Amnesty International chief Salil Shetty described as 'devastating' the plight of Aborigines in central Australia after visiting communities in Utopia at the weekend. 'I've been to many places in bad shape in Africa, Asia and Latin America but what makes it stark here is when you remind yourself you're actually in one of the richest countries in the world'.
Many Australians have reached a point of believing that the difficulties afflicting Aboriginal communities are beyond address or that if they are to be overcome, it will take the type of heavy handed, and often humiliating, compulsion that has characterised the Northern Territory Intervention.
There is at least a widening consensus that welfare, beyond being applied for emergency purposes, quickly becomes a poison that destroys a person’s capacity for self-reliance. Generations of welfare within a community, black or white, can produce an almost post-apocalyptic outlook.
But welfare is not the only scourge facing Aboriginal communities. Another, perhaps deeper, malaise is the great loss of confidence which many Aboriginal people feel in their dealings with the main society; a situation bred by decades of misunderstanding and discrimination. It is a malaise that now also extends to their dealings with one another.
In a debate between rights and responsibilities that is becoming increasingly shrill, Noel Pearson has called on us all to look to Asia, and in particular to Singapore, for models of community development that may offer a path out of our national tragedy.
Whether Singapore, which achieved its extraordinary success through a near totalitarian approach, is an appropriate or even possible option is open for debate. Relevantly though, Singapore has its eyes cast eastwards to the Philippines where the National University of Singapore sends its business students to study a grassroots community development model known as Gawad Kalinga.
Meaning 'to give care' in Tagalog, Gawad Kalinga was founded by a Filipino, Tony Meloto, who drew his inspiration while living in Melbourne. In 1995 he returned to the Philippines to work amongst the gangs in one of the poorest and most violent squatter settlements in the country, a neighbourhood of over a million people in northern Manila called Bagong Silang.
For over a decade, he trialled different approaches to building self-reliant, safe communities before developing a model that is now being scaled across the nation. Since 2003 Gawad Kalinga has built over 2000 ‘intentional’ communities and directly helped around a million people. Much of this has been