Given the spirit of amity and goodwill engendered by the Federal Government's formal apology to the Stolen Generations on February 13 last year, it was always to be expected that that the first anniversary of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's momentous speech would prompt reflection on whether the lives of indigenous Australians were improving materially rather than a commemoration of the event itself.
Indeed, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been scheduled to deliver the first of his promised annual report cards to Parliament yesterday, outlining the Government's efforts to close the gap in health and living standards between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, but his office cancelled at the last moment, citing the difficulties posed by the unfolding bushfire crisis in Victoria. The report card, which will now be made public at the next sitting of Parliament, beginning on Monday week, will doubtless catalogue a solid list of achievements, particularly in regard to the federal intervention into indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, and conclude with a reiteration of promises of unceasing efforts to end the institutionalised disadvantage that plagues so many Aboriginal communities around Australia.
And yet, careful examination of Commonwealth and state government initiatives and polices in indigenous affairs since Rudd's apology reveal a preponderance of good intentions rather than quantifiable improvements. In the NT, the intervention initiated by the Howard government but endorsed virtually wholesale by the ALP has stemmed the the flow of grog and pornography, with beneficial results. Health checks of children living in remote communities has confirmed what was already known about the appalling state of their welfare, but there are few outward signs of the promised new houses, schools and clinics for indigenous communities, and many residents of those communities feel their concerns about other aspects of the exercise the lack of consultation, the unilateral acquisition of townships, emasculation of the permit system which provided a measure of protection from grog-runners, carpetbaggers and sexual predators, quarantining of welfare income, dismemberment of the Community Development Employment Projects and sidelining of the Racial Discrimination Act have been overlooked or dismissed.
The Rudd Government's failure to respond officially to the report of the board set up to review the intervention (which recommended scrapping the quarantining of welfare money) has heightened such suspicions.
The chronic disadvantage faced by Aborigines elsewhere also appears to be unchanged though if blame is to be apportioned here it must be go to the states, not the Commonwealth. Just over one week ago, a report tabled in the Victorian Parliament suggested that the 17-year life expectancy gap between Aborigines and other Victorians is expected to widen in coming years because of systemic disadvantage. It found that that the state's 33,000 Aborigines were three times more likely than non-indigenous Victorians to be unemployed, three times more likely to have diabetes, 11 times more likely to be abused as children, and 12 times more likely to be jailed at some point in their lives.
It takes many months, even years, to ameliorate entrenched disadvantage, a point that any other politician confronted with these unacceptable statistics would quickly make. And governments must also contend with the isolation of many disadvantaged indigenous communities. This makes it difficult (and expensive) to recruit the doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers necessary to break the cycle of abuse and disadvantage, and virtually impossible to provide the jobs that could otherwise help end the cycle of boredom and despair that so often characterise these communities.
The ennui and abuse destroying the lives of indigenous Australians are not recent phenomena. Report after report has acknowledged it for decades. The response of government was hand-wringing, followed by promises (soon forgotten) of affirmative action. After his apology to the Stolen Generations last year, Rudd pledged his Government would be different, that it would ''build a new partnership to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians''. He expressed a preparedness to ''look at new and practical ways of doing things'', and even set goals, such as halving the gap in reading, writing and numeracy ''within a decade''.
But the Labor Government's willingness to persevere with the Coalition's flawed intervention in the Territory, and to ignore the legitimate concerns of its critics, suggests it is incapable of viewing the problem in anything other than partisan political terms.
Twelve months on from issuing the long-awaited apology, Rudd needs to contradict his critics or risk being exposed as having given a speech that was all style and no substance.