indigenous politics
16 Jul 2009
What 'Liberal Consensus'?
Peter Sutton may be a respected voice in Indigenous affairs, but in his new book he is more interested in throwing punches than solving problems, writes Jon Altman
I'll disclose my interest at the outset. I run a centre that undertakes research to inform public policy in the difficult area of Indigenous affairs. My years working on Indigenous issues, mainly from the perspectives of economics and anthropology, only number 32, fewer than Peter Sutton's 40, and the list of communities I have visited is less impressive than his. I know enough, however, to recognise that The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of Liberal Consensus, Sutton's new collection of polemical essays, offers limited assistance to those striving to address the undeniable development and social problems Indigenous Australians face.Sutton has a huge reputation in the academy with a long track record in Indigenous studies, primarily in linguistics, material culture and native title. Sutton knows Cape York languages, he curated the memorable Dreamings exhibition in New York that placed Aboriginal art on the world stage in 1988, and he has worked as an anthropologist on numerous land rights and native title cases that have required him to prove to the courts continuity of tradition, connection to country and associated religious and economic affiliations.
Arguably, Sutton's career as a linguist and anthropologist has been made in the Indigenous cultural and land rights arenas. In 2000, he had an epiphany: the vestiges of pre-colonial social norms, in combination with alcohol and passive welfare, have formed a deadly cocktail when interacting with western institutions. This is not a new observation. Sutton himself quotes WEH Stanner's 1958 observation that the Market and the Dreaming may be incompatible. And, since 2000, Noel Pearson has been on a similar moral and political crusade focused on Cape York, the same region in which Sutton has specialised. Indeed, Sutton's book has been published hard on the heels of Pearson's Up From The Mission, reviewed on newmatilda.com earlier this month.
Pearson's reform agenda is both more sophisticated and productive than Sutton's, in part because Pearson identifies both the decline in Indigenous social norms and inappropriate and inadequate state action as problematic, whereas Sutton is more limited in his understanding of the state apparatus. Where Pearson has a policy agenda, Sutton is ultimately a policy nihilist: he proposes no future pathway. While he finds past assimilation abhorrent and he abhors the destructiveness of so-called "self determination", he hints on many occasions that the former is probably preferable to the latter, invoking the emotive posture "in the name of the child" (both present and future), as used by Mal Brough to justify heavy-handed intervention in the Northern Territory.
The publication of The Politics of Suffering also coincides with the release of the Productivity Commission's Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage 2009 report. With the now-common media and political hype drawing attention to yet more disappointing results in closing the gaps, the Melbourne University Press publicity machine was well positioned to promote Sutton's book.
To the key question of how the problems facing Indigenous Australia have become so deeply entrenched, Sutton's answer is that among scholars — and I do not think he excludes himself from this category — there has been a code of silence born not of malice, but of the cultural relativist framework within which social anthropologists in particular operate.
Sutton takes the high moral ground as the scholar who will risk all at the end of a distinguished career to out his peers. He sets out to establish his moral authority based on references to the numerous communities that he has visited and having thus chronicled his credentials, Sutton progresses with what I regard as a selective and at times indulgent polemic. I make this assertion on two grounds. First, he rarely links his observations about Indigenous dysfunction to empirical evidence from the numerous and diverse places he has visited — his main focus is on Aurukun in north Queensland but he is too comfortable shifting from this particular to the general. Second, he fails to engage with a massive body of scholarship, much generated by people whom he selectively references using private rather than public sources, and he often fails to place the scholarship that he does reference in its proper context.
I particularly object to some of Sutton's emotive backhanders and give just one typical example. He makes the observation that "Many of the academics who I knew who reacted negatively to the Intervention as a whole ... but failed to give primacy to the fate of so many children, were also childless". Sutton debases his own keen intellect here in concert with Mal Brough's hysterical and self-serving observation that people who did not support the Northern Territory Intervention didn't care about kids, or hadn't had kids.
My major concern, however, is Sutton's scholarship. His central hypothesis is that the role of tradition as an explanator of dysfunction has been under-emphasised and protected in some way. While Pearson confronts Indigenous people and their leaders in Cape York communities for a code of silence that excuses violence, alcoholism and abuse, Sutton wants to confront the academy and some of his peers. In my view this is a highly charged and moralistic confrontation based on a largely imagined intellectual indiscretion of silence, a latter day version of Stanner's "Great Australian Silence".
