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Here’s the text of a talk - “Ordinary poverty and sores” - given by Elizabeth Povinelli at Charles Darwin University’s workshop “Indigenous policy reform in the NT: An extraordinary debate for extraordinary times”, on 20 July 2007.

Why are these exceptional times? Why is time exceptional now? What is exceptional about it? I have been living down at Channel Point, a place called Balgal, with a group of Aboriginal men, women and children who were driven out of their homes at Belyuen by other men, women, and children – their families to be sure, but wielding axes, chainsaws, pickets, and rocks. They ransacked their houses, stole their goods, and chased them into the scrub. No one was charged. The police investigation seemed minimal at best. Without any foreseeable housing in Darwin, and not wishing to live as part of the urban radical poor, they were promised housing at Balgal. Months later they are still living in tents, hauling water, firewood, as non-Aboriginal people live in houses just kilometers away on Aboriginal land. Not lease land, but unalienable Aboriginal freehold. And the government continues to pressure them to return to Belyuen where they risk slow death. Why cost, of course. Because as much as we hear that these are extraordinary times, they are also ordinary times; the same time it’s always been for the radically poor and black. The bottom line is the bottom line: What kind of life is worth what kind of investment? The rain is coming, everyone knows; perhaps the rain will push these families back.

The title of the conference, I am assuming, cites the controversial work of Giorgio Agamben, and his writings on the state of exception. For Agamben, the state of exception refers to the moment when democratic constitutional orders declare the suspension of the ordinary constitutional order that is thus internal to democratic constitutional orders. In instances of social extremity, for instance, parliaments can legally declare the suspension of the constitution giving the executive body nearly dictatorial power. In these moments, political life is reduced to what he calls bare life, a form of life in which certain people can be killed with impunity. Agamben reads the new security laws arising from 9/11 and 7/7, and instanced in the ongoing case of Doctor Haneef, now being held under immigration law in the notorious Woolmer detention center, as various degrees of the state of exception. The suspension of habeas corpus in the US would be another pretty obvious example. States of exception do not necessarily depend on an actual war being waged against a nation-state. They do depend on creating a condition of supposed extraordinary social extremity, perhaps the rape of children and gang warfare.

So I wonder again, what is extraordinary about the given time, what separates today from yesterday; yesterday from the day before? How do we give an account of this moment as a specific moment in time? And how do we give an account so that we can distribute accountability?

One answer is pretty straightforward. We are not seeing a state of exception but the state about to go into an election. After eleven years, we all know Howard pretty well. If it’s not one scare tactic it’s another. Again, in this way, the Howard government is very much like the Bush-Cheney government.

And yet, for as much as this must be true, that this is about an election rather than an exception, it is not only about an election insofar as this intervention has created an extraordinary hegemonic link between many on the Left and the Right: the children must be saved and thus (and its this connection that we should pay attention to) we must declare a state of exception for indigenous people, passing laws that racially discriminate, suspend property rights, and militarize social life.

This is an experiment, of course. All actions within states of exception are experiments. Those designated as being in the condition of bare life are always open to social experimentation because we can always say, what are the options? Remember my friends and colleagues at Balgal. But again, how do we give an account of this moment as a specific moment in time: Why has this hegemonized both Right and Left; or left the Left without an answer that seems viable?

One reason is that the foundational dream of the last thirty-plus years of the self-reparative Aborigine, nurtured almost entirely by the image of cultural difference and recognition, has been, if not shattered, then severely battered. The recognition of the worth of cultural difference — its embrace — was slung around like some pop cure for self-esteem problems. Yet the stubborn tenacity of structural poverty, its corrosive work on health, the incoherence of property rights (remember, there a white family with a house on Aboriginal land where Aboriginal families displaced by violence are living in tents), and the co-dependency of alcoholism in rural economies (white-owned shops and black customers) have remained, deepened into subsequent generation.

The Right has rushed in to claim its pyrrhic victory. Take for example a recent editorial page in The Australian in which, on the left side, is an editorial against Islamic radicals and, on the right side, against cultural difference. The cultural Left is mocked for supporting indigenous culture in toto, being naïve, and politically correct. And here I think we see the meeting point, what theorists call the articulation point, between some on the Left and Right — or, perhaps, and this is as important, the general population: that the problem somehow lies within Aboriginal communities/being/culture.

