Sustaining Australian democracy through adult and community education

I have written a discussion paper on the role that Australian adult and community education (ACE) providers can play in sustaining Australian democracy and supporting civil society.

The ACE sector provides a great deal of value to support Australian democracy. Given the importance of education to democratic functioning, the ACE sector’s expertise in education and training of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups – particularly through foundation skills of language, literacy and numeracy – means that it has a unique role in ensuring that Australian democracy thrives. Read the paper summary here and the full paper (PDF) here.

The Community Colleges Australia Summer Reading List

This year, I wrote Community Colleges Australia’s first “Summer Reading List”, with selected recommendations for members and friends. (You can view the CCA version here.)

“Summer reading is a sacred pastime. For many of us, it’s about the only time we now have to read without constant distraction.” – Tim Soutphommasane 

Understanding Australia 

My Country: Stories, Essays & Speeches by David Marr 

David Marr’s My Country: Stories, Essays & Speeches is a massive collection of his writing, from the 1970s onwards, including early works, such as the first review of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. “My country is the subject that interests me most, and I have spent my career trying to untangle its mysteries,” writes Marr. The book is filled with Marr’s wisdom: “The true radicals in Australia are those who call themselves conservative…. Australians are a practical people…. We fight change hard here – often brutally hard – but the leaders we come to admire are mostly reformers.”

I suspect I am not the only person on whom David Marr has grown over the years. Perhaps best-known for his biography of Patrick White, Marr’s work has broadened and deepened in recent years, turning him one of Australia’s most insightful cultural and political commentators. In recent years, Marr has published Quarterly Essay biographies of Tony Abbott, George Pell and Bill Shorten. Listen to Marr’s ABC Radio National “Conversations” interview with Richard Fidler (13 November 2018) for a preview of his book’s contents. 

Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up by Gabrielle Chan

In this week’s Sydney Morning Herald (29 December 2018), Shane Wright writes: “Capital cities are eating up the rest of Australia. Already home to more than two-thirds of the nation’s 25 million residents, each capital city will soon dominate their respective state or territory in a way that will challenge Australia’s economic and political landscape.” Capital city populations became dominant in 1916 in South Australia, 1921 in Victoria, 1942 in Western Australia, 1954 in New South Wales and 1991 in the Northern Territory. It’s projected to take place in 2027 in Queensland and 2040 in Tasmania. The social, political, economic and cultural implications of this national demographic shift is profound.

It’s also one cause for the political restlessness of non-metropolitan Australia, with increasing numbers of non-major party politicians winning seats such as Cathy McGowan; the further you get from the state GPO, the higher the disillusioned minor party vote. 

That’s the context of Gabrielle Chan’s book Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up. Born to Chinese immigrants in Sydney, Chan became a journalist and moved to western New South Wales in 1996. She separates the book into 2 parts (“Shedding my city skin” and “The politics of country”) and 19 chapters – which she calls “lessons”. Examples: 1. WTF? There are people west of the divide; 2. Place is everything; 5. There is an education divide; 7. Not all kids want to go to uni; 11. Rural politics is stuck in an old model; 15. The economics of a small town are tricky. Listen to Chan’s interview with Philip Clark on ABC Radio’s “Nightlife”. 

Seize the Fire: Three Speeches by Richard Flanagan 

Acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) has begun to develop a reputation as one of Australia’s most insightful speech-makers. This short volume includes three of his recent speeches, encapsulating a unique Australian voice: “Australia is not a fixed entity, a collection of outdated bigotries and reactionary credos, but rather an invitation to dream, and this country—our country—belongs to its dreamers . . . if we are finally to once more go forward as a people it’s time our dreamers were brought in from the cold.” 

Understanding America

The United States of America has always fascinated Australia, however during the last two years – since the ascendancy of President Trump – the need to understand what is happening across the Pacific, and it’s meaning for Australia, has become acute. These two works should assist.

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

This ground-breaking, lengthy and acclaimed historical work by Harvard academic and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore attempts in one volume to explain the full scope of American history. Writing in The Atlantic, Megan Garber writes: “I can think of no stronger endorsement than this: These Truths is 932 pages long—and, reader, I didn’t want it to end…. Here are some of the most urgent and defining truths of the current moment—among them inequality, partisanship, nationalism, and, in particular, racism—told in reverse, Metacom to Cotton Mather to Andrew Jackson to Frederick Douglass to Pauli Murray to Phyllis Schlafly to Barack Obama … [p]eople who, treading the vast American landscape, bent the arc of history.”

