Pearson's revolution - In Depth

THREE years ago, Allan Creek moved onto 225,000 hectares — two days' ride from boundary to boundary — of his mother's country in the heart of Cape York. The return of the land to the Ayapathu clan meant that after 40 years mustering other blokes' cattle, Creek now drives his own herd into the drafting yard he built from his people's timber. Ironwood posts and bloodwood rails, he says, slapping the tall stockade walls. He's not making a living from it yet, but he will.

An eloquent man with a vocabulary enriched by the colourful lingo of the bushman and the broad vowels of the blackfella, he is momentarily speechless. "I can't put into words the way I feel about it. To ride my horse with my cattle and my dog, you just feel good. Branding our cattle."

The brand burned on the rumps of Creek's cattle is "A4D". That's "Allan for Dorrie" — Doris Harold, his partner and fellow dreamer. Allan's booming laugh is flushed with embarrassment at the accusation that he is a bush romantic, but he doesn't deny it. He is a man driven by his love of country and by convictions etched on his heart. They are that work brings rewards. Education brings opportunity. Rights bring responsibilities. Inactivity — or passivity — encouraged by the welfare drip-feed brings disease, despair and death to his children and his grandchildren. This is his mantra. It defines what has become his mission, and that of his sister Ann Creek, to reinvent their community of Coen, a town high on the old telegraph line stretching to Australia's northernmost tip. It's a philosophy that has found a powerful, controversial voice in another, better-known Aboriginal visionary, Noel Pearson, who grew up eight hours' drive south in the old mission of Hope Vale.

Pearson's vision, 20 years in the making, underpins a radical experiment that began last week in Coen, Hope Vale and two other Cape York communities — Aurukun and Mossman Gorge — turning 30 years of welfare orthodoxy on its head. The pilot project, run by the Cape York Institute, will redefine access to welfare, paying incentives for behaviour that improves education, health and the prospects of the next generation finding work. But with money will come obligation. Under the project template, a families commission in each community — a panel of perhaps two elders and a retired magistrate — will be empowered to make orders that dictate and direct payments, using sticks and carrots to require, for example, that children not only get to school, but are rested and fed and capable of learning. If a parent is drinking the family income, payments could be redirected to another relative. If they're not caring for the kids, they might be sent for counselling.

Pearson rests his reform agenda on the rebuilding of social norms — the invisible conventions that guide and moderate individual behaviour. Manners and grooming, standards and expectations, rules of behaviour. The challenge, and the controversy, is in leveraging such behaviours against the welfare stream. Such coercion under existing law would be illegal. Over the next year, Pearson will head to Canberra to argue that such discrimination is not only desirable but crucial. In the meantime, work proceeds on the ground — talking to communities, determining what the problems are and what mechanisms might fix them — with a plan to roll out the changes from March.

Pearson has enlisted Allan and Ann Creek as key foot soldiers in Coen to bring about the "new deal" on welfare that they and other leaders in the four communities who have opted into the experiment are convinced represents the only hope for the children of remote indigenous communities.

Many of the households on the cape are kept running by grandparents raising children. The generation in between is too disabled to do the job, bequeathing only inertia and hopelessness, says Pearson.

His welfare reform pilot aims to spring the poverty trap of "perverse incentives" that he says causes people to lose ambition for themselves and their children. He says countering this will require a revolution in attitudes within the communities — towards education, aspiration and mobility — and beyond in the mind-set of the "well-intended progressives" who shape welfare policy. It's a line that delights conservative politicians and commentators and discomfits the softer elements of the left.

But Pearson, speaking to The Age in Cairns as work on the ground began last week, is less concerned about what people say than with what will happen in Coen and the other three pilot communities. He's pursuing real improvements in health, education and employment within five years, and revitalised communities operating in real economies within a generation.

"So far as our policy is concerned, well, if it doesn't work here, then I really think …" Pearson pauses for a long time. "I really think that there's not much hope."

PEARSON'S fears are echoed by Megan Irving as she drives the track from the Coen airstrip into the township — a pub, store, guesthouse, school, clinic, police station, the welfare offices and a scattering of overcrowded houses. "This has to work," she says matter-of-factly. "Because this is the last straw."

Irving first flew in here 12 years ago as the kindergarten teacher. In many ways, it is a good community, she says. You can leave your house unlocked and your keys in the car. The old people still have enough clout to keep the kids in check, and juvenile crime and drinking are far worse in the better suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. It's safe to walk the street at night. The danger is behind doors, when the drinkers make it home, frightening the families they love when they are sober, and in the intangible toll of lives without hope and direction.

School attendance is reasonable, says principal Ken Crowther, but standards lag sadly behind the mainstream. The gap is too much for many students when they go south to board at high school. As few as 6 per cent finish year 12.

Dean Taylor, one of the flying doctors who visit the clinic each week, treats long queues of patients suffering the ills of sedentary lives and substance abuse, and worries about the decline of mental health. Suicide is disproportionately high. Pearson's project, he thinks, is on the right track.

