A Poverty of Will

7am Monday morning is no time to be at a work function.  And, yet, yesterday morning I found myself sitting down at a business breakfast and doing that “networking” thing that makes you wish you had a proper job, like a sewerage inspector or the guy inside the padded suit at an attack dog training school.  I am not a morning person.

My reason for being there was that the breakfast at least supported a good cause – the International Day for People with a Disability.  Our guest speaker was none other than the Hon Bill Shorten MP, Minister for Most Things.  Big Bill, when he wasn’t being interrupted by the asinine MC, spoke about the origins and philosophy behind the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  Even through the blur of the early morning fuzz, through the degrading triviality of the MC and through the gumminess of cold toast, Big Bill’s message cut through.  That message was, in so many words, that rights without power are just words on a page.  That is, you can enshrine people’s rights in legislation and policies, but unless those people have the power to assert their rights then all we are doing is wasting trees and ink.  The point behind the NDIS was to give disabled people power as a consumer and, in doing so, help to make them visible and influential.  The Scheme is merely the spark that lights the fuse.  It is self-determination that will, ultimately, blow open the walls that separate people with a disability from the cloisters of power and influence.

 

As I reflected on the philosophy of the NDIS, my mind immediately turned back to a documentary on the Howard Government I had been watching not 12 hours previous.  The documentary, Liberal Rule, touched on the way in which the Howard Government had dealt with the group in society who, perhaps more than any other, suffers from systemic discrimination, disempowerment, poverty and marginalisation – our Indigenous community.  The contrast between the Labor Party’s vision for disabled Australians and Howard’s approach to Indigenous disadvantage could not be more stark.  Where the NDIS seeks to empower and make visible the struggles of those with a disability, Little Johnnie throughout his time in government sought to do the complete opposite for Indigenous Australians.  The Howard Government’s disempowerment of our Indigenous community was both symbolic – by refusing to fully acknowledge the hurt of the Stolen Generations through apology – and, ultimately, concrete – through the “Intervention”.  Self-determination was supplanted with state-determination over how Indigenous people should feel and live.  In this sleight of hand, Howard’s policies traced a direct philosophical lineage back to those who had thought it was in the best interests of Indigenous children to be removed from their families to be raised by good, clean Christians.  They were, in short, simply the next generation in the genealogy of disempowerment.

We're from the government and we're here to help...



Now, I don’t claim to have the fix for Indigenous disadvantage in this country – but I do know that systemic issues require solutions from both within and without, and that the imposition of a code of behaviour on a group rarely delivers change or success.  This post, however, is not about arguing for a particular policy position.  What is of interest here is: why is it that we can deliver a (hopefully) powerful and constructive policy to address disadvantage in one group within society, but not another?  Why is it that the Gillard Government can dedicate billions of dollars toward helping disabled persons and the main questions being asked are: is that enough and will all the money promised actually be available?  While, conversely, we still having debates around what to do on the “Indigenous issue” and the very validity of “pouring in” further money.  What does this reveal?

At one level, it reveals the complexity of resolving Indigenous disadvantage.  But complexity is only a problem where there is an absence of ideas and/or will.  While I don’t work in this field, I have still met with many people – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – who have ideas to address this issue.  Some of those ideas are outstanding, others are execrable, providing only self-aggrandisement for white liberals while doing nothing for (and maybe even harming) those they claim to help.  Nonetheless, as a society, we don’t seem to suffer from a poverty of ideas. Rather, the weakness lays in the will to do what’s required.  A weakness borne of racism. 

There are no votes in Indigenous health and education.  Such things are, not only, beyond the experience of average Australians, they are beyond the care of too many.  Even today, the Australian experience too often begins in 1788, with Indigenous society positioned as some kind of pre-historic mise en scene to our triumphant narrative of progress and equality in the face of adversity.  Lost in the background, the Indigenous experience only comes to the fore to get in the way and disrupt our comfortable perspective.

At our best, we are a wonderfully compassionate and inventive nation – the NDIS, if it lives up to the promise, could be evidence of this.  At our worst, we are hateful and bigoted.  The real shame is that too many of us sit in that middle ground of apathy and self-interest. While for a glorious moment I sat listening to Big Bill, feeling great about being an Australian and leading the world on the empowerment of people with a disability (and we should be proud of this), the sickening realisation returns.  The realisation that there is still an implicit definition in Australian society that it is not acceptable to help some people in a constructive manner that deals with underlying power structures, that we are not yet ready as a nation to tackle this convenient racism toward our Indigenous citizens and that we are not willing to let the rights of our Indigenous people be more than words on paper.  There is hope that the reforms we are seeing in the disability space mark a maturation in our thinking toward disadvantage – a sign of things to come – but it is also hard to escape the fear that it carries no greater, lasting cultural significance than a drunken Balinese henna tattoo ... [fades to static]