Indigenous Australians experience disadvantage at rates unlike any other sector of society. It’s time to stop the ‘deficit discourse’

For Indigenous Australians, the concept of a 'fair go' is meaningless

“Fair go” is meaningless when applied to the panoply of disadvantage that First Nations peoples experience on a daily basis. For us, life in the settler-colonial state of Australia has never been fair. By every measure, as Dunghutti man Gavin Ritchie says, “my people are still chained firmly to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder”.

It’s important to recognise the influence of the “deficit discourse”: the ways that policy, power structures and public discussions portray Indigenous people in terms of deficiency, absence, lack or failure.

Deficit discourse makes Aboriginal people a problem to be solved. It overlooks the larger socio-economic structures at work and is accompanied by the persistent belief that the dominant system knows best, a crucial part of what author Sarah Maddison refers to as the “colonial fantasy”.

“Discourses of deficit occur when discussions and policy aimed at alleviating disadvantage become so mired in narratives of failure and inferiority that those experiencing the disadvantage are seen as the problem, and a reductionist and essentialising vision of what is possible becomes pervasive,” ANU researchers Bill Fogarty, Melissa Lovell, Juliegh Langenberg and Mary-Jane Heron reported last year.

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They found the deficit discourse has an impact on the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people and it must be flipped to focus on strengths-based approaches.

“Operating from a deficit approach provides only one side to a multi-faceted story, and inhibits alternative solutions or opportunities that facilitate growth and thriving.

“We are hopeful that … recognising the rights, culture, diversity and strengths of Australia’s First Peoples will become the norm,” they wrote.

The health benefits of connections to identity, culture and land are also being measured in a major longitudinal study called Mayi Kuwayu (from the Ngiyampaa-Wongaibon language, meaning to follow people over time).

“People confuse Indigeneity with ill-health and poor outcomes. A big part of our study is looking at how, when people are connected to culture, they are better off, and how those things really matter and should be part of our national health policy,” lead researcher, Professor Ray Lovett, told Guardian Australia in launching the study last year.

Lovett also pointed out the impacts upon Aboriginal lives of stress caused by constant subtle and overt racism. “The intergenerational effects are profound,” he said.

As just one example, Guardian Australia has obtained recent unpublished figures from the NT Department of Health as part of the Fair Go? series which show that more than 30% of Aboriginal children living in the Northern Territory aged between 6 months and 5 years old have had anaemia in the past year. One in 14 Aboriginal children in remote NT is underweight.

A major cause of both conditions is a lack of healthy food.

Anaemia affects physical and cognitive development in the early years and can lead to chronic diseases later in life. It is considered to be the most preventable cause of a lack of healthy development in children.

Consistently high anaemia rates indicate a lack of food security for Indigenous families who have limited access to affordable, healthy options and whose lives are impacted by the difficulties of complying with punitive forms of welfare like work for the dole (CDP) and income management via the cashless debit card (CDC).

As part of a review of the CDP last year, the federal government commissioned a survey of “community voices and stakeholder perspectives” in eight remote Aboriginal communities.

That report found social problems had increased since the introduction of the CDP including:

an increase in break-and-enters to steal food, predominantly by children and young people

an increase in domestic and family violence

an increase in financial coercion and family fighting, and

an increase in mental health problems, feelings of shame, depression, sleep deprivation and hunger.

Eighty-three per cent of work for the dole participants in Australia are Indigenous. As a condition of income support, they must engage in up to 20 hours of work for the dole over five days a week. There has been a 740% increase in financial penalties since it replaced the previous remote jobs and communities program in 2015.

The federal government’s own review found that Aboriginal CDP participants were three times more likely to be penalised for non-attendance and were penalised more often. They went without income for longer periods and were less likely to be exempted on medical grounds “despite a much higher burden of disease in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities”.

Research by the ANU’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research found that about 6,000 people have dropped off the scheme since 2015, and may be receiving no income at all. Almost 60% of those disengaging were under 25, and another 31% were 25-34 year olds, ANU researcher Lisa Fowkes told a federal inquiry in 2018.

“The disengagement of this group is extremely troubling, as they are at a critical stage for developing skills and work experience,” Fowkes said. “They’re also the group that has the highest suicide rate and are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system.”

Nationally, homelessness among Aboriginal women and children has grown by 36% over the past five years

Navigating Centrelink was “contributing to increased stress, anxiety and mental health problems for jobseekers”, Indigenous people told the federal government CDP review.

