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	The case for Indigenous self-determination by Sol Bellear Chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern Australia   I"ve been fortunate enough to travel the world, and in the process I"ve witnessed firsthand the benefits of self-determination for Indigenous peoples.   I"ve looked at the Sami Parliament in Europe, I"ve visited reservations in the US and Canada, and I"ve spent time in Maori communities.   What I found in my travels shames our nation and makes a mockery of our fear of a "nation within a nation".   Dozens of treaties have been signed in the US and Canada which afford First Nations communities varying degrees of genuine self-determination, from controlling their own schooling to giving them a real capacity to generate an economic base.   In the United States today, there are more than 250 Native American tribal courts across at least 32 states, which handle everything from criminal matters to family court.   Native American corporations and individuals are exempt from a raft of state and federal taxes, including state income tax for people living on reservations.   Native Americans and First Nations people in Canada also have significant political structures which ensure a greater degree of power in their own communities. In Canada, they have the Assembly of First Nations. In the US, individual reservations act as partially autonomous bodies, providing their own law and policing, schooling, health, housing and infrastructure, and income through tax breaks and initiatives like casinos.   In New Zealand, Maori have seven seats which sit over the entire nation, in which only Maori can vote (although anyone can contest a seat).   This is real self-determination in action, yet none of these nations has imploded or been crippled by their relationships with their Aboriginal peoples.   This is real self-determination in action, yet none of these nations has imploded or been crippled by their relationships with their Aboriginal peoples. All of them have been enhanced.   Of course, things aren"t perfect overseas. Treaties are regularly breached, and the life statistics of Indigenous peoples consistently lag behind those of their non-Indigenous countrymen. But here"s what Canada, the US and New Zealand don"t have.   They don"t have trachoma, a third world disease that has been eradicated in most nations.   They don"t have the world"s highest recorded rates of rheumatic heart disease, another third world condition linked to overcrowded housing.   They don"t have jailing rates of Indigenous people up to eight times greater than the jailing rates of black males in Apartheid South Africa.   They don"t have world-beating rates of suicide and self-harm.   They don"t have life-expectancy gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in the double digits.   And they don"t have third world infant mortality rates.   And in particular, they don"t have an excess mortality rate even approaching that of Indigenous people in Australia. Research by Australian Dr Gideon Polya reveals that the excess mortality rate of Aboriginal Australians is one of the worst on earth, twice that of the mandatory reporting death rate for live cattle exported on a boat from Australia, and the same rate as a sheep in an Australian paddock. It"s actually higher than Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam during their respective wars.   But can we blame all this on a lack of self-determination? Research by Dr Paul Kauffman, another Australian researcher, provides some interesting food for thought. In 2003, he completed a study called "Diversity and Indigenous Policy Outcomes: Comparisons between Four Nations".   In Australia, the rate of Indigenous over-representation in prison is 10 times greater than in the US.   Briefly, it compared the progress in Canada, the United States and New Zealand against the appalling state of affairs in Australia. And it looked specifically at what sort of institutions each nation had which could be classed as self-determination in action. The results are startling.   In Australia, the rate of Indigenous over-representation in prison is 10 times greater than in the US.   Australia"s Indigenous youth suicide rate is twice that of New Zealand and three times that of the US.   In New Zealand, 85 per cent of Maori have a post-school qualification. In the US the figure is 65 per cent. In Australia, it"s fewer than 14 per cent.   To round out the study, Dr Kauffman noted that Canada, the US and New Zealand all have treaties, constitutional recognition and extensive employment diversity programs. Australia does not.   Dr Kaufmann"s study may not be conclusive proof that self-determination is the difference, but it"s pretty compelling. Either Australian Aboriginal people have a knack for death and destruction, or something else is going on.   That"s not to suggest Australia doesn"t pretend to support self-determination, because we certainly do when the rest of the world is watching. In 2008, the Australian Government endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document which was crafted specifically to set out the rights of First Peoples to govern their own lives and communities.   Yet virtually every Australian government policy announced since flies in the face of our stated international position. The Northern Territory intervention and its bastard son, the Strong Futures laws, for example, breach almost half the articles of the UN Declaration.   