Australian author Bruce Pascoe is in a spot of bother. His ancestry has been referred to the Australian Federal Police for investigation into his ethnicity.
Ponder that for a moment; in 2020, it’s in the purview of the police to question and, presumably, lay criminal charges as consequence of what they might find regarding someone’s ethnicity.
How on earth did we get here?
In Pascoe’s case, it’s been a lengthy journey and one which, depending on which “team” you are on looks like this chronology listed by Andrew Bolt or the more sympathetic version (presumably written by supporters) in his Wikipedia entry.
What’s apparent from either side of the story is Bruce’s claimed Australian Aboriginal ancestry is not likely to amount to many actual relatives who existed anywhere but his fertile imagination, if any at all.
But how did he manage to get away with this fantasy for so long?
Obviously, the opportunity was created by well-meaning politicians. When trying to rectify centuries of appalling and egregious treatment of the first people of Australia, politicians needed to create a definition against which they could allocate the additional state funding and resources.
That definition is as follows:
An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he (she) lives.
Can any bright students see the problem with that?
Yes, young girl at the back of the class, what’s the answer?
The words identify, accept and community all require definition to remove subjectivity.
If not, there is a situation ripe for exploitation by people who want free money.
As in most situations, where America leads, Australia follows.
Famously, 2020 Presidential hopeful, Elizabeth Warren, was the recipient of a place at law college reserved for a Native American after claiming to be Cherokee.
Cheekier still, Rachel Dolezal claimed to be of African American ancestry to become chapter president of the NAACP without having any black ancestors.
What can we learn from this?
Bill’s Opinion
As always, incentives matter.
In a situation where there’s free value (money, housing, academic places, increased employment prospects, perception of victimhood) and little obvious consequence for lying, there will be fraud.
The fact that this isn’t obvious to legislators says more about their IQs and knowledge of human nature than the dishonesty of the people who claim to be an ethnicity they are not.
Warren and Pascoe and Dolezal (see what I did there?) are at the top end of the fraud town. It’s not beyond imagination to suspect there are likely countless more frauds at the bottom end.
And who can blame them; presumably people already living an underprivileged life have a great incentive to invent a memory of an distant indigenous background like Pascoe’s to get to the front of the queue for housing or free dental care, for example.
What is going to be interesting about Pascoe’s case is to see what the decision might be regarding the potential crime committed. I’m not a lawyer so my research for precedent utilises the same resources as you, i.e. Google.
The best I could find was this campaign, which infers there’s definitely suspected cases of Aboriginal identity fraud but doesn’t describe any consequence.
My suspicion is, the crime rarely, if ever, results in a successful prosecution for two reasons; 1) there would need to be proof of intent rather than a mistaken “family memory”, and 2) until Pascoe, the people committing the crime were already in relatively humble conditions so the authorities took a lenient view.
Of course, like Elizabeth Warren, Pascoe has a low cost and quick remedy to clear his name; take a DNA test with 23 and Me.
We’ll wait, Bruce. We’ll wait.
In the USA, people who fraudulently claim to be military veterans are guilty of the crime of “Stolen Valor” (in the UK, they’re referred to by the name “Walt“).
In Australia, the Aboriginals suffered the pain and trauma of the Stolen Generation.
Now it would seem Bruce Pascoe and others might be accused of Stolen Victimhood.
Again, incentives matter; when victimhood is increasingly seen as having value, don’t be surprised to see fraudulent claims to it.
It has long been the case that prominent Aboriginal activists have been less Aboriginal than the most disadvantaged members of the group they claim to represent, i.e. those uneducated people living in remote, dysfunctional communities who have lost their culture and not adapted to another. I find it hard to believe that blacks sleeping rough on the dry river bed of Alice Springs really care much about Constitutional recognition or welcome to country ceremonies.
Most white Australians don’t mind giving a little preferential treatment to Aborigines, but this goodwill is eroded when those with little or no Aboriginal ancestry or inherited disadvantage seize those opportunities for themselves.
The Welcome to Country ceremonies seem to me to be not for the people in Bamaga or Alice Springs but Mosman and East Brighton.
But anyway, the ethnicity part of this is not relevant; it’s humans reacting logically to a flawed incentive structure.
Whether this is flawed depends on your point of your view. I guess. It nicely perpetuates a substantial growth industry, with a supporting bureaucracy.
I’ll do the maths one day, and I could be operating from a flawed memory about the starting point, but when I was at uni and touching on demography (about 25 years ago), I recall the % of the population that was aboriginal or TSI was about 2%. That it is now about 3.3%, when the overall population has gone up so dramatically seems a little odd. It could be right, and it is possible that it is supported by two factors – an expanding category of people who identify that way, and a much higher birth rate. With a very high death rate (and a tragically lower life expectancy), I am thinking that category expansion is doing some heavy lifting. Could be wrong here of course.
Although my preference is to never be wrong, just not right.
I’ve tried before, and the stats aren’t easy to find to work out how this has happened.
Any system which creates a privileged class that can be simply be obtained by making a claim that is hard to prove is going to see a large amount of ‘fraud’. It can be solved overnight, if that was desired.
“It can be solved overnight, if that was desired.”
Yes. Two mouth swabs, $125, 3 week wait.
This comment is on the previous topic – The Australian bushfire climate crisis – an antidote to the chaos. I cant post there.
You will have a far more productive and joyful life in replacing yacht bulkheads than trying to fathom out climate politics.
What error message did you get?
Any HTML links in the reply?
There is nowt there, no leave a comment link, nothing to get an error message about.
Hmm.
Somehow it switched the comments option off, or “Guardian mode”, as it’s known.
I’ll fix it tomorrow.