Neoliberalism, market fundamentalism and the colonization of Aboriginal policy

"Neo-liberalism is a hungry beast and this 21st Century strain of capitalism is shaping the agenda for control of Aboriginal lands...........Australian Government policy is heavily influenced by neo-liberalism through its extraordinary emphasis on managing access for mining companies to resources on Aboriginal lands. This involves controlling what is still perceived as ‘the Aboriginal problem’ and forcing a social transition from traditional values and cultural practice to ‘mainstream’ modernism of a particular brand. It also involves displacing many Aboriginal people from their traditional lands and concentrating them in ‘growth towns.......To make any sense of the aggression behind most current Indigenous policy in Australia you need to study the impact of neo-liberalism around the globe"  

Jeff McMullen

The Australian journalist, writer and social justice campaigner Jeff McMullen has written two cogent and articulate critiques of the colonization of Aboriginal policy making in this country by the cancer of neo-liberalism (or what others call market fundamentalism). 

One of Jeff McMullen's articles The New Land Grab is available on line here (in The New Internationalist blog). The second piece is a book chapter titled Dispossession- Neoliberalism and the Struggle for Aboriginal Land and Rights in the 21st Century which appears in a new book In Black and White: Australians at the Cross Roads (edited by Rhonda Craven, Anthony Dillon & Nigel Parbury). This article is available here on Jeff McMullen's own website

In drawing on the work of David Harvey and others, and incorporating the voices of Aboriginal people, McMullen makes the case that neoliberalism is a key driver of the agenda for the control of Aboriginal lands and assimilation of Aboriginal people in Australia.  

Neoliberalism, McMullen argues is the ideological underpinning of a uniquely Australian strain of state-corporate capitalism that aims to control Aboriginal communities to enable exploitation of the land and mineral wealth on Aboriginal lands. McMullan argues that the real goal here is the upward redistribution of land and mineral wealth.

McMullen demonstrates the way that successive Federal and State Governments have used the coercive powers of the state to impose an agenda of modernization, control of Aboriginal lands and assimilation and assault on Aboriginal rights and culture.

Drawing on David Harvey's book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, McMullen identifies 4 essential features of the neoliberal agenda and analyses the extent to which they are manifest in Aboriginal policy making in this country:

1. Privatization and commodification of public and community goods. This has occurred through the privatization of Aboriginal lands, via policies that open up Aboriginal land to resource exploitation and attempts to override community land ownership and impose private property ownership rights.
2. Financialization to treat good or bad events as opportunities for economic speculation.
3. Management and manipulation of crises to establish a neoliberal agenda. This includes using the  Northern Territory Intervention as justification for  exerting greater control over Aboriginal communities to enable market and corporate exploitation of the minerals and resources on Aboriginal lands and the use  of 'military style campaigns to exert control and challenge Aboriginal sovereignty
4. State redistribution of wealth, not to the poor but to the rich and powerful.

Analyzing Aboriginal policy through the lens of neoliberalism as McMullen does, helps us to understand what drives social policies such as the Northern Territory Intervention and the social engineering to control Aboriginal people still living on traditional lands, as well as the aggressive land grab by mining and resource companies, aided and abetted by Federal and State Governments, which divides Aboriginal communities, and even Aboriginal families.  He writes:

'Neoliberalism connects the agendas of modernising Aboriginal culture and allowing mining companies to vigorously exploit and minimal cost the mineral treasures on Aboriginal lands'.

McMullen points to the divide and conquer tactics of mining companies and governments in the Kimberley and Pilbara in Western Australia, across the Northern Territory, on Cape York and in parts of NSW and South Australia, as manifestation of these neoliberal agendas.

McMullen is scathing about the role played by influential Aboriginal leaders, such as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine who have become influential advocates and brokers for neoliberal policies and have gathered adherents and supporters in both political parties and corporate Australia.

Phillip Pullman and the greedy ghost of market madness

"there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about.. things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight"  Phillip Pullman

Fantastic speech here by British author Phillip Pullman on what he calls "the greedy ghost of market madness" and the social, cultural, and democratic dislocation that it causes. 

