Beyond Humbug: Transforming Government Engagement with Indigenous Australia

Abstract

Beyond Humbug: Transforming government engagement with Indigenous Australia Michael C Dillon and Neil D Westbury 2007 Seaview Press, West Lakes, SA, vii+243pp, ISBN 9781740084802 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Both Dillon and Westbury bring 30 years of close experience with remote Aboriginal communities to this book. (While they use the word 'Indigenous', Aboriginal Australians are the peoples meant). 'Humbug' is a good word in the book's title because of that longstanding poplar belief that a great deal of humbug is involved in dealings with Aboriginal peoples: humbug first on the part of government officials passing out money for benefit programs of uncertain value; humbug on the part of academics engaged in the 'Aboriginal studies industry'; humbug by Aborigines who have been swallowing too much misplaced welfare money; and, finally, looking from the Aboriginal side, a great deal of humbug by the White community that speaks fair words but avoids doing anything that might really support Aboriginal life and culture. The authors of Beyond Humbug give a verbal serve to all of the above because they find humbug in all of them. They do not claim to take up everything, warning also that each chapter is self-contained and can be read on its own, and the reader should not be surprised to find some divided opinions. The book is not just denunciation or shrill advocacy but, rather, an attempt to give reasons why so much labour, by so many well-intentioned persons, using so much money, has gone awry. In their introduction, Dillon and Westbury summarise some common half-truths about Aboriginal disadvantage. Economists say that Indigenous citizens should not be treated in separate legislative and administrative ways, since that only stymies their own economic development. Moreover, their culture, especially communal forms of property rights, is an obstacle to 'progress'. Historians and political scientists, for their part, have seen government intrusions as preventing Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty and as having dismantled their own normal authority networks. Anthropologists emphasise that cultural differences were not taken into account in making policy, with the result that the programs did not mesh with situations on the ground. Finally, a continuous diet of welfare has generated a climate of dependency that has sapped, fatally, all sense of personal responsibility and initiative. Attempts to overcome this passivity by coercion and imposition do not work, as Australian history has amply shown. If all these opinions say something about government failure, how can we develop, as they put it, a 'comprehensive re-engagement policy framework'? Dillon and Westbury note that WEH Stanner (1968) put his finger on a basic problem when he wrote in his Boyer Lectures of the 'cult of forgetfulness', and of the 'cult of disremembering' from the beginning in 1790; Dillon and Westbury accept his judgment (p.l). The core theme of this book is about a 'structural government disengagement' that has left the need, as they put it, 'for establishing effective institutional frameworks for nation identity' (p.5). To accomplish this, a transforming of present government disengagement between Aboriginal peoples and other Australians will be crucial. In small remote communities in northern Australia, the absence of police, nurses, teachers and other officials has left a veritable governance vacuum. Outside major towns and cities, local government is feeble, where it exists at all. The situation is serious enough, using World Bank and United Nations indices, to call into question the legitimacy of governance in northern remote communities and to run the risk of harbouring a failed state within our borders. Similar comments have been made recently by Lieutenant General John Sanderson (2008). Not only is national reputation at risk, but even national security (cf. Chapter 2, p.30). There are, of course, two radical ways of remedying disengagement: one path is to disengage completely and allow an independent Aboriginal state to form in the north with its own culture, its own government, its own way of doing things; the other path is to do just the opposite, to absorb and integrate Aboriginal Australians into the Australian mainstream until their culture effectively disappears. …

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