In my reading of the literature I see very little silence. What I see is many academics grappling with the highly problematic role of culture and transformation in explaining poor outcomes both from a mainstream statistical perspective and for Indigenous people. There are numerous publications that highlight the role of children's autonomy and absence of effective sanctions in explaining poor school attendance, for example, or the significance of competing cultural prerogatives — especially kin-based pressures to share — in explaining poor mainstream employment outcomes, poor health and public housing problems, to name but a few areas of inquiry.
In seeking to highlight the role of Indigenous culture as an explanator of dysfunction, Sutton understates the link between structural factors and failure. He writes, "In 2008, one can still read accounts [unspecified] arguing that dispossession, dislocation, separation, exclusion from services, inadequate services and the tyranny of distance were sufficient to explain current levels of Indigenous disadvantage, especially in the field of Indigenous health." This seems like a reasonable and comprehensive list to me although we can easily add culture.
To be more precise, there is compelling evidence that if the curriculum is right and education facilities adequate, children will attend and can excel at school (not to mention young adults learning outside formal school settings). There is evidence that if employment arrangements are suitably flexible, Indigenous people can excel as employees or as self-employed workers and business people, that if health professionals are suitably tolerant of bi-cultural determinants of poor health, outcomes are improved, that if design takes into account residential preferences, family structure, and environmental health factors, housing can provide effective long-term shelter.
Structural factors like historical and current needs-based neglect cannot wholly explain dysfunction where it occurs — and that is not everywhere — and nor can cultural factors, whether pre-colonial vestiges or post-colonial modifications, be upheld as the sole explanator. Such a dichotomous framing is erroneous in any case because today inter-culturality, an ongoing and highly diverse adaptive blend of customary and western social norms, is everywhere.
There are successes in Indigenous policy that need to be recognised, replicated and supported; and there are policies and policy processes that need to be reformed. Now, as history and culture wars are being exposed as unproductive, Sutton seeks to generate a new firestorm, as if in the name of imagined practical outcomes ideological contests are worth revisiting. This to my mind is irresponsible; to use Sutton's words "it beggars belief". While Pearson has clearly defined his "radical centre", a legally defined mix of rights and responsibilities in the Cape York trials, Sutton never defines his. He announces the end of the "liberal consensus" (was there ever such a thing in Indigenous affairs?) with vigour but Sutton's own project remains opaque.
This is a deeply disturbing and very negative book. Frustrated by his own inability to influence state policy — which too many scholars believe is a seamless and unproblematic process merely to be triggered by their expertise — Sutton shifts his attack onto his conspiratorial colleagues and his disciplinary foundations.
Unfortunately, this treatise against Indigenous culture comes at a moment when Sutton is likely to win many allies who are all too willing to use such arguments to impose monolithic assimilationist solutions. As if such approaches have not been tried, and failed, before. As if our economic system and materialist culture are not looking to be increasingly on shaky foundations. Ultimately, in his desire to expose others' denial of what is failing, Sutton himself denies what works. Indigenous people in many places have overcome extraordinary hurdles to foster emergent social norms and new institutions to negotiate the difficult space between the Market and the Dreaming. Their efforts are ignored and unacknowledged in this book.
Peter Sutton's new book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of Liberal Consensus, is published by Melbourne University Press.
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"Unfortunately, this treatise against Indigenous culture comes at a moment when Sutton is likely to win many allies who are all too willing to use such arguments to impose monolithic assimilationist solutions. As if such approaches have not been tried, and failed, before. As if our economic system and materialist culture are not looking to be increasingly on shaky foundations. "
Yes, indeed, Rudd and Macklin are only too ready to listen to Sutton and Pearson, and like thinkers. They refuse to even think ‘out of the box’.
With mass Commercialisation, consumerism and the Markets looking more and more shaky every day, and irrelevant to a people who are culturally and possibly even genetically ‘different’ to white profit-driven society, and with ‘sharing’ these days looked on as total weakness in our broken society, we just seemingly do not have the capacity to understand another way of thinking so very deeply ingrained after many thousands of years. These people survived this long; we are having trouble surviving a couple of thousand years of raping lands and peoples, and with our never-ending wars of aggression and mass murder, mainly in the pursuit of material gain.
