Black arts faculty-Cultural intellect & death of merit

Gary Johns 25 November 2023 The Spectator Australia?

The Queensland University of Technology is to establish a Faculty of Indigenous Knowledges and Culture. Damn, my grammar app keeps trying to correct knowledges to knowledge. Obviously, it is a colonialist piece of software that refuses to acknowledge that Aboriginal people know differently.

Some Aboriginal people know different things, but I doubt they know differently. For example, during the referendum debate, Noel Pearson explained how rheumatic heart disease (RHD), which affects Aboriginal people disproportionately, could be solved by a committee of Aboriginal people. Unfortunately, for Noel and the Yes case, a cause of RHD is poor hygiene.

Pearson’s disciples would have lapped up medical advice suggesting that, ‘People who do not have opportunities for effective washing of their hands and bodies may have increased rates of Strep A’, a cause of RHD. Who in Australia does not have the opportunity to wash?

According to the Australian Heart Foundation, RHD was common in Australia until the 1960s. My mother, born somewhat earlier, suffered damage from RHD as a child. The discovery of penicillin (to treat Strep A infection) and ‘improved access to healthcare and socioeconomic conditions’ led to declining disease rates. I am confident that access to health care is far greater for the poor today than in 1930s inner-city Melbourne when my mother contracted her infection.

RHD persists in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and M?ori and Pacific Islander communities. And yet, RHD Australia and the Menzies School of Health Research boldly assert, ‘the systematic neglect of culture in health is the single biggest barrier to advancing the highest attainable standards of health’. And the now compulsory statement of faith: ‘It is necessary to acknowledge the ongoing impact and trauma that colonisation has on … health.’ I guess the M?ori and Pacifica can transfer their intergenerational trauma to Australia; any old colonialist will do.

Cultural intellect

Undoubtedly, many factors influence ‘health-seeking behaviour’, and culture is important in clinical practice, but is ‘incorporating traditional indigenous medical practices’ useful knowledge? What ‘indigenous medical practices’ will the workforce apply? Aboriginal beliefs preclude the germ theory of disease. Yet, academics insist that Aboriginal culture must be respected. Why? Why not disrespect it, as would good nurses of earlier eras who taught the poor of the inner cities of Australia how to keep clean at a far lower standard of living?

Following the advice of RHD Australia that ‘an adequately trained and supported Aboriginal… workforce is the key driver for successful health programs’, the new QUT faculty saw its chance. A huge edifice is being constructed in Aboriginal health that strains credulity. Is the trained Aboriginal workforce administering this knowledge to Aborigines also ‘culturally’ Aboriginal? Do Aboriginal graduates suffer from RHD? Why are they exempt when they, too, have supposedly suffered from the intergenerational trauma of colonisation?

The advice extols ‘patient journey mapping’ but not ‘life journey mapping’. The message is always the same: ‘Be Aboriginal; we will tidy up after you….’. It may be that the Aboriginal health workforce has unique insight into the ‘lived experiences’ of families. They are said to ‘possess a “cultural intellect” that the mainstream cannot replicate’, but the healthy graduates seem to have crossed the stream.

Many learned people have been drawn in by the ideology – the social determinants of health – raging through public medicine. Indeed, the poor suffer poor health compared to the rich. Poverty may not be the cause. The living standards of those presently poor would be greater than those of the rich of a previous era. One could concentrate on making the poor not so poor: but exalting culture?

The argument incorporates a material deterministic ideology of human behaviour with a twist: Aboriginal culture is sacro-sanct. On the one hand, the poor must be looked after because they are oppressed, but on the other, their culture, which may well keep them poor and oppressed, must remain unchanged. It is a perfect model for never-ending funds for public health administrators.

And here is the giveaway. The Australian government’s ‘reform’ to fund all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students will increase opportunities for students to attend QUT to study Indigenous Knowledges and Culture.

Death of Merit

What of the trained workforce? How will they and the extra staff required to ‘instruct’ them be chosen? Here is the second leg of the strategy. QUT is to cast aside merit. The word ‘merit’ will be deleted from their selection policies, and they will hire staff based on ‘suitability’ instead. Job applicants will have their achievement rated against ‘opportunity’.

Achievement will be assessed ‘relative to opportunity’. Gone is the idea that a poor, bright student from the wrong side of the tracks can make it with brains and hard work. Instead, failure to thrive will be rewarded. It is as if the constitutional recognition of the Voice won.

A selection panel may consider how the appointment would achieve ‘organisational equity, diversity, respect and inclusion obligations’. Quotas are on. One academic suggested the policy to eliminate merit is ‘bordering on embarrassing’. ‘It’s completely disrespectful to tell students who will be charged thousands of dollars for a program that they will be taught by people chosen not on merit, but suitability.’

QUT will hire second-rate staff to teach crap to second-rate students for Aboriginal people who do not wash. If you want to know where the money goes in Aboriginal affairs – academic empire builders soak up quite a bit.

AUTHOR Gary Johns

Gary Johns is the chair of Close the Gap Research and author of The Burden of Culture.