Imagine if the Nova Peris ‘lived experience’ test was widely applied and allowed to determine who could and could not talk about Indigenous affairs. It would be impermissible for a non-Aboriginal person such as myself to question an Aboriginal person’s take on the causes and nature of Aboriginal disadvantage.

Fortunately, the rules of the identity politics game haven’t yet rotted the core principles of our public life. Hence, we can challenge and correct some fundamental errors in the misleading statements Indigenous leaders continue to make about why Indigenous communities such as Aurukun are plagued by disadvantage and dysfunction.

The account given by Rosalie Kunoth-Monks —star of the 1950s film Jedda and veteran Indigenous activist — in a recent opinion piece in the Australian is an example of the muddled thinking that distorts the Indigenous debate. According to her, the promise of the successful ‘Yes’ vote in the 1967 constitutional referendum has been betrayed, due to the continued practice of paternalistic and assimilationist government policies that have prevented Aboriginal people from living a traditional way of life. These policies have allegedly perpetuated the colonial legacies of dispossession and oppression that robbed Aborigines of their traditional lands and destroyed their culture. Australia’s first peoples have been denied the self-determination required to restore their culture and be empowered within Australian society.

This has been the standard account of Indigenous disadvantage offered by Indigenous leaders for many decades. We have been repeatedly told there will be no improvement in the lot of Aboriginal Australians until Aboriginal sovereignty is officially recognised and Australia’s founding shame is redressed through a formal Treaty process. But this highly-politicised account mistakes causes for cure, and overlooks the true role ‘separatist’ Indigenous policies have played in creating Indigenous disadvantage.

Many people on both the left and right genuinely believe that addressing the sins of the past to achieve Reconciliation is the key to making things better for Indigenous Australians. What they don’t realise is how the longstanding efforts the nation has already made to ‘fix’ history have actually made things worse. In reality, the social chaos and breakdown in Indigenous communities have been facilitated by well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided, efforts by governments to make amends for colonial wrongs.

The policies of ‘Aboriginal Self-Determination’ established by the Whitlam and Fraser Governments were designed, in theory, to enable Indigenous people to live on ‘country’ — on their traditional lands and practice traditional culture. This was made possible by government funding for Aboriginal-controlled services in the rural and remote ‘homelands’. In practice, these policies have contributed to the appalling living conditions in those communities. The prevalence of passive welfare, combined with the impact of other social problems including drug and alcohol abuse, pornography, and overcrowded public housing, has broken down social norms regulating community life in the homelands, and exposed women and children especially to epidemic levels of violence and abuse.

In the past 20 years, the work of Noel Pearson, Gary Johns, Helen Hughes, and other revisionists has driven the national debate about the need for ‘practical reconciliation’, and for ‘mainstreaming’ of Indigenous services, if we are to close the gaps in health, education, employment and other social indicators between the Indigenous and other Australians.

However, too many Indigenous leaders, like Kunoth-Monks, still prefer to regurgitate the separatist political agenda of the Aboriginal rights movement of the 1970s that demanded the implementation of self-determination policies. The notion that continues to be advanced — that promoting greater self-determination and maintenance of traditional culture will improve outcomes and end the marginalisation of the most disadvantaged Indigenous Australians — is not only problematic when we review the results of the past 50 years of policy; it is also sadly ironic when we ponder all the complexities of the causes and nature of the problems in the homeland communities.

Herein lies the significance of the work of one of the most important revisionists, the anthropologist Peter Sutton, which turns the argument about self-determination and culture on its head.

Having spent a professional lifetime working with Indigenous people in Cape York, Sutton has pointed out that the homelands with the worst problems have been least affected by colonialism. Self-determination has meant that Indigenous Australians who live in these communities are those who have continued to live closest to a traditional manner on their traditional country. But what has this actually produced? Sutton’s book, The Politics of Suffering, also dared to discuss the most taboo subject of all: how maladapted some aspects of traditional culture are to the modern world. Sutton suggested that community dysfunction in the homelands cannot be solely explained by attributing it to poor policy creating social problems. What also matters is the ‘interplay’ between policy and culture, and understanding how the legacy of Aboriginal traditions, practices and habits impacts on the way people live and act today. For example, health outcomes in these communities are compromised by traditional hygiene and sanitation habits suited to a hunter-gather lifestyle but unsuitable for sedentary settlement. Another example of how cultural practices suited to ancient times have outlived their usefulness is the violent way of resolving conflict that Aboriginal men are traditionally socialised into from childhood, which is part of the explanation (along with the welfare and the grog) for widespread violence in places like Aurukun.

Acknowledging that not everything that is customary is a positive for Indigenous people has major and challenging implications for the Indigenous debate.

One implication is that the focus should not be on discussing whether Aboriginal people need a treaty and larger dose of the separatist agenda that has lead to so much suffering and disadvantage in the name of maintaining traditional culture. The further implication is that real subject for debate should instead be the future of taxpayer support for the homeland communities, and whether the failed social experiment with Aboriginal self-determination has had its day.

The post Welcome to country appeared first on The Spectator.