Dr Kauffman"s study was completed in 2003, a decade ago, but today my people are further from self-determination than we"ve ever been.   In the coming weeks, the newly elected Conservative Abbott Government will unveil its signature Indigenous affairs policy - a hand-picked board of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who will advise the government on the best ways forward for Indigenous peoples in this country.   It is the precise opposite of self-determination, light years from the only policies that have been shown to impact positively in other nations in a similar position.   It also happens to be a recycled policy that failed under the Howard government. It will fail under the Abbott government too because as history shows, the new National Indigenous Council will spend its time telling the government what it wants to hear, not what it needs to know.   And that"s one of the key problems in this country - we don"t learn the lessons of our history.   The great lie of 100-plus years of Australian Indigenous Affairs policies has always been that Aboriginal people are so backward that we need to be saved from ourselves.   After socially engineering our communities into world class poverty, governments blamed us for circumstances, and declared themselves the only ones capable of fixing it.   So they took our children away. They forced us from our ancestral lands. They held our wages and savings in trust, and then found better ways to spend the money. We were forced into slavery, denied equal wages and prevented from ever building generational wealth.   That great lie still underpins thinking in Indigenous affairs policy today. So it"s time to do something different, and time to acknowledge that the case for self-determination for Aboriginal people in Australia isn"t just compelling - it"s overwhelming.   Of course, we"re not debating HOW it should occur. We"re still debating WHETHER it should occur. And most Australians think it shouldn"t.   That speaks some volumes not just about our maturity as a nation, but also about our capacity to stare down the racism and paternalism that infects our national character, and the truthfulness of our claimed national identity as "the land of the fair go".   The solution, obviously, is for the Australian Government to practice what it preaches, step back and let us make decisions for ourselves. On that front, I can offer you a couple of guarantees.   The life circumstances of Aboriginal people will not improve overnight. There is no silver bullet. Over the course of that journey, there will be corruption and nepotism. There will be wasted funds, political in-fighting, and examples where well-meaning programs cause more harm than good.   Put simply, we will make many of the same mistakes that have been made - and continue to be made every single day - by mainstream Australian political and governance structures.   On occasions, our "parliament" will be as toxic as yours. On occasions, our leaders will embezzle funds and abuse their travel entitlements, just like yours do. On occasions, our leaders will make bad decisions that favour themselves and their families, just like yours do. On occasions, our communities will erupt into crime and violence, just like yours do.   But I can also guarantee you this: over time, the advances we make will be far greater than those under a system of colonial occupation.   How do I make this guarantee? Because we could hardly do any worse, and because decades of international experience, research and outcomes tell us so.   We are the only first world nation on earth that thinks self-determination is a dirty word, and yet Australians are in the worst position of all to lecture.   The fact is, my people will not simply surrender anymore than you or your children would if Australia was invaded tomorrow. So you can talk till the cows come home about wanting to help Aboriginal Australians, but until the conversation shifts to how non-Aboriginal Australians can stand aside and permit Aboriginal Australians to help themselves, then we"re just marking time.   While we wait, many more of my people will die, having lived tragically short lives marked by violence, dispossession and misery.   * Sol Bellear is the Chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern, and a long-time Aboriginal activist.   * References: http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/justice.htm http://tracker.org.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/10/Diversity-and-Indigenous-Policy-Outcomes.pdf http://www.hrlc.org.au/funding-cut-for-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-legal-services-should-be-reconsidered
	Rich win big with class warfare in session by John Falzon Australia   The Language of the Unheard by Dr John Falzon. (Edited extract)   In 2006 the then Prime Minister John Howard gave an address at the Westin Hotel in Sydney in which he referred to the ‘zones of chaos’ that wreck young people’s lives. This continues to be the framework through which we seem to approach social problems in Australia.   Rather than using the language of exclusion or marginalisation here, the ‘zones’ discourse constructs individuals, homes and then communities as being either unwell or unlawful. Implicit in this practice is the affirmation of the place of these individuals, homes and communities within the normative economic, social, legal, moral and political framework that ‘all of us’ call Australia.   