M. C. Dillon and N. D. Westbury: Beyond Humbug: Transforming Government Engagement with Indigenous Australia

Abstract

According to anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, an elderly Aboriginal person once summed up nonIndigenous (European) Australians for him, in eight words: ‘‘Very clever people, very hard people, plenty humbug’’ (Stanner 1969, in Dillon and Westbury 2007, p. 207). This anecdote fronts the concluding chapter of Dillon and Westbury’s: ‘Beyond Humbug: Transforming Government Engagement with Indigenous Australians’, self-published through Seaview Press in 2007. It captures the book’s core intention of shifting the focus in Indigenous affairs, away from a politicised ‘blame the victim’ pre-occupation which asks: ‘what’s wrong with Indigenous cultures and communities?’, and onto the public policy context: ‘what constitutes appropriate and effective public policy engagement?’ Between them, Dillon and Westbury have decades of senior public service experience in Indigenous affairs, policy and administration. They suggest from the outset that the root cause of the continuing entrenched disadvantage of Australia’s Indigenous populations is a longstanding absence of ‘‘coherent policy engagement by governments at all levels underpinned by the absence of determination and political will’’ (2007, p. 4). While acknowledging the heterogeneity of Australia’s .5 million Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultural and locational diversity, the authors’ focus specifically on government dis/engagement with the (approx) 25% of the Indigenous population who remain living, or have returned to live, on their traditional lands in ‘remote’ and ‘very remote’ settlements. Across the 86% of the Australian continent classified as ‘remote’ or ‘very remote’ there are some 1200 Indigenous communities organised in small dispersed settlements. Australia’s Indigenous population is growing at a rate exceeding that of the non-Indigenous population and over the next decade, in remote areas, is predicated to increase by between 20–24% in the arid zones and 38–42% in the wet tropics (Dillon and Westbury 2007, p. 24). At the same time, Indigenous communities suffer entrenched, inter-generationally embedded and disproportionate rates of socio-economic disadvantage on every criterion of health, employment, income, housing and mortality. Indicators of Australian Indigenous disadvantage have stagnated at shocking levels of disparity with nonIndigenous counterparts and lag well behind the comparative improvements in Indigenous well-being evident in western democracies such as New Zealand, Canada and the US. As a Coronial Inquiry into deaths by petrol sniffing in remote areas commented: ‘‘that such conditions should exist among a group of people D. Tedmanson (&) School of Social Work & Social Policy, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia e-mail: deirdre.tedmanson@unisa.edu.au