Shouting to be heard
21.11.2001
By: Peter Charlton
Once again, a report by Tony Fitzgerald QC has produced shockwaves in Queensland. But will it have any impact outside the state? National affairs editor Peter Charlton reports
IN MAY this year, at a bookshop in inner Sydney, Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson delivered his now familiar message: The most important problem facing his people is grog.
The occasion was the launch of a book containing lectures and papers given to the Brisbane Institute. Along with Pearson was Labor backbencher Mark Latham and ABC journalists Maxine McKew and Geraldine Doogue.
But it was Pearson, in that quietly eloquent way of his, who had the audience's attention. They sipped their wine and they listened attentively to every word he said. Although The Sydney Morning Herald sent one of its most senior writers to the launch, a report of Pearson's speech did not appear the next day. Nor, given the time constraints of journalism, the day later.
Yet two weeks later, the same newspaper devoted one of its feature pages to record the fact that, one year after the march across Sydney Harbour Bridge for reconciliation, nothing much had happened. (To be fair, that feature did mention, almost in passing, Pearson's arguments for ending welfare dependency for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people).
Yesterday, The SMH reported Tony Fitzgerald's Cape York Justice Study -- well inside, down page 6. Ironically, its page 3 lead story reported the prevalence of violence in Sydney's inner city pubs and clubs. At least the national daily, The Australian, put the Fitzgerald report on page 3.
The news treatment of the latest Fitzgerald report is, perhaps, not surprising. The overwhelming majority of The SMH's readers, not to mention its journalists and editors, would have absolutely no idea of the conditions of the Aboriginal communities on Cape York. For them, Aborigines are people who live in Redfern, or who fight for a living, or play football, albeit with a tendency to go missing from training on occasion.
In Sydney -- indeed in Melbourne and Canberra as well -- among what has been called pejoratively ``the chattering classes'', the big indigenous issues are reconciliation and the ``stolen generation''. Yet the biggest issue of them all, the destructive impact of booze in Aboriginal communities, goes almost unreported.
The dimensions of the issue, outlined by Fitzgerald, are huge: Aboriginal women in Cape York are 104 times more likely to be assaulted than non-indigenous Queensland women. Community breakdown linked to alcohol abuse has also brought massive truancy rates. Many babies are born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Life expectancy for Cape York's indigenous people is 25 years less than the general population. ``A significant number of people in the communities drink alcohol to harmful and even hazardous levels,'' Fitzgerald wrote. ``Life for those who don't drink to excess, including children, is spoilt by those who do.''
Without going into the same detail, Pearson's May message was the same. In that speech, Pearson said indigenous culture had been significantly affected by the explosion of grog and drugs. ``I think that if we succeed in our agenda to firstly move on the drug and grog people among our people, I think there will be enormous opportunities,'' he said.
``But, in the wider culture, I detect a sort of latent fatalism about the position of our people, and this latent fatalism infects the ideological debates and the response of the progressive people as well as the conservatives. There is this resignation to the little compatibility of the traditional culture and the requirements of the global culture in which we are inexorably, inevitably and inescapably entrenched.
``I think what we have to do is transform passive welfare. This is our biggest challenge, and the inter-relationship between grog and drugs and passive welfare is profound.''
The latest Fitzgerald report follows work done by Pearson and my colleague Tony Koch. It was, on Premier Peter Beattie's part, a piece of inspired politics, using the hugely respected Fitzgerald to examine the problem and give it a kind of independent respectability. A government might baulk at taking the courageous step to ban booze in Aboriginal communities on the basis of a newspaper reporter's disclosures, or even the campaigning of a respected leader such as Pearson. But another Fitzgerald report provides the perfect platform for such action. This Fitzgerald report details the link -- if such detail was really needed -- between alcohol abuse and the cycles of violence, poverty, truancy and loss of community esteem.
Fitzgerald confined his investigations to Cape York communities. Similar findings, however, would result if similar investigations were carried out in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and in parts of New South Wales, including the inner suburb of Redfern. It is entirely reasonable to extrapolate from Fitzgerald to the wider indigenous community of Australia and say, categorically, that Aboriginal Australians have a problem handling alcohol.
A medical doctor, working in the field of alcohol addiction in Sydney, would speak only if she wasn't named. ``I'd be ostracised for speaking out publicly,'' she said. ``I've done it at medical conferences, only to be branded a racist.
``But Fitzgerald is right. So is Noel Pearson. Alcohol is an enormous problem in indigenous communities but to say so is another thing. In many ways, we are not as advanced in this country as say Canada or the United States. Both have had more success in dealing with the problem of alcohol abuse among their indigenous people.
``We'd rather be talking about abstract concepts such as reconciliation or the largely symbolic issues of land rights. It's fair to say that indigenous Australians were better off when the churches ran the missions and banned alcohol.''
YET the Fitzgerald report's recommendation was criticised by Cape York Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander commissioner Murrandoo Yanner as the government playing ``the great white missionary'': precisely the kind of criticism that Fitzgerald said was ``inevitable''.
Perhaps the best response was that of Griffith University academic Boni Robertson. She headed an Indigenous Women's Task Force which investigated violence and alcoholism on remote communities two years ago and found that murders, bashings and rapes had reached ``epidemic proportions'' in Aboriginal communities. Robertson said Fitzgerald's report covered ``old ground''. ``We've been researched and inquiried out,'' she said. ``We need to get beyond the inquiry stage now and do something about it.''
