Sorry, but not sorry enough

Australia entered 2008 one of the richest nations, both on paper and on the ground. Far from fearing recession like Europe and America, Australia bursts into its 17th year of uninterrupted economic growth with its currency surging to 23-year highs, its unemployment rate approaching 4 per cent, and its weekly wages more than 20 per cent higher than in the United States and Britain (not to mention the cheaper cost of living). Swimming pools and rumpus rooms adorn working class homes, and for almost everyone a sandy beach is but a two-hour drive away.

Yet for the descendents of Australia’s original inhabitants, its half-million Aborigines, this success has proved as remote as the Great Sandy Desert. Male Aboriginal life expectancy, at less than 61 years, is less than Cambodia’s, while Australia’s as a whole is higher than Switzerland’s.

Aboriginal statistical data is a catalogue of social disaster. Basic communicable diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis are respectively five and eight times more prevalent among Aboriginal than white Australians. Aborigines are almost three times more likely to kill themselves, and more than 15 times more likely to be imprisoned.

But these aggregate statistics are a walk in the park compared to life in remote Aboriginal towns, where up to half Australia’s Aborigines live.

In May 2006 the Northern Territory Crown Prosecutor, Nannette Rogers, exposed conditions bordering on dystopian. Children and babies have been routinely raped and abused. Extreme substance abuse (including petrol sniffing among children to the point of brain damage) and general lawlessness give central Australia a homicide rate 10 times the national average, and Aboriginal women are 52 times more likely to be hospitalised from domestic violence than white women.

In June 2007 the situation had reached such “depths of depravity and despair”, as the former Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough put it, that the Howard government shocked international café society worldwide by sending in the military to restore social order, and restricted pornography and alcohol. Inevitable squeals of “racism” emerged from the fashionable, trendy quarters of Sydney and Melbourne, unable to imagine life without porn, petrol and alcohol.

That such an execrable state of affairs exists in such a rich country is surely deserving of an apology, a real apology among the living, for the bald empirical fact of white wealth amid manifest black squalor?

These appalling social conditions are of course entirely unrelated to the nature of Aboriginal people themselves, an absurd concept in any case. Yet if any group is most to blame for the status quo, it is the ultimately pernicious group of left-wing intellectuals, whose ideas have dominated public policy on Aboriginal issues for the past 35 years. Rather than reaching for Marshall and Mill, they reached for Marx and Foucault, facilitating a poisonous mix of double standards in public policy, and an ongoing celebration of a crude “diversity” for its own sake.

In 1938, two Aborigines, J Patten and W Ferguson, from the Aborigines Progressive Association, wrote:

We do not wish to be … ‘preserved’ like the koala bears … [or] ‘studied’ as scientific or anthropological curiosities … we have no desire to go back to primitive conditions of the Stone Age. We ask you to teach our people to live in the Modern Age.

Since gaining the constitutional power to make laws for Aborigines in 1967, rather than encouraging assimilation, the federal government has effectively subsidised hundreds of tiny, remote, uneconomic communities to promote an Aboriginal “hunter-gatherer way of life”.

It has provided ongoing passive welfare payments without any requirement to work, resulting in labour force participation half that in white society.

Since 1976 it has created a communist system of land ownership for Aborigines that even Marx would have thought bizarre given their initial economic poverty.

It shut off remote communities to “non-Aborigines”, requiring entrance permits granted by local “elders”. It has undermined the teaching of English in remote schools, leaving 80 per cent of young remote Aborigines illiterate, and many unable even to communicate in English.

On top of this Labor governments have wasted public resources pursing futile, divisive symbolic issues, and all this in order to pursue “reconciliation”, a wholly unverifiable and unobservable goal.

Even the law has been afflicted. In 2002, a Northern Territory judge sentenced a 50-year-old Aboriginal man to one day’s jail for raping a 15-year-old Aboriginal girl, citing traditional culture in his defence. In 2006, a Queensland judge let nine Aboriginal men go free after gang-raping a 10-year-old Aboriginal girl, who, the judge thought, “probably agreed” to the rape.

