Book Reviews

Which Justice and Which Politics?

Rethinking Social Justice: From ‘Peoples’ to ‘Populations’ by Tim Rowse, xx + 249 pp, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2012, ISBN 9781922059161 (pbk), $ 39.95.

Rethinking Social Justice is a significant book not because its arguments always convince but because it can promote constructive debate. Three proposals are central to the work. The first one is that, since the 1950s, the Australian discourse regarding Indigenous issues has been structured by two ideas of social justice embodied in the notion of ‘a people’ and ‘a population’. The latter term refers to an aggregate of individuals; the former to a nation or ethnic group though Rowse proposes to understand ‘a people’ not so much in cultural terms but more in terms of a political and institutional project. At first glance the book may appear to be a play on two aspects of justice pertaining on the one hand to self-determination and, on the other, to a range of capabilities that people require to be self-determining in the modern state. Yet this would be a mistake. The first hint comes in the book’s subtitle, From ‘Peoples’ to ‘Populations’. Rowse sees the former mode of social justice under attack and by the book’s end it is hard to see the latter mode, addressed to various disadvantages, as a part of justice at all. A communal, political course is privileged over capabilities and also over other dimensions of sociality that bear on both gendered and generational relations. Such a position may not be what Rowse intended but part of this review will address this bent in his argument.

The book has a second and related theme. Rowse argues that the terms in which an Australian Aboriginal people are defined should not be cultural ones – especially connoting a baseline of tradition or custom – but rather historical and political ones, calling on the manifold experience of an Aboriginal people in the Australian state. This people is a ‘collective’ and ‘lasting interlocutor of and within the nation’, and ‘of government’. This interlocutor has a ‘distinct identity, heritage, institutions and land base’ (pp. 5, 77). I for one could not but endorse Rowse’s proposal to understand an Aboriginal people as a historically evolving subject rather than one of essentialised tradition. Given Aboriginal people’s encapsulation in the state and its capitalist economy, this people’s identity cannot but be both political to a degree, and rendered through experience. Yet Rowse does not explore much the richness or complexity of this subject. He elaborates on just one dimension of an Aboriginal people: that people as manifest in an Indigenous sector of Aboriginal corporations. Moreover, although this sector is ‘embedded in the apparatuses of Australian government’ (p. 126), he sees it still as the collective, and singular, voice of self-determination.

A third proposal is that quantitative data concerning disadvantage can be used to undermine self-determination. These data are ostensibly transparent and quickly understood. Nonetheless, they are also subject to political uses. Qualitative data can seem less transparent and more difficult to grasp. Yet they are significant. These different types of data bear on the standing of the Indigenous sector. Self-determination is a long-term project involving the salience of Aboriginal experience and the tenor of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Qualitative gains that this project brings do not always register in ways that lend themselves to measurement. Therefore health, education and employment ‘gaps’, measurable in some form, also can be used to mask other types of incremental achievement among Indigenous organisations. A focus on the Aboriginal population can subvert, both intentionally and unintentionally, the project of a people’s voice. Rowse is warning here that an Indigenous sector undermined could leave Aboriginal people as isolated advocates for their interests; their rights as a first people obscured or washed away. This view has great merit but also needs careful scrutiny.

These three themes are pursued more or less intently through a variety of chapters that reflect some of Rowse’s passions: one is the biography of Australian liberal intellectuals of various hues. Six chapters in the book discuss particular figures: Paul Hasluck, Theodore Strehlow, Helen Hughes, Noel Pearson, Peter Sutton and especially HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs. Another of Rowse’s passions is public administration and, in particular, that of remote Aboriginal communities. A third is the social movement for Indigenous self-determination, for the self-governance of a people. Rowse’s earlier writing on this issue came in the context of the Mabo decision and in his work on Coombs. In this book, the agency identified with land rights and native title is extended to an Indigenous sector and its organising role, especially in remote communities. A further four chapters elaborate in one way or another Rowse’s concern with the people/population distinction and the concomitant issue of qualitative versus quantitative data. Rowse’s discussion of the initial South Australian land rights legislation, the New South Wales Stolen Generations and the Australian Reconciliation Barometer are all interesting.1 One chapter concerns the Indigenous sector mainly as reported on by consultant anthropologists. Rowse’s references to self-determination preponderate in this chapter.