I believe that unless we start very soon to understand and appreciate the cultural underpinnings of indigenous peoples, the connection with ‘land’, we, the white invaders, oppressors and occupiers of this country are going to be the ones left well behind. Like, we are NOT going to survive! Dazza.
There is an old piece of self-serving conservative mythology about how Churchill once said (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/63556/Digging_fossils.html) that he who wasn’t left wing when he was young was hard of heart, he who wasn’t right wing when he was older was soft in the head. Liberal Party politicians (for example it might have been written for Peter Costello) firmly believe this of course, as do businessmen, newspaper columnists, radio shock jocks, developers, foresters and nuclear power advocates. I’ve come to the conclusion, sadly, after many years of observation, that there are some biologists (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/52610/Point_Counter_Point.html) who seem to believe the same thing, a discipline where I would have thought it essential to remain young at heart (much like Tim Costello). I don’t know if the observation would apply in the social sciences?
Jonnyboy55
Sorry guys, but as long as we treat indigenous people as different, they WILL REMAIN different!
Does "if the curriculum is right" mean teaching in native languages rather than in English? Does "if employment arrangements are suitably flexible" mean that indigeous people can’t work in exactly the same way as other humans? Does "tolerant of bi-cultural determinants of poor health" mean that that indigenous people should have different healthcare management to other humans?
As long as well-intentioned academics like Mr Altman and do-gooding public institutions like OATSIH perpetuate this well-intentioned but ultimately flawed variation on apartheid, aboriginal people will never be equal to the rest of us Jon
While I can claim nothing like the length of time, knowledge of, and intensity of interaction with Indigenous people as can Peter Sutton or Jon Altman, nevertheless as a sometime teacher educator of Kooris, I am sensitive to the problems that can arise when a courageous (if somewhat ferocious) ‘insider’ (Sutton) attempts to fight his way out of the often stifling conformity imposed by the dominant discourses of the past 40 years about Aboriginal identity, culture, disadvantage and related issues. So while I can appreciate the position from which Altman writes, I nevertheless, feel he does potential readers a great disservice by focussing on a relatively narrow set of concerns, chief amongst which are Sutton’s references to colleagues with whom he has disagreed at various times. But the book is so very much more than this!! Polemical certainly, but not to the exclusion of, deep scholarship, the marshalling of evidence to support claims ( with which-provided we do so in a well-informed fashion- we are at liberty to disagree ), and folding together the personal with wider social analysis. Whatever one may eventually decide about the book as a whole,it is in my view it deserves to be read thought about deeply and discussed. I agree with others who see it as one of the most important publications on Indigenous struggles and suffering of recent times.
Harry Morton Dazza Spot on. Says it all.
Right on dazza, if sustainablity is the new goal then we have much to learn from Aboriginal people.
"Does "if the curriculum is right" mean teaching in native languages rather than in English? Does "if employment arrangements are suitably flexible" mean that indigeous people can’t work in exactly the same way as other humans?"
Dazza’s point as usual, is on the mark. The obvious response to the above thinking is to question why it is, exactly, that we think we have the right conditions, the right curriculum, the right style of flexibility in employment, etc. Human work style actually varies greatly dependent on the amount of freedom given or denied. It’s likely that cultural supersession of social elements above work is the more normal approach to life, but one which has been crushed by centuries of slavery, feudalism and then capitalism.
From an anthropological perspective, and indeed from a pyschological perspective, most aboriginal cultures are far more socially advanced than our own (emphasis on social interactivity and relationships, rather than on power and subordination). Why wouldn’t we take some leads from them, given the fact we are, after all, in Aboriginal (Murri, Koori, et al), not European, country? 40000 years of habitation leaves most western culture for dead in terms of longevity; there’s obviously something in it, if we could only bring ourselves to accept that and not fall back on the default colonialist thinking.
And yes, teaching in native languages (and also English, which I believe is the norm in these examples) is a good means of preserving cultural identity. Cultural identity tends to relate to self-worth and well balanced minds. Perhaps worth reading Eric Fromm’s The Sane Society for a pyschologist’s view of our insane western culture that presumes greatness without any particular foundation.
cheers, Derek
Without reading Peter Sutton’s book i feel i am unable to make any meaningful comment, but the question which forms in my mind in relation to this discussion is "To what extent are the contributors familiar with the concept of ethnocide?"