Companion piece: Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein, a recent visitor to the Sydney Writers Festival; listen to her Festival talk here.

Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit

American journalist, historian and environmental activist Rebecca Solnit – author of Men Explain Things to Me, about male arrogance which preceded “mansplaining” – has marked out her place as one of the most original voices on feminism, ecology and the environment and how place matters in the modern age. Her latest collection consists of 20 essays separated into four sections – Electoral Catastrophes, American Emotions, American Edges and Possibilities. The pieces in this collection were all written since 2016 and are thus imbued with a sense of urgency within the shadows of the Trump presidency. Solnit lives in San Francisco, and brings a unique West Coast perspective, compared to the New York-Washington-Boston intellectual approach we are used to.

Companion piece: Women and Power: A Manifesto by British classicist Mary Beard.

Understanding the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, with its accompanying marketisation/privatisation agenda, has made a profoundly negative impact on Australian vocational education and training (VET), and – as a result – the community education sector. These three recent books provide arguments against the marketisation agenda and essential reading on what to do next:

Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next by Richard Denniss is a passionate, highly readable essay that shows how “the language, ideas and policies of neoliberalism have transformed our economy and, more importantly, our culture.”

The Wages Crisis in Australia: What it is and what to do about it is a free e-book from University of Adelaide Press, edited by Andrew Stewart, Jim Stanford (a recent speaker to NSW community college CEOs) and Tess Hardy. Read chapter 9, “Contracting out community services, marketisation and wages”, by Fiona Macdonald and Michael Pegg.

Wrong Way: How Privatisation & Economic Reform Backfired, edited by Damien Cahill and Phillip Toner, includes 19 case studies of how marketisation has failed Australia. Read Toner’s chapter entitled “A Tale of Mandarins and Lemons: Creating the Market for Vocational Education and Training”, which I reviewed back in November.

Understanding Economics, Democracy and Politics

And finally, the age of Trump means that more authors are writing passionately about and why democracy should be saved:

• The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin)
• Why Save the Bankers? And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis by Thomas Piketty. If you couldn’t bear the idea of ploughing through Piketty’s 816 page Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this short book of his articles and essays from 2008 to 2015 may be just the thing to ensure that you understand this seminal French thinker. Piketty “transformed out economic discourse” (Paul Krugman) and is widely credited with being the person who convinced us that rising inequality is a big story.

What would a next Labor Government do with Australian vocational education and training: read this book

Speculation about changes of governments in Australia even reaches international audiences. So what would a change of national government mean for Australian vocational education and training? I have been monitoring the statements of the Federal Labor Opposition and report below.

Few areas of Australian public policy are more fraught than the recent experience with vocational education and training (VET). For years, commentators have criticised the marketisation/privatisation of Australian VET. They are particularly scathing over the failings of the (now defunct) VET FEE-HELP program, which may have cost Australian taxpayers up to $7.5 billion. Even the economically dry Productivity Commission described that program as “a well-documented example of how policy can fail if governments do not ensure proper policy design along with suitable regulatory oversight.”

The failures have been compounded by consistent ability of VET funding to keep up with other education funding, as the Mitchell Institute has shown: funding has gone backwards in the last ten years, especially notable compared to funding increases in university (53% up), schools and pre-schools.

The results of funding scarcity and VET brand “trashing” continues to have a “long tail” impact: Australia’s lack of a national VET policy means that not-for-profit community providers have continued to lose out.  The recent VET FEE-HELP reforms, while necessary and welcome, are not sufficient. Despite numerous well-publicised private for-profit VET college failures, it’s not over yet: On 9^th November, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) instituted Federal Court proceedings against Productivity Partners Pty Ltd, trading as Captain Cook College, alleging “systemic unconscionable conduct in breach of the Australian Consumer Law” going back to 2015, and impacting 5,500 students.

So how is VET shaping up in the Federal sphere? If you are looking to work out the Federal Labor policy on VET, the easiest way is to read the speeches of Shadow Skills Minister Senator Doug Cameron.

