I can't comment directly on John Howard's plan to stomp into aboriginal communities, following a report on sexual abuse, but here's some thoughts on it anyhoo.

The quick summary: a health audit found that sexual abuse of children in Aboriginal communities is endemic. Howard started by banning alcohol and pornography, and has since sent the army and police in. (Note: it's election year. He has to call an election sometime between now and November, and he's currently trailing badly in the polls.)

Two different views from the media, first from Germaine Greer in the Guardian. Howard is undertaking 'a new crusade' -

It is hard not to view this as yet another attack on native title by the white establishment. No sooner had Aboriginal peoples achieved, after a tremendous expenditure of time, effort, expertise and money, freehold title to bits and pieces of country under the 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act, than there was an attempt to redefine freehold as it applied to Aboriginal areas, so that they could be reclaimed if there should be a need - for minerals, fossil fuels, foreign bases, tracking stations, whatever. New laws in 1993 and 1998 sealed this flagrant violation. Now, having had such resounding success in rescuing Iraq from tyranny, fanaticism and madness, Howard claims to be riding to the rescue of Aboriginal children in distress.

...

A year ago, the government stripped Mutitjulu [home of the traditional owners of Uluru] of its annual funding of A$3m (£1m) and installed a white man from Perth as adminstrator to the council. Two weeks ago the federal court ruled the appointment invalid. The elders rejoiced. Then Howard announced his coup d'etat. Until then tourists couldn't get to see Mutitjulu, because no one could get in without a permit. Simply walking in could get you a fine of A$1,000. Now Howard has swept away the right of Aboriginal freeholders to keep interlopers off their land; the permit system is to be abolished and tourists will be able to add Aboriginal dysfunction to the sights they go to see. Boundaries are important to Aboriginal peoples, who have always respected each other's space and have suffered acutely whenever disparate groups have been forced to occupy the same space. Land confers identity; failing to protect the integrity of one's land is tantamount to annihilation.

Greer goes on to argue that many in these communities are trying their best to address the problems: the government could support them, rather than undermining them as they have done. Its also worth noting that the rate of child abuse is not that much lower elsewhere in white Australia. In terms of raw numbers, the Aboriginal case is a drop in the Ocean - but of course, no police state is being declared in Sydney, and no bars are being closed down.

The second, sublimely right-wing, point of view comes from Australian Telegraph opinion-writer Piers Akerman ('the price of left ego is black despair'): he blames the left for ruining Aboriginal communities, and claims they are 'relieved' that the government is doing something. Quite how he's reached this conclusion without talking to anyone from those communities is unclear. What have the left done? Oh, lots of things: condemned Aborigines to 'welfare slavery', and written 'flawed reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody and the so-called "stolen generations"...'

What are the stolen generations? The forced removal of indigenous children, which -

happened in every state and territory of Australia. The separation of Aboriginal children started in Victoria and New South Wales as early as 1885 and, in some states, was not stopped until the 1970s. About 85% of Aboriginal families have been affected in some way, either by having children taken away from them or by being forced to make major decisions to avoid having their children taken. Mothers of some Aboriginal children would cover their fair-skinned children with black clay, hide them in trees, behind sand dunes, or in hollow logs. Families were moving constantly, to keep one step ahead of "welfare." Some families said that they were Italian, Maori, or Greek, leaving their true identity to themselves to escape the strict control of the white "protector." The removal of these children from their families affected more than just a few people. In New South Wales, the government estimated that, in New South Wales alone, there were at least 8,000 Aboriginal children who had been taken away from their families between 1885 and 1996. Aboriginal children were often taken for being "neglected."

So Piers' opinion is a little like saying: those damn lefties keep on writing books about the so-called 'holocaust'. This policy was effectively the final breaking of the connection between generations that could keep Aboriginal culture alive. I mean - the police came and dragged people's kids out of their families, and they never saw each other again. It doesn't take very much empathy to see how horrific this is, surely? (Unless, of course, "the darkies don't feel in the same way we do...")