Here I focus on just two issues among a number of notable ones. The first concerns self-determination and the Indigenous sector. The second concerns the issue of qualitative and quantitative data. As one dimension of self-determination, land rights and native title are unique. Both have been intertwined with the impacts of mining and the fight by Aboriginal people for a voice concerning their land. Both have carried the capacity to distribute widely a specific Indigenous resource – land and the engagement with it that reflects customary sovereignty. Albeit in very limited ways, this status is acknowledged now in non-Indigenous law. Land councils have been a central institutional and organisational expression of these rights, providing a political voice in state and territory politics. At their best these councils reflect both centrifugal and centripetal dynamics, empowering individuals and small groups as well as regional peoples. Moreover many have an income stream, including royalties, which derive from corporate mining agreements. These features make at least some land councils less susceptible than some other Indigenous ‘corporates’ to governmental routinisation.

Still Rowse argues rightly that an emphasis on ‘custom’ in these corporations can become a ‘traditionalist straitjacket’ (p. 27). Aboriginal people now desire not only land rights but also forms of appropriate development that rest on a monetised economy, and service provisions that rest on public administration. One reason why small groups register under an Aboriginal corporations act is to be a legally-defined recipient of an enterprise grant – for an art co-operative on country, a mustering project, or a rehabilitation centre. As these projects wax and wane, Indigenous corporations come and go. Yet these small proliferating corporations are not Rowse’s focus. He is more concerned with the larger organisations that deliver services to communities and outstation groups. Often these involve a community or shire council with its organisational links to one or more health clinics, school boards or, if it still exists, an outstation centre. Together these different types of corporation seem to match both the centrifugal and the centripetal thrust of land council institutions. Yet, it is difficult to find an equivalent as such. Most of these other types of corporation are heavily dependent on government funds. Moreover, the relation between the large service organisations, often controlled by a particular group, and small enterprise ones is unclear. The nature and locus of one collective voice is more difficult to discern.

Periodically, the resource concentration in large councils can create cultural strains as kin groups compete for control. The issue may not be services as such but rather the paid employment, transport, telecommunications and the like that are attached to an administrative hub. Rowse notes correctly that the Indigenous sector’s major challenge comes not from these local strains but rather from policy change in government. Yet this challenge comes not simply in the guise of neoliberal ‘reforms’. The fact that governments of any ilk remain a very major source of funds for Aboriginal communities makes them vulnerable. Moreover, these resources often come as transfers rather than as capital earnings. Lack of employment opportunity and capital, especially in remote Australia, mean that communities remain largely resource clients of the state. The explosion of corporations that Rowse and others note is in part a reflection of the administrative dynamic involved in defining legal individuals for governments to deal with. This development has an upside. It reflects Aboriginal people engaging the state and organising at a local level. It also has a downside reflected in extensive reliance on public funds. Inevitably, governments have the upper hand and local initiatives are far too exposed to shifts in the political mood of non-Indigenous Australians.

Patrick Sullivan observes that effective public administration for remote Aboriginal communities is likely to come only with integration at regional levels rather than at state or national ones. (His implication may be that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission model was misconceived or at least overly ambitious.) In Sullivan’s view, community administration will be done in an able and stable way mainly by Indigenous people committed to a particular locale. He suggests that this newly conceived Indigenous sector is in fact the basis for an Aboriginal civil society.2 Rowse sees more. He portrays employees in these corporations as a ‘new class’ of Aboriginal people in the ‘tutelary regime’ of the ‘state’. Moreover, this emerging class can become the collective voice of self-determination (pp. 105, 107, 126, 127).

This view of the Indigenous sector suggests at least three caveats. Firstly, without a greater range of resource sources, including earnings from the private and public sectors and private philanthropy, marked reliance on government remains. Is this truly self-determination?3 Second, without the capacity-building that this resource diversification entails, an incipient class dynamic must gather pace in remote communities – even in the absence of local labour markets. This dynamic will be propelled by the undoubted power of the state to persuade public servants, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to its frame of reference.4 Third, and notwithstanding the acknowledged ‘tutelary’ nature of the state, Rowse seems to assume that economic development can and should occur only beneath the carapace of community governance. Numerous examples of small business enterprise past and present in rural and remote communities5 make this an unhelpful stance. It acts to constrict thinking about the types of capability that remote Aboriginal people need today.

