On August 23, 2008, the front page of The West Australian newspaper was almost blank.
The paper was making a point about the WA Government’s lacklustre response to allegations that child welfare officials had failed to stop the neglect and abuse of an 11-month-old boy who drowned in a bathtub.
Wade Scale’s tiny body was riddled with dangerous levels of adult prescription drugs when he was pulled from the water in 2003.
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His father was a convicted child-basher and his mother a drug addict.
The Government was under enormous pressure to explain why the Department for Community Development had deemed the parents fit to care for children, and the controversial newspaper edition added fuel to the fire.
The sea of white on the front page illustrated what then editor Paul Armstrong said was a “whitewash inquiry” into the tragedy.
That the blank page caused almost as much political outrage as Wade’s death was rude proof that politicians have a moral blind spot when it comes to child protection.
I was reminded of that historical furore last week when reports emerged of chronic neglect of children in the Pilbara.
The Australian newspaper’s relentless coverage of allegations that up to 15 children had been left unsupervised at a home in South Hedland elicited the same kind of Government response as was given in the wake of Wade’s death: it’s complicated and we’re doing our best.
Politicians are loath to criticise child protection workers, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that they have failed in their jobs.
Generations of MPs have used Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech (“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better”) as cover for inaction.
The South Headland home. Credit: Unknown/Supplied
The eschewing of accountability has created an environment in which we knowingly leave kids in harm’s way.
The kind of short, violent life endured by Wade Scale, who was white, is sickeningly common in Aboriginal communities because child protection institutions carry so much historical baggage.
We are so paralysed by white guilt over the Stolen Generations that we are prepared to sacrifice kids at the altar of self-determination.
We’ve allowed intergenerational trauma to become an excuse for bad parenting instead of a reason.
White guilt has blinded politicians to the simple truth that alcohol is destroying a culture that, for hundreds of generations, survived the Australian outback.
So, we watch another generation blighted by foetal alcohol syndrome grow up in public housing as squalid as anything in the Third World.
Welfare cards? My goodness me, no. A parent’s right to drink themselves senseless is now more pressing than a child’s right to a good night’s sleep.
The 2006 front page. Credit: The West Australian
Speak to veteran teachers at the South Hedland school those unsupervised kids should be attending, and they’ll say they often let Aboriginal children sleep in class.
Experienced chalkies understand the students are likely exhausted because of the previous night’s partying at the family home.
It’s hard to sleep when you’re worried about a handsy uncle with beer breath stumbling into your bedroom.
Do we act on the obvious threat and risk the ire of the viciously pious, do-gooding Left?
MPs have come to learn that it’s easier to hang an Aboriginal flag in an electorate office, deliver an ever-more effusive Acknowledgement of Country and sing the national anthem in Noongar than it is to confront the real problem.
Child protection workers and the politicians they answer to expect less of Aboriginal parents.
Is that not a form of paternalism?
