Australia's failure to solve the problems of "dysfunctional and
disintegrating" Aboriginal communities is diminishing the whole
nation, but most people don't want to know about it, says Treasury
secretary Ken Henry.
Dr Henry said most Aborigines suffered "severe capability
deprivation", which shut them out of higher education and the
workforce, led to high unemployment and imprisonment, and cut 17
years off their lives.
He said there were solutions, but they were "simply too
confronting to command widespread community support".
"Most Australians know there is something wrong because they see
images of substance abuse and domestic violence in indigenous
communities," he said. "But that is about all they see.
"And it might be all they want to see: for the most part,
preferring the mental image of the indigenous community as a
sheltered workshop for the permanently handicapped.
"Well, indigenous communities are not sheltered workshops. They
are a constituent component of mainstream Australia."
Meanwhile, Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has told a
parliamentary committee hearing Australians should "hang their head
in shame" at the conditions tolerated in indigenous
communities.
"Kids were bored shitless" in remote communities such as Wadeye
- the site of widespread riots in May - because there was no high
school, Senator Heffernan said. And unemployed people were being
forced to participate in job-seeking activities despite there being
no work to be found.
"It seems to me that for many years we've just gone up there and
visited these people and gone away in air-conditioned cars and said
it's bloody terrible . . . and then forgotten about it," Senator
Heffernan said in an indictment of both state and federal
government indigenous affairs policies.
He appealed to both levels of government to stop the "blame
bullshit that goes on all the time - it's not getting us
anywhere".
Instead, he called for governments to commit to a timetable for
building a high school in Wadeye and bringing economic
opportunities to these areas through development of the north of
Australia.
Wadeye was one of the Aboriginal communities chosen by the
Council of Australian Governments in 2002 to participate in a trial
of a new "whole-of-government" method of service delivery.
Under that trial the Northern Territory and Commonwealth
governments and local council were meant to share responsibility
for administration and service delivery, but an independent
assessment of the trial leaked to The Australian Financial Review
found it had achieved very little. Just four houses had been built
in three years since the trial started.
Dr Henry, speaking at a dinner for the Melbourne Institute and
The Australian, said governments had tried to overcome Aboriginal
disadvantage, but they had failed.
He praised projects driven by Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson in
Cape York communities which put conditions on welfare and services
so as to equip people with "the capability to choose lives that
they have reason to value".