For example, Rowse cites as a resounding success a community resource centre, Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (BAC).6 Yet in November 2012, BAC was placed in administration due to the incompetence of a non-Indigenous CEO. The latter had replaced a previous non-Indigenous CEO of longstanding. The rapid fall from grace, in just three years, suggests a management board that lacked the enterprise experience, the knowledge and perhaps the confidence to check a rogue CEO (pp. 112–113).7 In an apparently similar context, I have seen a corporation in central Australia reduced to a shadow of its former self. Faced with increasing impersonalism and generational change, traditional owners lacked the relevant capabilities to safeguard their centre from ‘fly-by-night’, incompetent whites. By contrast, a recent report on the top 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporations cites as its case study in success an organisation in the Pilbara. Fortunate enough to be able to diversify across both public and private sector sites, its Aboriginal owner-staff are well paid and amply equipped to maintain their enterprise – founded over 40 years ago.8

Rowse’s focus on an Indigenous sector privileges politics over economics with some cost to the coherence of his argument. It seems that, in the case of economy, culture is a permanent obstruction whereas this is not the case for governance (pp. 173–174). There is no systematic account of the local and regional economies that Aboriginal people might engage now, or in the future with more capabilities and sources of capital. Ultimately, self-determination needs a rethink that involves both governance and development, the latter addressed in diverse and experimental ways but not simply as a highly vulnerable cost on government. This is possible without a mere capitulation to the mining industry or other like conglomerates. The rethink is required especially for those communities neither involved in mining’s milieu nor so small and remote that the carapace of government seems inevitable. Some of these at least can be a site for new forms of self-determination.9

Let me turn now to a second issue concerning the use of quantitative data on disadvantage. Rowse argues that constant reference to ‘the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people represents the former not as different or resilient but as the embodiment of mere lack. Inevitably, this undermines the standing of a people and thereby the Indigenous sector. Rowse also observes that questions in the Reconciliation Barometer invoke ‘Indigenous disadvantage’ in ways that suggest a ‘not so likeable’ feature of Aboriginal people: ‘their widely attributed failure to take responsibility for themselves’ (p. 216). In sum, not only do these data misrepresent when they are presented alone, they also promote a ‘blame the victim’ position.

The data that Rowse is referring to comes from sources including the Productivity Commission, Families, Housing, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs, Council of Australian Governments Reform Council, state/territory Departments of Health, Education and the like. Presented in isolation these data can misrepresent. Yet this does not make disadvantage inconsequential or imaginary. Rather, these data should be balanced by others, both qualitative and quantitative, that speak to the reasons why Aboriginal people wish to retain their particular lives. Such juxtapositions help to elucidate Indigenous dilemmas including ones that possibly only individuals and their immediate kin can resolve. In addition, data on disadvantage should be contextualised – both historically and comparatively. Is Aboriginal disadvantage more or less than some time ago? What criteria inform such a judgment? How do regions in Australia compare? How does current disadvantage and responses to it compare with that of other indigenous and non-indigenous peoples? What is ‘too expensive’ or a ‘waste’ in relation to justice for Australia’s first peoples? Deployed in a proper way, quantitative data establish the structural nature of disadvantage and its patterning through space and time.10 This type of observation serves social justice more than it undermines it.

There is another distortion though. In the course of the last decade, Aboriginal disadvantage was ushered into public consciousness by dramatic portraits of pathology among people who were described as being alcoholic, child abusers, violent and criminal. In 2009, with the Western Arrernte in mind, I asked how any such Aboriginal people could ‘accept such words as their descriptors’? This type of reduction, of disadvantage to pathology, refused Aboriginal people as interlocutors of the larger society.11 These accounts often implied that personal pathology is an invariable component of social disadvantage in health, education, employment and the like when in fact they are different phenomena only sometimes related and in complex and partial ways. How to respond to this type of denigration?

