Siding with predators
The Aboriginal establishment refuses to confront the evil of child abuse in remote communities
The Indigenous establishment’s rejection of a Royal Commission into Aboriginal child sex abuse has vindicated the decision of Australians to vote No at this month's referendum.
Here was a chance to allow young Aboriginal voices to tell their stories about the pain and constant fear of living at the mercy of adults with abusive intent.
A Royal Commission would not have been a panacea.
Still, it would at least have given us greater insights into this seemingly intractable evil and helped shape public policy in ways that would make a practical difference to vulnerable lives.
However, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's proposal was a non-starter in the ideologically charged world of Aboriginal politics.
In an open letter, dozens of welfare and Indigenous organisations condemned Senator Price’s proposal for playing “into the basest negative perceptions of some people about Aboriginal people and communities.”
“These calls for a Royal Commission into the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children have been made without one shred of real evidence being presented,” the joint statement said.
We have more than sufficient evidence to conclude Aboriginal children are far more likely to be sexually assaulted than other young Australians.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that in 2012, rates of sexual assault reported to police among Indigenous children aged under nine in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory were two to four times higher than rates among non-Indigenous children in these jurisdictions.
That statistic alone should have been enough to gain Senator Price cross-party support for her call to establish a Royal Commission.
Yet the head of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, Muriel Bamblett, says calls for a Royal Commission were “demonising Aboriginal men and reinforcing false stereotypes just to get media attention.”
The reluctance of the Aboriginal elite to throw light on the excess of violence and misery in remote Indigenous communities is not new.
Senator Price’s mother, Bess Price, encountered the same objections when she began speaking out on behalf of women and children in remote communities almost 20 years ago.
Aboriginal academics in the cities objected to the stigmatisation of Aboriginal people.
They sought to justify the violence, falsely claiming that most perpetrators were non-Indigenous.
They urged us to consider the underlying causes of crime, like poverty, intergenerational trauma, and colonial oppression's dark legacy.
When Price appeared on ABC’s Q&A 12 years ago, it provoked one of the most atrocious tweets in the history of the platform formerly known as Twitter.
"I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse, and I'm sure it was less offensive than Bess Price," indigenous lawyer Larissa Behrendt posted.
Such visceral, intemperate reactions cannot be explained as a mere difference of opinion. It is the response of someone whose entire vision of the world is disturbed by the notion that indigenous people are anything other than victims.
For those whose understanding of the world is shaped by identity politics, it is hard to absorb that the victims of oppression might also be oppressors.
They are quick to explain away the most abhorrent crimes on the grounds that the criminal was driven by circumstances beyond his or her control.
The internalisation of oppression means that Aboriginal men "may adopt the devaluing views against women", claims one apparently serious academic article.
"Colonial historical oppression disrupted the once matrilineal and woman-centred gender roles to be replaced with Western forms of the patriarchy.”
Nothing will change for Aboriginal children and their mothers in remote communities so long as academics and the Aboriginal elite persist in making these convoluted excuses.
In fact, things will almost certainly deteriorate.
Shifting attention to what progressives call "the root causes of crime" and away from the criminal responsibility of the perpetrator consistently leads to an increase in crime, as the African-American economist Thomas Sowell has demonstrated in some detail regarding crime in the United States.
The one ray of hope is the decisive rejection of political correctness and identity politics in this month's Voice referendum.
Most Australians can see through the cant and hypocrisy of the Aboriginal elite.
Senator Price has shown the courage to rock the boat.
That dozens of Aboriginal organisations have united to oppose the Royal Commission suggests the audit of Indigenous spending the Opposition proposes is long overdue.