Here's a tale of bastardy on bastardy.
The Federal Government had been looking for a site to dump nuclear waste from our one nuclear reactor for some time.
They tried it on with South Australia, but the State Government - with an eye on the votes - wouldn't have it.
In fact no State wanted to be saddled with it.
They had a sort of evaluation by a committee of experts of 41 potential sites.
The six they chose as most likely were all in safe Government seats.
So they were canned in a hurry and suddenly the committee's conclusions became 'obsolete', according to a minder of the then Science Minister.
What to do?
Out of the blue they found three sites in the Northern Territory, all of them owned by the Defence Department and therefore unencumbered.
One of them - Fishers Ridge, near Katherine - had already been investigated by the experts and dismissed as 'unsuitable on hydrological grounds'.
The other two are in pretty remote parts of Central Australia.
But, like Fishers Ridge, they are close to people.
Mt Everard and Harts Range have small Aboriginal outstation communities; Fishers Ridge adjoins a pastoral property and is also near good freshwater fishing and fish breeding grounds.
All, it is said, will undergo rigorous scientific assessment.
Before the last Federal election in 2004, the Government's Senator for the Northern Territory - one Nigel Scullion, a former commercial fisherman with one of those sexual harasser moustaches - found some spine and said 'Not on my watch!'
The thing is, they chose the sites in the Territory because they can.
We're not a State yet and we don't have the Constitutional power to refuse a proposal for Federal land.
Once safely re-elected, Scullion's spine miraculously disappeared and he became an ardent supporter of the proposal.
And there the plot thickens.
Scullion apparently had some discussions with the Northern Land Council, the representative body under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 for Traditional Owners of Aboriginal land in the top half of the Territory.
He then comes up with an amendment to the forthcoming Radioactive Waste Management Bill that's before Parliament to make it possible for Traditional Owners - or anyone else for that matter - to nominate a site for consideration.
Remember the concept of rigorous scientific assessment?
The name Muckaty Station - north of Tennant Creek and in the remote scrub of the Barkly - hits the news and not for the first time.
In the 80s it was widely rumoured to be up for sale to Japanese interests.
It has since become Aboriginal land but, like a lot of cattle country in the Territory, it's pretty impoverished.
The Land Council denied Muckaty was the site they'd be proposing for a nuclear waste dump, but the rumours persisted.
One group of Traditional Owners gets duchessed to Lucas Heights to see how safe a nuclear reactor is and how harmless the waste would be once treated.
And another hits the trail to protest against the idea.
So at one stroke the Land Council - the body that's supposed to represent Aboriginal interests and which is bound by law to consider the wishes of all people affected by a development proposal - seems to have been very successful in engendering division.
It might be churlish, perhaps even libellous, to suggest that its enthusiasm for the site had something to do with the fact that the husband of one of the Traditional Owners was a member of the Land Council's executive.
But they've pursued it behind closed doors with a vigour.
Nigel Scullion, in the meantime, had got his reward: a junior Ministry in the Howard Government to replace a Queenslander who was accused of corruption (and no, that's not a tautology).
One observer was heard to remark, in paraphrase, 'The Scum Also Rises'.
Finally, last Friday week, the announcement came.
Part of Muckaty was to be proposed as a site for a nuclear waste dump.
In exchange, if the site were to be chosen, the Traditional Owners would receive $11 million to go into a trust fund for housing, transport, education and culture, according to an NLC media release.
A further $1 million was to be set aside for educational scholarships.
But if the rigorous scientific assessment proves Muckaty to be unsuitable, it's all pie in the sky.
Once again Aboriginal people have to offer to give up their traditional rights in the hope opf getting something they should have, like all other citizens, as a matter of right.
This time the Federal Government's agenda was aided and abetted by the body supposed to represent the interests of Aboriginal people.
And to add insult to injury, they gave Clare Martin, our Chief Minister a kicking for it because, their chairman said, she'd ignored a national responsibility in favour of short term political gain.
She had, he said, '...misled and failed Territorians and...Aboriginal groups who benefit from development and employment opportunities on their country'.
Of all the things you'd want to take Clare Martin to task for - and the list is legion - the last thing you'd have a go at her for is sticking to the will of the majority.
Yes, I know, it's probably a first, but you can't knock her for it, can you.
You can - and I do - knock the chairman of the NLC for a thoroughly grubby little performance.
Slagging off Clare Martin does not distract attention from the stunt the Land Council has pulled on all the people of the Northern Territory, not least among them the Traditional Owners of Muckaty Station.
I suspect he and the council did it for short-term political gain, since they're perennially on the nose with government.
The piety and self-righteousness of the man in his attempt to gild utter venality is enough to make a reasonable person vomit.
Pots and kettles?
Yes, but it takes us back to blankets and beads.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Friday, June 01, 2007
Plus ca change
Our Productivity Commission regularly investigates Indigenous disadvantage as a social and economic cost to the nation.
Their latest report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage gives the usual depressing rollcall of statistics - premature death rates, chronic diseases, imprisonment, overcrowding, low educational attainment and so on.
With little or no improvement in any of the social indicators.
Reaction from the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the egregiously awful Mal Brough, was predictable.
First cab off the rank in the blame game was the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a representative body (fully-elected Board) which in 2004 finally died from the slow death of a thousand cuts it had been suffering from the day the Howard Government was first elected nearly 12 years ago.
Boofhead Mal said the government couldn't be blamed for the lack of progress.
It was all the fault of ATSIC.
I think my memory is in better shape than Mal's, because I recall one of the first acts of the Howard Government was to take responsibility for Indigenous health away from ATSIC and give it to the Federal Health Department.
ATSIC was never responsible for education, only for giving advice which the mainstream department largely ignored.
It was underfunded for housing and kept warning the Federal Government that it needed to spend $4 billion to clean up Indigenous housing nationwide.
Get the picture?
Then Mal said it was all the fault of Indigenous people anyway and if only they'd show a bit of personal responsibility all would be well.
The Productivity Commission offered four critical elements in making a way out of the mess:
• Cooperation between Aboriginal people and government and business;
• A bottom-up, rather than top-down approach;
• Good governance; and
• Continuing government support.
Most of these are self-evident and I won't go into them too much.
This government hasn’t cooperated, it hasn’t sought direction from Indigenous people, it’s failed to engage with them and it’s run by the ‘user pays’ mentality.
On the question of governance, the report said there were six indicators of good governance – governing institutions, leadership, self-determination, capacity building, cultural match and resources – all of which it says must be in play if success is to be sustained.
I think the government falls down on all of them.
And it certainly falls down heavily on the concept of a 'bottom-up' approach.
Mad Mal loves telling people what to do and he hates listening - a trait he has in common with most of the people who've held this portfolio.
They all know best.
The tragic thing about all this is that the profile of disadvantage the Productivity Commission lays out is not news: it's an update on what we already knew from other reports.
The only way the profile will change - in other words the only way Aboriginal people can have any expectation of decent lives - is when central government realises it can't get away any more with blaming and shaming or top-down policy.
They have to start listening to advice and acting on it.
And, above all, they have to have an elected representative structure (emphatically not Child of ATSIC) to help them do it.
Lapdog advisory bodies just don't cut it because (and this is being repeated in the Greenhouse debate) governments will always try to get away with what's least inconvenient.
And that's no longer good enough for Indigenous people and other Australians in the 21st Century.
Their latest report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage gives the usual depressing rollcall of statistics - premature death rates, chronic diseases, imprisonment, overcrowding, low educational attainment and so on.
With little or no improvement in any of the social indicators.
Reaction from the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the egregiously awful Mal Brough, was predictable.
First cab off the rank in the blame game was the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a representative body (fully-elected Board) which in 2004 finally died from the slow death of a thousand cuts it had been suffering from the day the Howard Government was first elected nearly 12 years ago.
Boofhead Mal said the government couldn't be blamed for the lack of progress.
It was all the fault of ATSIC.
I think my memory is in better shape than Mal's, because I recall one of the first acts of the Howard Government was to take responsibility for Indigenous health away from ATSIC and give it to the Federal Health Department.
ATSIC was never responsible for education, only for giving advice which the mainstream department largely ignored.
It was underfunded for housing and kept warning the Federal Government that it needed to spend $4 billion to clean up Indigenous housing nationwide.
Get the picture?
Then Mal said it was all the fault of Indigenous people anyway and if only they'd show a bit of personal responsibility all would be well.
The Productivity Commission offered four critical elements in making a way out of the mess:
• Cooperation between Aboriginal people and government and business;
• A bottom-up, rather than top-down approach;
• Good governance; and
• Continuing government support.
Most of these are self-evident and I won't go into them too much.
This government hasn’t cooperated, it hasn’t sought direction from Indigenous people, it’s failed to engage with them and it’s run by the ‘user pays’ mentality.
On the question of governance, the report said there were six indicators of good governance – governing institutions, leadership, self-determination, capacity building, cultural match and resources – all of which it says must be in play if success is to be sustained.
I think the government falls down on all of them.
And it certainly falls down heavily on the concept of a 'bottom-up' approach.
Mad Mal loves telling people what to do and he hates listening - a trait he has in common with most of the people who've held this portfolio.
They all know best.
The tragic thing about all this is that the profile of disadvantage the Productivity Commission lays out is not news: it's an update on what we already knew from other reports.
The only way the profile will change - in other words the only way Aboriginal people can have any expectation of decent lives - is when central government realises it can't get away any more with blaming and shaming or top-down policy.
They have to start listening to advice and acting on it.
And, above all, they have to have an elected representative structure (emphatically not Child of ATSIC) to help them do it.
Lapdog advisory bodies just don't cut it because (and this is being repeated in the Greenhouse debate) governments will always try to get away with what's least inconvenient.
And that's no longer good enough for Indigenous people and other Australians in the 21st Century.
Forty years on
It was forty years ago today....
Sounds like a song.
And it was forty years ago this very day that the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Can you remember what you were doing?
