Indigenist Critical Realism

Human Rights and First Australians’ Wellbeing

Gracelyn Smallwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138810365
• eBook ISBN: 9781317609490
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Indigenist Critical Realism: Human Rights and First Australians' Wellbeing consists of a defence of what is popularly known as the Human Rights Agenda in Indigenous Affairs in Australia. It begins with a consideration of the non-well-being of Indigenous Australians, then unfolding a personal narrative of the author Dr Gracelyn Smallwood's family. This narrative is designed not only to position the author in the book but also in its typicality to represent what has happened to so many Indigenous families in Australia.

The book then moves to a critical engagement with dominant intellectual positions such as those advanced by commentators such as Noel Pearson, Peter Sutton, Gary Johns and Keith Windschuttle. The author argues that intellectuals such as these have to a great extent colonised what passes for common sense in mainstream Australia. This common sense straddles the domains of history, health and education and Dr Smallwood has chosen to follow her adversaries into all of these areas.

This critique is anchored by a number of key philosophical concepts developed by the Critical Realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar. The book advances and analyses a number of case studies - some well-known, even notorious such as the Hindmarsh Island Affair (South Australia) and the Northern Territory Intervention; others like that of the author's late nephew Lyji Vaggs (Qld) and Aboriginal Elder May Dunne (Qld) much less so.

Representing one of the first attempts to engage at a critical and intellectual level in this debate by an Indigenous activist, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Critical Realism and colonialism.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315749556-1

The impulse to write this book has come from a lifelong struggle for the rights of my people, the First Australians, and also for the rights of the Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. I also write partly in response to urgings, such as those made by Branson for all of us to do what we can to ensure respect for Human Rights, be it at home, at school, at work or in the streets. I would add, as will be seen in Chapter 9, the universities, the hospitals and the prisons.

I make no apology for the at times angry tone that I write. However, while I spurn a spurious neo-Kantian identification of the objective with the impersonal, I am more than willing to admit that this is not a neutral book. Rather, this book is informed by a clear commitment to a Critical Realist notion of the truth, in that I seek to uncover the reason for things not propositions (2008, pp. 211–218). Moreover, the intent of my book is also inspired by Critical Realism, in that it will, I hope, contribute in a small way to the emancipation of my people.

My overall intention has been well expressed in another context by Vicki Grieves. In her response to Keith Windschuttle's (Windschuttle, 2002) shameful pro-colonialist book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847, Grieves (2003, p. 198) writes:

Deeper understandings of the complexities of our histories will enable us to chart an optimal future for this country. That is, a future free of the colonial yoke, informed by new understandings of our humanity and the need for social justice, reflected by the intelligentsia and in popular culture.

So despite the engagé and at times even enragé tone of what follows, I have endeavoured throughout to produce a work that consists of a reasoned response to the question: How important are the notions of social justice and Human Rights in the emancipation of First Australians?

On the face of it this question would appear to be rather banal and to cry out for a simple non-controversial affirmative answer. However, my book is being written at a time, when the notion of a policy based upon the Human Rights of the First Australians has come under sustained, powerful and influential attack (Johns, 2006a; Merlan, 2009; Sutton, 2009; The Australian, 2011; Windschuttle, 2002, 2009). Indeed, the anthropologist, Sutton (Sutton, 2009, p. 11), as we will see in Chapter 5, explicitly blames what he terms the ‘rights agenda and the redistribution of power’ for the current state of First Australians. On 15 April 2011, this charge was repeated in an Australian editorial which claimed:

Australians want to see better outcomes and an end to the shameful conditions endured by any First Australians. Yet the professional class of urban blacks is more interested in bridge walks or the agenda of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

(The Australian, 2011, para.4)

Sutton's (2009) work is part of what Barry Morris and Andrew Lattas have termed a ‘collective pretence’. They would have it that:

… it has not been inadequate funding, high staff turnover, poor planning, constantly changing policies and ineffective management which have led to poor health, education, housing, employment and material living standards for Indigenous people. Instead, Aboriginal culture and self-determination are blamed even though there is good reason to question the token and limited forms of self-management given to Indigenous citizens.

(Morris and Lattas, 2010, para.3)

If Human Rights based policies are under attack, so is the allied notion of social justice. It has been subject to scorn and criticism by the followers of the neo-liberal Friedrich August Hayek who has been described as ‘one of the greatest political thinkers of the twentieth century’ (Tomasi, 2007, para.13). Typical, here, is the work of Thomas Sowell (1999).

Sowell's (1999, p. 14) tactics are firstly to argue that the kind of information necessary to rectify social inequalities is not available to governments. One of the examples he considers is that of ‘racial preference’ in admission to colleges (Sowell, 1999, pp. 14–15). Here, he resorts to the metaphor of guiding a river boat. The claim is that the college will have to know every student as thoroughly as the captain knows the river, but this is impossible as each group of people has a unique history, and an accompanying set of reasons for its disadvantage (Sowell, 1999, p. 15). While it is true that every group of people has its own unique history, Sowell exaggerates the scale of the differences, and ignores what really matters to the victims of colonialism, which of course is the similarity of outcomes.

