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Director of the Cape York Institute Noel Pearson.
(AAP Image/Alan Porritt) |
NIT FORUMS: The business of controversy
Issue 130 - 31 May 2007
Issue 130, May 31, 2007: People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, particularly when they're lecturing others on matters of common civility, writes MEGAN DAVIS*.
In the past month there has been a frenetic output of opinion by Noel Pearson about Indigenous rights and Indigenous economic development.
Pearson positions himself as the only reasonable Indigenous voice holding the middle ground on rights. He distinguishes his advocacy on the basis of an ostensibly novel and innovative synthesis of rights and responsibilities fashioned as the rather unimaginative “third way” (The Weekend Australian, April 21-22,2007).
Never mind that most rights advocates (or “progressives” if you still have a penchant for 'turn of the century' polemics) have always held that ground.
Yet this influential and rather cobbled logic appears to result in the dispensing of rights and an elevation of “responsibilities” and the most concerning outcome of Pearson's recent proselytising in The Australian is the events of the last few weeks in Hopevale.
If media reports and interviews with community members are to be believed, communities were deprived of the opportunity to adequately participate in decision making processes that affect them: at its most simplest they were denied the right to self-determination.
Secondly, the staged media occasion (while perfect for the continued media aggrandisement of Pearson) displayed utter disregard for the rights and dignity of members of this community.
It is true, as Pearson would perhaps retort, that the greatest indignity is to neglect your children - and I agree.
But consultation with the people who you claim to speak on behalf of and represent the interests of - where your legitimacy comes from - is at its most fundamental, a social norm. And you can't preach civility to your people if you can't be bothered to be civil yourself.
The extensive media coverage of the signing of the welfare agreement ranging from television news reports to The Australian, ABC Radio National and the SBS Living Black program (16th May) with traditional owner Victor Hart highlighted the discord in the community about the lack of adequate consultation, if any.
By all accounts, members of the Hopevale community were not adequately consulted in the development of the Hope Vale Guugu Yimithirr Warra Foundations for Welfare Reform Agreement but rather were summoned to be paraded (read: 'consulted') before radio and print media.
The media reports that followed were enthused by the asperity of Pearson's messianic speech in which he zealously insisted that “this is my place” and he was “not yielding to anybody”.
Media grabs broadcast his sermon invoking the heritage of the community's grandfathers, after which (almost infantilised by some media descriptions) a number of traditional owners were moved to sign up right there and then: lucky the media was there to catch their conversion.
Patricia Karvelas writing in The Weekend Australian gave an insight into the participatory aspect of the $15 million welfare deal aimed at economic development (May 12-13, 2007).
It is apparent that many community members were “angry” at the lack of consultation and weren't involved in the process, yet the point of Karvelas' presence was clear: “by the end of the day, after Mr Pearson's strong speech, at least seven community members had approached the council to sign up”.
I ask myself, surely members of the community weren't informed of the details of this agreement over the course of that meeting and surely not for the first time in front of media?
Pearson is correct that “we can't all agree that there are these problems, but not have the courage to deal with them”, but what is worrying is that one of the major causes of failed economic development initiatives is the decision not to involve the people affected in actually developing the processes and policies that will apply to them.
We know that consultation is a basic tenet of self-determination: the right to freely pursue ones economic, social and cultural development. But we also know that advocacy for self-determination is inimical in the conservative millieu and the failures of Aboriginal policy is directly attributed by conservatives to this right of self-determination.
The hostility to rights has crystallised into the deliberately elliptical notion of “rights and responsibilities”, a fashionable mantra augmented by its adoption among pragmatic human rights advocates.
This notion has become vogue in recent years, probably due more to the conservative political climate than to any real justification for the suddenly crucial qualifier “and responsibilities” when talking about rights.
It is indisputable that “responsibilities” are important and inextricably linked to rights. This is recognised in the preambles to both the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that 'the individual is under a responsibility to strive for the promotion and observance of the rights recognised'.
But the fact that human rights are demonised as “abstract blather” in the conservative millieu is closer to the reason why the qualifier is supported by so many rights advocates today, yet they never uttered such a qualifier a decade ago.
While the ascent of the qualifier in rights discourse is ostensibly about citizens understanding their responsibilities to each other, it really enables the state to distort legitimate discussion about human rights and citizenship rights.
The approach that fosters a shift in community thinking from perceiving ineffective policy as “government failing in their responsibility to citizens” to “citizens failing their governments” is aimed at those powerless people who still do not enjoy many of the basic human and citizenship rights that other Australians do.
Apparently it is these people who must become “responsible” first in order to attain and exercise rights.
Indigenous peoples don't have to “earn” rights nor do we have to earn “self-determination”.
To say this is to grossly misrepresent two very complex principles.
“Rights” are the product of human dignity and do not need to be earned by good behaviour or the performance of duties.
And this is not just an international lawyer fantasising about “social justice and salvation via international covenants” as Noel Pearson has chided about international law (The Weekend Australian, April 21-22,2007).
