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So there's no deal and the offer is withdrawn.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.