An interesting theme runs through Senator Cameron’s speeches: his most quoted source is Dr Phillip Toner, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Senator Cameron has quoted Dr Toner three times this year: in his speech at a Federal VET Policy Forum in Melbourne on 16 July, at ACPET’s national conference in Canberra in August and at the AEU National TAFE Council meeting in Melbourne in April.

So what does Dr Toner advocate? The best way is to read his chapter, entitled “A Tale of Mandarins and Lemons: Creating the Market for Vocational Education and Training”, published in a recent book that he co-edited with Damien Cahill, Wrong Way: How Privatisation & Economic Reform Backfired (Black Books).

Toner’s article is 1 of 19 case studies of how “marketisation” has failed Australia. The other chapters deal with early childhood education, private health insurance, prisons, aged care, employment services, public sector engineering, electricity reform, labour market policy, financial deregulation, housing, the National Broadband Network, monetary policy, productivity, inequality, free trade agreements and foreign investment.

In other words, it’s the most complete handbook of what Australian governments have done to deregulate and to send services out to the “market”.

It’s not pretty reading. Here’s how Toner commences his chapter (p.59):

The creation of a ‘training market’ for public and privately funded vocational education and training (VET) is one of the most transparent failures of neoliberal public policy over the last three decades. There is a direct line connecting the early neoliberal economic arguments and pedagogy formulated by VET mandarins – those who designed and managed the VET system in the early 1990s – to its subsequent implementation. The VET market is an exemplar of the great damage inflicted when a naïve , idealised neoliberal conception of how markets work becomes the basis for public policy. Serious quality problems in the VET market arose from a misconceived analysis of both the economics of the private training market, and from the actual level of demand for quality training in large parts of the labour market. Further, the pedagogical system known as competency based training (CBT), instituted to develop competition between registered training organisations (RTOs) and flexibility in all aspects of training content and delivery has actually led to diminished quality of training and malfeasance among many RTOs, employers and students.

After an analysis of why VET matters in Australia, Toner examines the creation of the Australian training market, which has been modelled on the UK experience. He points out that TAFE (83%) and not-for-profit adult and community education providers (15%) delivered almost all publicly funded VET as late as 1996, but this fell to 49% and 6% (respectively) by 2016. The number of RTOs increased from 400 in 1995 to 1931 in 2016, the majority of them private for-profit providers.

Toner discusses the scale of the quality problem (“significant”), and examines the specific economic and pedagogical conditions in the training market that explain the scale and scope of poor quality and malfeasance. Minimal investment is needed, inadequate standards for teaching qualification and teaching resources and the low barriers for RTOs to enter are all exploited by opportunistic providers.

Toner concludes (p. 78) that:

The training market has followed the classic trajectory of neoliberal public policy: ebullient expectations quickly followed by disappointment leading to incessant and expensive – through largely futile – bureaucratic tinkering resulting in intensified regulation and altered incentives…. The time remaining to effect a rescue of the public VET system is rapidly diminishing

Further reading

“Social Service Futures: Marketization and regulation of vocational education and training”, by Professor Valerie Braithwaite, The Power to Persuade, 23 May 2016.

“Marketisation of VET: The New South Wales response 1990s–2017”, by Robin Shreeve and Joanna Palser, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 16 July 2018.

“New figures quantify the extent of the TAFE disaster”, by Professor Leesa Wheelahan, 23 June 2018.

Competition Policy and Human Services: Where Theory Meets Practice, by Rhonda L Smith & Alexandra Merrett, commissioned and edited by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and CHOICE, September 2018.

(This article originally appeared on the website of Community Colleges Australia on 12 November 2018.)

(image above: cover of Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired, Black Books, 2018)

Emma Gonzalez’ Speech and the Future of America

Even from my distance in suburban Sydney, Australia, thousands of kilometres away, the turmoil of American politics feels all too real in the digital age of instant news. As commentators have noted, Australia does not have a gun problem, so unlike the USA. So the Never Again MSD (standing for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School) student-led gun control movement wouldn’t happen here.

The medium and long-term impacts of the social, cultural and political vectors of the current moment of American gun control debate are almost impossible to predict. But some things are clear already: there is a generation of previously unknown young American student leaders who are passionate and articulate, wielding an unexpected political and moral power that does not appear to be dissipating.