Parallels to what happened in the US abound. Here's Piers again:

The disastrous effect of passive welfare, combined with an emphasis on distribution of any money earned by an individual through the extended family, has almost entirely destroyed individual enterprise. This was illustrated at one indigenous-owned resort site, where the operators unhappily told how their promising local employee had given up his job after pressure from other family members to share his earnings.

They had failed to learn the importance of selfishness... more on that shortly. Greer, conversely, points out:

Hunter-gatherer morality does not permit the accumulation of possessions and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle does not recognise the (utterly notional) value of money. Emily Kngwarreye once asked one of her patrons for a car for her nephew in payment for one of her paintings. The car was supplied, Kngwarreye gave it to her nephew and a few weeks later her patron was annoyed to learn that the nephew had sold the new car for A$300. "Why did he sell the car, a new car, for just A$300?" he asked. "Because he only needed A$300," said Kngwarreye. Capitalism simply doesn't know how to deal with people like this, except perhaps to make money out of them.

A comment on Piers' blog:

The real tragedy is how these left-wing perpetrators have treated the Aboriginal people as a collective... How many potential business leaders, engineers and scientists have been destroyed by this system??? To be an individual under a welfare tyranny is to be a leper.

Now to the US. Here's Senator Dawes, after a visit to the Cherokee in 1885. He would shortly afterwards push new laws to break up the Native American's collectively owned land into strips, helping them on the way to civilisation (and, only incidentally, selling off the surplus to the whites):

The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. It is Henry George's system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbours. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress. [The Earth Shall Weep, p.300]

Dawes, it's worth pointing out, was part of a large movement that aimed to redress the evils done to Native Americans - which meant, of course, civilising them, rather than giving them their land and freedom back. The general progression seems very similar to here in Oz: new people arrive, those already living there get mostly wiped out by disease, the settlers hope they'll just 'fade away': it's tragic to watch the noble savages disappear, but nothing can be done; oh, they haven't faded away; well, then, we'd better civilise them.

I think this Dawes quote is fantastic: it sums up so much. The Cherokee must learn their Locke and start mixing their labour with the land, otherwise they'll remain forever in a Morganesque barbarian state. Perhaps seeing parallels where I shouldn't, the same line of thinking seems to remain alive - in the World Bank, for instance. Here's Mamadou Dia, a senior officer in the World Bank:

The institutional crisis affecting economic management in Africa is a crisis of structural discontent between formal institutions transplanted from outside and indigenous institutions born of traditional African culture.

Dia goes on to say that domestic institutions that "harbour dysfunctional practices" need to "change if they are to become vectors of development... if these institutions continue to live in the past, they will be discarded as anachronistic relics."

The World Bank's 2002 World Development Report took up this line of argument. It started by defining 'institution' in a profoundly penetrative way: "the rules, including behavioural norms, by which agents interact - and the organisations that implement rules and codes of conduct to achieve desired outcomes." Including behavioural norms? Wow.

So - the Bank goes on to say that "where there are discriminatory practices, the relevant societal norms my have to be explicitly supplanted rather than amended" and that informal institutions and norms that complement the market should be interfaced with formal institutions. Norms that complement the market will survive, those that don't (including 'overly zealous egalitarianism') will be 'supplanted'.

This is what a team of academics has come up with in a Washington office; its less clear that these reports have any effect on World Bank staff working on the ground. But you can see the line of argument running from Dawes through Dia to Howard to Piers: your culture, your people, your economy will meet one of two fates: 'supplant or amend'; change or die.

So I'm trying to make this economic model, and I'm reading a workhorse of a textbook, and its all built on just the kind of human being that Dawes wanted to make out of the Cherokee. It seems trite to say it: 'homo economicus, social construction, yaaawn...' But I think its important to remember the following: there were a people here in Oz, before the settlers came, who had a way of life that worked very well, thank you very much. There were over 700 language groups, and a vast web of carefully negotiated uses of land. It worked, it wasn't capitalism, and you won't get to understand the first thing about it by reading economics books. Except maybe ones written by Steven Levitt.