In this speech Pulman attacks the British Government for its austerity cuts which are resulting in the closure of hundreds of libraries throughout the UK and are hitting the most marginalized and disadvantaged the hardest, whilst delivering tax cuts and more public funds to the wealthy, the corporate elite and business and corporate interests.

Pulman points the finger directly at all those who advocate for the unfettered freedom of the market  and who measure the success of an endeavor or a public responsibility by the metric of profit .

"...........And it always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It’s set up to do that. It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.”

Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.

So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they’re good books but because they’re just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit.

The greedy ghost is everywhere. That office block isn’t making enough money: tear it down and put up a block of flats. The flats aren’t making enough money: rip them apart and put up a hotel. The hotel isn’t making enough money: smash it to the ground and put up a multiplex cinema. The cinema isn’t making enough money: demolish it and put up a shopping mall.

"...............The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for.

Now of course I’m not blaming Oxfordshire County Council for the entire collapse of social decency throughout the western world. Its powers are large, its authority is awe-inspiring, but not that awe-inspiring. The blame for our current situation goes further back and higher up even than the majestic office currently held by Mr Keith Mitchell. It even goes higher up and further back than the substantial, not to say monumental, figure of Eric Pickles. To find the true origin you’d have to go on a long journey back in time, and you might do worse than to make your first stop in Chicago, the home of the famous Chicago School of Economics, which argued for the unfettered freedom of the market and as little government as possible.

Sarah Burnside on the Politics of Envy in a new Gilded age

Wealth and income are now more unevenly distributed in Australia than at any time since the 1920's. The last 2 decades has seen an unparalleled redistribution of wealth upwards.

Income and wealth are now concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who have reaped the benefits of economic growth by disproportionately increasing their personal wealth. This has been at the expense of Australians at the other end of the income scale whose share of personal wealthy has declined relative to high income earners.

In a piece in the Australian e-Journal Online Opinion Sarah Burnside discusses the linguistic and political strategies deployed by the powerful (and their courtiers) to counter and limit restrict discussion about inequality and wealth redistribution in Australia.

The Politics of Envy
Sarah Burnside*

Recently, Education Minister Julia Gillard unveiled a plan for an “education overhaul” to review the funding for all Australian private and public schools. The Australian noted that Gillard's emphatic statement that “this is not about taking money from schools” represented a desire to “avoid a repeat of the divisive 2004 election campaign debate about private school funding that destroyed Mark Latham”s leadership”

Former ALP leader Mark Latham was pilloried in 2004 for inciting a “politics of envy” in calling for redistributive funding of schools. His plan to divert funding from 67 elite private schools to needy government schools was slammed as a “private schools hit list” – terminology recently revived by Coalition education spokesperson Christopher Pyne. Then-Prime Minister John Howard suggested that Latham's educational policies were “based on class and envy”. Similarly, former teacher, writer and campaigner Kevin Donnelly argued that the ALP schools policy was “guilty of the tall poppy syndrome – let”s attack those schools that achieve the best academic results and that promote values that parents want”. Journalistic wisdom, citing the 2004 election as an example, holds that the ALP is vulnerable to indulging in the “politics of envy” and must guard against such tendencies if it is to enjoy electoral success. Anthony Ashbolt, a senior lecturer in politics, has subjected this “perplexing myth” to analysis, concluding that the policy had been electorally popular and that a combination of Liberal Party spin and soundbite reporting had buried it. In particular, Ashbolt charged that the ALP had mistakenly “managed to convince itself of the mythology surrounding its electoral loss”.