I was early in line at the record shop, rushed home with the truly amazing disc (yes, vinyl) tucked under my arm and couldn't wait to put it on our creaky little turntable.
In the days before pods, wav files, CDs even, the tinny little stereo could still blow your mind - with the right sounds.
Omigod, look at the cover.
Just look at those dope plants.
Who's that in the corner?
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
Shh.
Listen to this!
Twenty-two years old and full of shit and I wouldn't have missed it for quids.
Ah youth: where is thy sting?
And it's also forty years last Sunday since Australia struggled into the beginnings of a social and cultural transformation that is yet to be realised.
On May 27 1967 - I think it was the first time I voted - Australia voted in a Referendum to amend the Constitution to:
- allow Aborigine people for the first time to be counted in the national census; and
- to empower the Federal Government to assume responsibility for legislating for Aboriginal people over and above the States.
Astonishingly, a shade over 90 per cent of all voters said 'Yes' to the proposition.
And saying 'yes' to a referendum question is something Australians hardly ever do.
An earlier referendum on the question, in 1944, was defeated.
But that's probably because the central question of the referendum was to allow the federal Government to retain powers normally held by the States for the period of post-war reconstruction.
The fact that we did say 'yes' in 1967 is testimony to incredibly hard work done by a handful of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, like the Queenslanders Faith Bandler (whose father, I think, was a ni-Vanuatu) and the poet and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal; Jessie Street, a well-known social activist, one of whose sons later became Chief Justice of New South Wales; Victorian Bill Onus, whose son Lin became a leading Aboriginal artist; and countless other people from, as they say, all walks of life.
The feeling at the time was that it just had to be done and I think there was a lot of goodwill about the whole thing.
Certainly both parties supported it, which is increasingly a rarity these days.
And we all felt Aboriginal people had to be recognised as Australians and take their place in our society instead of being swept under the carpet, our treatment of them an embarrassment.
The campaigners built on the work of a handful of Aboriginal activists (although I doubt they'd have used the term then) in the 1930s, who petitioned the Government for Aboriginal representation.
One of them, William Cooper, made a heart-felt plea for recognition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary (or the Sesquicentennial, if you want to get pedantic) of the settlement at Port Jackson.
Bear in mind that at the time the authorities (funny old word, that) simply grabbed a group of blackfellas from missions and settlements in rural NSW, put them on trucks, drove them off to Sydney and kept them locked up in a camp before bringing them out in loincloths, waving spears, at the re-enactment of Capt Cook's landing - and his claiming the entire continent in the name of King George - at Botany Bay.
And then they trucked them back again into the obscurity of the Far West - out of sight, out of mind.
Caught in a flickering old black and white newsreel, Cooper nervously but unwaveringly asserts the right of Aboriginal people to be recognised and very generously offers to share their country with us.
In an early assertion of the right of Aboriginal peoples to share the economic wealth of the country with the rest of us, he says '...there's plenty of fish in our rivers for all to share...' or some such.
It is very moving to see it today and particularly moving when you consider all he was asking for was a seat at the table as an equal.
In legal terms the Referendum wasn't such a great change, as the eminent Aboriginal lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt, who is Director of Research and Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, pointed out on radio the other day.
It took five years for the Whitlam Government to actually set up a Department of Aboriginal Affairs, for instance.
But that little change was like a crack in the dam and it led to what might be described as big changes.
The forty years since have seen a roll-call of events, institutions and people: Nugget Coombs, Syd Jackson, Polly Farmer, Lionel Rose, the National Aboriginal Council, Gary Foley, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Noonkanbah, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory and other forms of Land Rights in the various States, the Tent Embassy, the Royal Commissions into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generations, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the Mundines, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Mr Djerrkura, Geoff Clark, the Krakouers, the Native Title Act, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Aiden Ridgeway, Yvonne Margarula, the late Murray Chapman, Kathy Freeman, Rover Thomas, John Mawundjul, John Bulun Bulun, Linda Birney, Marion Scrymgour, Barbara McCarthy, Alison Anderson, my friend Josie Crawshaw and so on.
(Without being facetious, and drawing the strands of this post somewhat together, the characters and events would have made a record cover to rival even Sergeant Pepper.)
And, in a simple illustration, forty years ago it would have been unthinkable for any official public gathering to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of whatever country the event is in; now it's unthinkable not to.
But Indigenous people are still dying early (average age of death some 17 years younger than for non-Indigenous people), are more likely to suffer preventable chronic diseases like diabetes, renal disease, tuberculosis; in remote areas are likely to be living in a house with as many as 30 other people, they are unlikely to finish school and and are highly likely to be unemployed.
That's not to say that the referendum itself was a failure.
It's successive governments that have failed in imagination, courage and determination.
It's governments who have shut out Indigenous people from a seat at the table.
Forty years on from expressing a national sense of purpose and unity on one of the burning questions of the age, we are now living under a government that is blaming Indigenous people for the conditions many of them live in and making them pay for services and infrastructure that people living in cities regard as theirs by right.
In 2007, we still have a long way to go and clearly a Constitutional change hasn't been enough to make serious change happen.
Perhaps it's time, once again, to say Treaty Now!
Sounds like a song.
And it was forty years ago this very day that the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Can you remember what you were doing?
I was early in line at the record shop, rushed home with the truly amazing disc (yes, vinyl) tucked under my arm and couldn't wait to put it on our creaky little turntable.
In the days before pods, wav files, CDs even, the tinny little stereo could still blow your mind - with the right sounds.
Omigod, look at the cover.
Just look at those dope plants.
Who's that in the corner?
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
Shh.
Listen to this!
Twenty-two years old and full of shit and I wouldn't have missed it for quids.
Ah youth: where is thy sting?
And it's also forty years last Sunday since Australia struggled into the beginnings of a social and cultural transformation that is yet to be realised.
On May 27 1967 - I think it was the first time I voted - Australia voted in a Referendum to amend the Constitution to:
- allow Aborigine people for the first time to be counted in the national census; and
- to empower the Federal Government to assume responsibility for legislating for Aboriginal people over and above the States.
Astonishingly, a shade over 90 per cent of all voters said 'Yes' to the proposition.
And saying 'yes' to a referendum question is something Australians hardly ever do.
An earlier referendum on the question, in 1944, was defeated.
But that's probably because the central question of the referendum was to allow the federal Government to retain powers normally held by the States for the period of post-war reconstruction.
The fact that we did say 'yes' in 1967 is testimony to incredibly hard work done by a handful of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, like the Queenslanders Faith Bandler (whose father, I think, was a ni-Vanuatu) and the poet and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal; Jessie Street, a well-known social activist, one of whose sons later became Chief Justice of New South Wales; Victorian Bill Onus, whose son Lin became a leading Aboriginal artist; and countless other people from, as they say, all walks of life.
The feeling at the time was that it just had to be done and I think there was a lot of goodwill about the whole thing.
Certainly both parties supported it, which is increasingly a rarity these days.
And we all felt Aboriginal people had to be recognised as Australians and take their place in our society instead of being swept under the carpet, our treatment of them an embarrassment.
The campaigners built on the work of a handful of Aboriginal activists (although I doubt they'd have used the term then) in the 1930s, who petitioned the Government for Aboriginal representation.
One of them, William Cooper, made a heart-felt plea for recognition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary (or the Sesquicentennial, if you want to get pedantic) of the settlement at Port Jackson.
Bear in mind that at the time the authorities (funny old word, that) simply grabbed a group of blackfellas from missions and settlements in rural NSW, put them on trucks, drove them off to Sydney and kept them locked up in a camp before bringing them out in loincloths, waving spears, at the re-enactment of Capt Cook's landing - and his claiming the entire continent in the name of King George - at Botany Bay.
And then they trucked them back again into the obscurity of the Far West - out of sight, out of mind.
Caught in a flickering old black and white newsreel, Cooper nervously but unwaveringly asserts the right of Aboriginal people to be recognised and very generously offers to share their country with us.
In an early assertion of the right of Aboriginal peoples to share the economic wealth of the country with the rest of us, he says '...there's plenty of fish in our rivers for all to share...' or some such.
It is very moving to see it today and particularly moving when you consider all he was asking for was a seat at the table as an equal.
In legal terms the Referendum wasn't such a great change, as the eminent Aboriginal lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt, who is Director of Research and Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, pointed out on radio the other day.
It took five years for the Whitlam Government to actually set up a Department of Aboriginal Affairs, for instance.
But that little change was like a crack in the dam and it led to what might be described as big changes.
The forty years since have seen a roll-call of events, institutions and people: Nugget Coombs, Syd Jackson, Polly Farmer, Lionel Rose, the National Aboriginal Council, Gary Foley, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Noonkanbah, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory and other forms of Land Rights in the various States, the Tent Embassy, the Royal Commissions into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generations, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the Mundines, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Mr Djerrkura, Geoff Clark, the Krakouers, the Native Title Act, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Aiden Ridgeway, Yvonne Margarula, the late Murray Chapman, Kathy Freeman, Rover Thomas, John Mawundjul, John Bulun Bulun, Linda Birney, Marion Scrymgour, Barbara McCarthy, Alison Anderson, my friend Josie Crawshaw and so on.
(Without being facetious, and drawing the strands of this post somewhat together, the characters and events would have made a record cover to rival even Sergeant Pepper.)
And, in a simple illustration, forty years ago it would have been unthinkable for any official public gathering to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of whatever country the event is in; now it's unthinkable not to.
But Indigenous people are still dying early (average age of death some 17 years younger than for non-Indigenous people), are more likely to suffer preventable chronic diseases like diabetes, renal disease, tuberculosis; in remote areas are likely to be living in a house with as many as 30 other people, they are unlikely to finish school and and are highly likely to be unemployed.
That's not to say that the referendum itself was a failure.
It's successive governments that have failed in imagination, courage and determination.
It's governments who have shut out Indigenous people from a seat at the table.
