Another year; another Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s report. More statistical improvements at the margins but the core issues evaded and unaddressed. For the next ten years we could deliver the same speeches with little material change on the ground.
That’s because three things remain unaddressed. Australia fails to apply activity requirements for work in remote Australia like we do everywhere else. We also fail to apply state law and prosecute parents who refuse to send their children to school. Last, our welfare reforms have hobbled into the third wave of ‘trials and pilots’ because Canberra prefers talking tough over being tough on welfare.
Australia has struggled for decades with Aboriginal exceptionalism; the argument finessed by John Altman which casts any move to stimulate a real economy as a western assault on the romanticised traditional life. This view insists on an impossible world of welfare without work, on the grounds that First Australians are fundamentally different to the rest of us.
Ministers Snowdon and Macklin are devotees of this view, locked into an unceasing vortex of larger and more elaborate aid programs for Aboriginal Australia.
Pearson was the first to unflinchingly challenge ‘welfare world’ in 2007 and the Coalition subscribed overnight. His Cape York family responsibility commissions combine counselling and financial empowerment with income management as the last resort. In places like Aurukun, positive social norms like protecting and schooling your kids, paying rent and staying out of trouble have driven school attendance since 2007 from 43 per cent to over 70 per cent and rising.
The missing link in Pearson’s work is work itself. His Cape York trial stands as immutable evidence that without real jobs, welfare reform can only get us so far. It shows us that the next welfare dollar is best devoted to getting people into real jobs; wherever they are.
The famed Whitehall studies show the influence of work on health. Lack of work makes us sick and harms our children’s future. In the pre-European era, every Aboriginal adult pitched in. White man then offered rations for work. Next came ‘welfare world’ where unconditional cash crowded out capability and opportunity.
Aboriginal Australia may one day deserve a second apology; not just for our first mistakes but for our socialist solutions which followed.
School attendance is utterly necessary but completely insufficient to turn this all around. First, Joe Sparling’s work with vulnerable kids shows much of the damage is wrought prior to kids even getting to school. Second, kids model older dysfunctional teens and parents, so we expect too much that remote schools can turn things around while teens, young parents and the entire adult population are disengaged. Last, we are entering the third Aboriginal generation on mass welfare, and with it the terrifying prospect that no one living can recall anything but the cargo cult and the faux economy.
At the heart of Australia’s failure is making welfare the cultural default rather than individual exception. Paying entire communities comfort money preserves dysfunction into perpetuity. Grant and royalty money too often corrodes kinship and pits rent-seeking families against each other. At the same time, intensive Centrelink case-management allows cash to tear families apart from within with humbug.
Relatives frisking the disabled for cash is just one appalling consequence of mass welfare quarantine.
That is why the big challenge is getting all working-age adults to work. Massive mining operations have created more low-skill jobs than there are working-age Aboriginal adults to fill them. Ending central Australia’s supply-side problem of no jobs has exposed the horrible reality that welfare makes taking a job unattractive. This is the fault of neither Aboriginal Australia nor mining companies; government created these perverse distortions and only government can undo them.
The first step is to work with kinship structures to include senior family members in workforce participation plans for family. Elders, not Centrelink case-officers should be re-motivating youth to acquire basic living skills and functional literacy. But like the rest of the world, this process can’t be opt-in.
Unless incapacitated or a carer, anyone in Australia walking away from real work opportunities has no right to unconditional welfare. Presented with clear choices, Aboriginal Australians can like the rest of us, make those choices about when family and culture trumps work commitments.
Ultimately, young Aboriginal workers will have to choose freely between scarce jobs in communities, orbiting for project or mining work or relocating to towns. That is how the world works. Many may negotiate to live and work in groups or be accompanied by supervising elders. Ultimately, the free market should decide where you live, not where someone builds you a free house.
There are plenty of policy carrots for work like flexible arrangements, travel support and concessions to return home in emergencies. Planning ahead for absences needs to be rewarded. But the single most important policy shift is away from numerator thinking; where we hand-pick the keenest black faces for opportunities, to a denominator approach where no one is left behind.
Filling remote communities with public housing and public service providers won’t close the gap. Working age people who are neither primary care givers or incapacitated must be at work or move to find it.
Only then will all kids go to school.
Welfare reform so far has been glacial, as has been partnering with mining to employ the entire remote Australian working age cohort. Only a full-frontal attack on the do-nothing option can end the despondency of a million and one excuses.
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