Griffith Review

Get Involved

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bryan Lobascher, Waramanga ACT

Government by the people, is the unspoken missing link in Australia's political system. In the years between elections, there is no motivating state mechanism for we ordinary Australians to take part in great debate, to feel and believe in our grassroots democracy. Yes there are powerful interest groups, yes there are media opinion polls, yes there are internet channels. But we are mostly impotent spectators of this repetitious journalistic wasteland.

We are bound to a system of Government versus Opposition embedded in the house of representatives. Each frustrates the other, and both sideline ordinary people who are thus deprived of direct political power. For too long, Australians have left a monopoly of government to their elected representatives.

What can be done to bring ordinary Australians into play, to motivate them to exert direct power? First, make non-binding plebiscites mandatory for Federal Governments on national issues which may involve Constitutional reform. Voting should be optional, and the plebiscites should offer options beyond the "YES/NO" of the referendum method, as a democratic guide to Governments. For economy and voter convenience, they should be held with Federal elections.

Second, reduce the age bar for voting in all parliamentary elections but without any penalty for under 18's who do not vote. With the old principle "no taxation without representation" in mind, we owe our youngsters the chance to exert influence and we absolutely need them to take part in the future.

Thirdly, the public influence of an elected Australian head of state, able to speak out for the silenced and the dispossessed without fear or favour of an over-zealous Government, would be another welcomed form of "grassroots" democracy. Elections for that Office should be held alongside Federal parliamentary elections, for economy and voter convenience. Voters would be quite capable of distinguishing head of state matters from those pertaining to parliamentary representation. Voting could allow for a second preference which, when distributed if necessary, could bring up an absolute majority for a preferred candidate.

Democracy in Australia, along with other "advanced" countries, has suffered from repressive Governments, while the people have risen to higher education standards. We're more than ready, we need government by the people as well as of the people.

From Betty Birskys, Sunshine Coast QLD

Dear Editor

9 am Saturday morning, 19th April: on went my television set. Some trepidation to begin with. Would it be anarchy, this 2020 Summit, with so many people trying to have a say? Would it be a fizzer, idea-wise? Just a re-hash of the same old? The Prime Minister's reputation was riding on this. The cynics of the national paper, the sore losers of the opposition, the frustrated Howard-loving nitpickers - get real, you lost the election, chaps and sheilas - were out in force for the preceding few days. In the press, on shock-jock talk-back radio, scoffing. But from the very beginning, from the Welcome to Country, it was clear - Kevin had done it again. The enthusiasm of those present, in their casual weekend gear; the warm relaxed approach of our Prime Minister; the delighted presence of the Governor General, in open-necked shirt, released from the box in which Howard had kept him for most of the past years and with something important to say to us... I could feel my heart - and my hopes - expanding as I absorbed it all.

What a venture to take on; what a dream come true. Most Saturdays, three old friends and I get together for lunch at the most central home, my sister's actually; we rotate the courses week by week: one to do mains, one to do the pudding, as we like to call it, one to bring a bottle of wine and one to have a day off. It is better than going out to lunch, which gets dearer and dearer for less and less satisfaction. We are all widows now, and our Saturday efforts encourage us to look beyond scratch-together meals. And I suppose you could call us all 'political tragics' - to one degree or another.

That morning, we had all caught the Summit on the ABC, and arrived for lunch euphoric. All agreed: It had been inspirational. Old hopes and dreams had stirred. And outstanding had been the keynote speech by Michael Wesley, young, first generation Australian. His speech had been so intelligent, so accessible and warm, and so imbued with love of country. What touched us in particular was that he mentioned us - not as ancient relics of a past Australia, part of a stodgy, conventional largely Angloceltic Howard-loving demographic, but as a generation which lived through a Depression and a terrible war with a real threat of invasion; which at the end of the war shook itself off, and mustered its strength and its courage, and looked with hope and dedication to the future; and built the country - the Snowy Mountain Scheme, schools and hospitals, homes, factories, roads and more.

