THE ABORIGINAL TRUTH
Edward Heathcoat Amory on which
politicians are really to blame for the present plight of the first Australians
NATIONS hate having to confront their ugly underbelly. So all those Englishmen who shrank from the sight of our football supporters laying waste to Marseilles will sympathise with Australia. The success of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in the Queensland state elections has forced the Aussies to ask themselves whether they are a racist people.
Mrs Hanson is opposed to further Asian immigration, and wants to reverse legisla- tion giving Aborigines special rights. She has been disowned by the ruling Liberal party, but not, apparently, by the voters in her home state. Politicians in Canberra have two explanations for this, depending on their political tack. Right-wingers will tell you that she is not a racist, and that her supporters are making a misguided economic protest. Left-wingers will claim that she is a racist, but represents a small minority of uneducated and ill-informed rural rednecks. Both are wrong.
This former fish-and-chip shop owner's message is indeed racist, but it cannot be dismissed as a protest from the political fringe. Outside the metropolitan centres that cling to the seaboard of the world's largest island, a spreading virus of race hatred threatens to engulf Australia. This moral and cultural catastrophe is the direct result of the failure of the policies that have guided the country for a generation. Labour politicians were determined to weaken their connections with the old Empire, and forge new links with the rising East, which meant encouraging Asian immigration. This same group wanted to make amends for the past treatment of the original inhabitants. They had a point. Some early settlers in Queensland hunted, the natives like animals, and the `Abos were treated worse than cattle until well after the second world war. Many half- caste children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to orphanages. But the compensation — massive positive dis- crimination and an unprecedented wave et subsidy — has proved far more damaging than the original discrimination. Over the last two years, I have visited Australia four times — my wife is writing 3 book on an Antipodean ancestor — and driven from coast to coast, across count. Y' through the hot, red centre. Once outside the urban areas, the consequences of gov" emment do-gooding are easy to see. You can tell when the red dust track that you, are following is approaching an Aboriginal, encampment, because a thick carpet (11 empty beer cans disfigures both verges. Cars are regularly abandoned in the mitltle of the road by their drunken drivers, simply because they have run out of petrol. We came across an Aboriginal family whose car was stuck in a sand dune. They were waiting under a gum tree for someone else to sort out the problem. They continued to sit there, drinking our water, while we attempted, for over an hour, to pull their car out. They watched while we became covered in sweat and oil, and when their car was finally free they went on their way without a word of thanks. These original Australians are no longer, if indeed they ever were, naive primitives struggling to come to terms with modern civilisation, handicapped by colo- nial oppression yet possessed of a special affinity with the land. That is a polite, politically correct myth. Most of central Australia's Aboriginal communities are in a cycle of apparently unstoppable decline. The government hands them cash, cars, cl othing, and land confiscated from white farmers. They are not obliged to work, so they do not. Instead, the money is spent on lottery cards and alcohol. Education and health standards have plummeted, and mortality rates risen. They speak signifi- cantly less English than 30 years ago. Tuberculosis is now once again endemic in the Northern Territory. In the town of Finke, run by Aborigines, white workers are imported to run the petrol pump. Their black employers treat them with contempt. The parasitic white advisers whose policies have created this human disaster can suggest nothing except more handouts, and so the downward spiral con- tinues.
This idiotic experiment now threatens to destroy not only the Aborigines but the white communities that live alongside them in the vast rural heart of the conti- nent. Scratch the surface of a rural Aus- tralian today, and you will find race hatred against the Aborigines. Apparently . mild and middle-class people will suddenly Wye of newt? Wing of bat? Stuff it, let's phone for a pizza.' come out with astonishing racist remarks.
Life in the outback is very hard. Summer temperatures in the fifties Celsius are common, and seven-year droughts unsur- prising. Pick up a spanner in the sun, and you will burn your hand. The men and women who manage to scratch a living in this environment are now obliged to watch as their taxes go to pay for floodlit basket- ball courts for their idle, dissipated, Abo- riginal neighbours. At the same time, many farms have been confiscated from white families who have owned them for a century or more, and handed over to Aboriginal groups who have managed to demonstrate any link, however tenuous, with the land. One farmer explained to me over the inevitable can of cold Fosters on his porch, 'I used to let them roam over my land, but now I don't dare. They might claim to find a so- called sacred site, and then my family would be thrown off.' Left-wing politicians deny all this, but when I asked Don Dun- stan, the former Labour prime minister of South Australia, to suggest an Aboriginal community somewhere on the continent that would prove me wrong, he was unable to think of a single suggestion.
This sorry situation explains one half of Mrs Hanson's appeal. Economic insecurity amongst the unskilled, white working class accounts for the rest. As in every advanced Western country, this group, particularly the men, are increasingly redundant in the labour market. Jobs are going to more highly trained immigrants from other Asian countries. This is, however, the less worrying half of the Hanson ticket. Although it is possible to find very good Asian cooking in Sydney restaurants, Aus- tralia is still a European country. Some large cities, like Adelaide, have no signifi- cant Asian population at all. Only Darwin, on the north coast and nearer Indonesia than Sydney, is a true racial entrepot. Mrs Hanson's anti-immigration rhetoric works because of the deeper racial prejudice against Aborigines. All is not lost. So far, Mrs Hanson's electoral appeal is concentrated in her famously redneck home state of Queens- land, In central Australia, a more typical reaction came from a senior administrator in the legendary flying doctor service, who told me, 'I agree with some of what she says, but I can't stand the woman herself.' Then there is the hope that John Howard's lacklustre government will take notice of this vote and accelerate its so far ineffectu- al attempts to stop featherbedding the Aborigines. It wouldn't be difficult. They could start by insisting that, instead of money for nothing, they would be paid only when they worked. Their first com- munity project could be picking up all the beer cans that now desecrate the land- scape they are supposed to hold so sacred.
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