Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Social Engineering: A disastrous experiment
After twelve years’ investigation of official records it is my
contention that present conditions on Aboriginal communities in
Queensland are the outcome of an unprecedented social engineering
experiment which still blights the lives of individuals and
communities. Today’s talk will demonstrate how I have come to this
conviction. It is organised into three overlapping sections: historical
background, every day life and governance.
Historical background
From 1897 the government legislated to control every aspect of personal
and social life: marriages, upbringing of children, place of living,
employment, supply of food and water, provision of medical attention,
shelter, schooling, community amenities, policing and justice. As wards
of State, around half Queensland’s Indigenous population lost all rights
to manage their own lives into the 1970s.
A
network of police ‘protectors’ was appointed to monitor and record the
actions and conduct of every family and these records formed the basis
of official interventions and detentions. There was no due process and
no right of appeal; in fact no knowledge of what was being written or
why actions were taken. This evidence remained secret into the 1990s.
The government set up a contracted labour force, hiring men, women and
children to the pastoral industry until the late 1960s, often at only
one-third the award rate, flouting its policy of 66 per cent parity and
disregarding surveys affirming Aboriginal labour as often more reliable
and more skilled than their white counterparts. Minimum workplace
conditions set in 1919 were almost worthless when inspections were rare
into the 1960s. The norm was extreme hours, wretched food, grossly
substandard shelter, foul water and sanitation. Physical abuse and
sexual assault of both boys and girls was not uncommon, but complaints
to the protector risked retaliation for lying or ‘cheekiness’, or
deportation to a reserve.
By
1934 the department controlled the lives of over 7000 people in
‘supervised camps’ on country reserves, 3500 people in the Torres
Strait, 3000 on settlements and 3500 on missions. In 1945 regulations
increased the disciplinary powers of reserve superintendents so that
‘troublemakers’ could be evicted, 32 hours’ (unpaid) work became
mandatory on communities (up from 24 hours), and Aboriginal police,
courts and councils were formalised under tight departmental
supervision. A range of by-laws – written by the department – were
introduced to supervise social behaviours.
Under the 1965 Aboriginal Affairs Act Aboriginal councils
supposedly exercised ‘the functions of local government’. All
Indigenous people were now declared ‘free citizens’, however all reserve
residents were deemed in need of ‘assistance’ and remained under
government control. Six years later, to deflect bitter criticism, the
government passed what it defined as ‘non-discriminatory’ legislation,
dropping the ‘assisted’ category but strengthening the permit system
which continued government control over visitors and residents. Only
now did the government cease its arbitrary extradition of individuals
between reserves as a disciplinary device. Only now, after almost 70
years, did the government cede its control of private property and
savings to the people, unless of course a magistrate upheld an objection
by the director. Beer canteens could be now established on reserves,
and State police could be permanently stationed where necessary. An
Aboriginal Advisory Council was authorised to offer advice, but had no
jurisdiction to achieve change.
An
amendment Act in 1979 strengthened powers of community councils over
tenancy on communities and allowed for appeals against decisions in the
Aboriginal courts; an amendment to the Land Act in 1982 promised, but
did not actually establish, deeds of grant in trust (DOGITs). This
cosmetic manoeuvre was a response to Federal strategies and political
criticism on Aboriginal land rights, and assuaged embarrassing
condemnation during the brief international glory of the commonwealth
games.
Only after passage of the Community Services (Aborigines) Act of
1984 did councils gain qualified local government powers, although, as
usual, the changes were imposed – sight unseen – on Indigenous
communities. The director boasted that after a three-year training
period, decisions would be made ‘by the people themselves’, but in fact
all accounts had to be vetted and audited by the department, and the
director could launch inspections, receive reports from visiting
justices, and control beer supplies for council-operated canteens. The
Governor in Council – effectively the Cabinet – could overrule by-laws
or dissolve the council, in which case an administrator was appointed
and all administration fees, allowances and expenses became a charge
against the council.