The expression “the politics of envy” requires unraveling. Such language is arguably symptomatic of the way real and substantive concerns about the kind of society we live in are reframed by the right in terms of personality, character and “values”. The reframe is powerful; arguing in favour of envy would appear as difficult as opposing hope, faith or charity. The identification of ideological difference with mere character flaws not only reinforces the banality of contemporary political debate. More dangerously, such reframing draws the life out of the arguments of the social democratic left. If a desire to create a more egalitarian society boils down to mere envy, then social democrats can be nothing more than a group of jealous people with an inexplicable inability to appreciate the fine things that capitalism has to offer their fellow citizens. Rather than a commitment to see all Australia’s children receive an optimum education, the ALP is characterised as having a (seemingly irrational) dislike of private schools. Tony Abbott queried Gillard’s call for an inquiry into schools funding, warning voters: “You can’t trust these people. They don’t like private education…if they’re re-elected, as sure as night follows day, they will try to cut private-schools’ funding."
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Similarly, former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has suggested that the ALP simply disliked the well-to-do. Nelson criticised the Rudd government’s first budget in 2008, which introduced means testing for the baby bonus, tighter thresholds for family tax benefits and an increase of the threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge to $100,000 per year for singles and $150,000 for couples. For Nelson, these measures were an attempt to “appeal to the politics of envy and resentment”. Nelson charged not only that the ALP had “always been opposed to people who do well”, but used extraordinarily emotive language in concluding that the Party had a “deep-seated vendetta” against them. The debate thus shifts from ideological ground to that of personality flaws, allowing the Liberals to avoid enunciating their own position in any depth by effectively accusing their opponents of mere mean-spiritedness. The real debates that underlie these issues – differences as to conceptions of the nature and extent of the state’s role in providing education and health to citizens – remain stagnant.

Some parallels can be drawn between the accusations of “envy”, “resentment” and “dislike” leveled at aspiring educational and tax reformers and the now-ubiquitous charge of “elitism” favoured by commentators such as Janet Albrechtsen. Thomas Frank, a journalist and editor of The Baffler, has written perceptively of the success of the Republican Party and its allies in linking liberals (in the American sense) inextricably with snobbery and elitism in the public mind. In his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Frank notes that a repackaging of social class was effected in America using the notion of a “liberal elite”. Such a notion, he argues, is “not intellectually robust”, has “never been enunciated with anything approaching scholarly rigor” and falls apart “under any sort of systematic scrutiny”. However, the trope of the elite liberal remains a powerful tool to sidestep ideological difference in favour of illusory generalizations as to personality. Frank cites a particularly instructive passage by the right-wing American writer Ann Coulter, who simplifies liberals as follows: “They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs”.

Parties of the right, on the other hand, have learned how to portray themselves as down-to-earth, abandoning or downplaying the patrician outlook of traditional upper-class Tories. John Howard’s self-assessment as “an average Australian bloke” appealed to a longstanding egalitarian instinct that has resonated throughout Australia’s history. That the kind of egalitarianism offered by Howard was one of character and personality rather than of economic equality sits comfortably within a Liberal Party tradition that eschewed class divisions. Professor of Politics Judith Brett noted in her 2005 Quarterly Essay Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia, Howard’s promise to govern “for all of us” echoed Robert Menzies’ commitment to the “forgotten people” of the middle classes and his conviction that: “We don’t have classes here as in England”.

In addition to sniping from the Liberals, Gillard has recently been criticised by Latham himself for wasting time on “stunts and trivia”, most notably the MySchool website, and for “putting politics ahead of policy”. In particular, Latham charged that Gillard had fallen prey to a “special kind of cynicism” in delaying an announcement of $11 million in funding for disadvantaged schools for 18 months, then releasing it “when she faced a PR battle over MySchool”. The MySchool website has been problematic for the left; the Australian Education Union has slammed national NAPLAN testing and its members have refused to administer them. The Union is supportive of the funding review announced last week, however, with federal president Angelo Gavrielatos calling for a new funding system to “ensure that the Federal Government meets its primary obligation to adequately and appropriately fund public schools”.

If the ALP accepts that redistributive policies on public education will inevitably constitute electoral poison, it will grant control of the debate to those who would deny the inherent value of substantive equality. Gillard would do well to refuse the reframe and respond vigorously in rebutting knee-jerk responses about “the politics of envy”.

*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.