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So there's no deal and the offer is withdrawn.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

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....