Antinuclear

Nugget Coombs, an economist who understood Aboriginal society

THE WAY AHEAD: The new land grab Tracker, BY JEFF MCMULLEN, JUNE 21, 2013“……..Even in the Labor Party, some like Dr Gary Johns and Aboriginal businessman, Warren Mundine, then National Vice President of the ALP, jeered at what they saw as the old ’Nugget Coombs’ model of communal Aboriginal society and they cheered for private land ownership, arguing that “communal land holding was retarding Aboriginal people.
While neo-liberalism was beginning to shape the views of some prominent Aboriginal operators like Warren Mundine, Noel Pearson and
Marcia Langton, the biggest influence on John Howard’s inner circle of advisers and parts of the bureaucracy in Canberra came from the poison pen of Professor Helen Hughes, a Senior Fellow at the right-wing Centre for Independent Studies,

Hughes painted what I consider a grossly distorted picture of the Aboriginal policy of self-determination by attacking the vision of the
former Reserve Bank head, Nugget Coombs. She derided Coombs for his remote community “experiment that was to give Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders a socialist utopia, leading to the establishment of a separate nation.”

Nugget Coombs had and still has many bitter and twisted ideological opponents, but the truth is he was an establishment economist with a
good grasp of animist attachment to land. He advocated autonomy for remote Aboriginal homelands based on traditional Cultural divisions, the kind of Indigenous control that I have seen bring rapid improvement to the wellbeing of many First Nations societies in the
United States and on the Saami lands of Norway, Finland and Sweden…..

But Helen Hughes and other neo-liberals do not seem to be influenced by history or evidence.

The striking difference between this vision of self-determination and the neo-liberal approach to developing Aboriginal lands is that
neo-liberalism involves dispossessing people of communal lands through dubious promises of payoffs if they sign long leases and chase the great Aussie Dream of a mortgage and “private home ownership”…….http://tracker.org.au/2013/06/the-way-ahead-the-new-land-grab-2/http://tracker.org.au/2013/06/the-way-ahead-the-new-land-grab-2/

June 21, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | aboriginal issues, AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, history