The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

 

The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

ALEX MCDERMOTT

Since the defeat of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, Indigenous truth and justice commissions have continued to extend their reach throughout different Australian states. They are all based on the assumption the Uluru Dialogues articulated: the problems that plague Indigenous communities can be traced back to the original trauma of dispossession.

Yet reality tells a very different story. Were 1788, and the train of colonial occupation that followed on from that, the primary cause, then you wouldn’t find such wide variation among Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians in urban areas and regional centres are hard to distinguish from the rest of the population in those places for levels of wealth, health, education and life outcomes.

The human crisis that produces and reproduces the Gap is much more clearly locatable. It is in the remote outstations of homeland settlements, and around some towns in isolated parts of the Australian interior. It is where there is no economic life outside the government provision of welfare and social services, and no jobs other than those government creates.

These places, where basic social order and safety have largely vanished, have been described by Noel Pearson as worse than Third World countries.

Let’s face it: 1973 and 1974, not 1788, better explain this longscale traumatic hurt and human damage. Those are the years when the new policy of self-determination, and the remote homelands ideal, properly took hold.

The idea that Indigenous peoples should themselves collectively decide the terms on which they would engage with Western life and settler society first emerged in the 1950s, thanks in no small part to the Australian Communist Party. As of 1931, communists argued that indigenous minorities in the advanced capitalist countries were oppressed colonial peoples. The glorious Soviet Socialist republics were “selfdetermining”, they declared – so should be indigenous minorities.

In an age of decolonisation, the idea had obvious appeal. Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who believed separating indigenous from other Canadians was a retrogressive step, and an inherently undemocratic one at that, issued a white paper, An End to Separatism, against it.

In Australia, Paul Hasluck, the commonwealth minister for states and territories, and thus the Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, shared Trudeau’s views.

Under his stewardship in the 1950s and 1960s, government repudiated the policy of protection that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

There is a solid argument advanced by Tim Rowse, an emeritus professor at Western Sydney University, that protection helped stabilise and rebuild the Indigenous population. But it undeniably treated Aborigines as inherently different, secondclass citizens, to be kept apart from the ordinary population. Hasluck instead sought a system “under which Aborigines were recognised as Australian citizens and were regarded as having the same status and rights as other Australian citizens”. Aborigines should be equals, treated equally.

It was through Hasluck that Aborigines regained much of what they’d lost or been denied under protection: civil rights, and the right to vote federally, in 1962.

But after Harold Holt’s drowning, Hasluck narrowly lost the partyroom vote to John Gorton and shortly after effectively left public life. With Hasluck gone no one else seriously pushed back against the new policy concept of self-determination.

Conflated with the shame of the recently junked White Australia policy, assimilation and even integration became bogey words, freighted with the stigma of racism.

Hasluck’s policy was condemned for violating the Indigenous right to decide for themselves.

Like multiculturalism – another buzzy, yet originally nebulous word that became policy without public debate about what it meant – self-determination germinated under the Coalition, was supercharged under Gough Whitlam, and then became orthodoxy.

Even to question it was to be tarred with hankering for the bad old days of assimilation. Yet self-determination produced failure on a vast, indeed cataclysmic scale.

Activist bureaucrats such as Herbert “Nugget” Coombs enthusiastically endorsed the idea that Indigenous communities in remote regions should be established largely outside modern capitalist Australia. After Whitlam’s 1972 election victory unemployment benefits were made available to all Indigenous people, even if they lived in communities where there were no jobs. It proved to be one of the most poisonous policy decisions of the 20th century.

In the 1950s and 1960s Aborigines had been employed at remote settlements and missions in government-run enterprises, which enabled them to work and live there. Piggeries, orchards, chicken runs, vegetable gardens, sawmills, bakeries and butcheries flourished.

After 1972 young people knew they could get paid more money by not working – “sit-down money”, or the dole. The enterprises collapsed.

In many areas self-determination’s wave of social destruction was made worse by the equal wages decision of 1967. On pastoral stations Indigenous cattlemen worked in a largely cashless economy. They were paid for work largely in rations, clothes and basic accoutrements, while continuing to work and live with their families on traditional country. The rations were often paid to the women, giving them considerable influence.

Once equal pay came in, pastoralists switched even more quickly to new technology, and to more skilled workers to run their stock.

Combined with the total loss of incentive to work from sitdown money, and the new ubiquity of the modern cash economy – including guns, grog, pornography and drugs – the traditional societies of remote Australia began to rapidly disintegrate, precipitating a dramatic rise in rates of offending and incarceration.

The fate of Vincent Lingiari’s Gurindji people illustrate this tragedy all too vividly. Writer and historian Charlie Ward describes how welfare payments, infrastructure development wages and “unprecedented amounts of funding” from the government fundamentally compromised Gurindji autonomy in the years after Whitlam had poured a handful of sand into Lingiari’s open palm in 1975.

Younger generation Gurindji refused to work in the Gurindjioperated cattle operation, rejecting their elders’ traditional authority.

A society that “had masterfully sustained itself by hard work and self-motivation” fell apart, chiefly “as a result of government assistance given under policies of Aboriginal selfmanagement”.

Indigenous policy has been our greatest failure. Ultimately, it is not just a failure of policies but of ideas. In a society where all Australians depend on each other – economically, socially, politically – the notion that any group can be “selfdetermining” is a fantasy.

Fifty years after the Whitlam government raised that fantasy into a religion, it’s time reality was given a stronger say.

Alex McDermott is an independent historian.

No road to net zero

 Eco heroes leave reality to ‘someone else’ 

CHRIS UHLMANN 

We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel. Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo. Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade. You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale. You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok. The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero. Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city. There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete. Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuelfree. How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live? Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain. Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”. The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept. Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all 1 Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad. This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weatherdependent power in the space of a generation. The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime. Outside this climate church there is no salvation. But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math? Physicist and former Australian mining engineer associate professor Simon Michaux, from the Geological Survey of Finland, has calculated the material challenge of meeting the stated emissions reduction ambitions of the EU, China and the United States. He found that the available minerals demanded by the transition to net zero were a fraction of what will be needed to meet every country’s pledges. Out of the veritable periodic table of elements the green transition will demand let’s take one mineral: copper. In a paper produced this year, Michaux notes, “The human species produced approximately 700 million tonnes of metal over the 4000 years prior to 2020. For global economic demand for copper to continue its current trajectory of growth, another 700 million tonnes would need to be produced in the next 22 years.” The world’s pre-eminent expert on energy systems, Professor Vaclav Smil, has calculated the amount of copper needed to electrify just the world’s vehicle fleet, noting the average electric vehicle contains about 80kg of copper, “compared to less than 15kg in an internal combustion engine car”. “Replacing today’s 1.4 billion ICE vehicles by EVs would thus require more than 90 million tonnes of additional copper supply during the next 27 years,” he said in a paper for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers. Smil went on to detail the staggering amount of mining that would be needed to extract that copper, given the very best mines have only 0.6 per cent of metal in the copper ore. “This means that the extraction of an additional 90 million tonnes of copper by 2050 would require drilling, blasting, removal, processing and waste deposition, amounting to about 15 billion tonnes of rock, a mass equivalent to the world’s annual extraction of all fossil fuels and of all metallic ores, combined.” So, a big job then. Just for the copper needed to electrify the world’s vehicles and not counting the 610 million tonnes of copper that will be required for everything else. And once we have solved the copper question, we can turn our minds to finding the dizzying array of other elements needed for this witches’ brew. It is impossible to predict the future but this much is certain, the path to net zero won’t be mapped in fantasy numbers. That is a road to nowhere. Technology may save us. Faith won’t.