For Hayek (1976, p. 62) the demand for social justice was an instance of ‘naïve thinking’, and:

… a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.

(Hayek, 1976, p. 63)

Hayek's critique of social justice has been well answered by Steven Lukes (1997). Lukes condenses Hayek's arguments to six claims and deals with these in turn. The first claim is that the very idea of social justice is meaningless, especially so in a free market society where prices are set by the impersonal forces of the market. Therefore, no one can be thought to be acting unjustly. However, as Lukes (1997, pp. 72–73) points out, the moral question is raised by the question of what one should do about the consequences of these ‘impersonal forces’. The market produces social inequalities and suffering, and to do nothing about this is unjust. It could be added, that there can be no claim, that the social consequences of free markets are not known.

The second claim, that Lukes considers as we have seen in the quote from Hayek above, is that the idea of social justice is a religious or superstitious one. As Lukes points out there is a contradiction, here, between saying that the notion of social justice has an intrinsically religious meaning, and the first claim that the very idea of social justice is meaningless (p. 68). Lukes (1997, p. 72), notes that, earlier, Hayek (1976) has endorsed a religious view of society, and moreover, that the idea of social justice is religious, and hardly constitutes grounds for a rejection of the idea of social justice.

The third claim, that Lukes considers, is that the idea of social justice is self-contradictory. The argument, here, is that the making of a claim for social justice implies that there is someone whose duty it is to provide that. Such however, is not the case in a free market society, where no one is in charge. Lukes’ (1997, p. 73) riposte is that markets are always regulated, and the effectiveness or otherwise of these regulations can be judged.

The fourth claim, that Lukes seeks to refute, is that claims for social justice are always ideological, in that they simply represent the claims of a particular interest group being advanced under a general cover. Here Lukes’ tactic is to bracket off claim four, and address claim five that social justice is unfeasible. He follows this with a critique of claim six, that all attempts to institute social justice lead inexorably towards totalitarianism.

There are two aspects to Hayek's claim that social justice is unfeasible. The first of these is that there are so many values or contending candidates for the ‘good’, that it is not possible to choose between them, or to arrange them in a hierarchy. Lukes (1997, pp. 75–76) points out that John Rawls isolates the notion of justice from the various candidates for the ‘good’, and asserts that it will not favour any particular claim in an a priori fashion.

Hayek's second argument, for the unfeasibility of social justice, devolves around the impossibility of any government having sufficient information to enable it to make a just decision with regard to distribution. Lukes (1997, p. 76) counters this by first conceding that Hayek's objection does apply to command economies, but not to mixed economies, where governments would have sufficient information to modify the impact of markets.

The sixth and final point, is that attempts to introduce social justice, would be disastrous, in that they would inexorably lead to tyranny. Lukes claims that Hayek's position is linked to his libertarian notion that the function of law is not to strive for fairness, but to limit coercion (1997, p. 77). It is the absence of arbitrary coercion that Hayek defines as justice. Here, as for Sowell (1999, pp. 168–169) the ideal of law is that it be general and abstract and apply to all. Lukes (1997, p. 77) points out that Rawls, in this case, gives the counter example of the Apartheid laws in South Africa as general laws, which were oppressive in their application. He also clinches his case, against Hayek, by pointing out that the latter has no mechanism for addressing the problem of the growing inequalities that the market creates (1997, p. 78). It could be added, that either Hayek, nor Luke, address the point, which Piketty (Piketty, 2014, p. 105) has made, that the source of the inequality is that: ‘[economic] growth raters are lower than returns on capital, and consequently there is a tendency for inequalities to increase rather than decline’.

Despite Lukes’ (1997) critique of Hayek being a very damaging one, the importance of Hayek's approach to social justice lies in the influence that Hayek and his followers have had on Western governments and, indeed, Eastern European governments for the past 30 years. Although, Friedman (1997, p. 1) argues that Hayek's political influence was confined, in the UK, to the ‘miraculous year’ of 1989. Davis makes the point that many of the actions of the Howard led governments (1996–2007), in Australia, become understandable, if we see them as motivated, at least in part, by the Hayekian belief in the supreme efficacy of the market in the satisfying of human desires (Davis, 2008, pp. 32–33). I would also point out, in this context, that the role of the Aboriginal lawyer and intellectual Noel Pearson and the origins of his later writings, especially, can be best understood as being extremely influenced by Hayek's basic approach (Pearson, 2010a; 2011).

It is this triumph of neo-liberalism that defines the broad political background to my book. This triumph has been well described by the late Edward Said (2000). He characterised the consequences of neo-liberalism thus:

What has disappeared is the sense citizens need to have of entitlement – the right, guaranteed by the state, to he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Methodology
• 3 Narrative and testimony
• 4 The tradition of all the dead generations ...the tradition of all Indigenous generations...
• 5 Engaging Sutton and Pearson
• 6 The education wars
• 7 Human Rights and the Aboriginal people of Australia
• 8 Human Rights: the Hindmarsh Island Affair, theNorthern Territory intervention, the cases of Lex Wottonand Lyji Vaggs
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index