Forty years on from expressing a national sense of purpose and unity on one of the burning questions of the age, we are now living under a government that is blaming Indigenous people for the conditions many of them live in and making them pay for services and infrastructure that people living in cities regard as theirs by right.
In 2007, we still have a long way to go and clearly a Constitutional change hasn't been enough to make serious change happen.
Perhaps it's time, once again, to say Treaty Now!
Thursday, May 24, 2007
What price dignity?
As soon as Aboriginal people reject outright something the Government wants them to do, out come the weapons of mass distraction.
Town camps in Alice Springs - 20-odd small settlements housing about 3000 people - have long been regarded as a blight on the landscape.
A community-based organisation, Tangentyere Council, represents the separate housing associations, who've been doing the job no-one else wants do; for some years neither the Federal nor Territory Governments have shown any inclination to negotiate a better way.
Tangentyere (pron like: Tang - enjeera) has been running municipal and social services,designing, building and maintaining houses, which rapidly become overcrowded.
The camps are dilapidated and there's the things you might expect to see among the dispossessed and desperate.
But they've been under Aboriginal control for decades.
And they've been underfunded, so Tangentyere's work has been in the nature of a holding pattern.
Along comes a new Indigenous Affairs Minister who can see an instant solution.
There's $60 million on the table for repairs, new buildings and infrastructure.
Lots of talk about how this will help create a decent future for families.
We all know it's necessary.
The people of the town camps and their housing associations know exactly how much good it would do and they've been crying out for an injection of just this kind serious money for ages.
They don't actually want to live the way circumstances have left them living for the past few decades.
They want to see change as much as anyone else does.
But, as with everything that this Minister offers, he expects a quick turnaround for a decision.
he expects it to be done his way and no other way.
And he has price tag.
The $60 million comes at the cost of the housing associations relinquishing responsibility for managing the town camps; and they have to consider proposals for sub-leasing the land to make way for, among other things, private ownership.
Instead of managing their housing, they'd be represented on a new advisory Board, but the Territory Government would take over management.
The town campers walked away from the offer last weekend and they walked away from it again yesterday.
Clearly, they felt losing a sense of control over their lives was too high a price.
So there's no deal and the offer is withdrawn.
They should never have been put in that position, of course.
A 'take it or leave it' approach is not going to work.
Deadlines that don't allow for complex negotiations within the Aboriginal polity won't work.
There has to be room for people to walk away after sealing a deal with their dignity intact.
It looks like neither Mal Brough nor the Territory Government can see this.
Clare Martin is still trying to broker some compromise.
But Mal has brought out the weapons of mass distraction.
He fears for the children and warns of dire consequences - perhaps even murders - if the town camps don't get cleaned up.
Over the top?
Just a shade.
Shaming people after the event isn't going to help matters when people know you already have a history of trying to bully people into doing things you want, your way.
And he's got an answer to the age-old question: What price dignity?
It's not for sale.
Town camps in Alice Springs - 20-odd small settlements housing about 3000 people - have long been regarded as a blight on the landscape.
A community-based organisation, Tangentyere Council, represents the separate housing associations, who've been doing the job no-one else wants do; for some years neither the Federal nor Territory Governments have shown any inclination to negotiate a better way.
Tangentyere (pron like: Tang - enjeera) has been running municipal and social services,designing, building and maintaining houses, which rapidly become overcrowded.
The camps are dilapidated and there's the things you might expect to see among the dispossessed and desperate.
But they've been under Aboriginal control for decades.
And they've been underfunded, so Tangentyere's work has been in the nature of a holding pattern.
Along comes a new Indigenous Affairs Minister who can see an instant solution.
There's $60 million on the table for repairs, new buildings and infrastructure.
Lots of talk about how this will help create a decent future for families.
We all know it's necessary.
The people of the town camps and their housing associations know exactly how much good it would do and they've been crying out for an injection of just this kind serious money for ages.
They don't actually want to live the way circumstances have left them living for the past few decades.
They want to see change as much as anyone else does.
But, as with everything that this Minister offers, he expects a quick turnaround for a decision.
he expects it to be done his way and no other way.
And he has price tag.
The $60 million comes at the cost of the housing associations relinquishing responsibility for managing the town camps; and they have to consider proposals for sub-leasing the land to make way for, among other things, private ownership.
Instead of managing their housing, they'd be represented on a new advisory Board, but the Territory Government would take over management.
The town campers walked away from the offer last weekend and they walked away from it again yesterday.
Clearly, they felt losing a sense of control over their lives was too high a price.
So there's no deal and the offer is withdrawn.
They should never have been put in that position, of course.
A 'take it or leave it' approach is not going to work.
Deadlines that don't allow for complex negotiations within the Aboriginal polity won't work.
There has to be room for people to walk away after sealing a deal with their dignity intact.
It looks like neither Mal Brough nor the Territory Government can see this.
Clare Martin is still trying to broker some compromise.
But Mal has brought out the weapons of mass distraction.
He fears for the children and warns of dire consequences - perhaps even murders - if the town camps don't get cleaned up.
Over the top?
Just a shade.
Shaming people after the event isn't going to help matters when people know you already have a history of trying to bully people into doing things you want, your way.
And he's got an answer to the age-old question: What price dignity?
It's not for sale.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
She's only human, thank the Great Spirit
'There are certain threshold issues that you get to and it causes you to confront who you are and what you are and I suppose the McArthur River issue was one that did cause a lot of anxiety within myself. As a Government Minister, what are some of the things that I should have been doing a bit more proactively? I’ve never hidden that fact from my caucus colleagues or others about what that had done on a personal level and it was my time to get away and to think about it. I am fully committed to the Labor party and our Government. There are times when we do, each one of us, it is a hard job. I don’t walk out of Parliament House or anywhere else and go home and wash my skin and the aboriginality disappears, that stays with me 24/7...I'm only human.'
Marion Scrymgour, Member for Arafura, Minister for Environment in the Northern Territory Government, proud Aboriginal woman, great human being, on radio this afternoon (ABC 105.7 FM, 23 May 2007).
Marion has been under fire from all sides since she declined to vote on the Macarthur River mine issue.
Rather than vote against the Bill - which woud have meant breaching the concept of Cabinet solidarity - she absented herself from the Chamber and took two weeks leave to think things through.
She's stood by what she did, in spite of Opposition attempts to try and wedge her.
And in doing so, she's highlighted a continuing dilemma for Aboriginal people who step across into mainstream politics: how do you reconcile being an Aboriginal person with the possibility that you may be called on to take a position that may be against the interests of either a specific group of Aboriginal people or against Aboriginal people generally?
We've created that dilemma with our narrow political systems, of course.
It's in the interests of a political party to have elected Aboriginal members and Labor has milked all it can from the fact that it has had the first ever Aboriginal Minister of the Crown (John Ah Kit) and the greatest number of elected Aboriginal members ever elected to an Australian parliament (six, of whom two are Ministers).
But we don't seem to be able to recognise Aboriginal politicians as first and foremost Aboriginal people.
First in the eyes of the government is Labor Party membership.
It's as if these Aboriginal members are divorced from the bulk of their constituency - which in all but one of these members is a majority Aboriginal constituency
So there's a continuing tension between the demands of the party and party system (conventions of Cabinet solidarity for one; party discipline for another) and people's identity - as there is for anyone of integrity who enters the political arena at this level.
It's especially tense for Aboriginal people, who are held to be role models/spokespeople for their people in whatever field they may succeed.
And that's because we apply our measures of success to the status they have won.
And if they become Members of Parliament, then we think they can't be - as they normally would be - bound by family and cultural ties to question decisions a government makes that may well be against the interests of their people.
We think they simply have to abide by the party platform and/or the fiat of the leader.
Which means in effect that, whenever it comes to the crunch and the interests of Aboriginal people are going to be subsumed by the needs of the majority - which means they are discarded - the Aboriginal members have to compromise their Aboriginality
People think Barbara McCarthy is flaky because she stood up for her relatives in the face of huge pressure from a multinational mining company and the party of government of which she is a member.
And the same goes for Alison Anderson and Karl Hampton, who stood by her and voted against the legislation.
Others think Marion Scrymgour is flaky because she was honest enough to admit to a deep-seated angst about the pressures on her to accept decisions that she knew - deep in her bones - were against the interests of her people.
The pressure we put on Aboriginal politicians who enter mainstream politics is the pressure to collude in their own opppression.
Thanks be to the Great Spirit that some of them - the truly human ones - have the guts to tell us that it's too much too bear, at least some of the time.
Thank you Marion, Barbara, Alison and Karl for the reality check.
If our system of government - particularly one that operates in Aboriginal country and relies on Aboriginal voters for its success - is to be truly inclusive, then we have to develop a new realpolitik that truly recognises and acts on the imperatives of other cultures.
If we can't do it, we don't belong in the 21 st century and we certainly don't deserve to govern.
Marion Scrymgour, Member for Arafura, Minister for Environment in the Northern Territory Government, proud Aboriginal woman, great human being, on radio this afternoon (ABC 105.7 FM, 23 May 2007).
Marion has been under fire from all sides since she declined to vote on the Macarthur River mine issue.
Rather than vote against the Bill - which woud have meant breaching the concept of Cabinet solidarity - she absented herself from the Chamber and took two weeks leave to think things through.
She's stood by what she did, in spite of Opposition attempts to try and wedge her.
And in doing so, she's highlighted a continuing dilemma for Aboriginal people who step across into mainstream politics: how do you reconcile being an Aboriginal person with the possibility that you may be called on to take a position that may be against the interests of either a specific group of Aboriginal people or against Aboriginal people generally?
We've created that dilemma with our narrow political systems, of course.
It's in the interests of a political party to have elected Aboriginal members and Labor has milked all it can from the fact that it has had the first ever Aboriginal Minister of the Crown (John Ah Kit) and the greatest number of elected Aboriginal members ever elected to an Australian parliament (six, of whom two are Ministers).
