What I write below is the reality in aboriginal communities.
I sat in on a community meeting which complained that the Government was giving Aboriginals the ‘hamburger with the lot’. There has been NO community consultation. They are stopping the permit system, scrapping CDEP, making Council amalgamations, pushing 99year leases (or is it now 5 year leases), mandatory health check-ups for children under 16 (or is it now voluntary?), banning Kava, banning pornography (I agree with the last 2). All this is happening!! People in the communities are confused and are asking what does the above have to do with child abuse? I don’t know what is really happening, and neither do the communities. How can they fight when they don’t know what is going on? And are some of the programs going to be replaced with others or will there be a huge vacuum?
As one lady said, I guess they want us to live off the land again. One Aboriginal man painted the bleak picture of how if 50% of a welfare payments is frozen for schooling/food it will force people into prostitution – to aboriginals and the itinerant Balanda (whites) who they can’t get rid of because the permit system is to be scrapped, and they have no police in the community (and can’t find proof enough to make police happy) to get rid of them.

The CDEP (to be scrapped in Sept) started as a program which Trained people and created work, and over the last 30 years has degenerated (through funding cuts, and lack of monitoring) into an organization which calls almost anything work to enable people to get their payments. In the Aboriginal community where I live there is no/very little work, and no access to training. So how do people ‘work’ or even ‘work for the dole’? One man is trying to start a large vegetable garden, he has people lined up for work, but because of politics he cant get the funding to start this up – the CDEP the very organization which is supposed to help him would not due to the manager at the time.

One Aboriginal lady in Yirrkala said, the Government/ media is making it sound like we havnt been trying to fix the problems and thats why they are stepping in. We have been asking for alcohol and pornography to be banned, but in the past the Govt wouldnt do it. We’ve been asking for more police, but not sent any. We need more housing (not happening) Now, like we said would happen, we have the problem and are being blamed for not fixing it. She was so happy to learn that alcohol/pornography were to be banned, but now is extremely disappointed because mining towns like Nhulunbuy (only 10mins drive from a ‘dry’ Aboriginal community, where at work pornography is in lunch rooms, trucks etc, and is regularly swapped) is excluded. This is the reality for the people here. A minority culture being swamped by the dominant one. And the dominant culture does not know or care about what is happening here.

People here are thankful for the mission days. The Aboriginal teachers, nurses, workers were all trained by the missions. They will say ‘it was hard work but a good time’. One man said ‘the Government will never admit that it did the wrong thing by getting rid of the missions’. This is the reality. Now that its at the stage that there is abuse something is being done (ad-hocly) – but child abuse is not the only thing being targeted.

Catharine Carpenter

I’m posting again because you misrepresent the excluded commentary on Pearson’s position, possibly because of the exact assumptions about “leftist” views I’m trying to explode. What I was saying wasn’t that Pearson’s generally wrong on the broader issues (though he gets “leftist” views wrong the same way you do), but that he calls for most of the same things as the “leftists” he bags, notably local self-determination and responses based in local Indigenous culture rather than imposed solutions. That’s evident even in the quotations you supply above, and has come through very strongly in his comments on the NT intervention.

There is a lot of common ground that gets eradicated by artificially imposing a left/right divide on these issues – it’s generally a fairly sloppy taxonomy anyway, but here it’s particularly inept. Arguing against a centralist/statist approach would generally be deemed rightist, wouldn’t it?

Phil Minchin

But you break all my blog rules here. You have not supplied me with your full name; you belong to an advocacy group with your own website, and your comment is way too long. Thus I have just featured your intro. The rest of your comment is mainly arguing that Noel Pearson is wrong or uninformed about these issues. I suggest you take up your concerns with him, if you believe he has so little proper understanding of the issues at hand.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

ANTaR’s position, consistent with many from the “leftist” side of politics, is that top-down change imposed from without doesn’t work, and in fact is exactly where you get problems like unmanned police stations and funding being yanked out of successful local initiatives. There are plenty of Indigenous people in local communities trying to make change for the better who know far better than some Canberra bureaucrat what needs doing. But they are NOT interchangeable; what might work in Cape York will not necessarily work in Mutitjulu. The problems each community faces vary hugely, which again is why local leadership, supported (or at least not impeded) by the resources of the state or Commonwealth, will produce better results than decisions made remotely.

Phil M