Boyer Lecture

<em>Illustration: Kerrie Leishman</em>

Illustration: Kerrie Leishman

The emergence of an Aboriginal middle class in Australia in the past three decades has gone largely unnoticed. While the numbers remain small, this change heralds an economic future for Aboriginal people, unimaginable 50 years ago.

When W.E.H. Stanner delivered the Boyer Lectures in 1968, After The Dreaming: Black And White Australians – An Anthropologist’s View, he gave credence, perhaps inadvertently, to the widely held assumption at that time that Aboriginal life was incompatible with modern economic life. Today, the expectation is quite the reverse.

The policies of federal governments for the past decade have increasingly made explicit the expectation that educational achievement and employability will be the key results of spending in indigenous affairs portfolios. This is a view generally shared by most ordinary Australians.

But on the left, and among those opinion leaders who hang onto the idea of the new ”noble savage”, the Aboriginal poverty is invisible, masked by their ”wilderness” ideology. Their unspoken expectation is that no Aboriginal group should become engaged in economic development.

By the late 1980s, indigenous policy and much public commentary in Australia was based on a paradigm that saw Aboriginal people as victims of a brutal colonial legacy, as residents of remote regions where they strove to maintain the vestiges of a traditional way of life, an endeavour in which they needed the support of government through income assistance schemes. Over the following two decades this paradigm came under increasing attack, led by Noel Pearson, on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstood the nature of contemporary Aboriginal life in Australia.

Indigenous people came to be treated, not just as different, but exceptional, and inherently incapable of joining the Australian polity and society. The history of legislation and policy applied to indigenous people demonstrates this: not citizens until after the 1967 referendum; the shameful effects of the nearly half-century-old Community Development Employment Program (a work-for-the-dole scheme) and entrenchment of Aboriginal people in welfare dependency; the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention; all these exceptionalist initiatives have isolated the Aboriginal world from Australian economic and social life.

But the Mabo case, the Native Title Act and engagement with the mining industry have changed the assumptions of that paradigm and catapulted Aboriginal people engaged in the mining industry into the mainstream economy. I have worked at mine sites and witnessed this extraordinary change.

WHEN I first went to the the east Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1980, I was deeply shocked at the poverty and racism that seemed then to be the unalterable fate of the Aboriginal people living in Kununurra, Warmun (or Turkey Creek, as it was known then) and the stock camps. Still today, for most Aboriginal people there, life is hard.

My first visit to the Kimberley’s Argyle Diamond Mine – the world’s largest producer of diamonds, owned by Rio Tinto – was in early 2000. At that time, there were four Aboriginal employees. Two of them were gardeners. Two years later, there were many more.

Among the people who made this change by employing local Aboriginal people was the mine manager, Brendan Hammond, recently arrived from Namibia, and originally from Zimbabwe. Like other southern Africans, he had lived through the dismantling of apartheid and the independence movement in his own country as well as in Namibia and Angola. He told me he was shocked at the racism in Australia, and that what he was dealing with in the vicinity of the mine was worse than anything he had encountered in Africa.

A new Rio Tinto policy framework for engaging with Aboriginal people gave him an extraordinary opportunity. He gave a direct order to the community relations staff to ensure that more Aboriginal people were employed. I attended a meeting with the staff of the mine in 2001 when discussions had commenced in earnest to identify jobs for Aboriginal people.

One man said: ”We can’t employ Aboriginal people because they have got problems with alcohol and they all have police records. This is a high-security site. It wouldn’t work.” Some shuffled subtly in their chairs and must have felt embarrassed. Those who knew of the instruction from the manager must have been wondering: ”How indeed would this work?”

I said: ”The best thing to do would be to employ Aboriginal women. They don’t have problems with alcohol or the police.” The response was a thick silence; but one man, the late Fred Murray, had a twinkle in his eye. When I next visited the mine, he made a great fuss about meeting me at the security gate. The security team was a group of tough local Aboriginal women, and Fred’s face beamed with pride. Later, I learnt that they had busted the local police as they left the mine site for a weekend in Kununurra. They were caught with company bed linen in the boot of their police vehicle.

Hammond revolutionised the culture of the Argyle mine, and today the rate of Aboriginal employment at that mine stands at 25 per cent of the total workforce.

