Tony Abbott, rubber time, central Australian time, and humbuggery about a failed state

(Above: Alice Springs, failed capital of a failed non-existent state? Well yes, says Tony Abbott).

Where I grew up, the urge for a new state was strong. And what better name could have been imagined in those prim colonial times than "New England"? Go Poms.

Sadly the New England movement folded its tent, and stole into the night, and its papers were recently deposited in an archive where only the sturdiest of loons will dare to tread - but of course in the wonderful world of the intertubes, there's now always a way to find out more, so if you want to take a rebel stand and learn the New England new state movement's fighting anthem, you should toddle off to here.

If only Tony Abbott had been around at the time, he could have made the state a reality. Because he's discovered a new state, and also discovered that - like NSW - it's a failed state.

It's called Outback Australia, and the sordid details of its failure are outlined in Outback Australia a failed state.

Outback Australia is close to being a failed state because no one is really in charge, nothing gets done quickly, and lots of well-meaning officials keep tripping over each other.

It's one of the delusions of city folk that there's a problem if nothing gets done quickly. When you get a jumped up city culture rushing in to say quick get it done, get it done now, the reaction often in the bush is why?

This isn't an unusual phenomenon. If you deal with say people in Malaysia, you soon get to learn about rubber time. Something might be scheduled for 9 am, but effectively that's just a way of saying it'll be dealt with in the morning. 10 am or 11 am will be just as timely, and after noon will probably be just as good for certain intractable problems.

Central Australia (which is not the Outback Australia so easily defamed by Abbott) has its own time frame, and it's not just because it's behind eastern standard time. It's because there's a different rhythm, and a different set of desires and expectations.

Part of this is just the way of things. When the summer heat hits and the flies come out in plague force, there's nothing much to do except indulge in sit down time - unless you're so keen to get things done, you don't mind a little heat stroke.

A lot of people turn up, decide they can't stand the immutable rhythms, the remoteness and the isolation, the lack of things to do, and the need for self-reliance and internal strength, and then bugger off again.

These blow ins always want to fix things, always want to change things, flurry about and then soon disappear, with the locals nodding wisely as they disappear, defeated.

Tony Abbott is a typical do gooder blow in, and the example he provides is also typical:

Last year, to give what I suspect is an emblematic example, a local person complained to the head teacher that a concrete block wall in the school playground at Ukaka, an out-station west of Alice Springs, wobbled when leaned on so was unsafe and could hurt the children. This week I was told that the problem would finally be fixed because contractors were coming to do the job that one man with a heavy hammer could have cleared up in about an hour. By the time this simple job has been completed, the teacher and regional office bureaucrats will have wasted much time in calls and paperwork, thousands of dollars will needlessly have been spent, and local Aboriginal people’s sense of powerlessness will have been reinforced.

Yes, but did the block wall fall down and hurt anyone?

Seems not, so why the fuss, where's the ultimate harm? Seems like the strategy of 'yes we'll get around to fixing it sometime, in due course' paid off, and by the time the simple job of knocking down the wall was completed, much enjoyable time - making phone calls, filling out paperwork, expending thousands of dollars (and shaving a little on its way through) - will have generated a pleasant feeling of being busy and being important.

Because at the end of the day in central Australia, there's not much to do, and there's not much prospect of getting ahead. Outside of tourism and government, what are you going to do, apart from make work schemes? There's only a couple of big towns, and they're the only places with sufficient size to generate momentum. That's why grog and sex and relationships dominate, because there's bugger all else to do.

Abbott's a can do city lad, irritated by the buck passing and the inertia:

The teacher on the spot couldn’t make a decision because her job was to teach, not to fix buildings; the bureaucrats procrastinated because there would always have been higher priorities; and local people wouldn’t have taken matters into their own hands because they’ve absorbed a culture of dependency. The result is that children have needlessly been exposed to the risk of injury while their parents have had confirmed both their self-doubts and their prejudices about the uselessness of government.

But if you get out and about and do too many things too fast, you'll be likely viewed as a trouble maker, going against the rhythms of the community. 'Always in a hurry that fella' is probably as damning a bit of character assassination as you can imagine.

Abbott is the typical blow in because he thinks a short time is enough to get a feel for the place and propose solutions:

Four days in remote parts of the Northern Territory have confirmed that big, complicated and incompetent government is exacerbating the usual problems of welfare dependent communities.

