{"id":1485,"date":"2017-11-02T04:50:46","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T04:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/course.oeru.org\/inda104\/?page_id=1485"},"modified":"2017-11-02T04:50:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T04:50:46","slug":"welfare-colonialism","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/course.oeru.org\/inda104\/learning-pathways\/indigenous-australian-education-and-employment\/welfare-colonialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Welfare Colonialism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Poverty and welfare dependency lie at the heart of many of the problems Indigenous Australians face today. This dependency is a contemporary legacy of the historical process of colonisation which resulted in Aboriginal dispossession and subordination to the state. Hence, central to the process of colonisation has been the denial of Aboriginal people\u2019s human right to self-determination and the forced dependency of Aboriginal peoples on the welfare of the coloniser.\n<\/p>\n

Aboriginal people lost access to the means to practice the subsistence economy which had provided Aboriginal societies with full employment for at least 50,000 years. They were progressively subject to policies of control and segregation and denied access to a quality education. Aboriginal employment was subject to government approval and generally restricted to the rural industry and domestic servitude. As Wages were commonly paid in meagre rations or, as in the case of the children forcibly removed from their families and later placed in positions of domestic servitude, a nominal sum was paid into a \u2018trust fund\u2019 controlled by government officials. The awarding of equal wages to Aboriginal people in the late 1960s was accompanied by a downturn in the rural economy. This downturn resulted in a significant rise in Aboriginal unemployment and movement of Aboriginal individuals and families to the fringes of urban centres in search of work. Employment was generally hard to obtain and often required a higher level of education and skills than many Aboriginal applicants possessed. Consequently, poverty became entrenched and reliance upon government and social security payments grew.\n<\/p>\n

Many authors and Aboriginal spokespeople argue that the process of colonisation is manifest today in the continued domination of Aboriginal people by the Australian state through welfare dependency and the government\u2019s bureaucratic control of resources and processes of Aboriginal organisations. This process is called welfare colonialism (Beckett, 1998). The issue of welfare dependency has been hotly debated yet the need remains to build a strong economic foundation from which Aboriginal individuals and communities can transcend the constraints of welfare colonialism and dependency.\n<\/p>\n

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Hughes, H. & Hughes, M. (2010, April 29). Education fails indigenous kids. The Australian<\/i><\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

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According to Hughes and Hughes (2010) in the required reading above, “NAPLAN and My School show most of the 150 schools with the lowest NAPLAN results (out of a total of about 9500 schools) are remote and very remote schools attended mainly by indigenous students. There are few non-indigenous schools in this group of 150, and few indigenous schools outside it” (para.4).\n<\/p>\n