Child abuse is rare, says justice worker Rhys Gardiner, though neglect is another story. Two men are in jail at the moment, well down from the half-dozen routinely locked up a couple of years ago, he says. Serial troublemakers these days are often sentenced, at the urging of the elders, to a stretch on the homelands — places like Allan Creek's station, where hard work and the absence of grog "gets their heads straight".

What's wrong in Coen became starkly clear last week at a funeral for a man who died too young of ailments that strip 20 years off Aboriginal life expectancy. The whole town stopped work to follow the ambulance to the graveyard. There, listening to the old women wail, Megan Irving realised she knew almost three rows of the people interred under simple white crosses and faded plastic flowers.

For the past four years, Irving has been running a financial management program that serves as a model for other communities, already overseeing the budgets of almost half of Coen's population of 300. Indigenous families on the cape survive on welfare worth about 60 per cent of the Australian average income. With one general store, no freight subsidies and no capacity to put away bulk food, "I challenge you to feed a family for a couple of days on $40", she says. Tinned tomatoes that sell in the cities for 85 cents are over $2.

Irving sets up systems that siphon welfare payments directly into accounts to cover rent, bills and education. Her difficult task is to educate, rather than dictate. Walking past the pub she's pursued by a woman with a beer in one hand and a final notice in the other. Irving glances at the bill. It's OK, she says. The money's there.

"At the end of the day, the money is the root of all evil," she says. "Mum's spent all the money, then dad gets pissed off." The drinking money is gone. "There's a fight. The kids miss kinder or school or they've got no food. They stay home because there's not enough money to do the washing and they've got no clothes."

Irving's program will be central to the Pearson agenda, but beefed up by the introduction of the "families commission". Under Pearson's plan, the kind of arrangements that occur now on a voluntary basis — with elders intervening and calling Irving in to help sort the budget in a struggling household — will be given teeth and applied more broadly. "Why should the grandmother who is actually looking after the kids not receive the financial support to do that when her adult children are just getting the kids' money and pissing it up?" asks Pearson. "That situation is the thing that is going to come to an end. The (families) commission will also have to make sure that grandmothers and other people like that are protected from intimidation or attempts to get the money out of them and so on. The commission (model) is basically designed to be a place putting the message continually out there … bad behaviour is not going to be tolerated. That if you don't take responsibility, then you are not entitled to free decision-making over your welfare support."

Conversely, showing responsibility will bring rewards. Clean, rested kids showing up at school, supported in their studies by their families, might attract enhanced benefits under restructured welfare criteria.

In the next six months — the design phase of the trial — Ann Creek will be central to the process of figuring out how reform will work in Coen. A grandmother who propels change in the town with the energy of a Queensland cyclone, she set up the local Aboriginal corporation 14 years ago to bring in welfare, fight for land rights and improve housing, health and education. Now, she says, it is time to confront where those efforts failed and to begin the next phase.

Her concern is that the 40 children in the Coen schoolhouse today don't have the choices she had two generations ago. The failure of parental and community responsibility is robbing them of that capability, she says. She fears her grandchildren and their peers will be denied the chance to walk in two worlds as she has.

The most celebrated student to come out of the cape in recent years has been criminologist Tania Major, who is also now enlisted in the Pearson effort. Major is frequently cited by local kids as a role model, but the odds are against them replicating her path. As she told a shocked Prime Minister John Howard three years ago, Major was the only one of her class of 15 who finished high school, and the only girl in her class who was not a teenage mother. Of the boys in the class, seven had been incarcerated, only three were not alcoholics and four had committed suicide.

"I did OK at high school (because) my upbringing was pretty strict," says Ann Creek. "We weren't wandering the streets, we had to be home in bed, and perhaps thanks to that we grew up with that responsibility. Kids need education and challenge. We work in the white world. It is no good hiding behind culture because we are afraid of taking the steps forward. If we don't nurture our future, who will?"

The Cape York agenda, says Noel Pearson, is about ensuring that people can "choose a life that they have reason to value". It might be in Coen or Cairns or Canberra or beyond. For Clive Casey, 15, originally from the western cape, it is on his Uncle Allan's Kulpa station.

Like many of his friends, Clive lost his way when he went to Cairns to attend high school. He dropped out and was living on the streets, smoking dope and drinking. Aunty Dorrie was sent to rescue him.

"He's a boy 15 years old, but when we first got him he thought he was 21," says Allan Creek. "He was drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney." Full of big talk. After the past few months working on the station, roping his first "micky" and putting up fences, "he's gone back to where he really should be. Back to 15." He's got chores and responsibilities, and the weighty expectations of Allan Creek.

Clive says he loves life on the land but he wants to go back to school. Cracking the bullwhip out by the stockade, he says he wants an education, he wants to work, he'd like some land. Such dreams, and the encouragement to chase them, are the rights that must now be pursued for the children of the cape, says Allan Creek.

"You'll need another Weet-Bix tomorrow," Creek cackles as Clive returns from repairing a fence demolished by brumbies. He's in strife with Aunty Dorrie because he let the chickens in the homestead. Cleaning up the mess is what Pearson might call a "social norm".