What a wicked game we play with indigenous social engineering

So what are we actually going to do about the atrocious conditions in remote indigenous Australia? Apart from wringing our hands, of course, and turning on Bill Leak for leading the resistance against political correctness?

Please God we don’t ask the bureaucrats to come up with another centrally planned something. The soulless solutions that emerged from whiteboards in Canberra and Darwin have played a considerable role in creating this problem in the first place and it’s time we told them to stop. The last thing Aboriginal people need is another “multifaceted and co-ordinated ongoing approach from all levels of government … to develop and implement effective and targeted actions” that produce “far-reaching and long-term health and economic benefits”.

It would be nice if those quotes were made up but, sadly, they’re not. They are drawn from the National Strategy for Food Security in Remote Indigenous Communities, a 90-page document endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments in 2009 in response to a previous bout of moral anxiety. It hardly matters which. The authors of the National Strategy for Food Security report found that eating food was important for the health of indigenous Australians, a conclusion with which it is hard to disagree. In the Northern Territory, however — unlike, say, Tasmania — the supply of food could not be left to the free market augmented by a modest freight subsidy. The state would have to provide.

Hence the Wicked Kneads Bakery in Yuendumu, one of 21 bakery cafes the Territory and commonwealth governments have built, or will build, with $7.35 million of taxpayers’ money. The establishment’s name is misleading — the dough is kneaded elsewhere, then frozen and trucked to the edge of the Tanami Desert, where it is put into an oven by European backpackers and prepared for local consumption. Why “Wicked”? Perhaps because few if any locals are employed by the bakery, despite the town’s unemployment rate of more than 50 per cent and the multiplicity of make-work schemes operated with limited local enthusiasm in half-hearted compliance with welfare conditions. What seems to have occurred to no one — at least not the bureaucrats — is why Yuendumu, a town of 700 people with a reasonable passing trade of truck drivers and tourists, didn’t have a cafe in the first place. Or a mechanic. Or a hairdresser. Or a pharmacy that doubles as a shoe shop, or a florist. Or somewhere else to go for coffee when you get sick of the bakery cafe.

After all, there are all those things in Pyramid Hill, a town with a population and average income — net of housing costs — similar to Yuendumu. Country Victoria, however, unlike the Territory, operates a demand economy. The Pyramid Hill IGA requires no licence, other than one to sell alcohol. Bureaucrats do not scan its shelves for signs of excess salt, sugar or saturated fat. There is no need for them to fly in for endless “consultation meetings”; the IGA stocks whatever its customers want to buy, providing they are willing to pay for it.

If a country store goes out of business, as they are inclined to do, it is not seen as a matter of “market failure” but the result of market forces. There will no doubt be a larger town with a healthier economy where Pyramid Hill residents may care to shop or even move to if greater opportunities prevail.

The decline of some towns is a matter for understandable regret. What would have been worse, however, is if the Whitlam and Fraser governments had decided in the 1970s to declare country towns to be homeland settlements where rural folk could carry out their quaint and noble customs free of the polluting demands of the modern world.

Imagine the disasters we might be witnessing in Loddon Shire, Ripon or the Murray Plains if the romanticist policies of HC “Nugget” Coombs had been applied in country Victoria as well as the Territory. Homeland settlements would be “autonomous and self-sufficient economic units”, promised Coombs in an Australian National University working paper in 1979. “Production, including hunting and gathering, will be directed to home consumption and the reduction of dependence on imported stores.

“Exports,” Coombs pronounced, “will generally be confined to arts and crafts and occasional surpluses. Imports will be diverse and include white-style food and clothing, fuel, tools and building materials.”

The most extraordinary thing about this harebrained scheme for a racially segregated economy is that successive administrations took it seriously. It is chilling to imagine the nodding heads as one of our most respected bureaucrats — for such was Coombs — explained why the curriculum in homeland schools should be restricted to basic numeracy and literacy “to minimise assimilationist influences” and allow children time with family groups and other adults to learn skills relevant to their own culture. Living in “decentralised homelands” would allow Aboriginal people to revive ancient rituals and afford “readier and more frequent contact with sacred sites and the Dreaming tracks of ancestral beings”.

What would Coombs, who died in 1997, make of conditions today where 80,000 Australians are condemned to live wretched lives in settlements — largely artificial — that he argued the government should protect? Would he regard it as social justice that the average monthly mortgage repayment in 2011 was $737 in Pyramid Hill while the average repayment in Yuendumu was nil?

Pyramid Hill residents can aspire to buy a block of land and build, while across swathes of central Australia private land ownership is forbidden. In Yuendumu the only accommodation type is state-run public housing that even at an average rent of less than $30 a week is hardly worth the price. In the light of the delinquency exposed by the ABC’s Four Corners, it is hard to imagine these rigid, state-run, dignity-destroying communities as the havens their founders thought they would become.

Within “the security of the homeland context”, Coombs argued, “the young would grow up capable of making use of what white society offers but remaining essentially uncorrupted by it … remaining able and happy to return to their own ways”.

Dream on.