IND/Welfare Colonialism

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’s human right to self-determination and the forced dependency of Aboriginal peoples on the welfare of the coloniser.

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 ‘trust fund’ 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.

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’s 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.