In less than three years, in a bi-partisan policy, we took in close to a quarter of a million post-war refugees from war-ravaged Europe: Displaced Persons, DPs we called them, or New Australians. They adapted to life here, married and raised families and were the vanguard for thousands who followed to make our wonderful multicultural Australia - probably the most successful multicultural country in the world. I was close to tears when Professor Wesley mentioned that part of our history; I always am. My husband Antanas was one of those Displaced Persons, forced here by the horrors of war, German deportation and Soviet occupation of his tiny homeland Lithuania. It is a story that is fading fast from the communal memory, from our history. Without knowing our past we can understand neither our present, nor our future.

All of which brings me to the real point of this article. Monday, the morning after the conclusion of the Summit, still aglow from its hope, from the spirit of community, I went out to reprovision body and soul. The young man on the checkout of our local food barn was a casual worker, aged about eighteen. We often exchange a few words across generations. This morning I could not contain my enthusiasm. 'What did you think of the 2020 Summit?' I asked him - and my heart sank at his blank look. I knew that look only too well from my teaching days: the stare of the completely disengaged student. (My son says that even in my dotage I can't stop being a teacher.) 'A big conference in Canberra,' I appealed to the young lad. 'Kevin Rudd called it, to discuss the future.' I mean, this was on the Sunshine Coast; Kevin Rudd - everyone here must know the name of our Prime Minister.

The young man did. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'There was something about that on Sunrise this morning, about some big meeting.' Not all that interested, this could not possibly involve his future. Another customer was waiting impatiently, and I moved on.

At the library I changed my books, and stole a quick look at the newspaper headlines. A young man sitting opposite at the reading table, in his late twenties I guessed, glanced across at my flurry of paper. He was studying job ads.

'I just want to see what the papers are saying about the 2020 Summit,' I said, answering what I took to be an unspoken question but again, the blank stare. 'In Canberra,' I proselytised. 'Called by Kevin Rudd - a thousand people from all over Australia, about our future - housing, education, health, the republic.' His look brightened.

'It's time for that,' he said, nodding. 'The republic. Yes, I heard something about that Summit. I should find out a bit more about it.'

'It was all over the ABC over the weekend,' I said.

'I usually watch the ABC or SBS,' he said regretfully. 'Not this weekend though.'

I had found a two-page spread in the Sydney Morning Herald outlining the Summit still open on the table. I turned it round to face him. 'It's all there' I offered. 'Not that it will worry me, I guess: 2020.' A rueful grimace for time's winged chariot. 'But it's your future - you young ones.' (The teacher re-emerging). He leaned politely over the pages, but as I left I could see he was back at the job page.

I am often guest speaker at Probus, Zonta, View and other community groups on the Sunshine Coast, talking about my life and my two prize-winning books: Homeland (QPLA Short List 2004) and At the Island, (SCLA First Prize Fiction 2007). Both self-published, though important I believe, especially the former, to our history, to our national story. I am indeed getting old. At these talks, when I mention the Balts, most of the ladies - in their sixties and early seventies - at first regard me with the same blank look as the young shop assistant, the job-seeker in the library. The Balts, the Displaced Persons? Most of these ladies knew little about them. Our history dies, and with it, our understanding of our present and our future.

So, what I am trying to say: in the 2020 Summit the brightest and the best have started a wonderful process, but it is obvious that it must be continued, with wide community involvement, or at least enlightenment. Can this be achieved?

Peter B. Todd, Sydney NSW

In response to Bill Bowtell’s essay in Edition 17 - Staying Alive

I found Bill Bowtell’s metaphor of a “vaccine of the mind” in reference to primary prevention as a means or eradicating HIV imaginative and provocative. Particularly as he perceives the prevention model adopted in Australia as a paradigm of global salience and efficacy in attempting to end a pandemic in which an estimated 25 million people have died, with a further 40 million currently infected with HIV. Mr Bowtell’s hypothesis seems to be that education and behaviour modification will be both necessary and sufficient to contain the spread of HIV even in the developing world where, for instance in South Africa, already 18.8% of adults aged between 18 and 45 are HIV antibody positive as are some 8.3 million people in South East Asia. This notion, I believe, is a misplaced article of faith with an insufficient empirical research base. Mr Bowtell has also expressed the belief in his essay that the priority funding of programs of care, treatment and research is paradoxically exacerbating the crisis of HIV/AIDS. Secondary prevention, however, in the form of antiretroviral treatment and care of those already infected is the only alternative to an unthinkable neglect of their human right to an enhanced quality as well as extension of life.