But we don't seem to be able to recognise Aboriginal politicians as first and foremost Aboriginal people.
First in the eyes of the government is Labor Party membership.
It's as if these Aboriginal members are divorced from the bulk of their constituency - which in all but one of these members is a majority Aboriginal constituency
So there's a continuing tension between the demands of the party and party system (conventions of Cabinet solidarity for one; party discipline for another) and people's identity - as there is for anyone of integrity who enters the political arena at this level.
It's especially tense for Aboriginal people, who are held to be role models/spokespeople for their people in whatever field they may succeed.
And that's because we apply our measures of success to the status they have won.
And if they become Members of Parliament, then we think they can't be - as they normally would be - bound by family and cultural ties to question decisions a government makes that may well be against the interests of their people.
We think they simply have to abide by the party platform and/or the fiat of the leader.
Which means in effect that, whenever it comes to the crunch and the interests of Aboriginal people are going to be subsumed by the needs of the majority - which means they are discarded - the Aboriginal members have to compromise their Aboriginality
People think Barbara McCarthy is flaky because she stood up for her relatives in the face of huge pressure from a multinational mining company and the party of government of which she is a member.
And the same goes for Alison Anderson and Karl Hampton, who stood by her and voted against the legislation.
Others think Marion Scrymgour is flaky because she was honest enough to admit to a deep-seated angst about the pressures on her to accept decisions that she knew - deep in her bones - were against the interests of her people.
The pressure we put on Aboriginal politicians who enter mainstream politics is the pressure to collude in their own opppression.
Thanks be to the Great Spirit that some of them - the truly human ones - have the guts to tell us that it's too much too bear, at least some of the time.
Thank you Marion, Barbara, Alison and Karl for the reality check.
If our system of government - particularly one that operates in Aboriginal country and relies on Aboriginal voters for its success - is to be truly inclusive, then we have to develop a new realpolitik that truly recognises and acts on the imperatives of other cultures.
If we can't do it, we don't belong in the 21 st century and we certainly don't deserve to govern.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Beware John Howard's wedgie
Over recent weeks, the Prime Minister and his Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, have been making a series of increasingly bizarre pronouncements on education.
He's talked about what he calls 'political correctness' among schoolteachers.
And we know Howard has odd views on history and geography.
The teaching of these subjects ain't what it used to be in his day, he's been heard to say.
And he wasn't auditioning for a part in a Canberra version of the 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch either.
More recently he and the lovely Julie have talked about the concept of performance pay for teachers and the automatic expulsion of school bullies.
There's a hidden wedge in every one, of course.
Best thing is to ignore the lot.
The real issue is senior politicians making deliberately ill-informed statements that either incite, or at least pander to, prejudice against public education.
And they do that at their peril.
Parents are voters, too.
He's talked about what he calls 'political correctness' among schoolteachers.
And we know Howard has odd views on history and geography.
The teaching of these subjects ain't what it used to be in his day, he's been heard to say.
And he wasn't auditioning for a part in a Canberra version of the 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch either.
More recently he and the lovely Julie have talked about the concept of performance pay for teachers and the automatic expulsion of school bullies.
There's a hidden wedge in every one, of course.
Best thing is to ignore the lot.
The real issue is senior politicians making deliberately ill-informed statements that either incite, or at least pander to, prejudice against public education.
And they do that at their peril.
Parents are voters, too.
Nature, cultures and snouts in the trough
Walking along the Esplanade early yesterday morning, I heard a barking owl in the bush behind Lameroo cliffs.
And then I saw it in the gloom, perched on a branch and repeating its cry: woof woof.
I'm not kidding.
That's why they're called barking owls.
Underneath the trees, orange-footed scrub fowl witter about like avian extras in a Monty Python movie.
This is little more than 100m from a large international hotel, a cocooned and air-conditioned haven that protects the moderately well-off visitor from the world around them; from the world they travelled thousands of kilometres to experience.
It may well be a sign that nature is holding its own in our city.
But for how long?
Cranes are on the skyline, big holes are in the ground and the real estate agents are grinning voraciously.
Well might they.
They and their mates in the land development world, among them the unbelievably wealthy Sultan of Brunei, have transformed Darwin with a plethora of apartment buildings.
Now, the population ain't growing and I'm not sure who's buying them, or more importantly living in them, but there's another new building every time you turn around, it seems.
So there has to be a heap of money in it.
For the few.
Last month the Government sponsored a planning forum to 'develop a vision for Darwin'.
Nice idea.
But it's about 20 years too late.
What Darwin used to be is gone.
It's been ripped up and knocked flat, to be replaced by a collection of buildings of neither wit nor style and without a shred of environmental sensibility.
In other words they're not just ugly; they don't take advantage of the balmy breezes above Darwin Harbour and their reliance on airconditioning makes them energy-expensive.
So I think the exercise is called 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.
The planning forum was attended by invited stakeholders - the industry and government - only.
It seems that the people - the ones who work, live or shop in the city, even (or especially) the people who sleep in the parks - don't really count.
True, there was a public forum late in the day.
The people of Darwin were allowed to ask four questions.
Meanwhile the people whose snouts have always been in the trough have got carte blanche to keep them there.
And get rich in the process.
I'm not just worried about this on aesthetic grounds.
The people who get invited to planning forums of this nature will tell you that the kind of development we will continue to experience is necessary to give Darwin a proper image to cater for visitors, people from overseas and interstate, and investors.
In other words you take a place that has its own unique attraction and turn it into an andoyne replica of everywhere else in the world.
Meretricious kitsch (probably a tautology) replaces the real and the lived-in.
Welcome to the new Singapore.
It seems to me that it also involves a more or less deliberate attempt to obliterate history, culture and a sense of place.
There is no place for these in the airbrushed, sanitised vision of who we are and where we live.
There is no place for tangible reminders of Darwin's history, like blackfellas freely wandering the streets as if they owned the place.
Well, some of them - Larrakia people - do, actually.
But the 'antisocial behaviour' of some - living their lives in public places - makes them all unwelcome.
There is still an Aboriginal town, a black skin, underpinning the white town that tourists and transient whitefella residents think is the real Darwin.
Aboriginal people - some from Larrakia families, others from all parts of the Territory and many of them from the Stolen Generations - don't just live and work here.
They are a network that supports the greater part of the city's sporting, social and cultural life
If the transient whitefellas can't see this and don't know about it, however, it doesn't exist.
For the time being, the black town is still there.
But, like the barking owl and the scrub fowl, I wonder for how much longer.
It's an inconvenient intrusion on the seamless vision of a brave new world of pastel-coloured buildings and and clean, happy punters with their soy lattes and dhukka on pide.
Where I live in the Northern Suburbs, I walk my dogs in the early dawn along a beach that is washed by the Timor Sea.
Within coo-ee of the University, the hospital and Darwin's only big shopping mall, Aboriginal people are camped on the beach under the casuarina trees.
Fires are smouldering.
The sand is littered with shellfish - clams and long bums.
As it has been for thousands of years.
Here at least there will be none of the development that has poxed the city.
The coastal reserve protects mangrove swamp, paperbarks, remnant monsoon vine forest and tropical woodland, replete with pandanus - all behind the dunes - as it shelters the people who use it is a temporary home..
If you're lucky, some mornings you'll see white-breasted sea eagles and osprey or curlews, whimbrels and dotterels.
In the monsoon forest you might catch a glimpse of the azure flash that is a rainbow pitta's wing panel.
Or on the boardwalk through the mangroves you'll catch the fleeting edge of a threat from a fiddler crab's waving claw as it disappears down its hole in the mud.
I hope it will still be there when my children are old.
And it should be, as long as the smart money doesn't find it.
And then I saw it in the gloom, perched on a branch and repeating its cry: woof woof.
I'm not kidding.
That's why they're called barking owls.
Underneath the trees, orange-footed scrub fowl witter about like avian extras in a Monty Python movie.
This is little more than 100m from a large international hotel, a cocooned and air-conditioned haven that protects the moderately well-off visitor from the world around them; from the world they travelled thousands of kilometres to experience.
It may well be a sign that nature is holding its own in our city.
But for how long?
Cranes are on the skyline, big holes are in the ground and the real estate agents are grinning voraciously.
Well might they.
They and their mates in the land development world, among them the unbelievably wealthy Sultan of Brunei, have transformed Darwin with a plethora of apartment buildings.
Now, the population ain't growing and I'm not sure who's buying them, or more importantly living in them, but there's another new building every time you turn around, it seems.
So there has to be a heap of money in it.
For the few.
Last month the Government sponsored a planning forum to 'develop a vision for Darwin'.
Nice idea.
But it's about 20 years too late.
What Darwin used to be is gone.
It's been ripped up and knocked flat, to be replaced by a collection of buildings of neither wit nor style and without a shred of environmental sensibility.
In other words they're not just ugly; they don't take advantage of the balmy breezes above Darwin Harbour and their reliance on airconditioning makes them energy-expensive.
So I think the exercise is called 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.
The planning forum was attended by invited stakeholders - the industry and government - only.
It seems that the people - the ones who work, live or shop in the city, even (or especially) the people who sleep in the parks - don't really count.
True, there was a public forum late in the day.
The people of Darwin were allowed to ask four questions.
Meanwhile the people whose snouts have always been in the trough have got carte blanche to keep them there.
And get rich in the process.
I'm not just worried about this on aesthetic grounds.
The people who get invited to planning forums of this nature will tell you that the kind of development we will continue to experience is necessary to give Darwin a proper image to cater for visitors, people from overseas and interstate, and investors.
In other words you take a place that has its own unique attraction and turn it into an andoyne replica of everywhere else in the world.
Meretricious kitsch (probably a tautology) replaces the real and the lived-in.
Welcome to the new Singapore.
It seems to me that it also involves a more or less deliberate attempt to obliterate history, culture and a sense of place.
There is no place for these in the airbrushed, sanitised vision of who we are and where we live.
