In defending a controversial decision by WA Premier Colin Barnett, who announced last November that the State would be closing around 150 of its remote Aboriginal communities, the Prime Minister stated that government cannot ‘endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have …’
On hearing this, I was stunned at the crassness of the remarks. The cavalier use of the term ‘lifestyle choice’ is totally inappropriate when referring to the people who will be affected by the proposed closures.
As WA Opposition spokesperson Ben Wyatt has remarked, the PM’s words suggest that the Aboriginal people affected have made a mere ‘sea change move’. There has been a torrent of criticism aimed at Mr Abbott, among the most incisive coming from Noel Pearson who knows first hand the complexity of bringing about change in remote and disadvantaged communities. He challenges the government to address a number of questions regarding this issue.
The Prime Minister refers to ‘full participation’, but his meaning is not clear. Significant numbers of Indigenous people who are not living in remote communities can hardly be said to enjoy full participation; indeed, nor can many non-indigenous urban dwellers. Reliable water and electricity supply, health, education, housing, etc. are services all Australians should expect, wherever they reside; such provision in the communities being targeted, has, for a considerable time, been paid for by the Commonwealth and the State, jointly.
When he announced WA’s intention to close a number of small communities, Mr Barnett cited the Commonwealth’s decision to withdraw support, leaving the State solely responsible for essential services a cost it could not be meet. The Premier claimed that over 100 of the WA communities in his sights average five residents only. (More recently, following sustained criticism from many Aboriginal and other quarters, he argued that closure was a way to address violence and child abuse.)
That some people stay in remote communities, despite the limitations they encounter, attests to strong and enduring attachments to family and land. There is a degree of attrition as some people move to cities or towns, because of the need for medical care, or the attractions of urban centres.
While it is reasonable to enter into public discussion about the prospects of small remote communities, any suggestion that this is a simple choice for residents, is offensive. It also shows ignorance of history, both recent and more distant. Policy makers and governments have repeatedly instituted arbitrary measures to control the indigenous population, often treating them as an inconvenience. The Australian colonial project caused severe dislocation, pushing large numbers of people off their lands; missions and reserves were established on which Aboriginal people were placed, willy-nilly; many towns did not permit Aboriginal people to reside in them. This was the state of things for many decades.
There was talk, in some quarters in the 1970s, that remote Aboriginal reserves were unviable and that people should be moved into towns. To my knowledge, this proposition was never put to the people concerned. In any case, the idea did not survive. In the 1970s and 1980s, in a climate of greater recognition of human rights, including rights to land, some Aboriginal people took initiatives to establish ‘outstations’ or ‘homeland communities’.
These places allowed people to leave large reserves and missions, where disparate groups were often thrown together in institutional settings that led to conflict and dysfunction. At the time, such moves were often hailed as a solution to a variety of ills plaguing Aboriginal populations. Governments encouraged the trend, and provided services to those small settlements, some of which grew and thrived while others were abandoned or used as temporary or occasional camps. Many people living in remote communities today, or their parents and grandparents, have been pioneers in making remote, small, often extended-kin-based, communities viable.
This latest decision by governments to withdraw support is a disservice to those who have stayed on, or returned to, their ancestral lands. It is disrespectful in that the decisions have been taken unilaterally. Premier Barnett at least showed a modicum of sensitivity in acknowledging that the decision would be distressing to those affected. The Prime Minister, who claims to know Indigenous people well and to care greatly for them, does not show even that level of awareness. Faced with deserved criticism, he chose to repeat his assertion of ‘lifestyle choice’.
Undeniably, sustaining remote communities is expensive, and, if Mr Barnett’s numbers are accurate, the long-term viability of some of the smaller ones is dubious. For example, effective schooling is not feasible. Also, especially given the gap in health, medical services cannot be reliably provided in tiny communities. What is required is not arbitrary decision-making or implicit disparagement of people in remote communities, but genuine extensive engagement, by all levels of government, in respectful dialogue with the people most affected with a view to arriving at effective and lasting solutions.
Dr Myrna Tonkinson is an honourary research fellow in anthropology in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She has done research among Aboriginal people in the Western Desert of WA since 1974.
WA remote community image from Wikimedia Commons.