Noam Chomsky’s “secular priesthood” of the religious right in the United states, with its allies in the Vatican and in Islamic nations, has not only created policy obstacles to such primary prevention strategies as condom distribution and needle exchange programs, as Mr Bowtell suggests in his essay. The same lobbyists have also obstructed funding for scientific research which might result in those “fundamental understandings” which physicist Roger Penrose, for instance, regards as vital to the elimination of the “terrors of disease”, as discussed in my own essay “The Neglected Holocaust” in edition 16 of the Griffith Review. Such innovative research, however, is not the stuff of which Mr Bowtell’s social engineering model of disease control is made. I strongly agree with Mr Bowtell that HIV is “a product of viral evolution” and not the “divine retribution” postulated in primitive and fundamentalist theologies.

Indeed, I have referred to HIV as a “retroviral messenger” delivering a figurative “summons” to humanity to adopt an attitude of geopolitical holism in responding to the AIDS crisis, particularly in the developing world. HIV can be construed as an example of the “complementarity” principle formulated by physicist Niels Bohr, in the sense that the retrovirus exists at the interface of the living and the non-living. My main objection to Mr Bowtell’s argument, however, is that primary prevention strategies, envisioned in “creative arts, advertising, marketing and the media”, will not be sufficient in themselves, to contain the pandemic.

Viral mutation continues to thwart vaccine development while resulting in the emergence of multiple drug resistant strains of HIV which demonstrates definite limitations to the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy. While representing such a serious challenge to science that a major paradigm shift in theoretical understanding may be essential to combat the retrovirus and the global pandemic. HIV is a reminder of what molecular biologist Ted Steele has referred to as the “evolving chaos of the RNA world”. Mr Bowtell’s focus upon primary prevention does not, in my opinion, address such anomalies and the concomitant need for truly revolutionary scientific research. Inspired, for instance, by work like that of molecular microbiologist Johnjoe McFadden and his colleagues on a quantum mechanical model of “adaptive” mutation and the research of the other imaginative scientists, mentioned in my edition 16 essay.

Primary prevention programs while being an important part of the solution to the containment of HIV, will probably not be sufficient, especially because the complex and unconscious motivations of behaviours known to be related to HIV transmission, need to be taken into account. Similar difficulties have plagued cancer education programs which have not had anything approaching universal success in eliminating smoking as a cause of lung cancer or in encouraging women with breast lumps to present for early diagnosis. I was well aware of these issues when involved in research as a member of the University of California Biopsychosocial AIDS Project, in San Francisco, during the early 1980’s and in writing one of the first pamphlets on preventing HIV transmission at the Pacific Centre, Berkeley, USA. At present, I believe that Mr Bowtell’s optimism about prevention eradicating HIV, though well intentioned, is premature and perhaps unduly dismissive of HIV science.

Response to Peter B. Todd

Bill Bowtell, August 2007

In his criticism of my article, Peter Todd says that “… [Bowtell’s] hypothesis seems to be that education and behaviour modification will be both necessary and sufficient to contain the spread of HIV even in the developing world …”

This is not so.

My view is that the control and containment of the HIV pandemic will require both the increased resourcing and application of more effective behavioural prevention strategies and greater access and availability of existing and new biomedical prevention measures. If they are to work, both behavioural and biomedical prevention strategies will have to be resourced at far higher levels than is presently the case.

Clearly, the first HIV pandemic – the one that afflicts sub-Saharan Africa – must be responded to by providing all necessary care and treatment therapies and services, as well as a far greater emphasis on prevention. But the second, looming HIV pandemic – the one that is emerging in the Asia Pacific – is in its nascent stage. To head off this pandemic will require much less fixation on care and treatment, and much greater investment in effective behavioural and biomedical prevention measures.

Peter Todd does not support my contention that the priority funding of HIV/AIDS care and treatment is exacerbating the problem of the pandemic. Yet this seems to me to be a simple statement of cause and effect. Universal access to new and improved therapies must inevitably have the consequence that people become less concerned about acquiring HIV/AIDS knowing that there is at least some form of treatment for it. Of course, everyone who requires treatment should have access to it, but wishing for something does not make it so. Universal access to HIV care and treatment is simply not going to happen any time soon. It is a noble goal, but one whose costs have not been properly assessed.