At this point we see another aspect of the present that’s critical to understanding what time it is. This point has to do with the location of the intervention in Aboriginal substance abuse: rural Australia. We hear that the state of exception is in rural Australia and one of the key problems is their isolation (enter the proposal to do away with the permit system). Now, it is perfectly true that I know rural indigenous poverty best, most intimately. But from what I read, urban poverty, isolation, and racism are pretty bad, as is substance abuse. Moreover, although there may be some correlation between rural poverty and cultural adherence and urban poverty and cultural dispersion, I don’t think it’s worth its weight in toilet paper. Or, I’d like to see evidence of this claim. Why then the focus on rural Australia, rural communities, rural crisis?

I think we can begin to understand what is the state of exception within which we have been called to account. What has been so severely reduced to create a brand new state of bare life where the ordinary laws don’t apply is not indigenous life. The corporeally corrosive nature of poverty is ordinary. What is necessary is to shake this ordinariness, to make the ordinary nature of life (sores, malnutrition, sanitation, poverty) appear unusual even as it surrounds everyone like air. What makes this time exceptional is not internal to indigenous society: I wish. It is rather internal to Australian nationalism, and it is two pronged:

(a) the collapse of the multicultural compromise in the wake of 9/11, eleven years of the Howard government. In this aspect, locating the problem in rural Aboriginal worlds and sex is critical. Focusing on rural life and sex is perfect, really, because this focus seems, on the one hand, most distal to the actual interdependency of poverty, that poverty is also a choice about funding and how we think about the temporality of funding, and on the other hand, the most impossible to shrug off. One cannot answer the charge of sexual abuse. That’s why sex panics have been so important during large-scale political and economic transformations. They are experienced as so spectacular and catastrophic that all other, ordinary, cruddy, and corrosive forms of injustice pale in its wake. It’s like screaming fire in a movie theatre; no one is going to stop to ask: What’s going on here?

(b) But perhaps most important is the extension of the neoliberal state into every aspect of social life, thus creating a crisis of responsibility and accountability in dealing with Aboriginal misery and emiseration. The crisis, the state of exception that allows the government to claim the suspension of ordinary law and to experiment with life; to racially discriminate, to suspend property rights, and to militarize social life is a radical crisis of accountability and responsibility in changing regimes of political economy.

Take for example the rhetoric of failure that we are now hearing, that we have been hearing since the Howard assault on ATSIC. We might ask, what has failed? As we ask though, we must remember the increasing separation of class as a neoliberal regime takes hold — perhaps not yet as critically here as in the US where the separation between the top 1% ad the rest is staggering.

But what if we do not accept that the social welfare net and local social imaginaries are not working in some general way but only in a specific way? Why aren’t they seen to be working? What isn’t working? Take, for example, local policies in many indigenous communities of not treating staphylococcal and streptococcal infections until a person has at least six active infections on their body. There have been several reasons given to me why this policy is in place in poor indigenous communities. One reason given is that health officials have to assess the risk of creating a drug resistant form of staphylococci or streptococci as opposed to the value of clearing a person of infection. So, this reasoning goes, since indigenous persons living on indigenous communities will be constantly re-exposed to staphylococci and streptococci, their bodies should be allowed to fight off the infection until antibiotics are absolutely necessary. This risk analysis might make sense if it were not for the fact that these infections are rarely if ever cultured and that their treatment has not changed over the course of the last twenty plus years. When I first began living in indigenous communities in north Australia twenty-two years ago, amoxicillin or penicillin would quickly cure the infections I had. Presently, doctors on indigenous communities say that they continue to do so. Doctors in the US say they don’t and prescribe amoxicillin-clav (Augmentin). On amoxicillin-clav my infections recede within a week. On amoxicillin or penicillin they can persist for months and then re-emerge — the same is the case for my indigenous friends in Australia. How much would it cost to culture the various sores infesting indigenous Australians? How much to treat them with the proper antibiotics?

