ABORIGINES
Daily Telegraph - July 2006

At this week's NSW Farmers Association conference, there were calls on the Government to help maintain fragile rural communities. These, they claimed, were in danger of complete collapse due to drought and the subsequent evacuation of women and local businesses.

Meanwhile, not too long ago, it was revealed that many remote Aboriginal communities were in such a wretched state they were, basically, uninhabitable.|

Between these two stories, there is a curious and glaring difference: so far, no one from the Government has told farmers they should just give up and move to the city.

The degree to which we are sympathetic to the plight of farmers but not to that of Aboriginal people can be measured by the fact that every time there's a drought, a flood or a cyclone (all, I would have thought, occupational hazards of farming), Ray Martin hosts a telethon and the Commonwealth Bank sets up cardboard collection boxes.

Yet rural Aboriginal society can completely disintegrate into a hell of drug and sexual abuse, indescribable health problems and all the accumulated misery of the past 200 years, and the best we've got is, “Have you thought about moving to Redfern?”

Why do we regard black and white rural poverty differently? Why is it unthinkable to tell farmers that if they want good communications, health and social facilities they should move to the city, but not to say the same to black people? Why do we bend over backwards to appease rural Australia but leave out of that definition its indigenous population?

Before I am inundated with thousands of emails accusing me of being a typical inner-city leftie, I should point out that I have never had any particular interest in Aboriginal issues. I have, to my knowledge, no Aboriginal friends (a situation neither by design nor unique), never been to a Sorry Day march or a land rights rally and have certainly never acknowledged the traditional owners of anything.

Neither do I believe that simplistic notions of “racism” explain the problems of rural Aboriginals (although, God knows, when it comes to our indigenous people, the gloves are often off). Rather, I think we are cursed with notions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.

Farmers, we like to think, had poverty inflicted on them by ``acts of God''. Aboriginal people, on the other hand, seem to have made the poor “decision” to live in the remote areas they have inhabited for longer than any other people on Earth and strike us as being reluctant to work and chronically disorganised.

For this reason, the “acts of God” visited upon Aboriginal people since the beginnings of white history do not occupy the same place in our hearts as farmers suffering drought. That they seem poorly-equipped to deal with the immense obstacles in their path inspires little of the sympathy we reserve for our primary producers, but rather a demand to simply try harder.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008