In every sense, effective prevention strategies are cheaper and better than the alternative. The greatest intellectual shortcoming in the appalling global mismanagement of the HIV pandemic has been the lazy assumption that somehow the nature of the HIV crisis exempts it from any serious application of basic economic commonsense and rigorous assessment of costs and benefits of strategic options. This has a lot to do, I suspect, with the charming but deeply ingrained economic illiteracy of institutionalized medicine and the health sector generally. It is time for many of the comforting illusions and assumptions that have been generated by all sides in the great AIDS war to be subjected to minute and rigorous re-evaluation by gimlet-eyed accountants and economists.

Excellent scientific research for its own sake must be funded and supported, as must the best possible care and treatment services. But just as the United States has conclusively demonstrated that organising a national health system around just care and treatment is immensely and insanely costly and inefficient, so these lessons must be heeded when we seek to respond to global health management. Prevention in the United States has failed dismally because the national and state governments neither pay for it, nor support it. In those countries, such as Australia, that both pay for prevention and sustainably support it, the empirical evidence is conclusive that it has worked to reduce the incidence of many forms of cancer, HIV/AIDS, smoking-related illnesses and so on.

My belief in the need for more effective prevention is far from being based in simple naïve faith and optimism, or in a rejection of scientific methods and principles. On the contrary, I assert the primacy of scientific enquiry and research as being the only legitimate basis on which public health policy should be founded. It was the deranged rejection of scientific research and advice that resulted in the present HIV catastrophe. It will only be when global policy-making on HIV is refounded on the basis of science and evidence that we will be able to bring the pandemic under control and management.

Bill Pigott, Berry NSW

In response to Noel Pearson’s essay in Edition 15 - Unintended Consequences

I thank Noel Pearson for his essay in Griffith REVIEW 16. It gave me

many things to think upon. I read it through the lens of one who had worked in education and health development in developing countries, poor countries struggling with and/or facing development challenges. It has triggered many reflections on my years of working with communities striving to change. I see many parallels. I also respond as a Celtic Australian who has wondered often why approaches to community development used and funded by Australia in overseas development settings are not used here in our own internal community development efforts. I recall how, on hearing about or reading of some scheme to render some Indigenous community more like the commercialised materialistic society we have become, I have so often shaken my head and said this simply would not work in a community development situation.

No community starts with nothing, even though it may seem nothing to the outsider. No person starts with nothing. Trying to help others by assessing their deficits and identifying the gaps between them and us, and then responding by filling those gaps or remedying the deficiency, is a response from the outsider’s point of view and, if anything, leads to short-term change and, as Noel Pearson suggests, unhelpful “unintended consequences”. I compare this with approaches which help others find their strengths, their talents and their resilience and use these to change the relationship they have with the situation they are trying to address. In my experience, this approach is more likely to work. I have learned that perhaps the only way to help others change the relationship they have with their situation is to enable them to actually experience the sort of relationship which has them mobilising their own inner resources and tapping into their resilience. I believe that this might require from those who wish to help a very different sort of relationship, one which recognises where the other is, accepts where they are and responds from an understanding of what they understand. I am reminded of writings and discussions about development as the building of capacity within peoples and their communities. I think this is what Noel Pearson is also talking about.

In 1995 I had returned to Nepal as the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Representative to Nepal, having spent six years previously working in Nepal as a WHO staff member at project level and then eight years as Chief of the Organisation’s Staff Development Programme. After the first few months in the new job, I jotted down some reflections about development, and the place of tradition, culture and the people factor. I shared and discussed these reflections with others. They were clearly mutual concerns and in a written form I used them in briefing new staff members and visiting consultants. In my notes, I mentioned the need for two changes in the way we worked. The first was a change from seeing “money” as the answer to development problems towards making much more effective use of the resources that are already available. The second was a change from providing answers from the outside, towards enabling people to realise how much they have within their own experience and setting.

