I'm not sure who's worse... Howard or Bush... I doubt even GW would dare do what Howard is doing.


Terrified families flee in panic
Lindsay Murdoch in Darwin and Stephanie Peatling
June 27, 2007


PANIC about the Howard Government's crackdown on child sexual abuse has spread widely throughout remote Aboriginal communities, where parents fear their children will be taken away in a repeat of the stolen generation.

Some families have already fled the first community to be targeted, Mutitjulu at Uluru, but the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, blames "liars" who have something to hide from police and military personnel for terrorising people and spreading hysteria.

"The reason people are scared there at the moment is because people are putting around that the army are coming to take their children away, that the army is coming in to shoot the dogs and the Government is going to take away their money and make them sit there and do what they're told," Mr Brough said.

Social workers and indigenous MPs in the Northern Territory are being swamped with phone calls from Aborigines wanting to know what will happen in their communities.

An indigenous MP, Alison Anderson, said she had been trying to persuade families in her huge desert electorate south of Alice Springs not to take their children and flee before police and troops arrived, which in some places could be within days.

"In one telephone hook-up last night people told me they were going to run away to a waterhole 50 kilometres away," Ms Anderson said. "I have heard from many people thinking they may do the same thing. I've urged them not to panic and to stay on the communities and work with the people who arrive."

Marion Scrymgour, a Northern Territory Government minister, said: "There's a lot of fear, particularly among elder woman. Not so long ago - 30 to 40 years - children were being taken out of the arms of Aboriginal mothers. There is real fear that is going to happen again."

The Chief Minister, Clare Martin, told MPs yesterday to travel to their bush electorates as soon as possible to tell people "what is fact and what is fiction" in an effort to halt the panic.

Five communities in the Territory's south, including Mutitjulu, will be the initial focus, but Mr Brough declined to name the others. He said he did not want other people needlessly scared.

"It is the very typical scaremongering, standover bully-boy tactics and lies that some have perpetrated upon their people for too long, to keep them scared of authority, to keep them in a state of desperation," Mr Brough said.

"They're saying these things because they are wanting to frighten their own families."

Lesley Taylor, one of the Territory's most experienced child abuse workers, said: "They are scared stiff … This is creating very stressful environments that could lead to even more children being at risk."

Sixty to 70 communities will be targeted, and small teams of police, military and government officers will begin arriving today to audit people's needs. They would be replaced by teams who would stay to meet those needs, Mr Brough said. Public servants will oversee the programs, with a manager in each community responsible for what happens.

Mr Brough said it was essential that government, police and military personnel arrived as soon as possible to reassure people that they would not be harmed.

"We need to send a clear message to the people of Mutitjulu that we are not deserting them."

Ms Martin said she would tell the Prime Minister, John Howard, when they met in Brisbane tomorrow, that the plan "must be sustainable over the long term, effective and deal directly with child abuse".

"There are still a lot of details yet to emerge, and as they do it will be important to get them out to people in bush communities," she said.

The indigenous MP Barbara McCarthy said Aborigines she represented in Arnhem Land were calling for Canberra to ban alcohol outlets and the sale of pornography in the territory for six months, including in Darwin, Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. Most of the alcohol affecting the communities was bought in towns, she said.

She said that if the Federal Government sincerely saw a national emergency it should provide money for alcohol rehabilitation and immediately fund the construction of 1000 houses to ease chronic overcrowding. Twenty or more people commonly live in shacks.

John Reeves, a Darwin QC and a member of the taskforce that will oversee the federal plan, told the Herald he hoped "that common sense prevails and hysteria doesn't take hold".

A land grab, and new legislation aimed at dismantling Native Title rights. It is NOT all about saving children. The methods and Howard's rheutoric are pure evil disguised as "helping Indigenous children".


Welfare crusade seen as a land grab
Stephanie Peatling
June 27, 2007


CHILD abuse is being used as a "Trojan horse" to disguise a Federal Government takeover of indigenous-owned land, a former head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission says.

Pat Turner is one of nearly 90 signatories to a letter sent by indigenous, welfare, church, housing, health and cultural groups calling on the Government to consult more widely in its efforts to stamp out child abuse in Northern Territory indigenous communities.

Ms Turner said there was no evidence to suggest scrapping the permit system for indigenous land would lead to improvements in children's health. "We are totally against tying serious social need to our hard-fought land ownership and land tenure," she said. "No compensation will ever, ever replace our land ownership rights."

Ms Turner was also formerly a senior official in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, but yesterday spoke in her capacity as a representative of the combined Alice Springs indigenous communities. "[The Minister for Indigenous Affairs] Mal Brough is drawing too heavily on his military background to swoop into our communities and do a quick fix," she said.

Sixty communities in the Territory will have their permit-only entry system removed. Mr Brough said it was necessary to allow government officials to enter indigenous-owned land without having to wait for paperwork.

Others who signed the letter of protest include the Australian National University law professor Mick Dodson, the former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, the indigenous leader Lowitja O'Donoghue, the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association, the Central Land Council, the Australian Council of Social Service, Anglicare Australia and the National Council of Churches.