At the “March for Our Lives” Washington DC rally on 24 March, we witnessed one of the more powerfully affecting – and astonishingly short – political speeches of modern times. Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and one of the movement’s leaders, spoke for about 7 minutes. Rebecca Mead (The New Yorker) describes the impact, and makes some astonishing historical and cultural comparisons:

But it was Emma González, a Stoneman Douglas senior, who provided the afternoon’s most memorable moment….. González, who is small and compact, and who wears her dark hair cropped close to her skull, spoke for just a couple of minutes, offering an emotional name-check of the students who had died. Then, lifting her eyes and staring into the distance before her, González stood in silence. Inhaling and exhaling deeply—the microphone caught the susurration, like waves lapping a shoreline—González’s face was stoic, tragic. Her expression shifted only minutely, but each shift—her nostrils flaring, or her eyelids batting tightly closed—registered vast emotion. Tears rolled down her cheeks; she did not wipe them away. Mostly, the crowd was silent, too, though waves of cheering support—“Go, Emma!” “We all love you!”—arose momentarily, then faded away. She stood in this articulate silence for more than twice as long as she had spoken, until a timer beeped. Six minutes and twenty seconds were over, she told her audience: the period of time it took Nikolas Cruz to commit the massacre.

The best speeches, we now know, are mostly short, serving to respond to the moment and to inspire future action. Gonzalez’s speech may soon join the panoply of these greats.

Never have I seen someone wield silence so effectively. In hearing – or rather not hearing – her speak, you were forced to meditate on what happened and what had delivered this unlikely group of young people to the force of what had previously been one of the most intractable issues of American politics.  (Jelani Cobb, interviewed by Dorothy Wickenden, New Yorker Politics and More, WNYC radio and podcast, 31 March 2018.)

Film review of The Butler

Directed by Lee Daniels; written by Danny Strong; starring Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Elijah Kelly, Vanessa Redgrave, Cuba Gooding Jr, Robin Williams, James Marsden, Live Schrieber, John Cusack, Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda

Despite its many charms, the film “The Butler” struggles to capture American political, social and cultural history from the 1950s to the present day.  It’s a well-meaning and frequently enjoyable film with an all star cast, loving period detail (down the uniforms worn by 1960s US postal workers) and a genuine affection for both its topic and characters.

At 132 minutes, “The Butler” is both too long and too short, defeated by the task it has set itself – a virtual history of the American Civil Rights movement through the eyes of one man.  That man is Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whitaker, whose dignified performance is surely ripe for an Academy Award nomination – and the film is worth seeing for Whitaker’s acting alone.  He’s a black man who becomes a butler in the White House in the 1950s, and witnesses Presidential history first-hand through numerous administrations over more than thirty years.  The film is based on a true story of Eugene Allen, the subject of a feature article in the Washington Post on the eve of Barack Obama’s election in November 2008.

Growing up in the rural south prior to World War II, Cecil (spoiler alert!) witnesses both the rape of his mother and murder of his father by a white southern landowner.  Taken in by a kindly old southern matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave), he learns how to be a “house nigger” (the movie’s term, not mine), carefully and quietly serving the white plantation owners.

To survive as a black man in 1950s and 1960s America, Gaines needs to keep his emotions in check.  He finds his way into bar tending, then a fancy Washington DC hotel.  From there he is recruited to serve as a butler in the Eisenhower White House.

All of Gaines’ fellow butlers are black men.  He works there for the next thirty-plus years from Eisenhower (played by an unusually low-key and badly cast Robin Williams) to Kennedy (James Marsden, who sounds the part does not look it) to Johnson (Liev Schrieber, who tries hard, but never reaches the “larger than life” sense of his character) to Nixon (an incongruously cast John Cusack, who appears to have lengthened his nose for the part, and does a valiant but unsuccessful job at capturing this most complex of presidents) to Reagan.  Ford is barely mentioned and I do not recall Carter appearing.  You see what I mean?  The enormity of this topic conspires to defeat the film-makers’ best intentions.