There is no place for tangible reminders of Darwin's history, like blackfellas freely wandering the streets as if they owned the place.
Well, some of them - Larrakia people - do, actually.
But the 'antisocial behaviour' of some - living their lives in public places - makes them all unwelcome.
There is still an Aboriginal town, a black skin, underpinning the white town that tourists and transient whitefella residents think is the real Darwin.
Aboriginal people - some from Larrakia families, others from all parts of the Territory and many of them from the Stolen Generations - don't just live and work here.
They are a network that supports the greater part of the city's sporting, social and cultural life
If the transient whitefellas can't see this and don't know about it, however, it doesn't exist.
For the time being, the black town is still there.
But, like the barking owl and the scrub fowl, I wonder for how much longer.
It's an inconvenient intrusion on the seamless vision of a brave new world of pastel-coloured buildings and and clean, happy punters with their soy lattes and dhukka on pide.
Where I live in the Northern Suburbs, I walk my dogs in the early dawn along a beach that is washed by the Timor Sea.
Within coo-ee of the University, the hospital and Darwin's only big shopping mall, Aboriginal people are camped on the beach under the casuarina trees.
Fires are smouldering.
The sand is littered with shellfish - clams and long bums.
As it has been for thousands of years.
Here at least there will be none of the development that has poxed the city.
The coastal reserve protects mangrove swamp, paperbarks, remnant monsoon vine forest and tropical woodland, replete with pandanus - all behind the dunes - as it shelters the people who use it is a temporary home..
If you're lucky, some mornings you'll see white-breasted sea eagles and osprey or curlews, whimbrels and dotterels.
In the monsoon forest you might catch a glimpse of the azure flash that is a rainbow pitta's wing panel.
Or on the boardwalk through the mangroves you'll catch the fleeting edge of a threat from a fiddler crab's waving claw as it disappears down its hole in the mud.
I hope it will still be there when my children are old.
And it should be, as long as the smart money doesn't find it.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Some things just aren't for sale
Our Federal Government is upping the ante in its push to bring Aboriginal people the dubious benefits of the free market.
It's increasing its efforts to privatise their land.
A senior bureaucrat in the Northern Territory Government gave them the key to making it work.
Starting with the land on which there are townships - known with some irony as 'communities' - he proposed it be leased in its entirety to a Government-run entity for 99 years.
This entity would in turn arrange for sub-leases to outsiders for business and to Aboriginal people from within the town.
The argument goes that offering up a long-term lease as a security would make it easier for outside business to want to invest their capital and it would enable Aboriginal people to start up businesses or use the lease as security for getting the finance to buy their own homes.
For those of you who don't live in Australia, home ownership is the Great Australian Dream, the national sacred cow and the sine qua non of suburban existence.
And what relevance does it have to Aboriginal people, I hear you ask?
Precious little.
Except that Government wants it to be relevant to them so they can be just like all other Australians - whatever that might look like.
So they're peddling this dubious bill of goods wherever and whenever they can
The Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister held a meeting yesterday at Nguiu, on Bathurst Island, to dicker with traditional owners of the town land over how they might join in this scheme.
The clincher is the offer of serious bucks from the Commonwealth - $5 million down now and lots more to come.
It was a closed meeting of Tiwi Land Council members and Mr Brough claimed they had been identified as Traditional Owners of the land in question with anthropological certainty .
And these, the bombastic little twerp told reporters, were the only people he was going to talk to.
Once again he was talking through his arse.
The Tiwi Land Council, the Traditional Owners' representative body, never did the anthropological groundwork done by the two mainland Land Councils, as required under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to underpin land claims and negotiations for land use proposals.
So Mr Brough's statement gives us some grounds for inferring that he doesn't understand either the Act - the basis of the Aboriginal freehold title the Islands are held under - or the complex nature of traditional ownership.
Traditional ownership is rarely expressed as the kind of single entity ownership - person or body corporate - that we understand in our culture.
It's usually hedged around by checks and balances, like certain people from another clan (in some areas the clan into which the landowning clan marries) taking the role of 'managers', in the sense that they have the cultural right to vet and then approve or veto anything to do the land in question.
So the managers need to in on the consult too.
As do, according to the Act, any people living in the area who might be affected by big changes to the landholding regime.
The egregiously aggressive Minister brushed this aside, but did hold an open meeting later in the day so Aboriginal residents could listen to what was being offered and have their say.
The trouble is, it's difficult to see precisely what direction this whole thing is going.
If an outside entity takes control of traditional land for 99 years, it weakens Aboriginal control.
If it assumes the power to offer, vary or transfer subleases on that land without any reference to the Traditional Owners, it further weakens Aboriginal control.
If a business owner and staff are exempted from the usual requirements to apply for a permit to be on Aboriginal land - simply because the power over the land has been taken over by an entity - than that weakens Aboriginal control too.
An important part of land ownership in Aboriginal cultures is the landowner's ability to make decisions about it, to enforce those decisions according to Aboriginal Law and to pass on to his or her children the stories about the land that reinforce the clan's identity and its right to claim ownership of the land and the stories and ceremonies associated with that land.
A 99 year lease will irrevocably damage a traditional landowning family's hold on a piece of land because it will erode the intergenerational transfer of knowledge based on that land.
This is not museum stuff we're talking about: it's the here and now and it's right there in people's lives.
Just because we can't always see it or describe it in terms that make sense to us, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
And it doesn't mean that $5 million sweeteners and other such ephemera will make people walk away from it happily.
This might come as a shock to the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, but some things just aren't for sale.
And if we insist on trying to buy them, which means single-handedly determining the nature and pace of change to suit our needs alone and not the needs of Aboriginal people, then we do untold damage.
And it's damage piled on top of the damage that's already there: disease, premature death, dysfunction.
All in the name of the free market.
It's increasing its efforts to privatise their land.
A senior bureaucrat in the Northern Territory Government gave them the key to making it work.
Starting with the land on which there are townships - known with some irony as 'communities' - he proposed it be leased in its entirety to a Government-run entity for 99 years.
This entity would in turn arrange for sub-leases to outsiders for business and to Aboriginal people from within the town.
The argument goes that offering up a long-term lease as a security would make it easier for outside business to want to invest their capital and it would enable Aboriginal people to start up businesses or use the lease as security for getting the finance to buy their own homes.
For those of you who don't live in Australia, home ownership is the Great Australian Dream, the national sacred cow and the sine qua non of suburban existence.
And what relevance does it have to Aboriginal people, I hear you ask?
Precious little.
Except that Government wants it to be relevant to them so they can be just like all other Australians - whatever that might look like.
So they're peddling this dubious bill of goods wherever and whenever they can
The Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister held a meeting yesterday at Nguiu, on Bathurst Island, to dicker with traditional owners of the town land over how they might join in this scheme.
The clincher is the offer of serious bucks from the Commonwealth - $5 million down now and lots more to come.
It was a closed meeting of Tiwi Land Council members and Mr Brough claimed they had been identified as Traditional Owners of the land in question with anthropological certainty .
And these, the bombastic little twerp told reporters, were the only people he was going to talk to.
Once again he was talking through his arse.
The Tiwi Land Council, the Traditional Owners' representative body, never did the anthropological groundwork done by the two mainland Land Councils, as required under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to underpin land claims and negotiations for land use proposals.
So Mr Brough's statement gives us some grounds for inferring that he doesn't understand either the Act - the basis of the Aboriginal freehold title the Islands are held under - or the complex nature of traditional ownership.
Traditional ownership is rarely expressed as the kind of single entity ownership - person or body corporate - that we understand in our culture.
It's usually hedged around by checks and balances, like certain people from another clan (in some areas the clan into which the landowning clan marries) taking the role of 'managers', in the sense that they have the cultural right to vet and then approve or veto anything to do the land in question.
So the managers need to in on the consult too.
As do, according to the Act, any people living in the area who might be affected by big changes to the landholding regime.
The egregiously aggressive Minister brushed this aside, but did hold an open meeting later in the day so Aboriginal residents could listen to what was being offered and have their say.
The trouble is, it's difficult to see precisely what direction this whole thing is going.
But it's important to understand a couple of things here.
Bathurst Island is one of two main islands - the other is Melville and both are named after colonial aristos - that are the home of a culturally and linguistically homogenous group, the Tiwi.
It's a short (20-30 minutes) plane ride from Darwin and its international airport, has hundreds of kilometres of unspoilt beach and some of the best fishing to be found in a region that is known as an angler's paradise.
Hoteliers, resort developers and tourism operators have been eyeing it off for the past couple of decades at least.
Get the picture?
Now it seems clear to me that two things are going on: the land is being privatised for the benefit of business; and the process involves the removal of cultural constraints to the acts of privatisation.
If an outside entity takes control of traditional land for 99 years, it weakens Aboriginal control.
If it assumes the power to offer, vary or transfer subleases on that land without any reference to the Traditional Owners, it further weakens Aboriginal control.
If a business owner and staff are exempted from the usual requirements to apply for a permit to be on Aboriginal land - simply because the power over the land has been taken over by an entity - than that weakens Aboriginal control too.
An important part of land ownership in Aboriginal cultures is the landowner's ability to make decisions about it, to enforce those decisions according to Aboriginal Law and to pass on to his or her children the stories about the land that reinforce the clan's identity and its right to claim ownership of the land and the stories and ceremonies associated with that land.
A 99 year lease will irrevocably damage a traditional landowning family's hold on a piece of land because it will erode the intergenerational transfer of knowledge based on that land.
This is not museum stuff we're talking about: it's the here and now and it's right there in people's lives.
Just because we can't always see it or describe it in terms that make sense to us, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
And it doesn't mean that $5 million sweeteners and other such ephemera will make people walk away from it happily.
This might come as a shock to the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, but some things just aren't for sale.
And if we insist on trying to buy them, which means single-handedly determining the nature and pace of change to suit our needs alone and not the needs of Aboriginal people, then we do untold damage.