The framework of human rights constructed internationally after the Second World War was because of international consensus that states can not always be trusted to do the right thing by human beings, particularly small numbered racial or religious minorities.
If anyone knows this, Indigenous Australians do.
In one of these recent sophic outpourings, Pearson commented on the ABC's Difference of Opinion program devoted to Indigenous issues sneering at a “young, educated, largely urban-based, Indigenous people captive to the old rights paradigm”.
This language about an “old rights paradigm” seems to me to be old-fashioned, Howard-era polemic.
Most young, educated, largely urban-based Indigenous peoples understand that the practical and the symbolic are two sides of the same coin.
In criticising these young Indigenous people's applauding of rights, it may be pertinent to consider that the Aboriginal parent or parents of those audience members have discharged their responsibilities to their children and to the state and that's why their children, educated and living in urban Indigenous communities, identify “rights” as being important to them.
Just because a majority of urban Indigenous peoples don't agree with government policy such as abolishing the Community Housing Infrastructure Program and legislative changes to land rights, doesn't mean their opinions should be labelled as “captive” to any agenda.
And just because they don't come from these “hell holes” or “war zones”, as Noel Pearson refers to his own hometown of Hopevale, doesn't mean they can't comment on policies that will affect other rural and remote Indigenous peoples.
That's the beauty of democracy: freedom of speech; and that's the beauty of functional human capabilities: freedom of thought.
In any healthy community there will always be dissent and opposing views.
And for this reason I am, like many, concerned about this trend in lack of consultation.
For the past year, I have been involved in research with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development ('UNRISD') about Indigenous peoples and economic development.
For years Indigenous communities around the world have been concerned about the incongruous application of development theory to their communities and the unfulfilled Elysian dreams of economic development that, in hindsight, meant Indigenous peoples giving up much and the state very little.
UNRISD is developing a nascent thesis of Indigenous economic development that seeks to eschew many aspects of the traditional economic development paradigm in favour of a theory of Indigenous development with identity.
It is about the alleviation of poverty and improvement in the quality of life for Indigenous peoples while accepting that Indigenous peoples have different preferences for development and in accommodating those differences, respect for Indigenous identity and Indigenous preferences is paramount.
The research also interrogates the role of “power” in economic development; a dimension conveniently ignored in debates about Indigenous economic development in Australia (this power imbalance was clearly demonstrated in Hopevale).
The reality is that it is the preferences of the most powerful groups that dominate policy-making and the development pathway is generally in the interests of powerful groups.
Many international institutions have come to realise that this approach is ill conceived.
Why? Because it hasn't worked.
The application of theories of economic development from privatisation of Indigenous land to employment opportunities in mining companies doesn't always deliver the desired outcomes of quality of life or the alleviation of poverty, though they do deliver very deliberately in breaking down Indigenous land ownership and collectivity.
The other crucial reason why it doesn't work: self-determination.
It is fundamental that those people who are affected by decisions about economic development are involved in the decision-making process.
If people affected are not consulted and have no sense of 'ownership' over the process, this hampers the achievement of outcomes.
Development with identity is about the creation of “inclusive consultative platforms” and the reconfiguring of authority structures “so as to provide Indigenous peoples an avenue to participate in decisions that could affect their way of life”.
The Australian, (Mr Pearson's preferred vehicle of dissemination) has in the past derided the right to self-determination the 'ultimate absurdity' and a 'fantasy of desperate contradictions'.
Yet self-determination is the crucial right that underpins Australian democracies and, in fact, all great democracies.
It is a crucial for Indigenous communities because of our small number in a population of 20 million and a utilitarian polity.
I am not diminishing the integrity of Pearson's commitment to economic development.
If we accept that domestic violence and community dysfunction is a legacy of colonisation then we must also conceive of ways to arrest these behaviours.
But the truth is you can discharge your responsibilities to your family, your community and to your state until the cows come home but your government still has the power to suspend the operation of legislatively expressed right to non-discrimination at its whim (usually when the property rights of the most powerful are at risk).
In his recent essay in Griffith REVIEW Noel Pearson laments the lack of public concern about the breach of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by the Federal government in amending the Native Title Act and suspending the application of the Racial Discrimination Act.
Yet in that finding, the CERD Committee also highlighted the lack of consultation with Indigenous communities on the amendments as one of the main violations of human rights.
Noel Pearson wonders why this lack of consultation with Aboriginal people for state sanctioned racial discrimination never became a cause celebre for the Australian public like David Hicks, yet today he wants us to cheer for a state-sanctioned process that also lacked consultation.
In failing to recognise the right to be informed and consulted as the most fundamental social norm of successful communities - whether they be families, democracies or Indigenous communities - one wonders whether Noel Pearson's recent proselytizing in The Australian is to convince us of the integrity of his methods, or to convince himself.
forums@nit.com.au
* Megan Davis is the Director of the Indigenous Law Centre and Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW. Megan has held a United Nations Indigenous Fellowship at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. She is an Australian member of the International Law Association, Indigenous Rights Committee.
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