BY EWAN SAUNDERS
The report into violence in Aboriginal communities in Cape York, presented by Tony Fitzgerald, has opened the floodgate of "causes" and "solutions" to the alcoholism crisis that has faced indigenous Australians since white colonisation. Why is Queensland Labor Premier Peter Beattie now taking a stand on alcoholism in indigenous communities?
The Fitzgerald report identified alcohol abuse as a key cause of violence against women and children in Aboriginal communities, and recommended that the state government ban alcohol in some communities if it cannot control the problem.
The Fitzgerald report's findings and recommendations are similar to the findings and recommendations of previous inquiries into issues affecting Aboriginal people.
Sixty indigenous delegates at a meeting in Townsville recently released a statement asking Beattie why recommendations from the earlier reports had not been implemented.
In 1999, Griffith University academic Boni Robertson headed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Taskforce on Violence in Indigenous Communities, which, after extensive interviews, released 126 recommendations for immediate action. The taskforce was commissioned by the Beattie Labor government.
The Robertson report found that the underlying cause of community dysfunction were the breakdown of traditional Aboriginal family values, and the erosion of traditional law and cultural identity within communities.
The failure of consecutive governments to acknowledge and act on this, and address the economic dispossession of the Aboriginal people, is at the root of alcoholism, drug use and violence in Aboriginal communities.
Indigenous activist, academic and Socialist Alliance Senate candidate in the November 10 federal election Sam Watson sees the Fitzgerald inquiry as another political stunt by governments in the name of Aboriginal people.
"These inquiries that successive governments have convened are pure window dressing to soothe the concerns of certain Â鶹´«Ã½ of the electorate. They are never designed to deliver real change or real reform", Watson said. "The Aboriginal people have within themselves the capacity to make those changes and they need to be given the opportunities to do that."
Watson explained that it is the dispossession of Aboriginal people that is the root cause of alcoholism. "These Aboriginal communities are legacies of a by-gone colonial era. The land on which they are situated is not the tribal lands of the people. The people have no spiritual connection with that land.
"The communities are not based on tribal structures, they're not based on dreaming, and they're not based on particular cultures... These people have been stripped of land, of cultural values and shotgunned into these places; they no longer have the capacity to express themselves as spiritual beings, as Aboriginal people."
An article in the Brisbane Courier-Mail by Margaret Wenham noted that Beattie cited newspaper reports on violence and alcoholism in Cape York communities as reasons for commissioning the inquiry.
As soon as the front pages of Queensland's daily newspapers began detailing violence in indigenous communities, the Beattie government announced its desire to lend assistance, apparently in a shocked response to the revelations.
Now the premier has promised to "bite the bullet" on alcohol abuse in Cape York, admitting that previous governments had failed to address the problem. "If we don't face up to the issue of alcohol then we are clearly not serious", Beattie said.
But Beattie has no intention of getting serious about real solutions. As Sam Watson points out, the problems facing Aboriginal people will not be solved by prohibition of alcohol. "Alcoholism is not the problem. Alcohol abuse is merely a symptom of a deep spiritual and social disturbance, caused by the violent dispossession of land, the violent suppression of culture, the violent alienation from mainstream society and the violent denial of basic human rights.
"The only lasting solution is to recognise these facts. Real reconciliation can only be achieved when governments answer the cry for a treaty between white and black Australia. A treaty is the first step in the healing process", Watson said.
The Fitzgerald report is the report that the political establishment in Australia has been waiting for. By attributing the consequences of Queensland's long history of racism, murder, land theft, cultural attrition and marginalisation to the relatively recent phenomenon of alcoholism, and posing prohibition as the simple answer, Beattie has constructed a classic "blame the victim" solution to the problems of Aboriginal communities.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 5, 2001.
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