Achieving Culture Change

I gave a talk on ‘culture change’ today to the communities and indigenous policy parts of the Queensland Government. (The supporting slides are below – and are a slight excuse to test out a new Google PowerPoint embedding function).





My argument was in four parts:

• First, that people’s cultural influences really do matter for the choices they take in life – and in turn these are particularly driven by the influence of our family, peers, community, as well as the organisations we spend our time in.
  


• Second, that the attitudes, values and norms we derive from these affect our behaviour in often quite unpredictable ways along with other factors like the legislation, information or rewards we face. So we might have a value of a university education being important because the people around us have reinforced this, but it’s only when we are provided with the information and financial support to actually go that it becomes a ‘behaviour’.
  


• Third, that government policy needs to get more sophisticated at understanding the different influences acting on different people. Sticking with the example, providing simple information about university options may be enough for some but others might not even value it in the first place. In which case policy needs to consider much more about how to promote different courses of action ‘upstream’, for example through thinking about the nature of relationships and relationship support.
  


• Fourth, following this approach seriously has some quite big implications for government: being able to develop the case to target different people with different types of support; using a range of disciplines and approaches to get better insight into how people make decisions (and not just economics); and being ready to invest in securing big change for the long term and not just looking for the quick wins (which the more punitive legislative approaches tend to provide). And all the while treading the ‘elastic band of public opinion’ carefully to avoid crossing the boundary into paternalism and the nanny state.
  

Whether any of this is relevant for communities and indigenous policy here is I think part yes and part no. Yes in that current policy like the Northern Territory intervention applies a very limited set of levers in a very intensive and indiscriminate manner. So it places the entire community under income management whereby an adviser decides how to spend your money (unlike the welfare reform pilots in Queensland which will use income management in a limited and targeted way). My view is that the Northern Territory intervention will only serve to reinforce negative signals about community development and personal responsibility. The culture change work is also relevant because of the broader messages about promoting strong families and positive role models, as well as provision of support and advisory services.

Yet the real missing piece is on the supply-side: namely that most indigenous communities are so remote and so lacking in real jobs that there’s little to practically aspire to. There are jobs in the mines, but these merely replace one form of passivity with another and don’t offer a diverse set of life courses.

To a certain extent it reminded me of a visit to Salford I made in writing the original longer discussion paper. What Salford has been doing quite effectively is integrating their community redevelopment policy with the local economy and businesses (not least helped by the BBC’s move up there) along with adopting some cultural and behavioural support policies. What this could mean in community policy speak would be shifting away from the intense place-based initiatives of the past to integrating policy on community assets and opportunities with policies on skills, capabilities, and with cultural capital and personal and mutual responsibility. All of which returns me to my conclusion from the Aurukun blog: that welfare reform and community development is only going to work once someone’s got a sustainable economic vision for these remote communities - which would let loose a whole virtuous circle of cultures, behaviours, and outcomes.

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...

More Aurukun photos...

Death

I was due to visit a welfare reform project up in the Cape York region this week. It would have been an interesting trip on several counts. The project operates in a (mostly) indigenous town called Coen in the northern tip of Queensland, which being over 2,500km from Brisbane is somewhat off the beaten track (see below).

The so called Welfare Reform Trials have had a lot of attention because they set out strong conditionalities in return for welfare payments (e.g. sending children to school and meeting certain tenancy conditions) and an emphasis on family responsibilities. What I was going along to was the ‘Negotiation Table’ which brings together commonwealth, state and local government officials with local leaders and community organisations to discuss issues facing the indigenous community and specifically this time how the welfare reforms were working.

Unfortunately however one of the elders died this weekend and so the whole thing has been called off. I don’t know much about the community in question nor exactly what the meetings would have been like (and unfortunately now won’t) but it did surprise me a little that it’s been called off - and called off indefinitely as the community is entering a mourning period of up to a month. It’s a clear example of cultural differences – in the UK we’d likely go ahead, perhaps doing a minute’s silence or something similar to mark the passing. But we’d go ahead because we’d weigh it up against the now unavoidable costs of chartered flights for officials from Canberra and Brisbane, months of pre-conference work, and potential risk of disruption to the project. I’m not saying one decision is better than the other, but we’d say that the person would have wanted it that way because they loved the community and wanted to see it continue to strive or something similar.

So I decided to find out a little more about what death means in Aboriginal society. For Aborigines, death represents a return of the spirit to the Dreaming and the eternal life-stream. Upon death the spirit returns to its source to await reincarnation. Death rituals vary between Aboriginal groups but I was struck by a few points, some which I’ve seen in other societies and others not:

• It is forbidden in Aboriginal culture to refer in any way to the deceased. Instead the news is passed on indirectly in forms like “X has become one” (where X is the wife/husband). This was evident in e-mails and phone calls earlier where it was unclear who exactly had died.
  
  
• Ritual mourning and burying rituals have to be fully carried out to assist the spirit into the afterlife; without this the spirit will be caught between death and future life. Again this helps explain why it’s unclear if/ when the conference will now happen – with up to one month of mourning being planned everything else is disrupted.
  
  
• The mourning is supposed to be accompanied by high levels of agitation and (sometimes) self-harm like burning oneself with coals or gashing of the forehead. I’ve see a bit of this Hindu society in Nepal, though it was more agitation through intense wailing than active self harm.
  
  
• Relatives, and particularly widows, have to experience food taboos and isolation from the community for up to one year. This seems a particularly harsh feature, although may not be as customary these days.
  
  
• There are a range of burial approaches from burying under rocks to cremation. I presume these days everybody has to be cremated or buried in an official spot though perhaps not in these more remote areas.
  

Clearly then death in Aboriginal society is an intensely mystical, complex and tabooed ritual. Apparently Aborigines also don’t particularly fear for death which if right is a very positive feature of their culture - compared for example with the Catholic faith with its both rather elaborate rituals and instillation of life-long dread and apprehension of death. The psychology (and sociology) of grief and mouring is an interesting topic. From a purest perspective many of the Aboriginal customs wouldn't seem to help the emotional process of grieving and moving on from the death of a loved one - take for instance not being able to name the dead person or having to live in isolation to mourn. Perhaps though when rituals get deeply rooted in culture then the process of following the rules whether or not they 'make sense' itself helps one to move on because you are just doing what everyone else does.