DO-GOODER PATERNALISM DISASTROUS FOR AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

The Centre for Independent Studies has just issued a seminal paper. It's called A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities. It makes out a compelling case that the existing deal is a disaster and that the main beneficiaries of the present arrangements are a parasitic and incompetent class of whites in the so-called caring professions..... In the process, they provide the basis for a long-overdue revaluation of the policies of H.C. (Nugget) Coombs.

Coombs, a former governor of the Reserve Bank, was the principal author of a paper called A Certain Heritage, published in 1983. Hughes and Warin call it "a blueprint" for "a socialist experiment - advocating communal land ownership, supported by substantial welfare transfers". Its aim was "to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander hunter-gatherer utopia that would culminate in a nation independent from the rest of Australia". Put as baldly as that, the whole notion sounds ridiculous. Part of the authors' point is that it always was ridiculous. The tragedy, as they see it, is that too few of the sensible people on the Left or the sceptics on the Right have had the courage to speak freely about dreadful social policy that has had such dire consequences for an already vulnerable underclass.....

As Hughes and Warin put it: "Nowhere in the world has communal land ownership ever led to economic development. Attempting to replicate hunter-gatherer groups in fixed locations created remote, fragmented communities that cannot support jobs and incomes." As a result, education, health, life expectancy, housing and related gaps between remote community dwellers and other Australians have widened. Alcoholism, substance abuse and crime have escalated. They conclude that "any group, regardless of ethnic origin, subjected to this experiment, with all energies deflected from economic to cultural activities, would have been condemned to the same fate". .....

I asked Hughes to expand on the paradox of a man of palpably good intentions being the source of so much misery. She explains it largely in terms of the millennial fantasies about noble savages that were such a pronounced feature of the times. "Coombs's compassion is very understandable," Hughes says. "It is not, however, understandable how a professional economist could formulate a utopian dream of hunter-gatherers living in remote communities, far away from the centres to which Aboriginal people were being attracted by access to education, health and improved housing.....

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