Introduction by Croakey: Systemic failures in government policies and systems are contributing to poverty and hardship for remote Aboriginal communities in Central Australia, suggests a report recently released by Lutheran Care with the Batchelor Institute.
Centrelink often fails to adequately cater for many people in Central Australia because it does not take into account factors such as geographical isolation, cultural and language diversity, and limited access to technology and internet/phone coverage, says the report.
Below, one of the report’s authors, Dr Jude Lovell, says efforts to address poverty in Central Australia must be cognisant of the history of failed, punitive policies, and engage with communities’ knowledge about how to best address poverty.
Jude Lovell writes:
In 2007 the Abbott Government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) suspended the Racial Discrimination Act and Northern Territory Anti-discrimination laws. The NTER remained until 2012.
Almost twenty years since NTER commenced, it is still impossible to ‘boil down’ to one or two sentences the lived reality of the removal of human rights on the grounds of geography and race in our region.
Coinciding with the NTER in 2007, Australia’s largest ever forced local government amalgamation shut down local community government offices and created regional councils. This caused immediate local job losses and the removal of functioning plant and equipment from communities, overnight.
The increase in unemployment was somewhat disguised through transferring local community development employment program recipients to work for the dole and income management measures.
Local government office closures reduced employment in each community and regional council centralised to offices outside their Local Government Areas into the towns of Mparntwe, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek in the Barkley. The remote Aboriginal workforce decreased exponentially.
One of the greatest and most divisive failures of these policy driven interventions, and arguably one of the most punitive, is the compulsory Income Management measures as they have been applied to Aboriginal welfare recipients in the Central Australia.
Income Management was not designed to be a long-term welfare measure for individuals, nor a tool with capacity to be responsive or flexible to circumstances other than those covered in specific measures.
Yet now one and almost two generations of young ones have grown up knowing nothing else at all – no jobs, no employed family members, and no pathways from it.
As our recent report found, getting on to welfare is also difficult. There has been an assumption that technology will replace people in the delivery of a welfare service, which has instead placed people in geographically remote places further into financial crisis and increased levels of social exclusion as participation reduces.
Welfare entitlements have become increasingly inaccessible because without access to technology, connectivity and the relevant literacies required to navigate Services Australia, MyGov and CentreLink, entitlements are sometimes too hard to obtain and or to keep.
Income Management is not the only broken spoke.
Food and water insecurity
There is increasing disparity in food security and in affordable access to nutritious food across the region, which drives untenable demands for emergency relief, and which also puts pressure on other resources, with people needing to visit a regional town to access food relief because it is not provided to them locally.
Do the maths and logistics on what is involved in adding a 500 km round trip to the cost of groceries – I’m sure it’s unimaginable to many Australians.
Guaranteed access to clean drinking water is currently the subject of legal dispute in some communities, so in the meantime those residents must buy bottled or boxed water.
The disappearance of safe household drinking water has not happened suddenly – that decline has been monitored and reported on for at least a decade, from back when the water in the tap was drinkable.
I wonder if the situation could ever have become this dire before the Local Government Council amalgamations – or would the means have been found to manage the bore and water table levels according to the needs of the place?
Addressing poverty is important for many of the targets under the national Closing the Gap Agreement, such as ‘children thrive in their early years’, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people secure appropriate, affordable housing that is aligned with their priorities and need’, and ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people enjoy high levels of social and emotional wellbeing’.
However, despite the burgeoning systems of recording and measuring ‘the gap’, CTG does not give a definition nor measure for poverty.
Without asking for Aboriginal people’s guidance in addressing poverty, then program interventions and evaluations will not, cannot and should not be thought to be enough.
We have no agreed understanding of poverty in Central Australia. In our region any useful understanding and definition could only come from affected people and communities acting with the required support to lead and manage a process by which to define, identify, assess and monitor poverty and its flip side – security.
Our research confirmed that poverty detrimentally effects the capacity of people in central Australia to achieve and maintain a lifestyle which they could reasonably expect; and that systemic drivers are present but beyond individual or community control or choice.
In this context the resources being provided for Lutheran Care’s financial wellbeing services are too limited to impact positively across the region, and financial crisis is symptomatic of levels of poverty which require transparent collaboration to improve access and ensure the suitability of multiple of the CTG determinants.
The Albanese Government’s recent announcements under the Closing the Gap 2025 Implementation Plan – to reduce the costs of 30 essential products in more than 76 stores in remote First Nations communities, and to build a local nutrition workforce in these communities – suggest a shift that could meet some of the urgent needs, such as for improved food security and an increased and culturally astute Aboriginal health workforce.
But without central Australian Aboriginal leadership to identify what poverty is, and what relief from poverty might be, these 2025 initiatives will be vulnerable to the same patterning of inequity and profiteering in our region.
Potential solutions
Some ways forward include:
1. Increase the human interface that is linguistically and culturally capable of supporting service provision and compliance in central Australia. This can be done by employing local language-speaking residents who can provide culturally appropriate and safe services, and who understand place-based drivers and solutions.
2. Create transparency and collaboration between services to urgently provide culturally safe and coordinated pathways for people who otherwise experience increased vulnerability because of situations and circumstances or geography; and, that mesh resources for holistic response to ensure food, housing, education, employment, skills development, and safety.
3. Some further place-based responses could include rethink supply chain for provision of healthy and accessible food using proven models (such as FoodBank), and local workforce strategies and employment opportunities. If managed well and with creativity, this could foster initiatives that evolve into small businesses, pop-up shops, or local markets.
4. Activities that increase financial well-being and literacy skills, and workplace initiatives that source, supply, and provide adequate amounts and qualities of basic healthy food: pre-prepared, raw or as ingredients.
5. Combatting shame or blame around financial crises with social and emotional wellbeing support which is culturally and linguistically grounded, as well as then involving financial well-being or counselling staff who are specialists in financial resilience.
6. Calling out scammers and opportunistic profiteering to help to familiarise as many people in the community as possible, as quickly as possible, about the deliberate targeting that scammers use, and about the ways victims experience the consequences.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on poverty as a determinant of health