Through this legislation – with a series of minor adjustments – the
government continues its hegemony of Aboriginal communities today.
Everyday life
Throughout the twentieth century thousands of people were taken from
their extended families and country and deported to reserves where
children were commonly separated from parents and siblings and confined
in dormitories. These were characteristically dilapidated and
pathologically overcrowded, with inadequate food and clothing, extreme
discipline and substandard facilities. Occasional visits to family and
friends were insufficient to foster normal bonding, family
socialisation, or family responsibilities. Boys were commonly evicted
from the age of 14 ‘to live with anybody who will have them’; in some
institutions girls were trapped for life except for contracted external
employment or marriage. They were then expected to survive in social
conditions bereft of basic experience of the domestic and familial
normality which authorities insisted they attain.
Women commonly had no income with which to purchase utensils and
cleaning products, their child endowment and pensions were raided by the
government, their husbands’ wages intercepted by superintendents and
subjected to multiple deductions. Until the end of the 1960s, many
residents never had access to their savings and never had cash for
purchases, but were commonly given vouchers to use at the community
store which were poorly stocked and operated on profit margins up to 40
per cent. And always, in these institutional environments of abject
destitution and systemic neglect, there was the fear of having your
children taken from you and put in the dormitory.
Only in 1968 did the government substitute rations with a wage economy –
at 20% below the dole. Yet store prices were far higher than rural
towns and food deliveries erratic; pensioners complained they could not
survive on the fraction they received; lack of food or cash for lunches
sent school absenteeism soaring; surveys revealed scandalous levels of
malnutrition and disease.1
Community workers never received full wages despite legal advice to the
government in 1979 confirming the imperatives of the 1975 Racial
Discrimination Act. Indeed the government refused to budget for
inevitable increases, instead sacking over 1500 employees in the decade
to 1986, driving unemployment to over 92 per cent. The government was
well aware of the pathological consequences of this policy, anticipating
in 1979 that this high unemployment would bring ‘low morale and other
adverse social manifestations including alcoholism’, and re-affirming in
1980 ‘the resultant and evident adverse social symptoms, including
increased alcoholism, juvenile delinquency and crime.’2
These horrific outcomes blight communities today. Gross overcrowding of
increasingly dilapidated buildings intensifies domestic turmoil and a
‘floating populace’ of single males – separated, widowed, or unemployed
– moving from home to home for varying lengths of time aggravates
domestic relationships, depriving children of sleeping or eating
facilities, and increasing the spread of infectious diseases. These
aimless and rootless men are prey to alcohol and violence – figures of
ridicule without dignity, purpose or companionship.
Families pragmatically sacrifice stability and independence to available
economic realities. In 1979 a working husband, wife and 5 children
lived on the community wage of $85 a week, while an unemployed husband,
with wife and between 2 and 7 children on supporting parents benefit
received between $104 and $141 a week. A single unemployed male with a
single unemployed partner each brought in benefits of $51.45, as did
unmarried couples who did not live together openly. Separated mothers
received $98 a week plus a share of their partner’s income, either the
dole or the wage.
Today’s figures will change that arithmetic, but not the impasse. The
dearth of fully-paid employment means that women with children are
better off financially without an obvious male partner, and younger
single mothers are better off financially not getting married at all.
Sole parent families now account for over one-third of Indigenous
families, twice the rate in the non-Indigenous population. Incomes are
proportionately less than that of other Australian sole parent families,
as are the gross incomes of households in which they live.3
Many sole parents are supporting a far wider group than the pension is
intended for, raising the very real spectre of inter-generational
poverty for children. Recent research has confirmed that income support
payments to Indigenous families are ineffectively delivered,4
in part because of the role of extended family in child care, high
residential mobility among children and differing categorizations of
‘family’.
