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From
the October 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 48, No.
10)
In Responsibilities
Begin Dreams
Maxine McKew, The Bulletin
(centrist newsmagazine), Sydney, Australia, July 10, 2001
So many headlines and accusations. So much hand-wringing.
But [Australian Aboriginal leader] Noel Pearson sums up the root problem
in three words. “It’s the grog.” Addiction and passivity.
And of such magnitude that Pearson fears for the future of his “mob”
in the Cape. “You know, when I was growing up here, the missions
weren’t bloody Club Med or anything; they weren’t without
their problems, but what you had were poor families that were basically
functional, but now...”
The debate surrounding self-determination, which he worries is all
about “power and no responsibility,” is meaningless, he
argues, unless we “do the hard yards on issues like grog and
violence.”
In 1995, Pearson took then-Prime Minister Paul Keating for a visit
to his home community of Hopevale in Cape York in Far North Queensland.
Both were still basking in the triumphalist afterglow of the historic
passage of the Native Title Act. But Keating, nearly always the self-described
“big-picture man,” took one look at Hopevale and helped
Pearson, the Sydney University-trained lawyer, see something else
as well. “I drove Keating around the town and I remember, he
looked around the place and after a while said: ‘Why is it such
a mess?’ ” Pearson starts to laugh as he half attempts an
imitation of Keating in responsive spur-of-the-moment overdrive. “You
could see him, you know; he was turning himself straight away into
the landscape architect, and he was going to drive the whole thing
himself. But it put the wood on me, I can tell you. Here I was, I
had a great understanding of why things were the way they were. But
it was like seeing it for the first time through someone else’s
eyes. Keating was saying, ‘You can’t make excuses for this.’
And he was right. It was a bit of a turning point for me. It made
me realize that we have to take charge and clean up the mess.”
Pearson no longer talks about the “mess” of communities
in the Cape, such as Hopevale and Lockhart River and even more remote
places like Aurukun. There’s only one word he uses over and over
to describe the social chaos and personal devastation that’s
crippling opportunity and wasting talent.
“What we’re facing now is an epidemic. An epidemic of grog
and drug addiction.” The Aboriginal governing body, ATSIC [Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Commission], barely mentions the corrosive
effects of alcoholism, one more instance of its complete lack of focus.
But Pearson has had enough. He’s tired of libertarian permissiveness
and is fed up with those who talk about harm-minimization. As for
community leaders, some of whom are addicts themselves, well, he’s
had it with them as well.
Pearson is talking about a war. He’s got a few allies, some battle-hardened
combatants who “are on message on this stuff.” They’re
working toward a single goal. To get the grog out of the Cape.
This is a mighty ambition. Far North Queensland, a place of spectacular
natural beauty, is also a part of the country that floats on alcohol.
The 1995 encounter with Keating convinced him that a “rights
agenda” based on laws and political settlements, even treaties,
is all very well, but how does that help Aboriginal babies who come
into the world with fetal alcohol syndrome?
If he sounds like a zealot, a crusader, even at times like an old-fashioned
missionary, it’s because wherever he looks in his own backyard,
he sees the collapse of social order. “The situation is so bad
that the love that Aboriginal people have for their children doesn’t
stop their abusive behavior, a behavior that destroys any prospect
of a good future for those children.” Pearson says all this with
such rawness that it cuts right through the the self-justifying debate
that is now engulfing much of the Aboriginal leadership elite and
the latest action plan of well-meaning bureaucrats.
So we’re now to have a campaign against violence and sexual abuse
in indigenous communities? Pearson can’t believe it. Get a handle
on addiction, he argues, and watch as the statistics on domestic violence,
incarceration, and social retention rates improve. A turnaround in
the shocking health figures? Again Pearson says, “You’ve
got to cure the grog first, because people on grog don’t give
a fuck about nutrition or exercise or safe sex, or anything else.”
