the practical considerations of finance and security, which are taken to determine the greatest good for the greater number.
This inevitably damages people because the heart of human flourishing and healing lies in good relationships between people and with the world. In order for people held in institutions to thrive they must be in an enriching environment where they are accompanied by sufficient well-trained staff able to relate to them.
If they are confined in a mean, concrete world designed only to be washed down and trouble free, or are chemically sedated as a matter of course by transient and poorly trained staff they will inevitably shrivel as human beings and become incapable of contributing to society. And because no one is healed, the pressure for more technological solutions will grow, inevitable abuses will be revealed, more enquiries be held, and the circle will continue.
The alternative is to make the humanity of vulnerable people the consistent focus, and to commit sufficient resources to shape the environment and encourage the healthy relationships central to their healing.
The 19th century experience tells us that this will happen only if the common people as well as the politicians and technocrats make this commitment and come together in foregoing financial advantage to provide the means. That is as big an ask now as it was then. Clough's poem continued: 'Thou shalt not covet; but tradition / Sanctions the keenest competition.'
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.