I also noted that in many situations, quite unintentionally, people had become dependent on outside resources and ideas. In their interactions with development agencies and people from outside, they began to focus on how much they themselves lacked. Doing this continuously, they lose their self-esteem and their self-confidence. Such loss is very much an “unintended consequence” in the Noel Pearson sense. This seemed to be particularly so with respect to the cultural traditions and traditional approaches which had enabled these communities to survive particularly challenging conditions (conditions that would have been quite untenable for us as outsiders). Such traditions and practices represented adaptations that had taken place over hundreds or even thousands of years. They included adaptations in the ways in which communities relate with each other, make decisions and use available resources, and had all evolved in response to a particular context. The parallels with Noel Pearson’s people are obvious to me.

I added to my notes that I had seen many examples of foreigners moving into someone else’s country, bringing answers to problems that come from the outsiders’ own cultural context, and which may well have been very effective in that context. Because of their status, or the standing of the organisation they represented, they had easily convinced the communities they came to help to adopt these practices. However, as the years passed, it became clear that these practices from elsewhere were not as effective as they had been “back home”, and that their introduction had led to the dismantling of the more appropriate local systems. The basic wisdom that societies had developed in their long-term adaptation to the realities of the time and place in which they found themselves were ignored. An “unintended consequence” of imposing wisdom from outside is a disappointed or even humiliated local people, disabled rather than enabled.

I had observed that generally these outside “experts” have high status, highly developed skills in presenting attractively (“selling”) new ways of doing things, and could often offer material rewards. Thus they were able to convince people to want these new ways. In taking up the new ways, existing strengths were not maintained and died out, leaving holes in the people’s lives. It seems to me that such holes eventually give rise to an emptiness in the human spirit. People may initially be unaware of this emptiness, but as they become so, it becomes a deep ache, and they experience a sense of defeat. At the individual or personal level, people who lose sight of their place in a society may turn to drugs and alcohol or become obsessed with short-term material gains. They forsake the values that have sustained them, letting go the principles on which their communities are based. I must ask Noel Pearson if this is what has happened to his people.

I finished my reflections with another observation: “Because we have stopped validating people’s inner strengths, we have presented, like good advertising agencies, the idea that people should want something else. We forget to invest the time needed to validate what they already have and encourage their use of it to gain what they need. And in our discussions of development issues, it will not be sufficient that I recognise community members and value their contributions. It is essential that they feel recognised and valued.”

From my perspective in the Health Development field, it seems that we need to revalidate the human values of human development and explore a concept of health in a community, in which all participate with dignity, on their own terms, and in their own way. To do this we would need to encourage others to let go the things that hold them back, and hang on to and strengthen the things that have been their strengths and sustained them over the years. We would also need to develop new ways of behaving so that, in our interaction with other people, they experience what it means to be respected, recognised, to have their traditions and contributions valued, to be empowered and enabled to become responsible participants in their own development, with dignity and self-reliance.

At about that time I was also going through a personal discovery relating to a dyslexic son who had lost his way in an academic school in Geneva, where we lived at the time, in which well-meaning teachers had tried to help him by focusing on his faults and shortcomings (trying to close his gaps and correct his deficits). As a result, he so totally lost his confidence that we were asked to take him out of the school, and advised to send him to a special school where he should only take two subjects. We knew this was not the case, and with help found a small boarding school in England where all the teachers appeared to believe that it was their job to help each student find and recognise excellence within themselves. This is exactly what Michael did, doing well enough in the end to be offered a place at Cambridge University. He declined the offer and came to Macquarie University instead. As parents, we are grateful that we were able to find a community in which there were many who could, would and did validate what we knew to be there, so that Michael could himself begin to build on what was within. Back in Nepal, I looked around me and noticed that the development professionals with whom I worked fell more or less in to the same two groups, one of well-meaning people who found faults and tried to correct them and the other of equally well-meaning people who looked for and found strengths, talents and resilience and helped others use them and build upon them. I noticed a parallel in the different outcomes of the two approaches. This gave me new insight into my own work. It helped me recognise the power of some people to undermine others’ confidence, and the equally awesome power of others to build, rehabilitate and nurture. It has also helped me to recognise what I call the “multiplier effect” of being recognised. The starting point in our work with others is to believe in them.

I also recall the 1998 Christmas card sent to our office by one of the development NGOs working alongside us, which had as its text a piece on helping others by the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. The language is from another era but the message is most relevant today.