By employing this discursive practice the individuals, homes and communities are blamed for their own alleged pathology and/or criminality. In either case their condition is understood as a moral, as opposed to structural and historical, problem and, most importantly, the problem is theirs to solve by their own resolve, albeit with a goodly dose of what Lawrence Mead described as ‘the close supervision of the poor’. The Northern Territory Intervention into Aboriginal communities was the perfect exemplar of this paradigm. Significantly it was especially characterised by a monumental lack of awareness or even interest in the analyses of those who would come under its control.   We must eschew the patronising notion that the local is somehow a world unto itself, a little pocket of chaos or excellence morally reflective of the degree of cleverness and hard work of its inhabitants.   As Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has pointed out, the arena in which the so-called ‘chaos’ dominates is characterised by: a network society (both technologically and socially), in which inclusion is an indicator of social security and exclusion is a ticket to the informal economy (crime), reliance on structures of public or private welfare, or poverty.   An exclusionary network is increasingly produced, outside of which the rights of the individual are denuded and the responsibility of society is nullified. Indeed, the very notion of a common good is deemed dangerous.   Government might look hard at the spectacle of marginalisation, but only from the vantage point of prosperity. Which is how we end up with policies that are built on compliance and control instead of resources and self-empowerment. Leaving someone out is not addressed by pushing someone in. Compliance does not equal inclusion. Inclusion does not equal liberation, not least because one has to ask whether the ‘mainstream’ that the ‘dangerous classes’ are pushed into is itself in dire need to reconstruction.   The place to start is by asking which sections of society are regarded as garbage. The only explanation for the socio-political acceptance of the incarceration of asylum seeker children or the degrading housing conditions experienced in remote Aboriginal communities is that these sections of society are regarded as garbage.   Garbage is what you take out. You don’t particularly care what happens to it later as long as you don’t have to deal with it; as long as you don’t have to live with the stench of it or the sight of it.   The people who are treated like garbage, at best, are invited to sort themselves out, to recycle themselves into something socially useful; to go from being socially nothing to being socially something, even if that something is fairly low on the ladder of social class and hierarchy.   The existence of the people who treated like garbage, in prosperous Australia and across the globe, is the greatest reason for revolutionary change as the most practical expression of solidarity and love. Connections can be made between the people who are pushed to these extreme margins and the other, less extreme, form of marginalisation. The greatest power for progressive social change lies precisely with this connection between the excluded. It comes to fruition in the conscious¬ness of an ‘us’ that firms up what is common between these experiences of alienation and exclusion. But not, as some claim, by individually addressing the atomised instances of exclusion as if it were a private malady. As the writer, Isabel Allende, expressed it through the voice of one her characters:   “… it was not a question of changing our personal situation, but that of society as a whole.”   Australian democracy needs an intrusion of the excluded, by John Falzon.   We"re well into the election campaign and everybody is talking about the economy. The word "economy" has a Greek etymology. It comes from oikos (household) and nomos (law, order, management). In the contemporary context it is generally understood to refer to a set of figures, such as GDP, rate of growth, inflation, employment, balance of trade, the deficit. But maybe the number of people experiencing homelessness in Australia is also a measure of the economy? After all, it provides us with a picture of how many people are actually without an oikos!   The truth is that we could look at ourselves as enjoying a thumping record of economic growth while viewing the number of people experiencing homelessness as somehow incidental to this rosy picture. Likewise for the 2.3 million people living in poverty, including 600,000 kids!   In truth the popular mainstream notion of "economics" is ideologically loaded. It is a reference point not for the "public good" but rather a paean to private gain, private profit, and the accumulation of wealth — regardless of the concomitant accumulation of misery, both here and in those parts of the world where people are savagely exploited and plundered of their natural wealth so that our standard of living might be augmented.   It is predicated on the assumption that wealth generated for the rich will eventually trickle down to everyone else. Poverty, then, is seen as a symptom of personal failure. People are pathologised and many are eventually criminalised; for the criminal "justice" system is the logical end-point for those who find themselves outside the household, neither producing nor consuming according to the rules of the household.   