I recommend the article by Pierre Clastres "On Ethnocide"
see Pierre Clastres "On Ethnocide"
http://www.songlines.org.au/?p=573
And. if you are interested in ending ethnocide in Australian life:
“Putting First Peoples First” submission to National Human Rights Consultation
http://www.songlines.org.au/?p=578
cheers
Bruce Reyburn
It is an egregious error to attribute the various pre-colonial cultures of indigenous Australians as significant factors in their various situations, including those situations of great social concern.
I am also an anthropologist and it has been my observation that the situations and kinds of social pathologies among indigenous minorities with histories of displacement, appropriation, marginalization and ghettoisation is similar around the world and seems to get worse when welfare dependancy is added. Australia certainly was and is not the worst of all countries in its treatment of indigenous people.
The culture argument can be both romantic (mystical dreaming, songlines, walking gently on the land, bush tucker, think the movie ‘Australia’) or perjorative ( intolerant of alcohol, male dominance, traditional abuse of women and girls, can’t live in houses). It casts aboriginal people as the "other" who must not be - and can never be -"us".
This kind of confused thinking implies cultural pattern of behaviour are innate and it encourages indigenous Australians and non-indigenous Australians alike to accept that culture can be preserved by policies that encourage segregation and isolation. In fact such policies actually create create destructive, miserable subcultures born of extreme boredom, depression and feelings of unworthiness.
Culture - all cultures - are mutable, malleable, ever-changing, and while we all retain some of our ancestral folkways, these are usually continually being remodeled for contemporary relevance. Indigeous Australian need programs to widen their choices and opportunities in life. Go Noel Pearson!
Penno,
The point is, our western cultures (in Australia) should begin to reflect their Aboriginal cultures, not the other way around.
Apart from the facts (stolen land, no treaties, genocide, far worse than in many other countries with indigenous people, with a population of close to a million dropping to between 40 and 60000 in just a little over 100 years), it simply makes no sense to continue a European culture in an oriental land. European cultures reflect the environment they are from, and that is not Australia. There are *reasons* certain cultural traditions sprung up in Australia that didn’t in England.
As an anthropologist, you are no doubt aware of these variations, and they do affect (significantly) Aborigines today, both those who hold their traditional cultures still in tact, and those who don’t (via the legacy of history, tribal differences, Australian colonialist meddling in that area, via chucking different cultural groups into the same reservations, etc).
History, even apparently ‘dead’ history, continues to affect everyone. But culture is not dead history, it lives and changes, and even where languages and traditions have faltered, cultures have grown into the 21st century (just the same as they do for white folk). I see you start off your post by denying this important concept (by calling it an egregrious error, which tells previous posters they are wrong), and then develop it yourself further down the post. You are obviously either very aware that cultural differences are real, or believe that the ‘proper’ culture for Aborigines should blend to that of the rest of us [of european descent, presumably, and not of Chinese, Lebanese, central Asian, middle eastern, Maori, etc].
We should be clear; English culture is a thousand miles apart from chinese culture, and yet representatives from both cultures live in large numbers in Australia. We are not, culturally, all the same. We are different. That’s a thing to be cherished, and is certainly not synonymous with apartheid, or any other such corruption of that recognition. Egalitarianism (it doesn’t exist, but Australians persist in thinking it does) does not deny cultural differences, any more than science denies religion. It’s just a sad fact that many championing egalitarianism are doing it for the wrong reasons. Perhaps it can, in Australia, be used as a fancy, intellectual word for assimiliation.
As Graeme points out, when Aboriginal communities have the bare, unquestioned basics as the rest of us have, they’ll be on track to getting back on their feet and providing for themselves (and maybe even redeclaring requests for official treaties with the canberric government). You can’t deny a community everything the rest of Australia gets unquestioned, and then propose to deny them welfare too. You certainly can’t do it on the grounds of wishing to make the situation more fair (by equality in welfare). If you want a more graphic version of that proposal, you might look at Gaza. That is, severe economic strangulation. The choices at that point are to leave or starve.