If real success is to attend the effort to bring man to a definite position, one must first take pains to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret of the art of helping others. Anyone who has not mastered this, is himself deluded when he proposes to help others. In order to help another effectively, I must understand more than he – yet first of all I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him. If however, I am disposed to plume myself on my greater understanding, it is because I am vain or proud, so that at bottom, instead of benefiting him, I want to be admired. But all true effort to help begins with self-humiliation: the helper must first humble himself under him he would help, and therewith must understand; that to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant; that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient; that to help does not mean to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands.

I later found this quoted by David Ellermanin his paper “Helping People Help Themselves: Toward a Theory of Autonomy-Compatible Help” (Policy Research Working Paper 2693, The World Bank October, 2001) in which he cited the reference as a Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall, published by Princeton University Press (1946). Ellerman presents some ideas that might lead to much better “unintended consequences” for our Indigenous brothers and sisters than many of our present approaches.

Another author whose writings I shared with many colleagues at the time to help us embrace alternative attitudes to development is Alan Kaplan of the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA), a South African-based NGO consultancy practice which has been in existence for some twenty years. Of particular note was the paper “The Developing of Capacity”, published as a Development Dossier by the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service in 1999. As Kaplan himself says, the paper emerged from collective reflections on experience of the consultants of the CDRA, was written by a practitioner from the experience of practice, and written with a sense of urgency and a sense that it was becoming more and more difficult for development practitioners to work within a development sector which is unthinking, and “which has dominant allegiances with those very forces which conspire to maintain the status quo”. One quote that proved to be particularly helpful is the following:

Ultimately, then, the development paradigm which we are articulating here has little to do with the transfer of resources, which we saw earlier as the notion which informed the traditional approach to development. On the contrary, development is about facilitating resourcefulness, and this is a vastly different take on a very tired subject. A perspective which demands a vastly different response from practitioners.

In his essay, Noel Pearson refers to “ten classic dialectical tensions” such as “idealism versus realism” and “rights versus responsibilities”. Rather than tensions, I would see each of these sets of words as entities at either end of a spectrum which represents a range of different perceptions people use to interpret the world within which they find themselves and which they use to understand a given issue. They are tensions because we make judgements about which end is the correct one and then fight to impose our view on others. However, the reality is that both are components of a bigger picture within which we seek (or should seek) a balanced view and an appropriate starting point for discussion. The word “and” becomes a powerful alternative to “versus” in such a discussion. I would add more entities that represent either end of such spectra – “vulnerability and resilience”; “self-reliance and dependence on others”; “enabling and disabling” – and I would seek some additional pairs of words that would reflect behaviors exemplifying understanding, respect, compassion, equity and trust.

Within all this, the aim to have people take responsibility or be responsible is clearly a worthy aspiration and one I fully support. However, in order for anyone to be responsible, they must have the ability or capacity to respond. This is what our community development efforts should foster, as we enable individuals and communities to appreciate the resources within, to build on their strengths, build their capacity and to use their resilience as a resource, and thus enjoy an intended consequence of no longer depending on outsiders.

We trivialise or even demonise what we do not understand, and another’s profoundness can be an affront to us. Some years ago, while working overseas, I read “The Mantis Carol”, a story about a Kalahari Bushman by Laurence Van der Post. I remember marking the paragraph in which van der Post puts the view that the colonists could only cope with the simplicity and profoundness of the Bushmen by attempting to change them to be like the colonists themselves and that in doing so, they and their way of life were destroyed. He drew a parallel with Australia’s treatment of our Indigenous people. This echoed in my mind, having experienced earlier in my life a sense of profound respect for the wisdom and knowing of Aboriginal people I met while on short-term assignments with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and with the Aboriginal Health Service in South Australia. What a profound difference between their society and mine. They share what they have and respect the traditions that have brought them here. They seem to know things that are far beyond what we know. I am rediscovering this as I work with the Landcare movement as a volunteer. I am immensely impressed with the knowledge our Indigenous people have with regard to land on which we all live. I am impressed with the profound value their sense of country might be for all of us. I am impressed with their leadership in helping those of us who are open to being helped to understand our connection with country. I contrast this with what I see to be the extreme poverty of our material competitive world, with its short-term temporary aspirations and its obsession with being an economy that is forever growing rather than a people who express themselves in being a community.