This destruction of families has occurred because the single-waged
family unit is a less logical option than the fragmented welfare
opportunities. If the economic benefit attaches to the wage-earning
parent or parents, then the nuclear household becomes the optimum
financial unit. Analysts maintain that the fundamental cause of the
poverty of Indigenous families and their children is the employment
status of the adults, of which low income is a symptom.5
Around 50 per cent of community workforces today are dependent on CDEP,
or ‘work for the dole’. CDEP continues the discriminatory wages policy
which has operated on communities for around 100 years whereby
Aboriginal workers are denied legal wage rates and have few
sustainable jobs or career paths. CDEP was introduced in Queensland in
1978 as a financial strategy to benefit the State and Federal
governments, pursuant to the gazetting of Aurukun and Mornington Island
as local government areas to pre-empt Federal self-management
legislation. Faced with payment of award wages to community workers,
the premier threatened mass sackings and consequent blowouts in
unemployment relief. A deal was done to divert unemployment
entitlements to the State through CDEP. On these communities,
local governments would be funded from private pensions which
individuals could access only partially, according to how many hours
they worked.
Work is often rationed at less than the equivalent to the unemployment
benefit (the 1998 rate was $11.38 per hour6);
only from 1987 could individuals choose to opt out of CDEP in favour of
individual entitlements, although surveys revealed few did so,7
and only after ATSIC took over the CDEP scheme in 1990 could wives of
low-income community workers also claim Family Allowance. The funding
pool is insufficient to cover a full workforce and women are routinely
excluded, many relegated to pension dependence and boredom despite an
eagerness to pursue paid labour. The partial hours mean that men have
too much slack time ‘to waste at the pub’, although the flexibility is
an advantage to women with children.
The CDEP allotment is calculated on labour force numbers rather than
occupational advancement, so there is little incentive in full time work
and attendance is often erratic and effort marginal. Elders warn this
is deskilling the workforce and producing undisciplined and
disinterested youth; parents despair that the meaningless work
discourages pride or responsibility in the young. CDEP tends to
quarantine workers in mindless community maintenance, and people say
they are tired of ‘playing with whipper-snippers’ instead of getting
on-the-job training or the tuition in the literacy, numeracy or driving
skills which could open pathways to meaningful employment. Nevertheless
this relatively valueless employment presents an attractive career
option for many schoolchildren who quit early to enjoy the easy freedom
and cash, a choice reinforced by the entrapment in CDEP of others who
have completed training or even tertiary courses.8
There is no doubt Federal and State governments are profiting from this
entrenched deprivation. Even as CDEP was introduced on remaining
Aboriginal communities in the late 1980s the Federal government
expressed concern ‘that the CDEP is being used to prop up State
Government functions’;9
indeed over 90% of CDEP employment is in public administration and
community services which are, in all non-Indigenous communities, the
responsibilities of State and local governments. In some Indigenous
communities up to 80% of CDEP funds, that is private pension
entitlements, are supporting mainstream municipal services such as town
and infrastructure maintenance. Analysts argue this not only places
unreal expectations on local CDEP performance, but it distorts
eligibility of the communities for ‘appropriate compensatory subsidy’
through the Grants Commission.10
Analysts argue that the dynamic of CDEP as substitution funding (for
what are elsewhere separately funded functions) allows other levels of
government ‘to renege on their legitimate funding responsibilities.’
CDEP is also a far cheaper option for the Federal government than full
payment of social security.11
Courtesy of this unconscionable contrivance the majority of Aboriginal
community workers are paid less than their legal wage entitlement and
the majority of Aboriginal community families are forced to struggle on
less than the dole available to all non-Indigenous families. Aboriginal
communities are deprived of the local government funding which supports
all remote non-Indigenous communities, none of which fund their
municipal services through private pensions. Only on Aboriginal
communities is CDEP a substitution, rather than a supplement, for local
government requirements. Since at least 1979 State and Federal
governments have known that Aboriginal community workers were entitled
to award wages for their labour yet, for their own profit, they inflict
this inequitable system on people whose poverty has been fatally
entrenched through a century of social engineering. And publicly
question why Aboriginal families can’t better manage their lives.