Many of the significant changes in the Aboriginal world are due in some part to the changes in the mining industry, which offers employment and contracting opportunities as an alternative to the welfare transfers upon which many remote and regional Aboriginal communities depend.

Mid last year, in the Pilbara alone, Rio Tinto Iron Ore had more than 1000 indigenous employees and Fortescue Metals Group more than 300. As proportions of the total workforce in both these companies, about 8 per cent of the employees are indigenous. Nationally, Rio Tinto had about 1500 indigenous employees.

These and other companies, such as BHP Billiton and Woodside Energy, are also offering indigenous entrepreneurs unprecedented opportunities to tender for contracts. Rio Tinto Iron Ore and Fortescue awarded more than $300 million last financial year to indigenous contracting companies in the Pilbara. Last year, it was estimated there were 52 contracting companies owned by indigenous businesses or in joint ventures with indigenous companies. These companies are also employing indigenous people at an unprecedented rate.

HISTORICALLY the mining sector had a poor record of indigenous employment and this led to mistaken assumptions that indigenous people were not interested in working in mining and unable to acquire the skills to do so.

Earlier this year, Professor of Public Policy at Australian National University Matthew Gray and I addressed the question: ”What has changed?” We found that there were three factors that made this mining boom different, and for the first time opened the possibility of economic benefit flowing to local people who live near the sites of these mines.

First, the current boom is large. According to Treasury, in 2010, about 27,000 jobs were created in the mining industry. It looks like the boom will continue for a number of years.

Secondly, the boom has taken place during a period of strong growth in the whole economy. The resulting tight labour market has meant that mining companies have had trouble finding employees.

Thirdly, mining companies are increasingly seeing indigenous employment as an important part of agreements to mine on indigenous land. It maintains the companies’ “social licence” to mine. Companies with many indigenous employees have often made significant investments in recruiting and training them. Companies have provided literacy and numeracy programs, family and community support programs and mentoring of indigenous employees. While these programs involve costs, the companies have found the business case stacks up.

Maintaining the gains, and the momentum of change brought by the resources boom, could be transformative.

GOVERNMENT policies, media reportage and public attitudes have barely registered the extraordinary changes in the Aboriginal world of the last half century.

The demographic and regional change in Aboriginal Australia in that period is remarkable.

The demographic profile of regional and remote Aboriginal populations is overwhelmingly young: approximately 58 per cent of the indigenous population is under 25. Australia cannot afford for this group of young people to be excluded from the benefits of paid employment, as were many of their parents. For the first time there are now large numbers of good, well-paying jobs to be had in remote Australia.

There is also a growing difference between the indigenous population of the south and that of the north.

By 2040, half of the population of northern Australia will be indigenous. In the south, it will remain at about 2 or 3 per cent.

In 2012, indigenous people own 82 per cent of northern Australia in a variety of titles: pastoral leases, freehold, leases, native title determinations and special Aboriginal freeholds

The economic interests of indigenous and non-indigenous people in northern Australia are closely aligned – mining, cattle and tourism are the industries that fuel the northern economy.

In the south, the predominant issues raised in the media and public domain by Aboriginal advocates concern human rights, reconciliation and ”self-determination”.

In the north, the predominant issues raised by Aboriginal advocates concern land acquisition, industry and commerce, education, training, employment, and health issues.

The rapid, if dispersed, industrialisation of remote Australia is changing the traditional balance of power between the cities and the bush. It is likely that the people of the outback will be less stubborn, deprived victims of Pauline Hanson’s imagination, and more the avant-garde of a wealthy remote-area workforce.

The shift of infrastructure from the east coast to the remote inland and west is also striking. Our old and new mining towns are absurd contrasts of the primitive and modern. Since 1967 the mining industry has built 26 towns, 12 ports and additional bulk-handling infrastructure at many existing ports, 25 airfields and more than 2000 kilometres of railway line.

Australians mostly live in cities, far away from the mining provinces. They are largely unaware of the great wealth they generate and the economic and cultural shift happening inland.

What will be urban Australia’s response to the Aboriginal north? This is one question I have asked standing beside a mine pit in remote Australia, peering over its edge.

This is the first in a series of edited extracts of the 2012 ABC Boyer Lecture series to be delivered by Professor Marcia Langton, chair of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne. It will be broadcast on ABC Radio National on Sunday at 5pm.