And it's damage piled on top of the damage that's already there: disease, premature death, dysfunction.
All in the name of the free market.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
I kept my pants on
I didn't have to take my pants off - the spin doctors came good as I predicted (see post below).
But in another piece of bastardy I almost didn't notice, the government inserted a clause into the legislation making it impossible for Aboriginal people - and anyone else for that matter - to challenge this mine.
And they buried Barbara's brother on the weekend.
Now for a rambling tale about a movie, the point of which is not entirely unrelated.
'Ten Canoes' is an unusual film.
The actors are all Yolngu, the dilaogue is entirely in their language (Ganalbingu), it's shot entirely on location in the Arafura Swamp and it's a story within a story within a story about ancestral ways.
Rolf de Heer, the Dutch-Australian filmmaker (Bad Boy Bubby, Dingo, The Tracker etc etc) went out to Ramingining and took the time to develop the story, find the cast and shoot the movie.
The storyline owes its beginnings to a wetplate black and white photo taken in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thomson.
Thomson traveled through Arnhem Land with his dogs and his camera and took a marvellous photographic record of the rich lives of the Yolngu.
This particular pic shows ten goose hunters, standing in their canoes, at a point in the Arafura Swamp and its ia s starting point for the story in the film.
'Ten Canoes' has been very successful in critical and commercial terms.
In The Weekend Australian this weekend, de Heer writes about trying to tell one of his co-producers, Ramingining man Peter Djigirr, about an award they'd just won.
'Djigirr! You've won an award!.
'Right...what's that thing?'
'Like a prize.'
'A prize?'
'You know, recognition for doing good with the film.'
'Oh yeah...a prize.' Djigirr pauses. 'Any money?'
'Er, not sure about this one. Probably a piece of plastic.'
A long pause. 'Plastic?'
'Yeah, like a statue or something.'
'Ahh...what do I do with it?'
'Take it home, put it on a shelf.'
There's another pause, as Djigirr tries to digest the lunacy of everything I'm saying.
'I haven't got a shelf.'
This short piece of text, describing a conversation between two men who have managed the complex task of making a movie across a great cultural divide and who obviously have great affecton and respect for each other, is full of cultural dissonances.
Try as hard as he can to do otherwise, de Heer started the conversation with a series of assumptions about the extent of Djigirr understandingss about things that he himself takes for granted.
But understanding, even of the small things that pepper a conversation like the one above, is contingent on Djigirr having the sort of cultural capital that he obviously doesn't have.
So the talk is full of misunderstandings, of question and answers that only half clear up what is going on.
And note, de Heer is intellectually and emotionally honest enough to admit that what he is trying to do is 'lunacy' as he realises he's enmired himself in a swamp of his own making.
This kind of dissonance is not at all unusual for people who work in Aboriginal domains.
I've dropped myself in it repeatedly, as have most of the people I know.
But imagine how much greater the dissonance when you can't even hear what Aboriginal people are saying about their feelings for a river, say, that your sense of what's right - socially, culturally, economically and environmentally - says can and should be dammed, drained and diverted, all for what you determine to be the common good.
As de Heer might remark, how can we expect Aboriginal peope to grasp the lunacy of it all?
But in another piece of bastardy I almost didn't notice, the government inserted a clause into the legislation making it impossible for Aboriginal people - and anyone else for that matter - to challenge this mine.
And they buried Barbara's brother on the weekend.
Now for a rambling tale about a movie, the point of which is not entirely unrelated.
'Ten Canoes' is an unusual film.
The actors are all Yolngu, the dilaogue is entirely in their language (Ganalbingu), it's shot entirely on location in the Arafura Swamp and it's a story within a story within a story about ancestral ways.
Rolf de Heer, the Dutch-Australian filmmaker (Bad Boy Bubby, Dingo, The Tracker etc etc) went out to Ramingining and took the time to develop the story, find the cast and shoot the movie.
The storyline owes its beginnings to a wetplate black and white photo taken in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thomson.
Thomson traveled through Arnhem Land with his dogs and his camera and took a marvellous photographic record of the rich lives of the Yolngu.
This particular pic shows ten goose hunters, standing in their canoes, at a point in the Arafura Swamp and its ia s starting point for the story in the film.
'Ten Canoes' has been very successful in critical and commercial terms.
In The Weekend Australian this weekend, de Heer writes about trying to tell one of his co-producers, Ramingining man Peter Djigirr, about an award they'd just won.
'Djigirr! You've won an award!.
'Right...what's that thing?'
'Like a prize.'
'A prize?'
'You know, recognition for doing good with the film.'
'Oh yeah...a prize.' Djigirr pauses. 'Any money?'
'Er, not sure about this one. Probably a piece of plastic.'
A long pause. 'Plastic?'
'Yeah, like a statue or something.'
'Ahh...what do I do with it?'
'Take it home, put it on a shelf.'
There's another pause, as Djigirr tries to digest the lunacy of everything I'm saying.
'I haven't got a shelf.'
This short piece of text, describing a conversation between two men who have managed the complex task of making a movie across a great cultural divide and who obviously have great affecton and respect for each other, is full of cultural dissonances.
Try as hard as he can to do otherwise, de Heer started the conversation with a series of assumptions about the extent of Djigirr understandingss about things that he himself takes for granted.
But understanding, even of the small things that pepper a conversation like the one above, is contingent on Djigirr having the sort of cultural capital that he obviously doesn't have.
So the talk is full of misunderstandings, of question and answers that only half clear up what is going on.
And note, de Heer is intellectually and emotionally honest enough to admit that what he is trying to do is 'lunacy' as he realises he's enmired himself in a swamp of his own making.
This kind of dissonance is not at all unusual for people who work in Aboriginal domains.
I've dropped myself in it repeatedly, as have most of the people I know.
But imagine how much greater the dissonance when you can't even hear what Aboriginal people are saying about their feelings for a river, say, that your sense of what's right - socially, culturally, economically and environmentally - says can and should be dammed, drained and diverted, all for what you determine to be the common good.
As de Heer might remark, how can we expect Aboriginal peope to grasp the lunacy of it all?
Friday, May 04, 2007
La Passionara rides again
Well, they did it.
Three of the Aboriginal Members of the Assembly crossed the floor and voted against the Macarthur River Mine legislation.
Barbara McCarthy, in a passionate speech, told the House that it was shameful the legislation was rushed through while the people of Borroloola were still in 'Sorry Business' (extensive mortuary rites following a death, still widely practised by Aboriginal people despite the fact that the deaths come thick and fast these days).
Of course the Yanyuwa and Mara people are the last on Clare Martin's list of people to listen to.
Xstrata, yes.
The mining lobby, yes.
One's own parliamentary colleagues, as long as they don't say anything she doesn't want to hear.
But blackfellas?
Forget it.
The Martin Government prides itself on the fact that it has six Aboriginal members out of a team of 19.
No other Parliament has ever been able to make the same claim and some have no Aboriginal members at all.
But it's not much good when you expect Aboriginal people to help you legitimise actions that are against the interests of particular groups of Aboriginal people, which means you're asking them to collude in their own oppression.
These three have had enough of that, plainly.
But watch out for the spin doctors.
They'll present it that crossing the floor didn't mean they disagreed with the legislation.
It meant they were acting oout of a sense of shame at the offence towards the dead person and those in mourning - of whom Barbara McCarthy is one.
And I'll bare my bum in Smith St if it ain't so.
In other Aboriginal news to hand this hour (isn't that an appalling expression?), Federal Inidgenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough was out bush yesterday signing up the first happy punters to his private home ownership scheme.
The idea is that you get Aboriginal people to embrace privatisation and the joys of capitalism by taking them out of public housing and into the Great Australian Dream.
And how do you do it?
You spend huge - and unspecified - amounts of taxpayers' money building houses out in the bush (this one's 300-odd km from Darwin).
Then you tell the punters they have to pay the rent faithfully for two years.
OK, no drama.
Keep the house and yard clean and tidy.
Hm.
And send their kids to school (which is 40km away in this case) every day.
I kid you not.
If you were trying to get white public housing tenants to buy their own homes, you might insist on the first of these conditions as a prerequisite.
But any reasonable person might find the other conditions grossly intrusive and perhaps a contravention of human rights.
But because these tenants are black and the Government is just trying to help them see the light, it's OK?
Oy vey! That's Australia under John Howard for you.
Three of the Aboriginal Members of the Assembly crossed the floor and voted against the Macarthur River Mine legislation.
Barbara McCarthy, in a passionate speech, told the House that it was shameful the legislation was rushed through while the people of Borroloola were still in 'Sorry Business' (extensive mortuary rites following a death, still widely practised by Aboriginal people despite the fact that the deaths come thick and fast these days).
Of course the Yanyuwa and Mara people are the last on Clare Martin's list of people to listen to.
Xstrata, yes.
The mining lobby, yes.
One's own parliamentary colleagues, as long as they don't say anything she doesn't want to hear.
But blackfellas?
Forget it.
The Martin Government prides itself on the fact that it has six Aboriginal members out of a team of 19.
No other Parliament has ever been able to make the same claim and some have no Aboriginal members at all.
But it's not much good when you expect Aboriginal people to help you legitimise actions that are against the interests of particular groups of Aboriginal people, which means you're asking them to collude in their own oppression.
These three have had enough of that, plainly.
But watch out for the spin doctors.
They'll present it that crossing the floor didn't mean they disagreed with the legislation.
It meant they were acting oout of a sense of shame at the offence towards the dead person and those in mourning - of whom Barbara McCarthy is one.
And I'll bare my bum in Smith St if it ain't so.
In other Aboriginal news to hand this hour (isn't that an appalling expression?), Federal Inidgenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough was out bush yesterday signing up the first happy punters to his private home ownership scheme.
The idea is that you get Aboriginal people to embrace privatisation and the joys of capitalism by taking them out of public housing and into the Great Australian Dream.
And how do you do it?