Local government
Until DOGIT status, council independence was mainly cosmetic. The
department held power over dismissals, and managers influence over
nominations; they sat in on all meetings, recorded the minutes, and
forwarded annotated copies to head office, often with disparaging
remarks. For years all phone calls had to be made from the manager’s
office, and regulations allowed for the reading of all incoming mail.
Similarly emasculated, an Aboriginal Advisory Council (AAC) set up after
1965 could only address issues raised by the director or the minister
and had no power to initiate action. In 1974 the AAC organised a
briefing on forthcoming Federal anti-discrimination legislation prior to
their State meeting. The department brought the State meeting forward,
secured a motion confirming State policy, and marshalled 23 identical
telegrams from the Thursday Island office purportedly from individual
chairmen expressing ‘concern for their future well-being’ if the Federal
legislation overrode the Queensland Acts.12
The AAC lapsed soon after. It was revived as the Aboriginal and
Islander Commission (AIC) in 1976 ostensibly for community consultation,
but the government vetoed any statutory status specifically to avoid
accountability for AIC recommendations.13
The AIC was starved of funds and denied access to information or
personnel other than departmental officers.
Under the 1984 legislation, the Aboriginal Co-Ordinating Council (ACC)
and the Island Co-Ordinating Council (ICC) were set up to receive
grants, enter into contracts, and establish and operate businesses for
the ‘promotion, progress, development and well being’ of Aborigines or
Islanders. Politically, as always, they are confined to an advisory
role. In 1987, after the government had settled several under award
wages cases out of court, the ACC passed a resolution that full wages
for all communities should be backdated to June 1st 1986.
The government simply ignored the resolution.
As
DOGITs were conferred from 1986, hospital, police and administrative
buildings remained the province of the various departments, as did
nearly all revenue-producing enterprises whose profits were absorbed
into the Welfare Fund until 1993 and expended for many departmental
costs. The councils were thus predominantly dependent on rentals,
alcohol profits, federal pensions and CDEP funding to cover municipal
functions. In 1988 minister Bob Katter Jnr argued that funds and
self-management should be denied to councils who negotiated directly
with federal agencies.’14
Community councils today continue to pay the price for decades of State
government manipulation and fragmentary devolution of management.
Budgets calculated for DOGITs are based on what the department would
have otherwise outlaid to run the local government functions,15
despite the obvious gross deficiencies over decades of both funding and
local government amenities. Indeed the massive infrastructure backlog
on Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities has been assessed nationally
at $2.5 billion.16
As
a result of ineffective transitional support, described by the Public
Accounts Committee in 1991 as ‘woefully inadequate’,17
there is a desperate need to import skills and expertise to compensate
for depressed educational and practical experience. Administration,
law, finances, accounting, engineering and town planning are all
specialist fields, but professional advice is not always available or
affordable and importation is also highly costly financially, socially
and culturally. Yet Indigenous councils currently exercise functional
responsibility for 59 local government operations, compared with only 34
for mainstream councils.
For every local government area – excepting Aboriginal communities and
shires – local government grants are calculated by subtracting assessed
revenue raising capacity from total expenditure need. Since 1991/92,
however, grants to these communities are reduced by almost
two-thirds18
mainly because unemployment benefits (redirected through ATSIC as CDEP)
are factored into revenue. Effectively, council progress is restricted
by pre-existing policies and hamstrung by funding which is arguably
insufficient even to meet the provision of essential services. No other
small towns run their councils on unemployment benefits. It is this
parlous funding position which forces councils to rely so heavily on
canteen revenue. It is inconceivable that this grotesque travesty of
human rights persists in the twenty-first century.
