Stirring the possum on Australia Day
NO SOONER than someone tries to say something serious about Australia Day, the history-culture wars break out again. This happened within hours of the Australian of the Year, the Aboriginal leader Mick Dodson, pointing out the mixed feelings all indigenous people must feel about celebrating the start of white settlement.
While it may not be as immediately enraging as, say, the foundation day of Israel would be for Palestinians, the formal annexation of this land by Governor Arthur Phillip more than 200 years ago will be recalled by Aborigines as, in Professor Dodson's words, "the day on which our world came crashing down".
Indeed for a growing number of non-indigenous Australians, all settlers or their descendants, there is sadness that the encounter of two worlds turned out so badly for the original Australians, and as futile as it now might be, speculation about whether it could have been different. What we are now starting to appreciate is that Aboriginal society and culture did not suddenly end, and that indigenous people were more important in the building of modern Australia than our old history texts might have told us.
Mick Dodson probably didn't need to say anything to start a row, just be appointed. This award conclusively brings him back in from the policy outer circles where he had been up to November 2007. Those who had been in the inner circle up to then are predictably critical. They are still banging on the drum of "practical" reconciliation that was the catchcry of the Howard years. That period brought about practically nothing in the way of reconciliation, of course, just years of coldness and denial, followed by the politicised stunt of the Northern Territory intervention.
But he has stirred the possum by suggesting an alternative national day was needed, on a date all could celebrate. We don't agree. Dispossession of the original people is an undeniable part of our modern history that started on January 26, 1788, and our celebration of that anniversary has to include that, and get us thinking about ways indigenous Australians can come to feel that they too possess our new nation.
Professor Dodson starts his "reign" as our national role model with one of his most dearly sought-after objectives achieved - a formal apology from the Government of Australia to the stolen generation whose story he and others brought to light. Let's hope that his characteristic outspokenness does not result in more back-biting, but helps bring a year in which the symbolic and the practical combine to strengthen indigenous Australians and their communities.
Gillard's school of hard knocks
AS WE head back to workplaces and schools from the slow days of summer, it is clear that an uncomfortable number of Australian families face the devastating impact of unemployment. A report for charities by the consultancy Access Economics last November was based on the prediction 140,000 people would lose their jobs by the middle of this year because of the global financial crisis. Only a couple of months later that looks too sanguine. Now the forecast is for 250,000 to be thrown out of work by year-end.
As the crisis deepens, the Rudd Government now looks to have been too cautious and leisurely in its revamping of the social welfare system it inherited from its predecessors. Whether or not that system is based on a "punitive" approach to the unemployed, as John Falzon of the St Vincent de Paul Society suggests, the fact is that it was modelled to deal with a prolonged economic boom in which not only was work available to almost anyone willing and able, massive skills shortages allowed Australia to venture into temporary job migration for the first time. Now we are suddenly in very different times.
The economic slump will hit at many levels: from high-income bankers to fly-in, fly-out mining workers, from tour guides and waiters to department store staff. On each of those jobs hangs a family economy: a monthly mortgage payment to be met, a lump of car rego and insurance, the extras of school and college. Shatter enough of those little economies, and the wider economy starts to hurt, too, from effects like forced home sales.
So the talks that the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is to hold today with front-line charitable and welfare groups and employment agencies are urgently needed. If a little extra spending can be applied through the welfare net to keep families afloat when jobs are lost, it could be more useful than a much bigger general fiscal stimulus. The figure of a minimum of $300 million a year is suggested by the four big church-based charities.
Even with the promised ending of harsh penalties, particularly the eight-week suspension of benefits for failing repeatedly to turn up for interviews, the dole is still lean pickings. How to augment it, perhaps through some combination of part-time work and charitable aid, without creating an entitlement monster, is the tricky policy task. Perhaps more than in previous recessions, household debt will be a bigger factor. Helping the unemployed avoid foreclosure on their homes, by negotiating with lenders, could be the job for a new breed of advocates from the welfare sector.
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