BY PETER BOYLE
At its annual general meeting on October 30, Kerry and James Packer's PBL company announced it had paid $3.4 billion in bonuses to its executives. But while the greedy scum that run PBL stack away their coins, other Australians are struggling to survive.
The latest Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander census figures show Indigenous households earn about $200 less per week than non-Indigenous households. Indigenous people are half as likely to have completed their schooling and only about 40% are employed, compared to 60% in the wider population.
A few months earlier, a report in the August 29 Sydney Morning Herald explained:
- Aborigines still live an average 20 years less than their fellow nationals. Indigenous males live on average to just 56 years of age and females to 63.
- The Aboriginal female death rate from assault is between seven and 13 times greater, depending on the age group, than for non-Aboriginal women, while the male rate is six to 22 times higher.
- Aboriginal households' average incomes are 62% of other households, 43% of the juveniles in detention are Indigenous and the Aboriginal diabetes rate is 11% compared to 3% for others, the report also revealed.
The thing is, most Australians just blink when they see these shocking statistics. They've heard it so many times before, and they are convinced by politicians and mainstream media commentators and editors that nothing can be done.
Their argument is that Australian governments have thrown heaps of money in welfare measures at "the Aboriginal problem" and it doesn't seem to get better, just worse.
Then they laud the conservative and opportunist Indigenous politicians, like Noel Pearson, who say that "welfare has failed" and we have to look for so-called "new solutions" such as joint ventures with the fat cats like the Packers. CEOs quadrupled their corporate salaries between the 1990 and 2000, according to Greg Hywood, writing in the Age on October 15.
Your average Australian CEO is making about $2 million a year, has been enjoying double-digit percentage increases for at least five years, and has generally achieved that by sacking large chunks of his workforce and pushing down the pay of those he keeps.
In a nation where the average household income is about $60,000, pay rates are rising in the vicinity of 3-4%a year, and the average superannuation payout is $67,000.
While Aboriginal households are on $200 less per week!
Meanwhile rich households are getting a round of tax cuts for their surperannuation and that's just a small start of the tax cuts for the rich in the leadup to the next federal election.
And Pearson and his cheer squads in the Liberal and Labor parties say the solution to Indigenous poverty and misery is to look to business deals with corporate money grubbers!
It is such a ridiculous notion but it has some purchase becasue people think: what else — when welfare has failed?
The point is — there is a "what else".
First, don't bag the welfare net. It saves lives even if it doesn't address the problems at their source. It has been weakened and needs to be strengthened. Not just the specialist Indigenous welfare programs but the broader universal welfare programs.
Second, any serious attempt to address Indigenous oppression has to go beyond welfare and include a serious program of affirmative action in education and employment.
Special places for Indigenous students and Indigenous workers in public and private sector employment have a real and dramatic effect, as can be seen in the USA before the attacks on affirmative action took hold.
In Australia, there was never a serious start on affirmative action for Indigenous people. Even the special education programs, like Abstudy, have been cut back by Coalition and Labor federal governments.
Today:
- Only one-third of Indigenous students currently finish secondary school and yet we currently have a looming crisis in the training of Indigenous teachers.
- There has been a 33% decline in the number of Indigenous Australians training as teachers since the Coalition government came into power.
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me angry enough to keep fighting. I can put names and faces to this misery because I married into an Aboriginal family. My eldest daughter is one of the small number of Aboriginal teachers who graduated last year. She gives me stories from the coalface from her school where the kids are all poor and many are Aboriginal. I share her anger, every day.
But anyone with eyes and a bit of imagination can flesh out the grim statistics. I guess a challenge of alternative media outlets like 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly is to help people see the statistics for what they are: the underside of the "Lucky Country", the South in our North.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, November 5, 2003.
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