Perhaps the worst of the “unintended consequences” is that we try to make them like us, as we see only problems, see them only from our point of view, apply solutions that come from our own context and do so with the sort of short-term, quick-fix approach that betrays our guilt. Maybe it is just that we are more comfortable when others become as greedy and selfish as we are.

An alternative surely would be to start with their strengths and rather seek to learn and adopt behaviours and values that enabled our Indigenous brothers and sisters be the people they are and have been for so much longer than we have been. We just might benefit more than they do.

Thank you Noel Pearson.

On Edition 15 - Divided Nation

Sean Burke, Parkerville WA

How do we become Aboriginal?

Location matters. We cannot ignore our surrounds, or the people that have lived here for thousands of generations. The connection of indigenous people to the land is a gift that they can share with all others, but one which has been seriously undervalued.

The mainstream of society in Australia has, for the last two hundred years, tried very hard to distinguish itself from the Aboriginal people. This has taken on many forms. Then, as time went on, various attempts were made to bridge that gap of understanding, and of culture.

When I went to school, the emphasis seemed to be upon mere intellectual understanding. The idea was that attending the odd movie and writing reports on Aboriginal culture and traditions (taught by a European Australian who had read it in a book) would help to bring about harmony.

In more recent years, there have been many programmes that try to bring children first hand experiences of their local aboriginal cultures, both contemporary and traditional.

A few years ago, I came to understand that in order for there to be a real understanding between the mainstream and the disenfranchised Aboriginal population, the mainstream would have to ‘become a little bit Aboriginal’.

But then I realised that we already are. Language was the key. I realised that there were absolutely thousands of Aboriginal words in active use in Australia, both in the language proper and in place names, and also that the Australian accent would not be what it is today without the influence of Aboriginal tongues.

In other words, what I realised was that I spoke an Australian English language that was partly formed out of Aboriginal languages. This is not to say other tongues weren’t also important, such as Irish, Scottish or Cockney, but whereas we are ready to accept that our English might be a bit Irish, we might find it confronting to try to accept that our English is partly Aboriginal.

It shouldn’t be. Over millennia it has always been the case that a conquering people take on some of the attributes of the local subjugated people. Over time they become indistinguishable.

Shall I claim that I am a Norman, like the Deburghs of 1000 years ago? There are no Normans anymore. In Australia we might start to say that there are no English here anymore, only part English, part Aboriginal, part other, and thus Australian, people.

It isn’t a matter of blood, but of culture, of which language is a major aspect.

Everyone who has lived in Australia for any significant time, and particularly anyone who was born here, is, culturally, part aboriginal. The current tendency is to avoid, be ignorant of, or deny this.

In the American context, poet Robert Frost, in his poem The Gift Outright, wrote;

“The land was ours before we were the land’s…”

And;

“…something we were withholding made us weak.

Until we found out that it was ourselves…”

The way we speak in Australia is a little bit Aboriginal. So is the way we relate, the way we dance and sing and paint, the way we joke, the way we deal with distress and loss, the way we move over the land, the way we think.

The current challenge in Australia is for the mainstream Aussie to embrace their own part-aboriginality, which is present in the way they are, in their culture and their very soul life.

Once we begin to understand this, it has ramifications for the way we teach, learn and live.

On Edition 13 - The Next Big Thing

The Elderly: Was it All Our Fault?

Betty Birskys

(950 words, from the original 1334)

‘The Next Big Thing’ [Issue 13] inspired me to write concerning another demographic whose ‘political, social and creative agendas have been eroded by commercial imperatives, and turned into a commodity.’

I refer to the elderly, of whom I am one: an eighty-one-year-old survivor of the Great Depression, a veteran (in the VAD/AAMWS) of a war of genuine terror and peril, a mother and a grandmother. We begot the baby boomer generation, which begot Generations X and Y – and we are as homogeneous, so goes the hype, as are those younger groups that followed us.

In the best of all lands, we glide through life, smugly content with the world that we will leave to later generations.

That is the legend – and what a load of rubbish it is!

We are the generation that rejoiced in the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese Empire; that dared subsequently to dream, not of what we might one day own, but of the promised new world of peace and equity, a world without wars and poverty. We believed Australia was destined to continue as an example to the world, with its progressive agenda in social security, public education and health. We believed in a fair go for all.

