Last week Noel Pearson, lawyer and Aboriginal leader, raised a stir in the context of the election campaign when he said he would reject an apology over the stolen generation whether it came from Labor or a re-elected Coalition. He acknowledged that a Beazley Labor Government had promised an apology, “”but an apology at this stage of our national indigenous policy failure would only hide the present lack of insight and ideas among the Australian progressivist and liberalist middle class”.
Unfortunately, the media coverage over the apology tended to take the limelight from Mr Peason’s more important message. It is a message that challenges some widely held beliefs among Aboriginal groups and among Australia’s liberalist middle class. One of those widely held beliefs is a chain of causation that explains the Aboriginal condition. The chain starts with colonisation and dispossession. That lead to a breakdown of traditional ways. This troubled historical legacy results in a societal breakdown, alcohol abuse, violence, criminal conduct, poor health outcomes and so on. Under this theory, the dispossession has to be dealt with if the alcohol and substance abuse, violence and poor health is to be addressed.
Wrong, says Mr Pearson.
In an insightful lecture to commemorate the late Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins, Mr Pearson pointed out that at least in his Cape York Peninsula communities, the substance abuse, violence and high imprisonment rates are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They arose in the past 30 years.
Mr Pearson argues, “”History is irrelevant not only in the treatment of the addiction, but also increasingly irrelevant as an explanation for the first experimenting with the addictive substances” – whether they be alcohol, drugs or petrol sniffing. Mr Pearson points to five factors causing an outbreak of substance abuse: availability of the substance; spare time; money; the examples of others and a permissive social ideology. He warns that the epidemic of substance abuse is the main cause of the continuing epidemic of substance abuse. It is self-perpetuating, and will continue to be so unless news ways of looking at it.
He says that when Aborigines got formal citizenship rights they also got passive cash welfare payments and the right to drink alcohol.
Mr Pearson says that before 1967 Aborigines participated in economic life in Australia, even if at the lowest end. Obviously, he does not call for a reversal of 1967, nor a reversal of land rights and other formal achievements. Indeed, he praised the work done by Charles Perkins in these fields. But he makes an important statement about looking for more immediate causes for high imprisonment rates.
“”An enormous number of Aboriginal people are so physically and psychologically handicapped by their experience of the substance abuse and passive welfare that they are unable to participate in normal economic life,” he said.
Ten years after the Deaths in Custody Royal Commission, Aboriginal imprisonment rates have not gone down. Mr Pearson argues it is because the commission gave too much emphasis to historical dispossession and not enough to the more recent chain of causation: substance abuse leading to chaos, violence and property crimes (to get money for the grog) and over-representation in the criminal justice system.
Mr Pearson’s words should be heeded. Greater attention must be given to eliminating substance abuse – even if it means “dry” communities and to changing the welfare system so it is less passive and less cash-dominated.
The most important thing in reducing Aboriginal imprisonment rates and improving their health outcomes is to get more Aborigines as active participants in economic life – that means attacking substance abuse and passive welfare.
We can no longer go on blaming the events of 1788.