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Um...sorry...looks like it will be 3
parts
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When I consider the history of your people, I am
struck by the ironies. Few
Australians today appreciate their history. They do not realise that the certainties they yearn for were guaranteed throughout the twentieth century by the Welfare State to which the great majority of Australians were reconciled and committed. They do not realise that this civilising achievement was founded on the efforts of organised labour. Instead of appreciating the critical role that the organised labour movement played in spreading opportunity and underwriting the relatively egalitarian society which so many Australians yearn for today - organised labour has been diminished in popular esteem. It has come to be demonised, and whilst working people have a proud story to tell - of nation building no less - this is not understood by Australians today. The second irony concerns the sacrifices that working people and the organised labour movement made during the painful transition period in our country that occurred from 1983 - and the complete lack of acknowledgment in the historical understanding of the Australian community of this. Wage restraint underpinned the reform processes pursued under Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating. If these reforms were essential and have underpinned the current economic performance of our country - what credit did the working people get from the responsibilities that they shouldered for the sake of the national economic interest? The irony is that rather than taking the credit for the outcomes of the economic reform process during this period (when incomes declined and profit shares surged) the organised labour movement ended up being perceived as retarding economic performance, and the call for labour market 'flexibility' never abated. Indeed the pressure mounted and continues today. At the end of the day, organised labour was left between a rock and hard place: responsible for economic reform, but unable to claim credit because many workers wondered whether the sacrifices had been worth making. That is the origin and the present predicament of the Australian Welfare State, upon which your people have relied for generations and whose future is of critical significance to the prospects of your children. The predicament of my mob is that not only do we face the same uncertainty as all lower class Australians, but we haven't even benefited from the existence of the Welfare State. The Welfare State has meant security and an opportunity for development for many of your mob. It has been enabling. The problem of my people in Cape York Peninsula is that we have only experienced the income support that is payable to the permanently unemployed and marginalised. I call this "passive welfare" to distinguish it from the welfare proper, that is, when the working taxpayers collectively finance systems aimed at the their own and their families' security and development. The immersion of a whole region like Aboriginal Cape York Peninsula into dependence on passive welfare is different from the mainstream experience of welfare. What is the exception among white fellas - almost complete dependence on cash handouts from the government - is the rule for us. Rather than the income support safety net being a temporary solution for our people (as it was for the whitefellas who were moving between jobs when unemployment support was first devised) this safety net became a permanent destination for our people once we joined the passive welfare rolls. The irony of our newly won citizenship in 1967 was that after we became citizens with equal rights and the theoretical right to equal pay, we lost the meagre foothold that we had in the real economy and we became almost comprehensively dependent upon passive welfare for our livelihood. So in one sense we gained citizenship and in another sense we lost it at the same time. Because we find thirty years later that life in the safety net for three decades and two generations has produced a social disaster. And we should not be surprised that this catastrophe was the consequence of our enrolment at the dependent bottom end of the Australian welfare state. You put any group of people in a condition of overwhelming reliance upon passive welfare support - that is support without reciprocation - and within three decades you will get the same social results that my people in Cape York Peninsula currently endure. Our social problems do not emanate from an innate incapacity on the part of our people. Our social problems are not endemic, they have not always been with us. We are not a hopeless or imbecile people. Resilience and the strength of our values and relationships were not just features of our pre-colonial classical society (which we understandably hearken back to) - our ancestors actually managed to retain these values and relationships despite all of the hardships and assaults of our colonial history. Indeed it is a testament to the achievements of our grandparents that these values and relationships secured our survival as a people and indeed our grandparents had struggled heroically to keep us alive as a people, and to rebuild and defend our families in the teeth of a sustained and vicious maltreatment by white Australian society. So when I say that the indigenous experience of the Australian welfare state has been disastrous I do not thereby mean that the Australian welfare state is a bad thing. It is just that my people have experienced a marginal aspect of that welfare state: income provisioning for people dispossessed from the real economy. Of course the welfare state means much more than the passive welfare which my people have predominantly experienced. As I have said the welfare state was in fact a great and civilising achievement for Australian society, which produced many great benefits for the great majority of Australians. It is just that our people have largely not experienced the positive features of mainstream life in the Australian welfare state - public health, education, infrastructure and other aspects which have underpinned the quality of life and the opportunities of generations of Australians. Of course some government money has been spent on Aboriginal health and education. But the people of my dysfunctional society have struggled to use these resources for our development. Our life expectancy is decreasing and the young generation is illiterate. Our relegation to the dependence on perpetual passive income transfers meant that our people's experience of the welfare state has been negative. Indeed, in the final analysis, completely destructive and tragic. The two questions I ask myself about the Australian Welfare State in general and the future of Aboriginal Australia in particular are: First, why were the lower classes not prepared for the changes in the economy and the accompanying political changes in spite of the fact that the labour movement has been a powerful influence for most of the century? The stratification of society is increasing, but the lower classes are becoming less organised and less able to use their numbers to influence the development of society via our representative democracy. Second, why are we unable to do anything at all about the disintegration of our Aboriginal communities? Let us admit the fact that we have no analysis, no understanding at all. All we have is confusion dressed up as progressive thinking. When I have been struggling with these questions, I have gone back the early thinking about history and society of the nineteenth century international labour movement. A main idea was that social being determines consciousness, that is, economic relations in society determine our thinking and our culture, and that our thinking is much less conscious and free than we think it is. If we allow ourselves to analyse our society in the way I think early social democrats would, I think we would come to the following conclusions: Society is stratified. There is a small group at the top that is influential. There is a middle stratum that possesses intellectual tools and performs qualified work. The third and lowest stratum lacks intellectual tools, and does manual, often repetitive work. The middle stratum consist of two groups with no sharp boundary between them. One performs the qualified work in the production of goods and services (the 'professionals'), the other (the 'intellectuals') has as their function to uphold the cultural, political and legal superstructure that is erected over and mirrors the base of our society, the market economy I believe that a main function of our culture, from fine arts to footy today is to make people unable to use their intellectual faculties to formulate effective criticism and analysis while still allowing them to do their work in the economy. In this talk I use the word "culture" in a wide sense, including not only art and literature but also our social and political thinking. To intellectually format people, but still let them acquire the knowledge and develop the faculties needed for them to be productive is a complicated process. Therefore our culture is complex and difficult to analyse. |
