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Modern day version of Emporer’s new suit
Issue 92 - 27 Oct 2005
“Everything we need to do around health, education, rebuilding of families, rebuilding better communities, safer communities, getting on top of violence and a whole of problems that afflict our people, all happens under the umbrella of welfare reform.”
- Noel Pearson, 21 July 2005, Lateline
“Today’s poor may be disadvantaged, but they are also dependent, and the combination is fatal. How likely is it that Aborigines in Australia, or Native Americans in the United States, can reverse past injustices when they have become virtual wards of the state? They must first return to full citizenship. That requires that they reclaim from welfare the responsibilities that they have abandoned to it. They must recover strong families where adults functioned as workers and parents. They must prepare their children, by example, for vigorous lives.”
- Lawrence Mead, ‘Welfare reform and the family: lessons from America’ in Peter Saunders (ed) Reforming the Australian welfare state (2000) 44, 49.
Noel Pearson has enjoyed a meteoric rise as a courageous and ingenious black leader. He is commonly portrayed as a prophet, who has the pluck to admit the abysmal failure of self-determination and embrace the Holy Grail of mutual obligation.
Pearson is also an enigma in that he enjoys support across the political spectrum. He was friendly with Mark Latham, an advocate of the ‘Third Way’. When she wasn’t salivating above ATSIC’s life-support machine, her spittle falling on the ‘off’ button, Senator Amanda Vanstone was comparing the unelected Pearson to John F. Kennedy.
The mirage does not end with Pearson’s leadership qualities but permeates his theories on Indigenous poverty. His remedy for disadvantage, the injection of reciprocity into welfare programs, is a lot like the above Hans Christian Andersen fable.
From his taxpayer-funded looms, Pearson recycles old myths about the poor rather than weave new policies.
His association of welfare with societal breakdown resounds with the dogma of American neo-conservatives, whose influence flourished during the Regan era.
Pearson’s recent description of welfare recipients as ‘deadbeats’ has its parallel in Regan’s vilification of Cadillac driving ‘Welfare Queens’.
Like the Republicans, the writings of George Gilder and Charles Murray may have influenced Pearson. Both claim that welfare destroys initiative, leading to entrenched poverty and numerous social ills.
Or perhaps, Pearson’s inspiration was Lawrence Mead, who argues that the poor suffer a culture of defeat. Akin to Mead, Pearson attributes a victim-hood mentality to Indigenous people, easily cured by a hard day’s work.
In common with his American counterparts, Pearson does not support his theories with research.
His self-published manifesto - ‘Our right to take responsibility’ - is devoid of footnotes, containing only a handful of references to a book about an Indigenous community in Canada, and some enlightening quotes by Immanuel Kant.
This omission conveniently absolves Pearson from engaging with research that might question his mantra of reciprocity.
For example, several years ago, the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research published research indicating that high-income Indigenous families remained susceptible to ill-health and the criminal justice system. Consequently, gainful employment is not necessarily a vaccine against the multiple layers of Indigenous poverty.
Even the historical foundations of Pearson’s theories are dubious. For example, in ‘Our right to take responsibility’ he makes the following claims:
“... the Aboriginal struggle has to wake up to the fact that our belated citizenship in 1967 has given us two things. Firstly it gave us land rights and increasing recognition of our human rights - and this has been a good thing. Secondly, it gave us passive welfare as an economy - and this has been disastrous.”
In reality, the referendum only empowered the Commonwealth to enact laws with respect to Indigenous people and enabled our inclusion in the census. For Indigenous people in Pearson’s home state of Queensland, land rights and greater recognition of our human rights did not eventuate until the mid 1980s.
Given that Pearson grew up during Bjelke-Petersen’s reign of terror, his exaggeration of the consequences of the 1967 referendum is remarkable. However, such historical distortions suit his political masters.
If Indigenous people really acquired a level playing field in 1967, we have no one to blame for the poverty endemic to our communities. No one that is, apart from ourselves.
Far from being a Messiah, Pearson is an opportunist. Like characters in the Hans Christian Andersen fable, he weaves new policies from the invisible straw of conservative rhetoric.
* Nicole Watson is an Aboriginal lawyer and academic from Queensland, now based at the University of Technology in Sydney.
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