We have known about the tragedy of the commons since Aristotle wrote “every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest”. The basic economics of wealth creation were uncovered by Smith six years after the British discovered Australia, and principles of legal equality across individuals predate the 1689 English Bill of Rights. Yet, for vast numbers of black Australians, for whom it was obvious socialism would fail, this core human knowledge has been withheld. The implicit racism of the Left is breath-taking, yet its constant moral posturing renders most blind to it.

On February 12, the new Labor Prime Minister Rudd apologised in the national parliament, to the great acclaim of left-thinking people everywhere. For decades many had agitated for such a “national apology”, its necessity had become the pre-eminent shibboleth of polite society. Rudd said “… we apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on [Aborigines]”.

But do you think, dear reader, that this apology was referring to the ideologically-driven laws and policies outlined above, or the Hogarthian social conditions of today’s Aborigines? Of course not; the academics, politicians and commentators who supported such policies are alive, and would never admit to gross negligence, bordering on economic manslaughter.

The apology was given for the “stolen generations”: a phenomenon of highly contested nature and extent, a policy whereby Australian state governments removed some Aboriginal children from their families, between 1910 and 1970, sometimes against their mothers’ will. Children were placed in the care of churches or white foster families, who, it was thought, would provide better life chances. Such paternalistic yet racist policy is hardly out of step with the state of social progress in the West at the time (in 1924, Virginia passed a law banning white women from marrying black men).

The same day the new Opposition leader, Dr Brendon Nelson, leader of the Liberal Party offered a more balanced speech, which underlined the “complexity” of the issue, warned against “moral superiority” across generations, and reminded the parliament of more pressing concerns. Many activists turned their backs on him, and slow clapped to drown him out.

Without doubt, the headline government report that uncovered the impact of this policy, entitled Bringing Them Home (1997), although tendentious, lists a litany of very sad stories of abuse and heartache. It also notes:

The predominant aim of Aboriginal child removals was the … assimilation of the children into the wider, non-Aboriginal community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear, giving way to models of Western culture [horror!] … Removal of children with this in mind is genocidal.

The genocide charge in particular has animated ongoing concern for a “national apology” for the “stolen generations”. Perhaps surprisingly, no court action has proceeded on the basis of such a serious claim in Australia or elsewhere (yet some “perpetrators” are still alive), and only one Aborigine has achieved compensation in the courts for his removal.

Oscar Wilde wrote in 1888 “we cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be”. Indeed, scoring easy moral victories over dead people and basking in our own self-righteousness is unflattering, and all the more so when contemporary ills are so pressing and dire. The Left’s Holy Trinity of race, class and gender is particularly noxious as it simplistically encourages inter- and intra-generational victimhood among groups based upon their physical characteristics.

Where are the Sorry Days and apologies for other people damaged and distraught by yesteryear’s perceived policy mistakes? My grandmothers, and thousands of others, lost some of their children from hopelessly lax and lenient drink-driving laws, seemingly as absurd to us today as any passé social program..

What of the Australian government’s complicity in the removal of 10,000-odd British children to Australia in the decades after World War II?

Others too have been scarred by too-slow scientific and social progress. Yet, it seems that those groups who don’t fit neatly into the Holy Trinity are not as highly regarded. In fact, surely by definition any piece of legislation or common law principle that now applies, or one that no longer applies, is evidence of past abuse, and is thus deserving of an “apology”.

To those who say an apology is pragmatic and “heals the nation”, I say elevating particular group grievances in the name of “healing” some “national story” is, frankly, fascism-lite and will ultimately foster a more fractured and fractious society. Moreover, time is in fixed supply and the fuss over historical apologies wastes intellectual and physical effort. Apologise for all history, or none at all.

Let’s apologise for the present, not the past, and provide genuine redress. Far from being hesitant in removing Aborigines from their dysfunctional surrounds, we should implement the wholesale education and integration of Aborigines into modern society, as some Aborigines themselves suggested in 1938.