Four days! The first thing, almost a rite of passage, a local will point out to you as you head into Alice Springs is the rocks, billions of years old, exposed and weathered and worn, dark on the sunless side, a pitiless bright red orange on the other, yet also imposing and eternal. The rocks tell you that four days is just a sparrow's fart in the timeless land.

Some don't mind the timelessness, some find it oppressive and leave. The usual blow ins and blow outs are the minders sent in to put the people on city time:

Whether it was police officers on short-term contracts leaving just as they’d established trust with local people, new tenancy arrangements that made house repairs and maintenance harder than ever to arrange; useful enterprises suddenly stopped because policy had changed in Canberra, or economic possibilities thwarted because permission needed to be obtained from a land council accustomed to playing favourites, the sense of frustration was palpable.

Abbott is typically delusional when he talks of useful enterprises - would that be the winery at Alice Springs or the camel races? Great for the tourists perhaps, but the sense of frustration and irritation is palpable in the way all small communities are forced to jostle along together. Blow ins who think they can sort years of prejudice are just another way of ensuring the sense of frustration keeps jogging along.

There's no easy solution in a landscape which is tough and which naturally limits what is possible. Just getting around is time consuming and expensive, and it cultivates a kind of independence and self-reliance which means herding people is like trying to herd cats.

Typically Abbott thinks that all that's required is a new kind of herding, a new government model, having already established earlier in his piece that government is generally perceived as the problem:

Under the Intervention, the former government was inching towards a new model of governance for remote communities. There was an operational commander answerable to the federal minister with overall responsibility for service delivery. Then there were government business managers on the ground in each of 73 remote townships responsible for ensuring that all government service providers were pulling in the same direction.

Notice how he says nothing about how the people, allegedly absorbed in a culture of dependency, and with prejudices about the uselessness of government, are included in this structure?

Well this kind of government re-organisation and re-structuring has come and gone, usually as governments come and go, and people get by and the rocks endure.

Abbott is still clinging to the delusion that the Intervention, organized by the Howard government as a cynical, desperate election ploy after a decade of neglect while in power, somehow was the salvation of the failed state of Outback Australia (nee Central Australia), and now it's being ruined by the Labor government.

More than anything else, the departure of General Chalmers as operational commander in March and his replacement by a bureaucrat who was quietly shuffled off after three months signaled the effective end of the intervention. The government business managers are now just another official trying to make a difference with no special authority and subject to bureaucrats in Alice Springs and Darwin. The Intervention has made a difference but its potential to herald a more effective system of governance in remote communities has almost certainly been wasted.

No doubt Abbott means well, but how well meaning is it to rock into a place for four days, determine it's a failed state, then rock out again, complaining how nothing gets done quickly?

On that basis, I could say exactly the same about Canberra after my last tragic visit, where the sense of frustration within the government department was palpable, the sense of powerlessness within the bureaucrats was constantly being reinforced, and the bureaucrats had both their self-doubts and their prejudices about the uselessness of government paraded on a daily basis.

In Canberra they tend to call this kind of analysis blather. In the failed state which isn't a state operating on its own time, it's called humbug.

And yes indeed Tony Abbott is a humbugger full of humbuggery of the most tedious kind. Because he's not really that interested in solutions, he's interested in using outback Australia's failed state status and waste as a way of bagging the Labor party.

If the salvation of central Australia is reliant on politicians carpet bagging their way up from Canberra then it's doomed.

Luckily it's neither the best of times, nor the worst of times, but just the times, and now summer's coming on and the flies are out and about, and the dryness wrenches the moisture from your body within the hour, why not sit down for a little while and think about the problems of life? There's thinking time, and sorry time, and time to do nothing much, or to do what moves your spirit, or time to move through the land in ways that please and move you ... And don't worry about the sounds of politicians - their buzzing is as transient and as useful as a blow fly. Come to think of it, blow flies play a much more useful role in the life cycle of the bush ...

Whatever you do, don't play golf. Only mad dogs, English men, politicians, and tourists do that ...

And for an alternative view to Abbott's, why not read Alistair Nicholson's Indigenous intervention a costly flop, which has fortuitously turned up at the same time as Abbott's humbuggery? What have you got to lose, except a little time?