Aboriginals

What would Dr Nugget Coombs think of our treatment of the environment and the economy today? Quark applies a retrospectoscope to the problem as she reports on a 1970 Boyer Lecture on environment and economy.

"…In the protracted quarrel between the nature lovers and the money spinners, certain premises have been taken for granted: we can have a rising standard of living at the cost of destruction and pollution, or we can preserve some of the quality of the continent at the cost of material comforts. ..”

A yellowing square of newsprint fell out of an aged scrap book taken from a bulging filing cabinet. It is a random piece amongst many old fragments of decades old news. It is from the Melbourne newspaper “The Age” dated Saturday November 14, 1970 and looks to be an editorial titled "Selling the future".

The subject of the article is the 2nd Boyer lecture given by eminent economist, public servant and first governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr. H.C. (Nugget) Coombs,1906-1997. According to the article, Dr Coombs declared the choice between environment and standard of living was a “false dichotomy”.

Dr Coombs, says the article, wanted Australia to conserve the

“unique treasures of the Barrier Reef and the unique culture of the Aborigines”.

The article continues ,

“He is equally insistent that we should not join in a mad scramble to sell off the newly discovered mineral resources of the nation to foreign interests to make a quick dollar .Such behaviour, he warned, is economically irresponsible and a ‘betrayal of our heirs and successors’.

It goes on to say ‘Even recent discoveries do not guarantee that Australia has inexhaustible reserves of oil and metallic ores. To sell off our rights to these capital assets in a mood of ‘mineral madness’ is to hand over the bulk of these assets to foreign enterprises interested only in short term gains.'

According to the article, Dr. Coombs

“believes we have nothing to lose and much to gain by letting some of these resources lie undisturbed for later generations to exploit. Their market value is likely to increase as the world resources of minerals are consumed and as Australian technology improves to the point where we can process them in this country instead of selling them off for a fractional benefit”

Did Australia’s technology improve to the point where the country was able to “add value” to raw materials or did global economics get in the way of this happening or being maintained? How often now do we hear of any consideration being given to future generations and the need to leave resources for them to use? Rarely, I would say. What I am hearing now is that Australia’s “resources boom” might over, meaning that we are not extracting minerals as quickly as we would like, to bolster our economy.

Oil production in Australia has been declining for at least 10 years. Where will this leave future generations? We cannot be confident that this resource will not be needed in the light of perfected “renewables”.

The old "Age" article continues with Coombs’ thoughts:

“In the meantime , our techniques for preserving and conserving the natural environment must improve. We are still in the very early stages of developing a balanced programme of ecology and if we are too greedy we may do harm which can never be repaired.”

I wonder what Coombs would say about the environment reports that have come out from the various states in the last 20 years. Environment is not important to governments today.

This has been expressed again very clearly by the Victorian government having very recently tucked Environment in with Primary Industry.

Apart from the possible conflict between the 2 sections, environment is ultimately all we have. It should have a department all its own!

Again from the editorial -

“As chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, Dr. Coombs has his own close and studied interest in the preservation of the first human culture in this continent. Before making any further decisions on the mining of Aboriginal reserves, people in power should carefully ponder the question which he asks ‘by what calculus can one assess the relative importance of instant profits from the dispersal of wasting assets against the destruction of a way of life unique in the world?’ "

'This is not the kind of talk used in elections; it is a long sighted view of the future of the this country, as well as its immediate economic needs. Politicians on both sides of the fence would do well to read this paper and treat it with the seriousness due to a major national problem. It not only affects our lives but the lives of our children.'

The grandchildren and even great- grand children of the adults who cast their eyes over this editorial back in 1970 are now here. Have the intervening generations done the right thing by them?

At the time the article was written, the largest concentration of rock art in the world - an amazing gallery of aboriginal observation and history on the Burrup Peninsula, Dampier Archipelago - had barely been discovered. In the meantime it has been severely compromised through industrial and infrastructure projects.

Thank goodness in 2008, the Australian Government placed 90% of the remaining rock art areas of the Dampier Archipelago on the National Heritage List.

Would Coombs be pleased with the degree to which Australia adds value to its mineral exports? The iron ore that Australia exports now has a much higher phosphorus ad silica content than previously, suggesting that the highest quality ore has already been mined - an indication that we have not been thinking of future generations.

I imagine Coombs was already horrified at the time he died with the destruction of Australia’s environment and we are now 16 years further down that path of environmental destruction.