Pearson has clearly spent a good bit of time studying addiction. What
he’s come to hate is the way “the grog has infiltrated our
culture. It’s made us manipulate each other. So a lot of us end
up facilitating the abuse. But now we just have to stand up to abuse
and say no to manipulation. It means not giving money to relatives.
I tell you what, if I walk down the street here, and one of my mob
asks me for money, I try and dodge ’em.”
Settled into a quiet table at the Red Ocre, he’s happy to be
more expansive about some of his other attackers. In recent weeks,
Democrats Sen. Aden Ridgeway has taken a bat to Pearson on the basis
that his ideas can’t be any good because of the right-wing cheer
squad they attract.
Where Ridgeway speaks almost exclusively about salvation through rights,
Pearson’s approach is broader and much more demanding. “You
know, mate, I’m as good as Aden or anyone else in fighting for
rights. I could have stayed in that zone, and all my supporters would
have felt comfortable with that. And I know that there are things
that I’m now saying that are pretty bracing for many on the left.
I say to them, ‘Listen, these are people we claim to care about.’
And the fact of it is our people are suffering because of a lack of
responsibility. It’s a simple equation. It’s about rights
and responsibilities.” As for contemporary ideas from the left/liberal
spectrum, the sort of ideas that will make a tangible difference,
Pearson jokes darkly that what you end up with is a suggestion for
“an act that outlaws substance abuse for children. You could
pass that tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a bit of a difference.”
Equally, Pearson has little patience for the approach that says, “
‘Let’s take some time to understand the nature of this problem.’
Understanding doesn’t confer a solution. It doesn’t get
you anywhere. All this stuff about historic causes and victimization.
Well, it’s true. We have been grossly victimized. But we’re
not victims. To say that people are, is to take away the last thing
that they have, and that is their own power to change.”
And if this means you end up keeping company with a right-wing cheer
squad as Ridgeway claims?…So be it?
Pearson stares across the table for a couple of seconds: “It’s
not in our interests to get sucked into these things. But the fact
is, where the left has been very good to us in terms of rights, at
the other end of the spectrum we have a lot to learn from the conservatives
about social uplift and economic inclusion.”
Pearson has finished his fish and pushed aside his plate. He’s
keen to talk about his battle plan. Start at the top. The premier.
“Beattie is terrific. He gets it. But it’s the bureaucrats.
The white fellas, mate. I have a lot of problems there.” He’s
talking about the health officials, the ones he says peddle a “harm
reduction ideology, and I tell you it just doesn’t work up here.”
Pearson says much of this ends up being a “complete farce.”
“In one community, the state bureaucrats put a bus service to
transport intoxicated people from the tavern or the canteen to a safe
house. The safe house of course is ‘home,’ which immediately
makes it an unsafe place. But what happened was the bus ended up being
used as a courtesy vehicle that transported people to the tavern.
People would hail it down. So instead of walking the one kilometer
to start drinking, everyone got a lift. The bus, all $40,000 of it,
became a facilitator of abuse. What a farce!”
Pearson became convinced that a soft approach was useless when he
realized that every social layer of the communities had been caught
up in the contagion of alcohol. “When I was growing up, it was
rare to see women drinking. But I started noticing a big change in
the ’80s, when I came back here as a counselor. By then, around
70 percent of women were drinking.”
But slowly he is attracting allies. Some of the women from the communities
are behind him. He wants a zero-tolerance attitude toward the dealers
in the streets of Cairns who are pushing both marijuana and heroin
onto children. As for the communities, he’s pushing them to trial
prohibition.
Before he gets up to leave, he mentions that “just a few days
ago I was looking through some photos from the early days. And one
of the girls I spotted…ended up murdered.”
He stops, perhaps thinking of the details, and then says with
tremendous conviction and affirmation, “You know there’s
great talent here as well. That has to be my starting point.
A completely unprejudiced view of the capacity of our people.
You have to believe our people are capable of anything.” 
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