In mid February, spectacular television footage of a confrontation between police and young Aborigines in Sydeney's Redfern flashed around the world. By mirroring the daily scenes of conflict from occupied Palestine, these images dramatised to the world a real hidden war in Australia.
This hidden war doesn't usually make as spectacular TV as the war zones of the Middle East. But it is as deadly. After more than two decades of bipartisan economic rationalism at all levels of government, here are some shock facts that reveal the war that is killing Indigenous Australians faster each year.
According to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report, "A statistical overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia":
* Aboriginal life expectancy is around 20 years lower than for other Australians. The gap actually increased between 1997 and 2001, from 20.6 to 20.7 years for men and 18.8 to 19.6 for women. For men, this is a lower life expectancy than in Papua New Guinea, Burma or Cambodia. For women, it is the same as sub-Saharan Africa, with AIDS factored out.
* The Aboriginal infant mortality rate is 2.5 times that of the rest of Australia, with the rate in the Northern Territory four times the national average. Moreover, the number of babies of low birth weight is double the non-Aboriginal average and actually increased over the late 1990s. The figure is higher than those for Ethiopia, Senegal, Mexico and Indonesia.
* The unemployment rate for Aborigines is about three times higher than that of the non-Aboriginal population.
* Aborigines are imprisoned at 16 times the rest of the population and, consistently since 1999, have made up 20% of the prison population — a rise of 6% since 1991.
* In 1990-99, 115 Aborigines died in custody, representing 18% of custody deaths.
* Indigenous people also suffer higher rates of crime. A 2001 study in New South Wales found that Aborigines are 5.5 times more likely to suffer domestic violence, 3.4 times more likely to suffer assault, 2.8 times more likely to suffer sexual assault, and 2.5 times more likely to be murdered.
* Aboriginal households on average earn about $200 less per week than non-Aboriginal households.
* Aborigines are half as likely to have completed schooling and only about 40% are employed.
* A January 2004 study by the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research found that "labour market discrimination is more likely to manifest in an inability of Indigenous individuals to secure a job, rather than in being paid low wages".
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The HREOC report also found that the life expectancy of indigenous people in the USA, Canada and New Zealand had fallen since the mid 1990s, but the deterioration had been sharper for Indigenous people in Australia.
Each time another horror report on the situation of Indigenous Australians comes out, many people blink in despair. Is there any way to end this nightmare for the most oppressed in this wealthy country, they wonder. Even some Indigenous voices are proclaiming the failure of welfare solutions and are looking to other more dubious fixes, such as the "social entrepreneurism" (read: leave it to the capitalists) favoured by neoliberal conservatives of the Tony Blair-Mark Latham school.
Welfare is important as a safety net, but it does not attack the source of the problems. The totally unacceptable situation of Indigenous Australia can be turned around with affirmative action measures that actively address the cause of theiroppression.
But if the reforms won by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated the limits of welfarism, they also showed that where programs of affirmative action in education and employment were actually implemented (i.e. governments and private employers were forced to make special places available for oppressed groups) significant progress was achieved. Special education programs for Aborigines have been gutted and there have never been enforceable quotas for Aboriginal employment by government and large companies.
The Socialist Alliance stands for a program which begins with an apology and full compensation for the stolen generations and restores and extends land rights, based on the High Court Mabo judgement in all states.
We demand the return of wages stolen from Aboriginal workers under past racist "protection" regimes. We will pursue increased funding for, and Indigenous control of, community services. We demand affirmative action programs to get better access to education and employment.
Above all, we call for a treaty to acknowledge the dispossession resulting from the British invasion and to establish a framework for self-determination of the Indigenous peoples of Australia.
Peter Boyle & Iggy Kim
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 31, 2004.
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