A first step involves understanding the ideology behind these accounts of disadvantage that become portraits of pathology. The writer whose work presents this reduction most clearly is the late Helen Hughes. Although her writing follows some conventions of social science, it is also interspersed with dramatic accounts of pathology; descriptions of a people whose life is not constructive on any front.12 The coalescence of an academic and a populist style produces a view of Aboriginal people as spent and in need of total reclamation. Why? Because they are the product of a ‘failed experiment’ in HC Coombs’s purported socialism (pp. 176–177).

‘Socialism’ here refers to Australian governments’ (the public sectors’) interventions with regard to Indigenous employment, education, housing or health where there are no easy market (or private sector) solutions. If it is assumed that by definition there always will be market solutions, or that the only solutions are market ones, this social democratic response to needs and rights becomes misguided, even illegitimate. According to this latter view, with its naturalised notion of market efficiency, any public sector intervention is doomed to fail with a concomitant devastating impact on the citizens involved. Hughes did not need to learn very much about quotidian Aboriginal lives. Their comprehensive pathology is an entailment of her position.

Too often the response from academics has been to accept this reduction and to avoid talk of disadvantage altogether in the name of ‘not pathologising’ Aboriginal people. Similarly, because the attacks of Hughes and others have promoted totalising market ‘solutions’ over government strategies, a common response has been to brand economic policy generally as simply ‘neo-liberal’. Yet this sloppy usage and negative view of economy per se is an ill-wrought strategy that has the air of denialism. In fact the issue should be how to identify the structural disadvantage – for which Aboriginal people are not responsible – that undermines the local potential of not all but still too many individuals.

In sum, I am sceptical of the view that social justice conceived as a fight against disadvantage undermines rather than augments social justice for a people. Nor am I convinced that an Indigenous sector now or soon can be the collective and autonomous voice of a people. At minimum, Aboriginal people need more regional consolidations, more diverse capabilities and genuinely human economies along with alliances that extend into other types of politics. Indeed, the very nature of self-determination for a people encapsulated in a larger sovereign state requires continuing innovation.13 I am also of the view that quantitative data can be used constructively as well as destructively. Notwithstanding differences with Rowse, I strongly endorse a historical view of an Aboriginal people – a basic tenet of my anthropology. Tim Rowse is a seasoned writer on Indigenous issues. His book deserves a wide readership.

References

Altman, Jon 2005, ‘Economic futures on Aboriginal land in remote and very remote Australia: hybrid economies and joint ventures’, in Culture, Economy and Governance in Aboriginal Australia, Diane Austin-Broos and Gaynor Macdonald (eds), Sydney University Press, Sydney: 121–134.

Austin-Broos, Diane 2009, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

— 2010, ‘Quarantining violence: how anthropology does it’, in Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (eds), University of New South Wales Press, Sydney: 136–149.

— 2011, A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

— 2012, ‘Keeping faith with self-determination: economy and cultural difference’, Indigenous Law Bulletin 7(29): 18–23.

— 2013, ‘Livin’ this way: freedom and Aboriginal self-determination’, paper presented to the conference, Freedoms and Liberties in Anthropological Perspective, Moises Lino e Silva and Huon Wardle (organisers), University of St Andrews, 31 May – 2 June 2013.

Dingle, Sarah 2012, ‘Leading Aboriginal corporation in administration’, The World Today, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2 November 2012, <http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3624310.htm> (accessed 3 October 2013).

Engle, Karen 2010, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy, Duke University Press, Durham and London.

Hart, Keith, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio Cattani (eds) 2010, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide, Polity Press, Cambridge UK and Malden Mass.

Hughes, Helen 2007, Lands of Shame: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘Homelands’ in Transition, Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney.

Keen, Ian (ed) 2010, Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ANU E Press, Canberra.

Office of the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations (ORIC) 2012, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporations: The Top 500, 2010-2011, Commonwealth of Australia, Woden, Australian Capital Territory.

Sullivan, Patrick 2011, Belonging Together: Dealing with the Politics of Disenchantment in Australian Indigenous Policy, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

Diane Austin-Broos

University of Sydney