You spend huge - and unspecified - amounts of taxpayers' money building houses out in the bush (this one's 300-odd km from Darwin).
Then you tell the punters they have to pay the rent faithfully for two years.
OK, no drama.
Keep the house and yard clean and tidy.
Hm.
And send their kids to school (which is 40km away in this case) every day.
I kid you not.
If you were trying to get white public housing tenants to buy their own homes, you might insist on the first of these conditions as a prerequisite.
But any reasonable person might find the other conditions grossly intrusive and perhaps a contravention of human rights.
But because these tenants are black and the Government is just trying to help them see the light, it's OK?
Oy vey! That's Australia under John Howard for you.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
More on 'First there is a river'
The Macarthur River mine deal looked set in concrete.
And then the wheels came off and it looked for while there as if the Government had stuffed up big time.
In the Government's hurry to bend over for Xstrata's plans to divert the river and expand to an open-cut operation, the Mines Minister - a former sports administrator and living embodiment of the Peter Principle - overstepped the mark.
He apparently didn't follow due process and approved the mine plan under a deficient part of the Mining Act.
Work on the mine stopped when the Supreme Court found they'd stuffed up.
Not to be deterred, our Chief Minister - the redoubtable Clare Martin - stepped in to rescue boofhead and simply said she would change the legislation overnight to regularise the process retrospectively.
So mining will continue.
Swift and decisive action to save the Territory economy?
Maybe.
But it's more like being bluffed into submission by the company threatening to pack up their shovels and tents and piss off somewhere else.
And the benefit to our economy is dubious.
The company gets $100 million year in various subsidies.
That's taxpayers' dollars.
It pays no royalties.
Most of its fly-in-fly-out workforce lives anywhere in Australia but the Territory.
And the traditional owners of the country who still vehemently oppose the deal and who were behind the Supreme Court challenge?
'I'm sure they'll understand,' says our Clare.
Sure.
One of the TOs who led the opposition to the mine died recently.
He was 42.
Go figure.
And what about the views of the Aboriginal members of the Assembly?
Will they collude with this desperation play?
I don't think they'll be taking this one lying down.
Not this time.
And not ever again.
Government for all Territorians?
I hope so.
At last.
watch this space.
And then the wheels came off and it looked for while there as if the Government had stuffed up big time.
In the Government's hurry to bend over for Xstrata's plans to divert the river and expand to an open-cut operation, the Mines Minister - a former sports administrator and living embodiment of the Peter Principle - overstepped the mark.
He apparently didn't follow due process and approved the mine plan under a deficient part of the Mining Act.
Work on the mine stopped when the Supreme Court found they'd stuffed up.
Not to be deterred, our Chief Minister - the redoubtable Clare Martin - stepped in to rescue boofhead and simply said she would change the legislation overnight to regularise the process retrospectively.
So mining will continue.
Swift and decisive action to save the Territory economy?
Maybe.
But it's more like being bluffed into submission by the company threatening to pack up their shovels and tents and piss off somewhere else.
And the benefit to our economy is dubious.
The company gets $100 million year in various subsidies.
That's taxpayers' dollars.
It pays no royalties.
Most of its fly-in-fly-out workforce lives anywhere in Australia but the Territory.
And the traditional owners of the country who still vehemently oppose the deal and who were behind the Supreme Court challenge?
'I'm sure they'll understand,' says our Clare.
Sure.
One of the TOs who led the opposition to the mine died recently.
He was 42.
Go figure.
And what about the views of the Aboriginal members of the Assembly?
Will they collude with this desperation play?
I don't think they'll be taking this one lying down.
Not this time.
And not ever again.
Government for all Territorians?
I hope so.
At last.
watch this space.
Monday, April 23, 2007
All together now...
I was in Alice Springs a couple of weeks or so and witnessed episodes of what they're coyly referring to as 'anti-social behaviour'.
It was generally harmless - the odd drunk humbugging for money.
But I did watch a couple of kids (black and white;14 y.o?) wind themselves up to have a fight with a German tourist.
Lots of loud and bad language.
Windmilling arms.
Ostentatious taking off of shirts.
Preparing for a fight.
It looked ugly, but didn't go much further than that.
A few days before there'd been a 'riot'.
Self-appointed vigiliantes took to the streets, but overweight men with red faces don't scare pumped-up kids who can run a lot faster.
Not much.
A few days later there were a couple of fatal stabbings.
And then the Chief Minister was in town for a regional sittingCabinet meeting of our town council sized and grandiosely -named 'Parliament'.
She copped a fair amount of abuse from people who were 'scared to go out', 'sick and tired of violence' and 'waiting for something to be done'.
The something?
More police.
Less tolerance.
Laura Norder.
But they're not yet prepared to see Alice Springs become a dry town (no public drinking whatsoever).
That's bad for business.
It's about what you'd expect, really.
No-one's prepared to look at the whys and wherefores, though.
Like, why is it happening?
I got a clue sitting in restaurant one night.
There was party of white people across the room.
Lots of wine and loud voices.
One stood out: 'The thing you have to realise about Alice Springs is that nobody comes from here; we're all from somewhere else'.
It's bullshit, of course.
It's not even true of white people: several families have been around the Centre for a few generations now; and I have friends of middle age who were born there and whose parents were born there.
But it says a lot about how some - many - whites view blacks.
They're interlopers who don't belong in a whitefella tourist-fuelled economic wet dream that only exists in this arid, but long-peopled landscape, because their culture lives and tourists want to experience it before it too dies.
Forget about the Mparntwe people, the custodians of Yeperenye, the Caterpillar Dreaming.
Forget about the fact that you're as likely to hear Arrernte on the radio as you are English.
To the nouveau Alice Springs resident, they're invisible.
Marginalised.
And what is the last desperate resort of marginalised people?
All together now....
It was generally harmless - the odd drunk humbugging for money.
But I did watch a couple of kids (black and white;14 y.o?) wind themselves up to have a fight with a German tourist.
Lots of loud and bad language.
Windmilling arms.
Ostentatious taking off of shirts.
Preparing for a fight.
It looked ugly, but didn't go much further than that.
A few days before there'd been a 'riot'.
Self-appointed vigiliantes took to the streets, but overweight men with red faces don't scare pumped-up kids who can run a lot faster.
Not much.
A few days later there were a couple of fatal stabbings.
And then the Chief Minister was in town for a regional sittingCabinet meeting of our town council sized and grandiosely -named 'Parliament'.
She copped a fair amount of abuse from people who were 'scared to go out', 'sick and tired of violence' and 'waiting for something to be done'.
The something?
More police.
Less tolerance.
Laura Norder.
But they're not yet prepared to see Alice Springs become a dry town (no public drinking whatsoever).
That's bad for business.
It's about what you'd expect, really.
No-one's prepared to look at the whys and wherefores, though.
Like, why is it happening?
I got a clue sitting in restaurant one night.
There was party of white people across the room.
Lots of wine and loud voices.
One stood out: 'The thing you have to realise about Alice Springs is that nobody comes from here; we're all from somewhere else'.
It's bullshit, of course.
It's not even true of white people: several families have been around the Centre for a few generations now; and I have friends of middle age who were born there and whose parents were born there.
But it says a lot about how some - many - whites view blacks.
They're interlopers who don't belong in a whitefella tourist-fuelled economic wet dream that only exists in this arid, but long-peopled landscape, because their culture lives and tourists want to experience it before it too dies.
Forget about the Mparntwe people, the custodians of Yeperenye, the Caterpillar Dreaming.
Forget about the fact that you're as likely to hear Arrernte on the radio as you are English.
To the nouveau Alice Springs resident, they're invisible.
Marginalised.
And what is the last desperate resort of marginalised people?
All together now....
Monday, April 16, 2007
Travelling North: On the Road
The term 'desert' doesn't do justice to the amazing variety of micro-environments that pattern the arid inland of Australia.
Think about the complexity in so-called 'dot' painting, then look at Google Earth's view of the Centre from the sky.
I travelled both south and north in a round trip of more than 8000km last month.
We drove to Melbourne for my eldest son's wedding and then I drove back solo, accompanied only by Warren Zevon, The Chieftains, Lyle Lovett, JS Bach, WA Mozart, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Alison Krauss and Guy Clark.
This is one of the amazing views from the road - the top end of a large complex of salt lakes in the country to the south-west of Woomera.
Day 1 I drove from just out of Melbourne to Burra, in mid-north south Aust, via Mildura, Renmark and Morgan.
Day 2 was Burra to Coober Pedy via Horrocks Gap into Port Augusta.
Day 3 Coober Pedy to Alice Springs.
Day 4 Alice Springs to the Highway Inn.
And Day 5 Highway Inn to Darwin.
See more pics on our web album.
Vale Kurt Vonnegut
Dry insights, mordant wit and spare prose: his writing shone in my youth, although I felt that in his later years, which were marked by depression, he tended to lapse into self-parody.
Now old Kurt has been swallowed up by the great chronosynclastic infundibulum in the sky.
So it goes.
Poot-tee-wheet
Now old Kurt has been swallowed up by the great chronosynclastic infundibulum in the sky.
So it goes.
Poot-tee-wheet
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
It might be neat and tidy, but is it democratic?
Back in the bad old days of serious machine politics in the various state Labor parties, the numbers men exhorted the faithful to 'vote early and vote often'.
In some wards, the dead rose from their graves to vote repeatedly at different polling booths.
That was then.
We've since got an independent statutory body - the Australian Electoral Commission - which oversees elections at every level.
Our elections - apart from the extremely rare occurrence of missing ballot boxes in some organisational elections - are usually straight.
We have a formal electoral roll and what used to be a pretty straightforward enrolment process with a reasonable period for enrolment after elections are called.
But that's changing as of 16 April this year.
For the rest of this week, you can enrol by giving name, address, citizenship status and birthdate and getting someone who is already on the roll to witness your signature.
Next week, you'll have to provide full ID and choose from a small menu of authorised people to both view your ID and witness your enrolment application.
