This chapter does four things. First it provides a brief history of Australian Indigenous policy in the modern era demarcated by the 1967 Constitutional Referendum. Next it looks at contemporary Indigenous policy – in particular, Closing the Gap strategies – and its unrelenting focus on a form of convergence and structural adjustment based on Western economic institutions and norms as measured by statistical indicators. Governments of all political persuasions favour such thinking. This particular form of governmentality justified by a neoliberal trope focused primarily on easily targeted and highly dependent segments of the Indigenous population living remotely is then outlined. Finally, alternatives better suited to diverse Indigenous circumstances and aspirations are articulated and defended.

A brief history of Indigenous policy

Indigenous affairs is a complex policy field because the Australian settler colonial state was largely built on a denial of Indigenous property rights or political and citizenship equality. It was only in the 1960s that Indigenous Australians became fully incorporated into the mainstream provisions of the Australian state and only in 1992 that the myth of terra nullius was legally buried by the Mabo High Court decision recognising native title at common law. Wolfe (2006) has theorised that Australian settler colonial society is predicated on a logic of elimination, the dissolution of native societies so as to gain access to territory. Thus settler colonisation is structural and ongoing – because both original settlers and later arrivals are here to stay; colonisation is not an historical event that can be limited to a particular time as in 1788, or particular place, like Sydney. Settler colonialism has negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, its forces strive for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, a new colonial society is created on the expropriated land base that members of native societies can eventually join as citizens if they meet certain criteria.

This possibility for integration was identified definitively over 50 years ago at what was called the Native Welfare Conference, where Indigenous policy was outlined in the following terms:

My copy of Ad Borsboom's thesis Maradjiri: A Modern Ritual Complex in Arnhem Land, North Australia is notated on the imprint first page ‘J.C. Altman, Dept of Prehistory + Anthro, The A.N.U., May 1979’ so I must have taken this book into the field with me when I travelled to Maningrida in April 1979. Nicolas Peterson, my supervisor, must have given it to me.

It was a year later, in May 1980, when I first met Ad. Actually, it was Elfrida whom I almost met first. I had been living at an outstation called Mumeka with Kuninjku people over the wet seasons, cut off from Maningrida owing to seasonal flooding of the bush track that ran past Mumeka. The contact that Mumeka residents and I had with the outside world was via the Liverpool River and a landing called Manbulkardi about 10 kilometres from the outstation. I had been living at Mumeka since October 1979 and in May travelled to Maningrida by boat for one of my rare visits to the township. I went into the local MPA (shorthand for the Maningrida Progress Association) shop, and there I saw this exquisite Balanda (non-Aboriginal) woman and my mind raced. Unfortunately, I soon found out that she was Mrs Borsboom, living at Maningrida, with two young daughters Jacqueline and Sandra and the anthropologist Dr Ad Borsboom. Despite my initial disappointment, the Borsbooms and I formed a long-standing intercontinental friendship.

Maradjiri was a big part of my early bonding at Maningrida with Jimmy Burinyila, a Djinang man of the Mildjingi clan who had also worked with Borsboom; I was then a young economist metamorphosing into an anthropologist and Burinyila and I used to talk a lot about ceremonial exchange. Burinyila was the son of Raiwalla who had been a close collaborator (we used to call them informants, but they were actually the people who made our cross-cultural engagements possible) of the anthropologist Donald Thomson. Thomson had written an early book Economic Exchange and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land that struggled with explaining the hybrid economic and social institution embedded in trade ceremonies. Maradjiri was one of these ceremonies and Borsboom's thesis had investigated how the pre-colonial Maradjiri had transformed in colonial times from a post-burial ceremony to a ‘birth pole’ ritual that celebrated a child's birth several years after the event.

The geographic area in which government settlements and church missions for Aborigines are found today has been variously called remote, traditional and ‘colonial’ Australia. All three adjectives seem appropriate. This vast area of the country is remote, being beyond the fringes of settlement, and isolated from major population centres and economic activity. It is also traditional, since the majority of Aboriginal residents in the region are of full descent and appear less divorced from the social, cultural and kinship systems of their forefathers than those Aborigines in more settled or urban areas. Finally, Rowley's (1971b) expression ‘colonial’ is apposite as well, alluding as it does to the pluralistic features of society in this part of Australia. But while each adjective is in its own way appropriate, the term used in this chapter is ‘remote’.

Geographically, remote Australia comprises half the continent.

What socio-economic differences are there between the Aboriginal population as a group and the remainder of Australian society? While most people in Australia could probably give some suggestion as to these differences, it is unlikely that there is any simple source to which someone interested in the question could turn to find a reasonable summary of the information necessary to make a useful comment. In this chapter, therefore, a synthesis is given of the available material on various aggregate socio-economic indicators. These assist a comparison of the standard of living of Aborigines as a group with that of the rest of the Australian population.

For this synthesis, it is not ‘primary’ material that has been collected: only the available ‘secondary’ information has been drawn together; and Aborigines as a general, internally undifferentiated group are discussed. In this grouping, the analysis is based upon an examination of the aggregate ‘Aboriginal population’ of Australia as at present ‘officially’ defined.

This chapter aims to highlight some of the economic issues raised in previous parts of the book. In discussing the implications of the economic status of Aborigines, a qualification made in the preface bears repeating, namely the value-laden assumption that economic growth and development may be desirable, or at least worth discussing. Some authors, especially in affluent societies, have condemned an ‘obsession’ with economic growth because of its aesthetic and ecological implications. On the other hand, as W. A. Lewis (1955, pp. 420–1) has argued, ‘the advantage of economic growth is … that it increases the range of economic choice … the case for economic growth is that it gives man greater control over his environment, and thereby increases his freedom’.

The purpose of this book is to provide a survey of the available information on the economic status of Aborigines in Australia. It is true that a few economists (and in particular H. C. Coombs) have studied facets of the economic life of Aborigines in different parts of the country. And it is also true that historians and political scientists (such as G. Blainey and C. D. Rowley, to mention only two names) have vividly described the prehistory, history and contemporary history of the Aboriginal people, and in doing so have touched upon past and present economic issues. But in general there is a lack in the literature of an overall economic view of Australia's Aboriginal population. The closest attempt to a survey is a work which is now more than ten years old (Aborigines in the Economy (1966) eds. I. G. Sharp and C. M. Tatz) but in which only one of the twenty-four chapters (comprising conference papers) appears to have been written by a person described as a practising professional economist.

Economists in general have indeed seemed to shun the study of Aborigines in the Australian economy. For example, a widely-used text book in Australia (P. A. Samuelson, K. Hancock and R. Wallace (1970), Economics, 2nd Australian edn) dismisses the issue with these words (pp. 124–5): The position of the Aboriginals is undoubtedly worse that that of the American Negroes, but their numbers are smaller and the problem of Aboriginal poverty has to date been regarded as a problem more of social welfare than of economic policy'.

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency for groups with a feeling of traditional Aboriginal kinship to leave white-controlled settlements and to establish ‘decentralised’ communities, usually on lands of ancestral affiliation. This tendency is an intriguing response to the historical pattern of relationships which has evolved between whites and Aborigines.