“All my mob want to do is work, do a real job that helps their people,” one respondent told researchers. “Let them do things they know need doing in the community so they can be proud.

“Stop making people feel like they are the criminal for not having a job or having to look after their family and business [culture].”

There is a fundamental and enormous difference in the kinds of disadvantage Indigenous people endure, compared to the “rest” of the nation.

Australia was built on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people, the frontier killings of thousands, and generations of unpaid labour by Aboriginal men and women.

For more than a century during the protection era – from 1869 to the late 1960s – Aboriginal people were herded onto missions and reserves, their every movement curtailed. They were told where they could live, whom they could marry, where and when they could work. Their wages were held in “trust” by protectors and were mostly never paid. Their children could be removed at any time. In Queensland until 1965, the director of native welfare was the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children, whether their parents were living or not.

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Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and communities from the very first days of the European occupation. In 1997 the “Bringing them Home” inquiry found that most families have been affected in one or more generations by the removal of one or more children. It estimated between one in three and one in 10 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.

Child removals are still taking place. Indigenous children are grossly overrepresented in the out-of-home care system nationally.

Education in mission schools, where it existed, was rudimentary and segregated. Missionary schools taught only the basics, and training institutions were focused on turning out manual workers. There was a deliberate and systemic lack of access. Until 1972, NSW school principals could and did exclude Aboriginal children from schools on the ground of “home condition” or “substantial (community) opposition”.

Historical and structural racism, legal discrimination, social and economic exclusion, the criminalisation of Aboriginality, compounded by generations of trauma from loss of homelands, breaking families and child removals and – in the space of a generation, going from working for rations to working for the dole – have all contributed to disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal communities today, at rates unlike any other sector of society and, by some key indicators, it is getting worse.

According to the Productivity Commission, 40% of Indigenous people face two or more forms of material deprivation, meaning they do not have two or more of the essentials for a decent standard of living, like housing, clean water, food, income, and health. More than 40% of Indigenous people experience social exclusion, meaning they are unable to participate in the economic and social activities of the community. These rates are more than double those for every other group in the lowest percentile.

Nationally, homelessness among Aboriginal women and children has grown by 36% over the past five years. According to Homelessness Australia’s analysis of the most recent AIHW data, 41,038 Aboriginal women and 23,926 children are without a safe place to live.

Those rates are worst in NSW, where the rate of homelessness among women and children has grown by 74% since 2014.

The Closing the Gap Report 2019 said “a child’s early learning abilities can be compromised by factors such as intergenerational trauma, family stress, unstable housing, violence, low parental education and unemployment.”

The deficit discourse operating here is that these children are then identified as “at risk” and removed from their families, and resources are allocated to managing removals rather than to prevention.

Last month, federal, state and territory ministers sat down with Aboriginal organisations for the first time to work on Closing the Gap, after signing a 10-year partnership agreement.

Chief executive of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (Naccho), Pat Turner said it was long overdue.

“We want real outcomes at the local community level where Aboriginal people can start experiencing secure, healthy living, where they can have ready access to community-controlled, comprehensive primary healthcare no matter where they live, they can have access to the best education services available, from early childhood to adult education.

“We want our people to have jobs: real, full-time paid jobs. That’s how you get out of the poverty trap. We want much better services, early intervention, wraparound services for vulnerable families.

“We want to reverse the removal of our children into state care, reverse the numbers of our children going into detention centres, reverse the number of our adults being thrown in prison. We refer to that as the negative end of the spectrum, where investment is very large.

“We want greater investment at the positive end of the spectrum to help people turn their lives around and be productive members of the community.”

Social justice commissioner June Oscar and co-chair of the Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, Rod Little, agree. They are joint leaders of the Close the Gap campaign.

We know the statistics. They are part of the lived realities that confront our families and our communities across the country. We are asking our fellow Australians to remove the deficit lens. We are asking to be seen as the dynamic, resilient and self-determining people that we are. When decisions are in our hands, we feel good, we feel strong, and we revitalise our health and wellbeing for generations to come.

As Claire G. Coleman, Wirlomin Noongar woman wrote in Guardian Australia in January: “Indigenous people are forced to accept conditions that no other Australian would tolerate. We are blamed for the effects of colonisation in an extraordinary case of victim blaming. We have had the basics card, grog bans and the intervention layered on top of deaths in custody, high rates of incarceration and lack of prospects.

“If a paternalistic approach to Aboriginal affairs was ever going to work we, the Aboriginal people, would no longer suffer inequality.”

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust