PEARSON HITS WELFARE POISON
30.04.1999
Tony Koch
chief reporter
PROMINENT Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has appealed to governments to help break the welfare dependency of indigenous people so they can live more healthy, dignified lives.
Speaking in Cairns this week, Mr Pearson said welfare was ``a poison'' which had turned many Aboriginal people into ``drunken parasites'' and was destroying family and community life.
He also challenged Aboriginal leaders to cease disempowering their own people through continually depicting them as ``victims''.
But most of all, Mr Pearson wants Aboriginal people to accept that, along with the rights comes responsibility _ to themselves, their wives, husbands, children, elders and the general community.
``The whole Aboriginal policy debate has been about rights _ human rights, legal rights, land rights, individual rights against government and so on,'' he said.
``There has been no discussion about our responsibility. There is a defensiveness."
Mr Pearson has written a 42-page discussion paper for Cape York Aboriginal leaders, titled Our Right to Take Responsibility.
``We have to get rid of the welfare system from Aboriginal community governance in Cape York Peninsula, and get rid of the welfare mentality that has taken over our people," the document says.
It states the two key problems affecting Aboriginal people are racism and welfare dependency.
Mr Pearson wrote: ``It is time we analysed our condition as a people without being defeated and paralysed by the racial issues. This is not to say we should forget about racism, or pretend that it doesn't exist.
``By addressing the concrete social and economic circumstances of our welfare dependency, we can find the power necessary to prevail against racism.''
Mr Pearson advocates a changed system in which money coming into communities _ there are 13 on the Cape which are home for about 12,000 indigenous people _ is controlled by ``a new interface'' between the federal and state governments and ATSIC.
He said the new administration needed to be ``holistic and de-welfared'' and he is seeking support for Cape York to be the pilot model for the changed system.
``Welfare is a resource that is laced with poison and the poison present is the money-for-nothing principle," Mr Pearson said.
``In the 1950s and 60s, our people worked hard in the hot sun for red-necked pastoralists, and people placed value on every penny earned. It is only the welfare system that has devalued money _ because it is not earned.''
Mr Pearson said the ``welfare poison'' was progressively breaking down Aboriginal society _ a society that put tremendous pressure on community members to ``provide resources to a parasitic drink-and-gamble coterie''.
``Since the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people have believed their right earned was the right to drink,'' he said. ``What about the responsibility to your children? The rights that are acknowledged are the rights of people to party, drink, use money in their own destruction. No talk of rights of children or old people.
``And why has there been this collapse in responsibility? In my view, it is related to the nature of the economy under which Aboriginal people are forced to exist _ the poisonous welfare economy.
``Aboriginal people should participate in the real economy _ where you don't get money for nothing, you have to work. Aboriginal people lived at the lowest, most miserable end of the market economy for most of colonial history and the time has come to change all that. Welfare is a parasitic exploiter.
``The Government is paying these people to sit around the canteen to drink and destroy the prospects of their children _ destroy society. The madness of that system has to stop.''
Tomorrow: The Pearson solution