It
is more than a decade since the Legislative Review Committee argued that
all obstacles to equal participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander councils in local government should be removed from State
legislation. Yet directives still emanate largely from Brisbane,
coordinated by ‘fly-in, fly-out’ visits and short-term local agents of
consequent limited experience. This operational and financial
strangulation effectively degrades councils’ administrative capacities.
The Review Committee stressed the need for equity of service levels
between Indigenous communities and on a par with non-Indigenous local
government areas: effective self-management could not occur while
council powers and their exercise are subject to government, ministerial
or departmental veto. Administrative, policy-making and program
development costs should be factored into service provision funding,
which should be organised in three to five year terms to enhance
development planning.
It
is almost two years since the ACC, in a detailed review, urged that all
‘protectionist’ residues be eradicated, and administration of local
council legislation transferred from the ‘specialised’ observation of
DATSIP to the standard parameters of the department of Local Government
and Planning, alongside mainstream councils. Councils have stated a
preference for the ACC to be resourced as the primary provider of
support services and to exercise a coordinating role with regard to
services, training or advice provided by other agencies including
solicitors, development consultants, enterprise feasibility studies,
tourism, child welfare services and women’s issues.
This devolution of advice and agency is vital for Indigenous control of
management at local level; fragmenting access to expertise diminishes
individual participation in community processes. At Aurukun, for
instance, in the late 1980s the council and community facilities such as
the post office, store and other agencies were predominately staffed by
residents. Yet such is the unsustainable complexity of requirements
(currently there are at least 15 different health programs, 200
education programs and numerous economic development schemes19)
that councils are increasingly forced to rely on non-Indigenous
personnel. Yet advisors and staff on many communities – due in large
part to funding constraints – are not necessarily the best qualified,
nor the most attitudinally-appropriate, candidates.
Governments continue to insist that imposition of non-Indigenous systems
will somehow deliver greater independence for communities over their own
affairs. There is no historical basis for such a belief nor confidence
in its logic: communities have no effective representation or advocacy
within non-Indigenous systems which are characterised by different
values, different cultural expectations, different legitimacies of
authority, different aspirations.
After one hundred years, surely it is time to face the facts:
governments have monumentally failed in their attempts at social
engineering. Big brother is an embarrassing – and dangerous –
anachronism. He must be evicted before he does any further damage.
1
Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Annual
Report, 1970.
2
QSA TR254 1C/190 policy statement (circa November
1979); ibid, 10.1.80.
3
Daly, A. E. & Smith, D. E., ‘Indigenous sole-parent
families: invisible and disadvantaged’, Centre for Aboriginal
Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) Discussion
Paper, No 134/1997.
4
Finlayson, J.D. & Auld A.J., ‘Shoe or stew? Balancing wants and
needs in indigenous households: a study of appropriate
income support payments and policies for families.’ CAEPR
Discussion Paper, No 182/1999.
6
DATSIPD A0000881 COR/203:2.
7
Sanders, W, ‘The rise and rise of the CDEP scheme: an Aboriginal
‘workfare’ program in times of persistent unemployment’, CAEPR Discussion Paper, No 54/1993:7.
8
Henry, R, and Daly, A., ‘Indigenous families and the welfare
system: The Kuranda community case study, Stage Two’, CAEPR
Discussion Paper, No 216/2001.
9
DAIA 00007-006 6.8.1986.
10
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, No Reverse Gear: A
National Review of the Community Development Employment
Projects Scheme, Report to ATSIC, May 1993:82.
11
Altman, G C and Daly A E, ‘The CDEP scheme: a census-based
analysis of the labour market status of participants
in 1986’, CAEPR Discussion Paper, No 36/1992:10, 15.
13
QSA TR254 1A/1252 1.9.76.
14
DAIA 01-038-012 June 1988.
15
Towards Self-Government, A discussion paper,
August 1991:32.
19
Martin, D, ‘Is welfare dependency “welfare poison”? An
assessment of Noel Pearson’s proposals for
Aboriginal welfare reform’, CAEPR Discussion paper No
213/2001.
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