If you're in prison, you now lose the right to vote.
Forget about internationally-recognised civil and political rights.
Cons will not be able to exercise them
And if they called an election tomorrow, you'd have until 8pm the same day to register if you'd forgotten to do it beforehand.
In a literate society, this should not be a problem.
But what about in remote areas, where many Aboriginal people - particularly the young - are barely literate?
Many simply do not carry their own documentation, leaving banks, stores and health clinics to look after ATM cards, Medicare cards and the like.
In order to enrol, they'd have to round up their ID, then find one of the authorised people and then fill out the form - or get someone to do it for them.
If they live on an outstation, they might not hear about an election being called.
So if they haven't enrolled, the chances of rounding up the ID, getting an authorised person to witness the form and then faxing it off to the Electoral Commission in time are pretty slim.
There's a big enrolment drive on in the territory at the moment, to try and make sure that Aboriginal people aren't disenfranchised by the move.
Funnily enough, not that many of them are likely to vote for the current government, whose Indigenous policies derive their intellectual foundations from the philosophy of assimilation.
They're also pretty good at blaming the victim, too.
The Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - a member of the governing party - said, without going into specifics, that the changes would stop the 'deluge of last-minute enrolments', which increased the scope for fraud and manipulation of electoral roll.
But as one of the activists who run the GetUp website pointed out, new technology should make voting easier and if the the government wanted the roll to be accurate and up to date, they should be allowing people to enrol.
Not making it harder and harder for them.
But no, they pushed the legislation through Parliament last year and it's sat there waiting for deadline - pretty well unnoticed by all but a few.
I took part in a survey by my union - the Media Alliance - and was asked if I was aware of the coming changes to the Electoral Act.
I think I surprised the interviewer with the extent of my knowledge.
She told me after the interview that only one in 30 members - yes folks, about three per cent - of the membership were aware of what was happening.
So if the media doesn't know, how are the punters going to find out?
Unnoticed changes might make the process neater.
But are they democratic?
In some wards, the dead rose from their graves to vote repeatedly at different polling booths.
That was then.
We've since got an independent statutory body - the Australian Electoral Commission - which oversees elections at every level.
Our elections - apart from the extremely rare occurrence of missing ballot boxes in some organisational elections - are usually straight.
We have a formal electoral roll and what used to be a pretty straightforward enrolment process with a reasonable period for enrolment after elections are called.
But that's changing as of 16 April this year.
For the rest of this week, you can enrol by giving name, address, citizenship status and birthdate and getting someone who is already on the roll to witness your signature.
Next week, you'll have to provide full ID and choose from a small menu of authorised people to both view your ID and witness your enrolment application.
If you're in prison, you now lose the right to vote.
Forget about internationally-recognised civil and political rights.
Cons will not be able to exercise them
And if they called an election tomorrow, you'd have until 8pm the same day to register if you'd forgotten to do it beforehand.
In a literate society, this should not be a problem.
But what about in remote areas, where many Aboriginal people - particularly the young - are barely literate?
Many simply do not carry their own documentation, leaving banks, stores and health clinics to look after ATM cards, Medicare cards and the like.
In order to enrol, they'd have to round up their ID, then find one of the authorised people and then fill out the form - or get someone to do it for them.
If they live on an outstation, they might not hear about an election being called.
So if they haven't enrolled, the chances of rounding up the ID, getting an authorised person to witness the form and then faxing it off to the Electoral Commission in time are pretty slim.
There's a big enrolment drive on in the territory at the moment, to try and make sure that Aboriginal people aren't disenfranchised by the move.
Funnily enough, not that many of them are likely to vote for the current government, whose Indigenous policies derive their intellectual foundations from the philosophy of assimilation.
They're also pretty good at blaming the victim, too.
The Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - a member of the governing party - said, without going into specifics, that the changes would stop the 'deluge of last-minute enrolments', which increased the scope for fraud and manipulation of electoral roll.
But as one of the activists who run the GetUp website pointed out, new technology should make voting easier and if the the government wanted the roll to be accurate and up to date, they should be allowing people to enrol.
Not making it harder and harder for them.
But no, they pushed the legislation through Parliament last year and it's sat there waiting for deadline - pretty well unnoticed by all but a few.
I took part in a survey by my union - the Media Alliance - and was asked if I was aware of the coming changes to the Electoral Act.
I think I surprised the interviewer with the extent of my knowledge.
She told me after the interview that only one in 30 members - yes folks, about three per cent - of the membership were aware of what was happening.
So if the media doesn't know, how are the punters going to find out?
Unnoticed changes might make the process neater.
But are they democratic?
Monday, April 09, 2007
No, Minister
It's months since I've posted.
Christmas intervened and then it got harder and harder to sit down and write something.
But I'm back!
The state of education has hit the news recently; more specifically the low levels of literacy and numeracy recorded in the Northern Territory as compared with other States and Territories.
We know we don't perform as well because the national benchmarking Multilevel Assessment Program tests (the MAP tests) say so.
What the MAP tests actually show is that the performance in urban and regional schools compares favourably with Down South.
It's the remote schools in Aboriginal communities, however, that show very poor returns: in some cases only around 30 per cent of kids actually perform at benchmark level.
And that's a terrific opportunity for talkback radio to get into the whys and wherefores.
So they wheel out the Minister for Education for an explanation.
A practised politician, he has no difficulty - nor hesitation - in fluently repeating the advice his Department has given him.
Kids in remote Aboriginal schools don't perform as well because they don't attend school.
All we have to do is attend regularly and everything will be hunky-dory.
Right.
The reality is a bit more complex than that.
What we're talking about - remote schooling - is still essentially a colonialist enterprise.
It's a valiant attempt to impart Western values and styles of knowledge that blithely ignores the complexities of working across languages and cultures.
In this context, it's not simply enough to provide schools and teachers and expect kids will automatically turn up.
You have to give them a reason for being there.
You have to bend your pedagogy and then your curriculum to accommodate cross-cultural, multilingual contexts, such as schools where kids may speak up to five languages and may speak Aboriginal English or Kriol as a sixth, but they don't speak, read or write a more formal English.
You have to make sure your teachers are fully trained, sensitive and mature enough to meet the demands; not simply recruit warm bodies to front a classroom and emerge at the end of the day more or less sane.
You have to work out the conditions that are necessary to keep teachers out bush, so that you've got continuity in people and programs.
And you have to have consistent and sustained support from your department.
Blaming kids can't hide the fact that the department is doing none of the above.
But it's what many people in the Territory want to hear.
It's yet more 'proof' that blackfellas are to lazy to get off their arses and make sure their kids go to school so they can get the benefits that we're supposedly offering.
That the assertion doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny doesn't stop the department running the line.
Fortunately, I was interviewed as a representative of the school councils' combined organisation and I got a good response to my suggestion that we needed to look at our own performance - as I've listed above - before we start blaming kids for their failure to perform at level.
I was followed by a senior bureaucrat who stuck to the line, which by then had become slightly modified to: 'well kids who do attend school have no problems with their literacy'.
No, Minister, this simply ain't good enough.
Aboriginal kids are the fastest-growing cohort in our schools and unless we tailor the system to meet their complex needs, they're missing out.
Dealing with this is not just a matter of equity.
It ought to be, to use a classic piece of modern bureaucratic cant, 'core business'.
Christmas intervened and then it got harder and harder to sit down and write something.
But I'm back!
The state of education has hit the news recently; more specifically the low levels of literacy and numeracy recorded in the Northern Territory as compared with other States and Territories.
We know we don't perform as well because the national benchmarking Multilevel Assessment Program tests (the MAP tests) say so.
What the MAP tests actually show is that the performance in urban and regional schools compares favourably with Down South.
It's the remote schools in Aboriginal communities, however, that show very poor returns: in some cases only around 30 per cent of kids actually perform at benchmark level.
And that's a terrific opportunity for talkback radio to get into the whys and wherefores.
So they wheel out the Minister for Education for an explanation.
A practised politician, he has no difficulty - nor hesitation - in fluently repeating the advice his Department has given him.
Kids in remote Aboriginal schools don't perform as well because they don't attend school.
All we have to do is attend regularly and everything will be hunky-dory.
Right.
The reality is a bit more complex than that.
What we're talking about - remote schooling - is still essentially a colonialist enterprise.
It's a valiant attempt to impart Western values and styles of knowledge that blithely ignores the complexities of working across languages and cultures.
In this context, it's not simply enough to provide schools and teachers and expect kids will automatically turn up.
You have to give them a reason for being there.
You have to bend your pedagogy and then your curriculum to accommodate cross-cultural, multilingual contexts, such as schools where kids may speak up to five languages and may speak Aboriginal English or Kriol as a sixth, but they don't speak, read or write a more formal English.
You have to make sure your teachers are fully trained, sensitive and mature enough to meet the demands; not simply recruit warm bodies to front a classroom and emerge at the end of the day more or less sane.
You have to work out the conditions that are necessary to keep teachers out bush, so that you've got continuity in people and programs.
And you have to have consistent and sustained support from your department.
Blaming kids can't hide the fact that the department is doing none of the above.
But it's what many people in the Territory want to hear.
It's yet more 'proof' that blackfellas are to lazy to get off their arses and make sure their kids go to school so they can get the benefits that we're supposedly offering.
That the assertion doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny doesn't stop the department running the line.
Fortunately, I was interviewed as a representative of the school councils' combined organisation and I got a good response to my suggestion that we needed to look at our own performance - as I've listed above - before we start blaming kids for their failure to perform at level.
I was followed by a senior bureaucrat who stuck to the line, which by then had become slightly modified to: 'well kids who do attend school have no problems with their literacy'.
No, Minister, this simply ain't good enough.
Aboriginal kids are the fastest-growing cohort in our schools and unless we tailor the system to meet their complex needs, they're missing out.
Dealing with this is not just a matter of equity.
It ought to be, to use a classic piece of modern bureaucratic cant, 'core business'.
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