What is interesting is that “The Age” back in 1970, thoughtfully conveyed Coombs’ Boyer lecture, so remote from immediate economic considerations in its editorial.

Sitting Bull (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his locally indigenous people as a war chief during years of resistance to migrant colonisers in what is now South Dakota, USA.]
Read about the Native Americans

Cultural assimilation is about respecting and adopting the prevailing local ways of a place - language, laws, social values, behavioural standards, customs, intermarriage, and spatial distribution across the community, etc. Assimilation is a gradual change process.

Australia's most excessive immigration Prime Minister on record, Kevin Rudd, just gone, by allowing 300,000 immigrants into Australia in 2008 denied any chance of assimilation.

The idiom 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do', is an instructive guide applicable to any land - Australia, Kosovo, Mongolia, Tibet, Saudi Arabia, not just for visitors, but especially for immigrants. A country has no obligation to change and adapt to suit those from foreign soils. Indeed, immigrants have an obligation to be humbly grateful to their new host country and their new hosts. That gratitude deserves the respect of accepting the local ways, not seeking to change them.

Respecting locals, local rights and local values is akin to respecting one's elders - an underpinning principle of all human societies. Those that arrived first have highest moral claim. Nobody has greater right to a place than where they are born. No-one has control where one is born - as such birth rights morally prevail over non-birth (immigrant) rights; indigenous rights morally prevail over immigrant rights.

Where this lore has been savaged through human history is by the use of armed conflict.
That human history has been dogged with rape, pillage and plunder does not make it morally right that it should be repeated. Local rights morally prevail. This is a universal right deserving not just of the human world but also the natural world.

Immigrants rejecting cultural assimilation with the local population are unwelcome invaders by definition. Newcomers by rejecting adoption of the local culture, are disrespectfully asserting an unjustified claim to establish and impose a foreign culture. It is an invasion, albeit short of armed conflict, or what colonists euphemistically term 'annexing', but arguably that is one of the few differences.

Immigrants seeking 'a new life' in Australia or New Zealand have a moral obligation to respect and adopt the ways of life of the local inhabitants, not to impose their foreign ways of life upon their new hosts.

Both Australia and New Zealand immigration policies have historically performed a disservice to both the local population and immigrants alike, by abandoning immigrants in the assimilation process. By ignoring the full cost of assimilation under the cloak of multiculturalism, successive governments may have kept their quarterly cash books in the black, but let the social costs soar. Government immigration responsibility stops not at the airport arrivals gate but after assimilation.

The British were unwelcome invaders when Cook landed at Poverty Bay New Zealand in 1769 and then at Botany Bay, Australia in 1770. Subsequent exploitation, colonisation and mass murder in these islands by the invaders was wrong and immoral and indigenous generations have remained aggrieved and downtrodden ever since. Both histories are of violent invasions of native peoples lands. History cannot be undone, but must not be repeated. The current indigenous peoples remain complex open wounds awaiting healing.

With history unchangeable, it would take many more generations to come to achieve acceptable conciliation by the respective indigenous peoples. This unresolved conflict has a higher priority than adding to the problem with new immigration waves - and that is even if a genuine conciliation process was to start now.

But the national identity problem faced by both New Zealand and Australia stews at the psyche mainly because this process has not even started. It is symptomatic of the national immaturity of both nations.

Instead history has been successively repeated - immigrant wave after immigrant wave. The problems have been compounded because of the lack of assimiliation.
Enclaves of ethnic migrants have cemented themselves and more recently been exacerbated by short-sighted concepts of multi-culturalism, addressing skills shortages, fueling economic growth and allowing massive influx.

It is the disgrace of both these nations that generation after generation they shun conciliation with their indigenous, while generation after generation both nations perpetuate the fragmentation of their societies by encouraging migrants bringing 'old country' baggage with them. Seeking a 'new life' in a new country means just that!
Perhaps New Zealand as always leads Australia in some respect as it questions the 1840 multiple versions of the Treaty of Waitangi and M?ori-P?keh? relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Australian Aborigines have not yet been offered a treaty. [Read More]

As the immigration wave cycle is allowed to continue without assimilation, the largest populations of the world will ultimately swamp both nations, overwhelming locals, local rights and local values, ultimately with their own. As both New Zealand and Australia are democracies, once the migrant number reach majority, migrants will be in politics and power. Locals will become downtrodden and ultimately extinct like the Thylacene and Moa.

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