The Sydney Morning Herald [Print Edition] Saturday, August 14, 1999 It's a sorry, sorry business by Richard Glover GOVERNMENT money spent on Aborigines is magic money. For a start, it needs to be spent only once. Also, it�s not a right � like money spent on other citizens � but an act of special charity. This week brought a new, bleak report on Aboriginal health, and a claim from some Aboriginal leaders that during the Olympics international reporters would be shown the reality of their communities. Together, these were enough to shift many white Australians into defensive mode. And defensive mode, as always, involves them asking, "Where has the money gone?� I think I�ve heard or read that exact phrase perhaps 15 or 20 times this week from a variety of white Australians. It has become the favoured means of pushing away the demands of conscience and fairness. �Indigenous babies are more likely to die at birth than other Australian babies, and those who survive are twice as likely to live in poverty and suffer from chronic disease.� That was the sentence from the Bureau of Statistics, and we should, of course, just sit with it and try to imagine a little of the suffering it reveals. Or another sentence. �Half of all indigenous men and four in 10 indigenous women will not live to see their 50th birthday.� We could just sit awhile with that, too. Instead, a frenzy of self-justification. To sit with these facts, it seems, is such a demanding act that we take up our bat and try to belt the thoughts away. And our favourite bat is, �Where has the money gone?� The idea is that white Australia has generously spent billions on the �Aboriginal problem� and, since it is not solved, it must be somebody�s fault. And because Aboriginal organisations have been involved in at least some of the funding decisions, the fault must be theirs. Houdini would be proud. With a couple of logical leaps, and the odd factual twist, we�re off the hook. The trouble is we don�t treat other government funding in this way. First: we don�t expect other funding will solve all problems, and solve them forever. There are problems now with the mainstream hospital system, but no-one asks, �Where did the past money go?� We understand that past money was spent in the past: it can�t be added up and presented as a sort of bill to today�s generation of needy patients. �You must be corrupt, or unable to be helped,� we could say to a current waiting-list-patient. �We�ve spent money on hospitals before, and still these damned patients turn up with needs and demands!� Second: we seem particularly hungry for tale of corruption and waste, and seem to conclude that they grow out of the recipients� Aboriginality. Other departments have instances of waste. Last year, the Department of Housing bulldozed half a Sydney suburb - Villawood - after admitting it had stuffed up the design. This year, the Department of Defence has been charged by some with wasting $5.1 billion on the Collins class submarine, again due to design problems. Both stuff-ups of the spectacular kind. People remain unhappy about them; they just don�t suggest they grow from the bureaucrats� race. Also missing: the sort of glee which seems present when people find waste within, say, ATSIC. It�s true that funding on Aboriginal health has increased, and that the bureau has concluded it is difficult to calculate the extent to which things have improved, You.can draw one of two conclusions from this. The first is that health funding works best when accompanied by social changes that deliver more real opportunity, power and respect to indigenous communities. Since non-Australians find it so difficult to deliver these real changes - witness the PM�s inability to even say an official sorry - the health interventions have been partly hobbled. The alternative conclusion is simpler: corruption has wasted the money. Unsurprisingly, it�s been a much more palatable conclusion for a white community unwilling to embrace real change. Why are we so quick to turn our face away from these difficult figures? Why so quick to find excuses? Why so hesitant to say sorry? The oppressed minorities of other countries talk of throwing bombs or taking up arms. Indigenous Australians talk of simply allowing international TV crews to picture reality. Why do we feel this mix of rage and guilt and anger and embarrassment when Aboriginal leaders make this threat? For me, the reaction shows how much non-indigenous Australia has to gain from reconciliation. We are not .relaxed and comfortable about this. We are, in our various ways, defensive and raw and pained and uneasy. When told about dying babies, why is our first response to apportion blame, rather than find solutions? Where does that leave our humanity? Both sides have so much to gain from reconciliation; so much unwanted baggage to lose. Richard Glover presents Drive on 2BL-702. ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/
