The Indigenous hybrid economy: A realistic sustainable option for remote communities? Paper presented to the Australian Fabian Society, Melbourne, 26 October 2005

The Indigenous hybrid economy: A realistic sustainable option for remote communities? Paper presented to the Australian Fabian Society, Melbourne, 26 October 2005 Report

CAEPR Topical Issue

• Author(s): Altman, J.C.
• Published: 2006
• Publisher: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University

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Abstract: Thank you very much to Race Mathews and Jacki Yowell for organizing this seminar and to Noni Sharp for commentating. It is always nice to be back in Melbourne to intellectually engage, for this is the city where I started my academic career in Australia in the economics department at the University of Melbourne nearly 30 years ago. It is also my third lecture in Melbourne this year: in April I presented a lecture on Brokering Aboriginal Art at the Museum of Melbourne and in June I gave a keynote address on Indigenous Issues to the Good Shepherd Microfinance Conference. Today I want to discuss the Indigenous hybrid economy. When this lecture was first mooted in April this year, I did not realize how timely and topical it would be, but the Howard Government has recently announced proposals for radical amendments to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and my unplanned consultancy for Oxfam Australia has resulted in one of the few research reports that offer vigorous dissent to these proposals. Debates in Indigenous affairs at the moment are becoming somewhat bifurcated and polarized. Last night, Noel Pearson from the Cape York Institute presented a lecture on development and welfare sponsored by the Centre for Independent Studies and delivered at the Sydney Stock Exchange; tonight I am addressing the Australian Fabian Society at the New Internationalist Bookshop on alternative Indigenous hybrid or diverse or community economies. The symbolism of this in terms of ideas and influence in Australian society today cannot be overstated. The ideas that I want to share with you tonight are not new, at least not for me: I want to discuss a form of economy that I term the hybrid economy that includes free market and customary and state components. I have been aware of this form of economy since 1979, when I left Melbourne to live and undertake research for a doctorate in anthropology at a remote outstation in Arnhem Land. There, the non-market or subsistence sector based on harvesting of wildlife was the dominant component of the economy. This late 20th century economy was not ‘traditional’, pristine, or precontact, even though colonization had come relatively late to Arnhem Land. This economy is contemporary and distinctly Indigenous. This economy is not single sector, it also has market and state sectors, and it does not exist in isolation (see page 2). While this hybrid economy has its own values, especially in the customary sector, it is also based on a series of conjunctions or articulations between all sectors. Diagrammatically, I have represented this economy as three overlapping circles, the market, the state and the customary, with four segments of articulation or overlap.

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• Publisher Location: Canberra