It’s been very obvious over the last 15 years that this is exactly the choice the govt has been presenting, by making existence in these communities ever more difficult. In answer to Bruce Reyburn’s question, this is the concept of ethnocide, but in relevant UN conventions, it’s more accurately described as genocide. Specifically, the non-violent approach to genocide.
On your point about mirrored social pathologies, I’d be interested in you expanding on that. Where do they come from? My guess is that the reasons you provided (‘displacement, appropriation, marginalization and ghettoisation’), are mostly on the mark, barring appropriation, which may bely your inclination by accident. In law, you cannot ‘appropriate’ something already claimed/owned, and by definition, you can’t do it violently. Appropriation is a benign term, and appropriation did not happen in Australia, NZ, US, Canada, or any of the countries of South America.
So if you replace ‘appropriation’ with ‘war’, and ‘genocide’ and ‘occupation’, you’ll begin to see a more honest picture of why ‘social pathologies’ may exist in Aboriginal populations around the world. Reparations, serious reparations are in order, not calls for them to get a job or starve (essentially the Pearson position). Particularly audacious when we (white people) hold all the cards in that respect.
That’s not primarily about separations into ‘us’ and ‘them’ but acknowledging the very basic premise that a massive part of the associated social breakdown plus economic and physical poverty (both 3rd world in many communities according to the UN, if we needed proof that the government has one rule for Aborigines and one for the rest of us) is to do with the fact that, continuing to now, we have been attempting complete the genocide on the various nations of Australia we started, first by guns and poison, then by dispersal of families, and then by forced merging of communities (to promote internal violence) and now by disperal of communities, and the killing off of persisting language. Rarely, in modern times, have we seen a more comprehensive and systemic version of genocide.
Add to that the assertions that *Aboriginal* paedophiles are rampant in the north (the studies don’t, so far as I recall, suggest widespread issues, nor do they pin the blame on Aboriginal men, in the detail. For example, a 17 year old boy having sex with a 15 year old girl is not quite paedophilia, or at least, its not the shock-horror thinking it is with regard to Aboriginal issues anywhere else in western society). This, of course, conveniently emasculates Aboriginal activist men, except those that side without reserve with the prevailing government.
The whole situation is deplorable, and so many Australians (left and right) lap it up, love their indignation, and dress up their old colonial instincts in new intellectual fancy dress to continue the same ‘we’ll fix/save you’ approach which works broadly via Ben Tre logic.
As for Noel Pearson; he is Aboriginal, he has a right to talk on Aboriginal issues. But think about this; why do we hear inordinately more from him than from so many other well-balanced, perceptive, intelligent and truly inspirational Aboriginal activists who actively listen to their communities? I would suggest it is purely because of the fact his views are so inline with those of state and federal government, and so many of these others are not.
cheers, Derek
I am a long term white resident of Yuendumu (now a "prescribed area" under the NTER) that unlike Peter Sutton has not suffered a Road to Damascus type conversion. I continue to see much good in remote Aboriginal society, not least its resilience under sustained beaurocratic attack.
I find all this talk of trying to solve the "Aboriginal Problem" rather depressing and annoying. I’m finding Peter Sutton’s book rather annoying. I’ve only just started it. He starts off with a litany of shock and horror and I’m told it doesn’t get any better. Jon Altman’s review indicates that Peter Sutton (unlike Noel Pearson)knocks many (predominantly other academics) but offers no useful alternatives of his own. It’s going to be a hard slog to finish it!
What right have we to dictate how remote Aborigines should live their lives? What right do Governments have to attack Aboriginal society with a politically opportunistic propaganda barrage?
I see the disempowerment of Aborigines as a far greater injustice than the existence of an ethnocentrically defined "Gap".
I’ve seen "self determination" (much maligned by Peter Sutton and like minded people) work despite often hostile opposition and even sabotage by public servants and politicians.
Pat Turner put it in a nutshell when at the start of the Intervention she defined it as "the final nail in the coffin of self-determination"
Having now lived two years under the NTER I find her words sadly prophetic. I’ll leave the final word to Kim Beazley Sr.:
"In Australia, our ways have mostly produced disaster for the Aboriginal people. I suspect that only when their right to be distinctive is accepted, will policy become creative"…