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Then PM John Howard and Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough in 2007. In September of that year the federal government moved the responsibility for outstations to the Territory government. |
NIT FORUM: Working future and outstations: Sure to fail?
ISSUE 180 - 25 Jun 2009
ISSUE 180, June 25, 2009: The Northern Territory government's recent policy announcement undermines the outstations movement and represents a step back to a dark era, writes PROF JON ALTMAN*.
In the early 1970s, something extraordinary happened in the Northern Territory. Aboriginal people started to migrate out of government settlements and missions to live back on their traditional lands.
This decentralisation was called the outstations movement.
It challenged evolutionary logic. Hunter-gatherers had been coaxed or coerced to centralise in larger communities by the Australian colonial state.
The purposes of this project were to sedentarise, civilise and assimilate nomadic Aboriginal people, at that time wards of the state.
But with the policy shifts to self-determination and land rights, not only did people return to live in small groups away from settlements, but the state supported such decentralisation.
There was an unchallenged recognition that the state project of assimilation had been an expensive failure.
Over the next 30 years, the Commonwealth took responsibility for outstations in a Memorandum of Understanding with the NT government.
But a proper outstations policy was never developed despite strong support articulated by a thorough parliamentary report 'Return to Country' in 1987.
With minimal support, sometimes bordering on unconscionable neglect, the outstations movement persisted and grew.
Today, there are an estimated 560 communities with populations of less than 100 people dotted across the NT. Almost all are located on Aboriginal-owned land that covers 500,000 sq kms - nearly 50 percent of the NT.
There is enormous diversity in outstations that statistical averages can mask.
Most are populated by small family groups, some number over a hundred people.
Some are occupied year round, others seasonally or rarely; in almost all there is considerable population movement between outstations and larger centres.
Some have robust local economies built on arts production, employment as rangers, and wildlife harvesting; others are highly dependent on welfare income.
Some have adequate shelter and basic infrastructure that might include a school, water reticulation, ablution facilities and telecommunications; others have rudimentary facilities.
The key commonality is that their residents have made a determined choice to actively engage with their land. This choice might be based on a desire to protect sacred sites, to retain connections to ancestral lands and ancestors, to live off the land, or to escape social dysfunction that might be prevalent in larger, less socially cohesive townships.
In September 2007 in the dying days of the Howard government and with the NT National Emergency Response at its zenith, the Commonwealth, with stealth and fiscal blackmail, divested responsibility for outstations back to the NT.
A new MOU was signed that locked in the historic chronic under-investment of previous decades.
The NT acquiesced, but only because it had no choice.
Since then it has worked to develop a coherent policy, a 'new deal' for outstations.
Last month, this much anticipated framework Working Future, Fresh Ideas, Fresh Results was released.
The policy, paradoxically, had little to say about outstations. Instead it focused on the targeted delivery of support to 20 of the larger Aboriginal communities now re-badged as 'Territory Growth Towns'.
The policy statement anticipates that these towns will become robust nodes for vibrant and sustainable economic development.
The only ground for this optimism is considerable federal funding of these development nodes; it resonates with the failed plans to develop similar Aboriginal regional centres with significant public underwriting in the 1960s.
Most of these large communities are also targeted for support by the Commonwealth as 'priority communities'; there is clearly policy collusion evident here.
During the past 30 years there has been a growing body of research that indicates that life at outstations is better - in health outcomes, livelihood options, and social cohesion, even housing conditions - than at larger townships, despite the government neglect.
In current parlance, prospects for 'Closing the Gap' might be more likely at outstations.
And clearly many Aboriginal people remain determined to live on their ancestral lands pursuing a way of life that is informed by fundamentally different value systems.
Working Future only envisages a conventional mainstream future for remote living Aboriginal people. While paying lip service to the value of outstations, it proposes that the status quo - ongoing neglect - continues.
There is an alternative 'working future' for outstations that deserves serious policy consideration.
Rather than revisiting the past, the NT government should champion the aspirations and determination of outstation people to live on their land pursuing a way of life that incorporates two ways - the customary and the market, Aboriginal and European.
Such a hybrid mode of living is clearly beneficial for Aboriginal people. But it also has spin-off benefits for all Australians and the nation.
Living on country, Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory occupy and manage nearly 10 percent of Australia.
They currently provide a wide range of environmental services including biosecurity for quarantine, customs surveillance, management of feral animals and exotic weeds, control of wildfires and associated carbon abatement.
Empty landscape, terra vacua, is not in the national or the Northern Territory interest.
Devising public policy for outstations is a serious challenge and will prove difficult.
Working Future unfortunately suffers from Commonwealth fiscal capture and associated collusion and the continued exclusion of the politically vulnerable from decision making about their own futures.
It even proposes perverse cost-shifting back onto outstation people living in poverty, recommending that they contribute to the cost of housing and infrastructure and water reticulation (which is all fine, if equitably means tested).
Sensible policy would provide practical support for what is working on the ground rather than just for imagined growth towns.
Equitable investments would generate 'fresh results' that close gaps, while enabling a more culturally and economically diverse, productive, and evenly-populated Australia for the 21st century.
nitforum@nit.com.au
* Jon Altman is Director and ARC Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU, Canberra. He has researched outstation policy for over 30 years.
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