Noel Pearson, allegedly, made it legitimate for white politicians to finally take some action on the national emergency of Indigenous child abuse. His (or the Cape York Institute’s) massive proposal [pdf] for controversial, welfare “reform” experiments as a solution to problems in remote Indigenous communities came after the Little Children are Sacred report [pdf] and before the Federal Government “crackdown.” There is much excellent discussion of these from and at s0metim3s and WP including the somewhat sidelined death in custody decision. However, before sides are wedged open by what Kim from Larvatus Prodeo has called Tampa 2007, it is important to examine the ambiguities and silences of this interstitial document.

(BEFORE I get down to it, I just want to acknowledge that what follows has been influenced by discussions over the last 36 hours with Elaine Kelly & Maria Giannacopoulos. We don’t seem to agree but their thoughts have become heavily entangled in my own.)

AT its heart I think the CYI’s From Hand Out to Hand Up [FHOHU] is a troubling pragmatic movement towards Indigenous community self-determination. Following the Cape York Agenda [pdf] its logic is premised on the idea that Cape York is a space that lacks social normalcy:

Mainstream Australia has social order, maintained through both visible (law
enforcement, neighbourhood watch groups &c) and invisible (social norms that act
upon and influence individual behaviour) means. These ensure that in mainstream
Australia, bad behaviour has consequences. In contrast, Cape York is operating at a
social order deficit, largely due to breakdown of social norms.
In other words, Cape York is not only severely disadvantaged, but is also
dysfunctional. Indeed, our social life has declined even as our material circumstances
have improved greatly since we gained citizenship. As well as poverty, we suffer from
passivity and addiction, compounding historical losses to lead to social disorder.

In light of this lack the CYI aims to build social norms in Indigenous communities. What distinguishes the proposed experiments from the Government’s declaration of emergency is that it seeks to ground this in some mode of community autonomy, rather than external [militarised] intervention.

WHAT Rex Wild and Pat Anderson wrote into the Sacred Little Children report was an account of suffering, a plea for response. As Lindsay Murdoch covers it:

“Our cry is for help,” Theodora Narndu, one of the most respected elders, told me one sweltering evening as she sat on the lawn of her house where she sleeps on the kitchen floor because there is no room in the bedrooms.

“Seeing what is happening, my tears are never dry. I hear the screams at night, terrified women and children. It has never been like this before. Our kids are not safe.”

People who have spent time in remote indigenous communities were not surprised by the findings of the territory’s inquiry, which found rampant sexual abuse in every community it visited, with victims as young as three.

Offenders were often non-indigenous men.

The inquiry’s authors, Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, QC, did not present their findings as new. But in a 316-page report they painted a disturbing picture of failed policies and made 97 recommendations.

“It’s time to cut the bullshit,” Ms Anderson said.

“Our children are suffering from one end of the Northern Territory to the other.”

This is in many ways precisely mirrors the diagnosis contained in the CYI proposal, where the absence of social norms have suspended the possibility a way-of-life. But as both the report and proposal indicate this is not an inarticulate howl for salvation from suffering, and to read them as such is precisely to reinscribe the paralysis the documents seek to undo. The government’s declaration of emergency makes the call passive and mandates external force as the only possible panacea. Perhaps both sets of Authors under estimated the extent to which humanitarianism to spaces

AS Marr points out this is precisely what is signaled in the focus on the Northern Territory as the locus for a “national emergency”, its legal non-state status marks it as a space open to direct federal administration:

DARWIN can do nothing to stop this. Canberra has all the authority it needs to sweep away Northern Territory laws. There are neither constitutional nor political barriers for John Howard, the greatest centraliser in the federation’s history, to roll back decades of Aboriginal policy in the territory.

There is no question that the federal government is using this “genuine response” to roll back any form of Indigenous self-determination of both law (as Marr highlights) and territory [mp3], which Howard seems to be internationally against. In short the genuine equates to recolonisation of the internal postcolony. A recolonialisation that internalises the militarised frontier with the promissory note of erasing it. In the words of Fanon:

The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesman of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son… In the capitilist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilderers’ separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge.

Here and now we can hope that the rifle-butts and napalm is enormously overblown rhetoric. Particularly as the internal direction of this colonisation, beyond just location, to save the sacred little children would seem to be a shield against such egregious methods. However even bearing in mind the government’s aim of protecting the apparently non-superfluous bodies of indigenous children, not to imagine the effects of warfare given the lack of infrastructure, labour and training to implement any part of the government’s emergency plan is simply ingenuous.

BEFORE looking at the differences between this government’s response and the proposals of the CYI I want to emphasise what they have in common. They both aim at the end of postcolony. The promise of national territorial and populational integrity through a uniform and ahistorical space of, as s0metim3s puts it, contract. There are innumerable reasons to be against this onto-theological program. But those who support the imperative of contract - that the participation in the national economy and system of justice even if it remains massively racist is infinitely preferable to the current plight of remote Indigenous communities - need to pay close attention to the vastly different modalities of the CYI and the federal government.