It wasn’t perfect. There was the Cold War, then Vietnam; civil wars and famine in other countries; occasional transgressions by politicians or business men at home. But these were mere tacks in the wind; the final course was set by the light on the headland. We thought we could attend to our common business of humanity: working, loving, setting up homes and families.

In our old age we awoke, like Rip Van Winkle, to a world of Doublethink and Newspeak, with t he economy replacing community and society as the main incentive in our lives.

When did ‘citizens’ become ‘customers’ of private enterprise and government? How did aged care, health care, child care and education become ‘industries’ And why did we so meekly acquiesce?

In our defence, we can plead that the change was cunningly wrought: first, denigration of the public providers and cutbacks in funding, with diversion to private entities; then fear campaigns regarding the quality and availability of the increasingly hard-pressed public services (health, education, aged care). Add to that blatant government policies encouraging the ‘private sectors’. The result - two standards of delivery to ‘clients’ – presented to a gullible public as a matter of ‘choice’, based on the ability to pay, fragmenting the last remnants of ‘community’.

Professionals (especially in health) are lured into the lucrative private sector, further degrading the public sector. This drift is boosted by expensive tertiary fees preventing graduates from entering the public sector, let alone doing pro bono work. State governments cop the blame for this shortage of specialists, engendered mostly by policies in Canberra.

Public hospital waiting lists lengthen for elective surgery (think agonising arthritis, blinding cataracts), so fearful pensioners pay for private cover, or spend their life savings on increasingly expensive procedures in the private sector. Private dentists’ fees are astronomical, but the national Dental Scheme was terminated in 1996. Medicare bulk billing rides a seesaw, and must be intermittently patched up by government tinkering.

Childcare, now largely privatised, has been described even by government members (e.g. Howard favourite Jackie Kelly) as ‘a shambles’: highly priced, often inappropriately situated, profit oriented, and its departmental administration confusing to customers. Overnight multimillionaires are the ultimate beneficiaries of massive taxpayer-funded subsidies in this industry.

State schools, once the democratising centres of communities, suffer as students attend highly subsidised (but often still expensive) private schools, which battle among themselves for brainier students.

Home affordability is at its lowest level since 1990 - due less to interest rates than to inflation, first-home-owner grants and a distorting tax system. Potential first home buyers and tenants share the agony of this; for many, rent or mortgage payments absorb up to 50% of income. Homelessness is at record highs, exacerbated by extreme cutbacks in government rental housing.

The irony is that the ‘housing boom’, the symbol of wealth at which the Treasurer danced a jig of joy, is an illusion. As mortgage sales increase, home owners may realise that theexponential increase in homes value is not real wealth; it only benefits investors or inheritors. If they’re lucky, Australians end up buying back into the same market in which they sell. Improper planning is another bad effect of the boom, with dire environmental consequences.

Two million Australians live in poverty, including many children. The real unemployment rate is probably double the official figure, but largely obscured by the amount of under-employment: 28% of jobs are casual and/or part-time, one of the highest rates in the developed world, and one hour’s work a week counts as employment. WorkChoices will likely worsen the situation. Leading church and welfare groups are rejecting the new Welfare to Work scheme as an attack on the most vulnerable.

I could go on. These matters concern many of my generation, and we discuss them at U3A meetings and over the internet.

We live in the real world. Not all our children and grandchildren are doing well; we fear for them, for all ‘ordinary’ people are just one push away from the precipice. In the present economic/social climate, only the very rich are immune.

What does this mean for the future? Greater division between rich and poor? More rampant consumerism funded by debt? Families finding their relationships in ever-narrowing circles decided by their children’s specialised schools? Increasing environmental degradation?

Is this the Australia we want? No longer the land of a fair go for all but a nasty, dog-eats-dog place, a Hobbesian land whereMargaret Thatcher’s ugly edict rules: ‘There is no such thing as society.’

Letters to the Editor Archive

Edition 1: Insecurity in the New World Order
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 2: Dreams of Land
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 3: Webs of Power
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 4: Making Perfect Bodies
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 5: Addicted to Celebrity
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 8 - People Like Us
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 9 - Up North
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Edition 11 - Getting Smart: The Battle for Ideas in Education
Click HERE to download. (PDF format)

Griffith Review

Get Involved

For Writers