(photo: Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman)

Ronald Reagan is played by British actor Alan Rickman, the most successful presidential portrayal.  How is it that Americans can play Brits and Brits play Americans so well – think Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln?  Worth pondering.  Jane Fonda plays Nancy Reagan, in one of the “The Butler’s” best in-jokes.  Fonda was once one of the most radical actors, including a notable visit to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.  So when Fonda plays a iconic conservative First Lady, the result is, well, slyly funny.  She’s also devilishly good in the cameo role.

Along the way, Cecil marries Gloria, who is played by Oprah Winfrey.  Younger viewers may not recall that Winfrey has had an illustrious acting career, gaining an Oscar nomination for her role in Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple”, as well as starring in “Beloved”.

Cecil and Gloria have two kids:  Charlie, the younger (Elijah Kelly), goes to Vietnam.   Louis, the older one (David Oyelowo), lives through a breath-taking sequence of historical events (Forest Gump-like):  He is a “freedom rider” for civil rights in the south in places like Birmingham, Alabama, is arrested sixteen times, joins up with the Reverend Martin Luther King, and even sits with King prior to King’s assassination in Tennessee.  He later becomes a radical black activist, helps to found the Black Panther Party and has a girlfriend who looks exactly like Angela Davis.

Martin Luther King (played by Nelsan Ellis) supplies a useful dramatic addition to the story.  When Louis embarrassingly says to King that his father is just a butler, King gives an articulate defense of African-American butlers and maids.  As the Salon review summarises:

Black domestic workers, King tells Louis, have played an important role in the struggle for civil rights….  Maids, butlers, nannies and other domestics have defied racist stereotypes by being trustworthy, hardworking and loyal….  In maintaining other people’s households and raising other people’s children, they have gradually broken down hardened and hateful attitudes. Their apparent subservience is also quietly subversive.

Did King ever say this?  I have not been able to find it, at least not yet.  But the point of the film is that King COULD have said it, even if he did not.  It’s at this point that “The Butler” starts to gain some of its power that it has given away through too much narrative and incident.  If, like me, you lived in the United States during the development of the Civil Rights movement, “The Butler” may have special meaning.  It dramatises many of the events, including some we can only guess at (how various Presidents dealt with the race issue), and ultimately is both moving and memorable.

Gaines lives long enough in the film (as did his inspiration Eugene Allen) to see Obama elected to the Presidency in 2008.  Thankfully, we are spared an Obama appearance – although Orlando Eric Street was originally cast to play the current President, but does not appear.  (Apparently Barack Obama turned down the invitation to play himself.)  Plenty of time left for that.

*****

Footnote:  Will Whitaker win an Oscar for his role?  His character – ageing about sixty years throughout the course of the film – is just the sort of role that the “Academy” loves.  But here’s a prediction: he is nominated but does not win, losing out to someone in a “flashier” film such as Tom Hanks in “Captain Phillips”, Robert Redford in “All is Lost” or – most likely – Chiwetel Ejiofer in “12 Years a Slave”.

Trivia corner:  A few years ago, Whitaker turned down the chance to play Obama in the film “My Name is Khan”.

Your summer reading list

It’s summer here in Australia.  Or, technically it will be here in Sydney in about ten minutes, once the clock strikes midnight to December 1st.

Each year the non-profit Grattan Institute publishes its “Summer reading list for the Prime Minister”.  And they have just published this years list.  It’s an interesting mixed bag, with six books (as well as seven articles), all non-fiction and mostly with an economic tinge.  That’s Grattan’s focus, although I would have liked to see something a bit more creative, as I fear that our Prime Minister (and almost all parliamentarians in Australia) are not reading enough creative works, thus possibly limiting their imagination.

Of the six books, I suspect that Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and An Angry Nation – originally published in June – probably is the most direct (and “on the mark”), but it is all about politics ….  There is also Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, intellectually challenging in a good way.

But all still a bit … uncreative, at least for me.

My own list to come soon.

Obama’s popularity in Australia

It’s official.  If Barack Obama was running against Mitt Romney in Australia, Obama would win by an historic landslide.  As reported in The Sydney Morning Herald today (Tuesday, 28 August 2012), an online poll by UMR Research discovered that 72 percent of Australians would vote for Obama and a miniscule 5 percent for Romney.

