Maybe an Australian Government is not too concerned about setting specific “benchmarks” in indigenous affairs, because who will change their vote if the benchmarks are not met?
The benchmarks set by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this month were ambitious. But it is hard to see how they can possibly be met without a wholesale change in indigenous lives – a change that must amount to almost total assimilation with only token observance of indigenous cultural practices.
Rudd promised that over five years every Aboriginal four-year-old in a remote community would attend an early childhood centre; that the Government would halve within a decade the gap in literacy, numeracy, job outcomes and infant mortality rates; and within a generation the Government would close the 17-year gap in life expectancy.
But these things are not within the ambit of a Government to achieve. Irrespective of what or how much money a government chucks at is, to get there, the vast majority of indigenous people would have to change their way of life. And they might not be able or willing to do it.
On these pages last week Jack Waterford made a pertinent observation. His benchmark for success was when he could pay for a haircut at a small business owned and run by an indigenous person in a rural town.
Others have asked, perhaps too glibly, how is it that a penniless refugee can arrive in Australia from Europe and become a multi-millionaire, but no indigenous person has ever made it to be a multi millionaire. Money is not everything, but does provide the things needed to meet Rudd’s targets, whether provided by government or bought by the user.
The high living standards – especially income and life expectancy – enjoyed by non-indigenous Australians, and Europeans and non-indigenous Americans and New Zealanders, have come about for reasons. It is perhaps worth asking what those reasons are. It might shed light on why those living standards have not been achieved by indigenous Australians and what has to happen (if indeed it is possible at all) for those standards to be reached by them.
Towards the end of the 18th century in Europe, particularly England, incomes and life expectancy rose sharply – not just for the upper crust, but for everyone.
Before that every technological advance merely went to increasing the population and swallowing up the gain. Before that the vast ruck of people in England lived probably not much better and possibly worse than the hunter gatherers of ancient times. Things improved for a time when the Black Death killed off a lot of people so there was more property per head, but it was not permanent.
There was not a steady improvement in income and life expectancy in the thousand years before 1800. They just bobbled along the bottom and then sky-rocketed. There are several theories as to why the Industrial Revolution happened when it did, even though conditions were not much different in 1800 from 1500.
The view of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney was that the Reformation did the trick. Once all those pious, hard-working Protestants with similar simple tastes arrived, it was ripe for the building up of capital and mass-production. On this theory you had to hack away at the underlying religion (which in Australia might also mean indigenous cultural beliefs) before you can get capitalism and high living standards.
Another view is that the build up of stable, more democratic institutions did the trick. The IMF imagines that once you put the institutions in place, prosperity and higher life expectancy follows. The African experience last century suggests otherwise, but we can try.
The African and Australian indigenous experience also shows that tipping large sums of money, particularly into health care, does not help. It probably hinders because population increases and there is less to go around.
Another view on the Industrial Revolution is that of Jarred Diamond. He thought Europeans got lucky – good latitude and climate, good domesticable animals and plants and gradual immunity to transmittable diseases that ravaged indigenous populations. With those advantages the American Indians and Australian Aborigines would have colonised Europe. On the good-luck theory it should not take too much to redistribute.
Another theory is put by US economic historian Gregory Clarke in “A Farewell to Alms”. He argues that for some centuries before the Industrial Revolution the sort of smart, entrepreneurial people who became wealthy reproduced at a much greater rate than the rest. But often one son would inherit the wealth and the others would have to fend for themselves, often at a lower level. A nobleman’s son would become a merchant and a merchant’s son would become a tradesman.
The society was downwardly mobile, but those going down took their entrepreneurial, wealth-generating genes with them, so that by the late 18th century the whole society had evolved by a form of natural selection.
If this theory holds up, the quest for Waterford’s indigenous hair-dresser might be some way off – not achievable in our lifetimes. The Millennium project to alleviate world poverty might also be in trouble.
Incidentally, Clark’s theory might explain why all those tracers of family histories so often find someone in the wealthy, powerful part of society if they go back far enough. Those are the sort of people who bred more.
We should ask the question, how did these affluent societies – with their high life expectancies — get there. And we should translate it to modern Australia.
If we don’t we are condemned to a ghastly mismatch and blame game.
High prosperity and high life expectancy came out of a unique set of circumstances with a long history in European – particularly English – society. Most likely, if you want to join that income and life expectancy you will have to embrace much of that society.
Economist Helen Hughes makes the important distinction between tribal, township-fringe and urbanised indigenous populations. Even so, the trade off among each of these groups cannot be avoided, it will only be a question of degree. The more we strive to meet Rudd’s benchmarks the less indigenous “culture” will survive.
I’m in favour of the benchmarks. I hope Rudd meets them, but it is hard to see how it can be done without great erosion of indigenous culture – maybe a cost worth paying. In any event, though, it may well be that history is against the life expectancy benchmark being achieved for some generations.