THERE is no other way to read FHOHU than as a document operating at the limit of what can be said as policy in this moment. With carefully blank irony it proclaims the end of discimination against Aboriginals:

The belated recognition of full citizenship brought equal rights, freedom from
discrimination and entitlement to welfare. Three policy shifts at the end of the 1960s and in
the early 1970s were unavoidable consequences of the end of discrimination:
• The introduction of equal wages in 1965 resulted in Aboriginal stock-workers losing
employment in the cattle industry and shifting to sedentary life in settlements and on
the fringes of country towns. This corresponded with a more general downturn in
Indigenous employment in many other rural industries…

At each turn the proposal names its direction as a move away from the historical markings of wrongs to a pragmatic reforms to solve ongoing conditions:

The most important insight for designing solutions to Indigenous social and economic
problems is this: we must distinguish between historical explanation and policy
prescription in the light of such explanation. It is one thing to have a greater understanding
and explanation of the reasons for certain problems in the present, but the explanation and
the greater understanding it provides does not by itself confer or suggest a solution. There
may be a history behind a problem, but illumination is not by itself a solution. We will still
need to deal with dysfunction and poverty as behaviours, as much as we seek to tackle
those structural dimensions that can be reformed.

In summary, history matters because it has built the present, but all that can be remedied of the past is in present effects and treatment must normalise the contemporary behaviour of individuals for future prevention. The present-future that it takes up is the hope of a liberal participation in a generative and meritocratic economy. The past-present that it seeks to disrupt is one where colonial power was ended with the problematic dependencies of explicit charity.

THE proposal designates the past-present problems as auto-catalytic epidemics - self-perpetuating externally-sourced diseases affecting a people. (I have a bunch of drafts on epidemy (epi + dēmos) as the prehistory and current expression of biopolitics, which can wait, but be warned it may convolute what I am trying to say here.) That is, there is a fundamental difference between the way CYI is trying to name the problem and the media repetition of Mal Brough’s statements about the ‘endemic’ crisis of child abuse. The native/foreign, inside/outside, sedimented/caused distinction of the en- vs. epi- traces the dovetailing of responses. While wanting to forgo its policy as a response to history in favour of a response to conditions, FHOHU still sees those conditions as historical. It is part of the history of a people it is trying to cure, with the direct-immediate (although not the only) cause being the system of welfare CYI casts as salve to the conscience of ex-colonialists. While the descriptor of endemic crisis or emergency, which is an epidemiological oxymoron, is the activation of racial crisis. The logic of emergency for modern democracy is a logic of epidemic. To designate something a crisis (autism, HIV [drafts], fatness) you call it an epidemic, something affecting the people, to call something endemic a crisis is exactly to declare an emergency of people. As such the government response is to recreate the colonial space to save the Indigenous people from themselves. In carefully choosing the label auto-catalytic epidemic CYI is trying to target the barriers between Indigenous community and the national circulations of priviliege. To enfold Indigenous communities in the economies of citizenship.

THE key, according to the proposal, is to make the Indigenous communities places where neo-liberal individuals can grow up. This is not the naive idea that keeping a child pure will magically make citizens, as per Howard’s suggestion that childhood can occur through policing and quarantine. Rather it argues that functional citizens are only possible from communities of norms, which are not the spontaneous province of good people, but emerge out of the co-operation of individuals, families, communities with access to a prosperous economy. It’s metaphor of choice is the staircase.

AS such FHOHU locates the instruments of change in re-writing the organisation of community welfare provision through a series of locale based panels forming a statutory authority named the Family Responsibility Commision. This would transform welfare into not just workfare but normfare. That is, the obligations imposed by the provision of funds extend not just to some concept of work, but to the labour of normalising community behaviour. However the proposal repeatedly stresses that the FRC is not merely a body responsible for implementing Centrelink mandated rules for welfare distribution but is invested with decisional authority at the local level to negotiate management of this economy. Additionally, by structuring the FRC locally the proposal seeks to remunerate local labour for the administration of this economy and fostering of norms, which is dramatically different to the deployment of external institutions and work currently proposed by the Howard government for the Northern Territory.

I have problems with what Pearson is proposing, I originally started this analysis, before yesterday, in order to critique the logic of norm, epidemic, ahistory and choice that lie at its heart. However, I think its creation of ambiguous spaces for negotiation is a more open initiative than the emergency response of recolony. Those parties and institutions, such as the “Opposition” [vid] and the AMA, that are endorsing response for the sake of response, however fucking cautious, need to step off and think about exactly what is entailed in sending a peace-keeping force to the Northern Territory.

UPDATE: More Documents.