These questions need not be asked or answered when we are dreaming of future worlds in which no one has these sores or these life expectancies even as others are never impeded in their quest to accumulate as much wealth as possible. But the actual cost-benefit analysis occurring is not the balance between the risk of untreated staphylococci or streptococci verses the risk of developing a drug resistant form, but the risk of untreated staphylococci or streptococci within certain populations and the cost of investing in poverty-stricken communities for the short or long term.

The presupposition underlying the treatment of infections in indigenous communities is that the communities themselves will remain fetid. And, within a neoliberal state, any social investment that does not have a clear end — a projectable moment when input values (money, services, care) can be replaced by output value — is not merely economically suspect but morally suspect no matter the life-enhancing nature of the investment. Take, for instance, a quite effective program on rural indigenous communities, The Community Development Employment Project (CDEP).

As Jon Altman and M.C. Gray note, CDEP has been described as “a labor market program, an alternative income support scheme and a community development scheme,” but whatever it is CDEP has raised the personal income of rural indigenous men and women. This basic fact, that a state run social program increased the quality of life for the most disadvantaged, was judged a failure, however, because it did not project its own end—the movement of indigenous workers out of the program and into the market. As a result, the Howard government has radically cut back positions available in the program and increased the reporting requirements for receiving social welfare. The young indigenous man I mentioned above was denied a position on CDEP because of cutbacks to the program. To be sure, when CDEP was a more robust alternative, he moved in and out of it. But even this use of the program increased the gross numbers of days he didn’t drink. Why isn’t the cancellation of this support of life seen as a form of state killing — a form of the death sentence? On the contrary, withdrawing this life support is considered a moral good. Somehow the refusal of this form of life contributes to the happiness of a majority of citizens, even though their own mortality and economic wellbeing has continued to increase irrespective of the presence or absence of the CDEP. Here we must remember that Failure, Normality, and Success are not Kantian Ideas floating out in space but ways of measuring the social world, norms for what is fair or not. Native Americans who were able to exploit their sovereignty to establish casinos are considered not to be playing fair because here they are making buckets of money. Some.

This mode of imagining the social cannot be maintained if the broad outlines of a neoliberal model of state and economy is to take hold. This model decisively shifts the triangular relationship among state, labor, and corporate actors and thus citizens who are within or effected by these actors. We see an emphasis on radical individualism, a shift from the state as a mode of redistributing wealth from rich to poor to the state as a source of corporate wealth and welfare through tax breaks and finance and the subsequent individualization of risk. And in Australia and Europe we see the slow dismantling of what the Harvard historian of European political economy calls the neocorporatist compromise in which, from the end of the second World War to around 1973, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, governing institutions consisted of state actors, management, and labor, German firms for instance having labor representative on their supervisory boards.

In Australia, as elsewhere, social, economic, and political life are increasingly organized around the neoliberal view that bodies and values are poker chips in individual games of chance and that the social is an impediment to the production of value. This view ramifies socially; and ramifies especially hard on the poor. As Craig Calhoun concisely put it, privatizing risk makes “individuals bear the brunt of hardships that are predictable in the statistical aggregate without effective mechanisms to share the burden, let alone reduce the risk.” Privatizing risk creates and fosters a language game in which the social is practiced as nothing more than an aggregate of individuated risk calculators working according to mathematically predictable econometric models. I am not in you. You are not in me. We are merely playing the same game of chance whose truth lies not here and now between us but there and then in who wins and who loses. No one is killing me. I am killing myself. Maybe … we’ll see … the future will tell.

These neoliberal discourses change the organization of responsibility and accountability. Anything larger than the individual is seen as an impediment to the enterprise subject. Indeed, they are said to be the cause of poverty along with longstanding federal and state commitments to indigenous social welfare. When indigenous people stop seeing their social worlds from the perspective of local cultural sense or from state-backed social welfare then they will, it is said, emerge from poverty and with this emergence gain the health that all other Australians have.

When, when, when … then, then, then … local men and women are quite familiar with the temporal ethics of this future anterior. They are used to being the locus of social experimentation, the nodal point of national anxiety. Sure, help; but how much, stop grog without detox programs, grab land without ensuring housing, suspend CDEP programs and cast Aboriginal labor into the lowest sector labor market. Lets see what happens. The future will tell.