John Berger, in A Seventh Man, his moving study of migrant workers in Europe, wrote: "According to the capitalist ethic, poverty is a state from which an individual or a society is delivered by enterprise." Poverty and homelessness therefore are constructed as a lack of enterprise, a moral failing. Berger goes further with this analysis of how exclusion is justified, and utters the terrifying judgement that "to be homeless is to be nameless".   It is time for a new beginning. The Prime Minister says we need a "new politics" or a "new way". The Leader of the Opposition responds that we"ll only get a new way by electing a new government. What is missing is the recognition that we actually need a new kind of economic democracy: a reconfiguration of our economic decision-making and prioritising, away from individualism towards a sense of the public good, the common good, the participation of all rather than the exclusion and marginalisation of many.   We need to broaden our revenue base in order to provide social goods such as education, healthcare, transport, housing, childcare, disability services, and employment services. We need to be unafraid of removing some of the massive and wasteful concessions — such as superannuation tax concessions that cost the taxpayer about $32 billion a year, according to Treasury, the bulk of which goes to upper-income earners. Many such potential savings have been identified in the Henry Tax Review.   We do not need to take from the poor to give to the rich. We do not need to cut payments to single mums or the unemployed. We do not need to cut expenditure on health or social housing or education.   In a recent opinion piece I put the following three questions to both leaders.   1. What will you do to make sure that everyone has a place that they can call home?   Over 105,000 people are homeless. Eighty per cent of the people seeking help from housing and homelessness services are trying to survive on a social security benefit. The factors contributing to homelessness include poor health, housing stress and the need to escape domestic violence.   Safe, affordable housing is a human right for all, not a privilege for some. The 2008 Homelessness White Paper sets the target of halving all homelessness by 2020. It costs more, in the long run, to manage homelessness than to end it. And you don"t end homelessness by blaming people who are homeless any more than you can fix unemployment by blaming the unemployed.   2. What will you do to make sure that everyone who can work actually has the chance to work?   We all want to be treated fairly and respectfully in the workplace and receive an income that allows us to keep up with the cost of living. While people are looking for work or are outside the labour market because of caring responsibilities, they should not be forced to wage a battle for survival from below the poverty line or be treated in a punitive or patronising fashion. If there was anything we should have learned from the Global Financial Crisis it is that unemployment and underemployment are, in the main, structurally rather than behaviourally caused.   It is a matter of deep shame for a wealthy nation like ours that our unemployment benefits have been kept deliberately low as a means of humiliating the very people they were designed to assist. We support helping people into the paid workforce. The time has come, however, to abandon the foolish notion that forcing them into deeper poverty improves their chances of employment. You don"t build people up by putting them down. You don"t help them get work by forcing them into poverty.   3. How will you ensure that everyone has the opportunity to learn?   Education is a game-changer in the fight against poverty. Every parent in Australia should feel confident that their child is going to have access to the highest quality education and that this should never depend on what they can afford or where they live. And education should not be seen as something that ends at year 12. University, TAFE, apprenticeship training and adult education should be accessible and affordable for all. Education is not just something we benefit from individually but also collectively as a society and as an economy.   It"s hard to be able to look for, or keep, a job when you don"t have a place to call home. It"s equally hard for a child, or an adult, to engage in formal education, in circumstances of homelessness, including overcrowded housing. It"s hard to find work when your literacy and numeracy levels are not up to standard and it"s hard to keep a roof over your head when you"re out of work.   The message is clear: A place to live, a place to work and a place to learn are deeply interconnected fundamentals for building the kind of Australia that deserves to be called progressive or fair. And this means for everyone: the First Peoples, the most recent arrivals, and for everyone in between!   It"s time to move beyond the politics of marginal seats to a politics that listens to marginal people. A good society is one where the people treated as the most marginal enter the public space and teach the rest of us what really matters. This "intrusion of the excluded" as Slavoj Zizek calls it should be the true measure of our democracy.   * Dr John Falzon is a political sociologist and Chief Executive Officer of the St Vincent Paul Society National Council of Australia.   http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=38766 http://www.acoss.org.au/policy/poverty/ http://www.acoss.org.au/policy/child_poverty/ Visit the related web page
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