Views from Western Australia

That was the headline over a lead story in the West Australian newspaper on 7.7.08; the story ran over two pages and it was covered in the editorial. The West was reasonably balanced in it approach, unfortunately the government is not.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Michelle Roberts, is considering closing Aboriginal communities; she was reported as saying "a Sustainable Indigenous Communities policy was investigating where money should be spent to promote sustainability."

However, further investigation shows the policy has not been written yet!  But it appears a ‘Taskforce’ to do the work has been established. The growing momentum towards this point over the last twelve months or so has been very concerning; it appears to be following on from Vanstone’s agenda and builds on the disastrous reforms of the CDEP. 

No doubt, the taskforce will meet and consider each community via some criteria that are carefully articulated in the yet to be written policy document. One would hope that the criteria includes actually going to the said communities and talking to the people concerned. People need to be involved in every community and outstation that is being considered; otherwise this smacks of being another government decision ‘for their own good’.

The process currently lacks transparency, which is really problematic when you consider it is potentially making major decisions over the future of people’s lives. This policy must be properly developed including a period where it is available for public comment. Otherwise, this becomes the inevitable broad brush response, to a few identified ‘problem communities’. It needs to be acknowledged that many remote communities and outstations function well. Clearly, this cannot consider and evaluate communities on only the basis of economic cost; but what other criteria are the bean counters going to use.  

This has the potential to be the third wave of dispossession and flies in the face of government policy to increase the population in areas like the Kimberley. It goes without saying that these people want to be on their country and history suggests this is principally a commitment to family, law and culture. People just want to get on with their lives.

This also has native title implications and will undoubtedly impact on other government policies like Aboriginal involvement in land care through Natural Resource Management.  Then again, maybe it is the next wave of dispossession; perhaps this is what the Deputy Premier, Eric Ripper, was getting at when talking about the communities on the Dampier Peninsular at the recent National Native Title conference in Perth.

There is an enormous diversity of communities in the remote areas of Western Australia; how can a Perth based taskforce of bureaucrats can understand this is they do not visit country and speak to the people concerned. It also should be noted that people also often live in communities because they want to get away from the towns that don’t really want them there!  Look at news reports about Broome from earlier this year as a case in point. Closing communities will push people into towns that are already not coping. This naturally brings to mind a point of comparison with similar sized white welfare towns, or towns that receive what is called ‘industry assistance’; one could well ask, “how come they continue to receive all kinds of government services and assistance?” 

This announcement by the Minister has ‘problems’ written all over it and it is definitely not the way to develop social policy. It is disturbing that the minister has announced this and tied it into economic indicators and an undefined, unwritten policy document.