I could have told you that.  As a long-resident Australian from the USA, I have found that Obama is possibly the most popular politician I have ever seen … in this country.   My public expressions of support for Obama – from the moment he entered Australian consciousness in early 2008 during the Democratic primary elections – have been met with universal approval here.  That’s never happened to me before. And it’s not like Australians actually like politicians.  Plenty of people here in Australia strongly dislike both the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

But Obama haters in Australia?  I have not found one yet.  In fact, the Herald article quotes Geoff Garrett, Head of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, reporting that during the 2008 American Presidential campaign, “Australia was the third-most pro-Obama country in the world, behind Kenya and Italy”.  (Kenya okay, but Italy?)

Why is this?  No one I know can give a satisfactory answer.  But the survey has stimulated renewed interest in US-Australia political comparisons, including one by Peter Hartcher, the International Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.  In the same paper, Hartcher writes in an “op ed” that Australia is much more “left-leaning” than the US, is “the only country in the developed world that does not provide paid maternity leave” and “does not pay child support to all families”.  As proof of the triumph of conservatism in the US, he quotes John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, British commentators whose book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America examines the phenomenon.

I think that Hartcher, Micklethwait and Wooldridge are missing an important point, one that is less about American politics and more about American society.  The USA is, at heart, a deeply individualistic country, from its very early settlement.  Thomas Frank wrote about this in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How the Conservatives Won the Hearts of America, and the late Joe Bageant wrote about this in Deerhunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. (Ironically, Bageant’s book was, per head of population, MORE popular in Australia than the USA.)  I think that many commentators are confusing America’s die-hard commitment to individualism with conservative politics, Australia and British style.  The success of American commitment to the individual is reflected in its popular movies, a large number of which are about individual achievement and triumph over adversity (let’s think The Blind Side)

Pop quiz:  Which country’s leader is publicly committed to gay marriage – the USA or Australia?  Not Australia, whose unmarried Prime Minister lives with her de facto partner, but implacably opposes gay marriage.  Hmmm. It’s President Obama who supports it.  Which country still has widespread rent controlled apartments (deemed true “socialism” by many commentators of a conservative bent)?  Last I looked, it was the USA, with numerous cities participating, notably New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC and numerous smaller communities.  The “Global Property Guide” deems the US far more “pro-tenant” than Australia.  So not everything fits so neatly into a British-Australian attempt to cast Americans as the conservatives in all things.  It’s far more complicated than that.

Postscript: Thursday 30 August 2012 – My letter to The Sydney Morning Herald responding to Hartcher’s Op Ed was published today.  Here is a link.  Mine is entitled “It’s complicated”, and is about 2/3 down the page.

Nicholas Rothwell and the failed state

In my decades of reading Australian newspapers, I have never come across a more damning and fascinating piece of analytical journalism than Nicholas Rothwell’s article “The Failed State”, in The Australian newspaper of October 24, 2009.  Rothwell has been The Australian‘s northern Australia correspondent for some years and is the author of two books on the topic, and – unlike most journalists – truly has spent much time travelling and experiencing his enormous “beat” of the Top End.

Here is how Rothwell starts:

In Australia we are used to seeing progress in governance, not failure.  We expect governments in our jurisdictions that function well, provide efficient services, and maintain a fair match betweent the rhetoric of politics and the facts on the ground.

There is, though, a failed state in our midst.  That state is not Aboriginal north Australia, where the social fabric is in shreds and tatters.  No: it is the jurisdiction largely responsible for entrenching this degree of indigenous disadvantage:  the modern-seeming, self-governing Northern Territory.

On the face of things, all the standard attributes of a democratic society are present here in Darwin: a parliament, political parties, government departments, a range of key social institutions that look much like their southern equivalents.  But in fact the Territory is best understood as an interlocking set of interest groups.  It is heavily dependent on outside funding, the bureaucracy is shot through with politics, almost all medium-sized business relies on public sector contracts and the entire system is founded on the administration of an Aboriginal underclass.

This is an extraordinary set of claims, and we will see what sort of impact Rothwell’s criticism may have.

Update November 1:  On October 31, Rothwell published his second article in this series in The Australian, entitled “Giving It Back:  A Revolution in the Bush”.  One of his conclusions:

We stand at a point of redesign for the remote NT.  It is a defining point for the federal government, and for the Prime Minister, whose one great weakness is his portfolio of dying indigenous initiatives.

Worth reading.