Prohibition and paternalism

The Australian government is moving to impose alcohol bans on aboriginal communities and make receipt of welfare contingent on parents getting their children to school and spending at least half of their benefit on food and essentials.

Prime Minister John Howard said his government would ban alcohol in remote Aboriginal communities and impose strict new limits on welfare payments to try to ensure Aboriginal children were safe from abuse and alcohol-related violence.

"This is a national emergency," Howard told Australian parliament. "We are dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present. That is a sad and tragic event.

"Exceptional measures are required to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation."

Howard said the prohibitions would apply in the outback Northern Territory but urged state governments, over which he has less constitutional control, to match them across the entire country.

I really don't know how to respond to this. Prohibition and paternalism have no track record of success. NZ experimented with them on the East Coast 70 or 80 years ago but the results didn't hold.

On the other hand, what are the options? From what I understand job/wealth creation schemes run by aboriginal communities haven't been a roaring success.

The focus has to be the children and their future. The prohibition and paternalism won't solve their parent's problems but it might improve the children's prospects. These kids need educating to an standard where they can leave communities that have no futures and make their own way in the world. We exercise both prohibition and paternalism over children anyway. But they need to grow up knowing that freedom and choice are achievable with age.

Or these conditions could make their environment even more dangerous. If children are already being bartered for alcohol increasing it's scarcity and price won't necessarily stop that horrible practice and could worsen their vulnerability. Prohibition will increase crime levels so truckloads of correctional and law-enforcement resources will be vital to protect innocent members of these communities. Are those resources available?

This is such a tough problem and one the state has to do something about.

And we shouldn't just feel relieved we aren't having to make these kind of decisions because these problems aren't absent from NZ. This touches on the Tamihere/Jackson solution. They want welfare controlled through community trusts who will work with the most dysfunctional families. A policy I think we will be hearing more about next year.