Aurukun

Despite the Coen Negotiation Table being called off, the opportunity to see first hand an Indigenous community was too much to pass up and I managed to catch a flight to the Aurukun community instead. This is remote Australia with a capital R: high up on the Gulf of Carpentaria it’s a land of airstrips built by the US Army in the Second World War, hundreds of miles of nothing but red dust, and multi-day drives to the nearby towns.

Aurukun is one of the most extremely disadvantaged communities in Queensland. It became well known for bad reasons last year after nine residents were given suspended sentences for the rape of a ten year old girl because the judge thought she “probably agreed to have sex with all of you". There are a little over one thousand people in Aurukun: one hundred of which are (mostly white) government officials, health workers and teachers, and the remainder of which are the local Wik people. The Wik people live inside the town, the officials in mobile homes around the perimeter.

On landing, a police check inspects baggage for illicit alcohol or other drugs. Aurukun is part of the intervention policy that has strict controls on the sale of ‘grog’; the town’s tavern is to shut next month. Sadly there were few positive signs about the community. There are no jobs – the only businesses are the shop and tavern and these are both run by the government. There is employment in these - and in the government office - for locals under a work for welfare scheme known as the CDEP. But it’s a depressing form of employment and seems to often be nothing more than an excuse for both sides (e.g. a woman employed under CDEP in the government office apparently rarely shows up for work and when she did for a couple of hours while I was there she was just put in the corner to play computer solitaire).

There are some jobs in the regional mining companies, but these are a long drive away and mean leaving the town or returning irregularly. Those who do find such work are well paid, but theft of food and petty crime against them and their families is pretty rife.

There’s a palpable sense of aggression in the community. In the 24 hours while I was there one person went on a rampage with a spear and shovel through the town, another threw a strop around the government offices because her welfare payment hadn’t gone into her account. There are regular riots here, with two expected crunch points ahead: in the next month with the welfare reform pilots kicking in and again later in the year when some of the residents now working in the mine receive their first tax bill.

The idea of the welfare reform is to:

• First, to ‘rebuild norms’. A Family Responsibilities Commission has been set up to promote child wellbeing with sanctions to place people under ‘income management’ (i.e. to take control of people’s welfare payments) for breaches in regard to child welfare, school attendance and lawful behaviour.
  
  
• Second, ‘reform incentives’. This is seeking to transfer people off welfare into jobs and provide skills and training. In the future it will be much harder to get onto CDEP, and payments will be reduced in size.
  
  
• Third, ‘normalise housing’. On top of welfare payments, most housing is rented out at low or no cost. In the future the idea is to promote home ownership and increase rental levels to market rates (though I’m not clear what ‘market rates’ means here as there is no market, nor equivalent to base rents from).
  
  
• Fourth, reduce the scope of government. In Aurukun the government sector completely crowds out any potential for private or not-for-profit sector jobs. It makes no sense for the government to own and run all towns like Aurukun and only increases the dependency culture. So the idea is to slowly transition some of these jobs out of government and develop more new ones.
  

At this stage the pilots are only beginning to roll out after a lengthy effort to get the details right with the community. It will be interesting to see how successful they are. To be honest my visit didn’t leave me with much optimism. Aurukun feels completely artificial: aside from the mines there’s no sustainable economy here and it’s difficult to see how it could be stimulated. If Aurukun wasn’t already here, people clearly wouldn’t move here.

Welfare reform will only work if people have a sustainable economy to transition into, or if such an economy can be envisaged and developed, and, sadly, I didn't get the sense that's the case.

Some photos I took below...