The groups will meet in Canberra today to work out an alternative proposal for tackling child abuse.

can it get worse....? Oh yes!!

It's time we stepped back - Treasury
Phillip Coorey
June 27, 2007

IMPROVING the wellbeing of indigenous Australians in a sustainable fashion may require the removal of all government assistance, says the secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry.

At the Cape York Institute Conference in Cairns yesterday, Dr Henry said there was an argument that "the best thing governments can do is step back and allow individuals, families and communities to take responsibility for their own outcomes in life".

"The removal of government assistance is likely to result in an initial deterioration of the wellbeing of people newly denied the assistance," Dr Henry said.

"But by taking this difficult, initial step, it may be possible to achieve a greater and more sustainable improvement in wellbeing than could ever be achieved through ongoing government intervention."
At a stretch it might sound good in theory, but pity there are no jobs and infrastructure or support network to replace it.

Dr Henry listed three measures needed to improve the lot of indigenous people: ending reliance on "passive welfare", raising education and health standards, and directly engaging indigenous people in setting the policies that affect them. Indigenous policies over the years had failed to deal with the underlying causes of disadvantage, he said..

He was particularly scathing of the layers of welfare that he said all but destroyed any incentive to work, or to seek an education.

"Decades of passive welfare provision have delivered dependency, not capability. Indeed, dependency has eroded that capability," he said. "Even if there were plentiful employment opportunities, good quality housing, low rates of crime and high quality services, we would still have a welfare system that undermined workforce participation."

translation: so let's not even make a start
.

[/IMG]
'It's black children overboard'
(in reference to the Tampa lie prior to the last federal election)

Jo Chandler at Uluru
June 27, 2007


AT the red centre of the maelstrom over the Federal Government's intervention in remote Aboriginal communities, about 80 men, women and children sit on plastic chairs in the dust before a whiteboard and a small amplifier, anxious for news of what tomorrow will bring. A letter read to them by the elder Donald Fraser, recounted first in English, then in the Pitjantjatjara tongue, still the first language of the old people, politely advises that a small contingent of federal and Northern Territory officials, and at least one federal police officer, would like to visit and talk to them this morning. The letter is couched as a request, respectful of the process which still requires the restricted community to give authority for strangers to visit, although the permit system limiting access to remote communities will be scrapped under the planned changes.

When Fraser passes the microphone to Harry Wilson, an angrier, younger man, the tension rises. Wilson proclaims that this is the Tampa again. This is "black children overboard … this Government is using these kids to win the election".

His words echo a joke dryly recounted earlier to the Herald by one local official that the Prime Minister, John Howard, the magician politician, has pulled a rabbit out of his hat. "Only it is a black rabbit."

But the letter read by Fraser urges calm. It offers reassurance. Much of what people are hearing and frightened about, it says - like the stories of coercive health checks of children, or the whispers that children will again be taken, stories that are said to have already sent families scurrying into the dunes - are exaggerated and unfounded.

The officials want to "explain to the community the Australian Government's response to the Little Children are Sacred report".

This was the recent analysis which distilled years of reports documenting sexual abuse and violence suffered by Aboriginal children throughout the Territory into a testament that compelled Howard to announce last week that he would wrest control of remote communities from the Territory Government.

But "Why us?" and "Why now?" are the questions underpinning yesterday afternoon's long meeting outside the Mutitjulu Community Office. A three-week investigation of claims of abuse in the community by a joint police taskforce last year - including more than 100 interviews with locals - failed to find evidence of abuse in the community, elders say. "Where is the evidence? Put up or shut up."
.

Dear friend,

ANTaR (Australians for Native Title & Reconciliation) believes the Prime Minister was right to describe the widespread abuse of Aboriginal children as a national emergency but wrong in the way his government is seeking to overcome it.

Particularly horrifying is the plan to introduce compulsory health checks for all Aboriginal children to examine for signs of abuse – regardless of whether this is suspected.

Little children are sacred. Compulsory and potentially invasive checks of this kind will add to their trauma.

There is no other group in society that would be subject to these kinds of measures. Can you imagine what would happen if the Government ordered compulsory health checks for Anglo, Chinese, Jewish or Muslim children? There'd be an uproar. Yet the Prime Minister thinks it is appropriate to enforce this on Aboriginal
children.

Efforts to stamp out child abuse should target the perpetrators rather than demonise whole communities.

The Government response also seemed to ignore the findings of the 'Little Children are Sacred' report that non-Aboriginal men were also responsible for the abuse of Aboriginal children.

While stopping alcohol abuse is essential to overcoming child abuse, prohibition would be unlikely to achieve this. Prohibition hasn't worked anywhere else in the world. Why does the Prime Minister think it will work in the Northern Territory?

The Prime Minister and Minister Brough are committend to ending child abuse, but their misguided approach would be unlikely to achieve it. The heavy handed control of Aboriginal people helped create the problems of child abuse and violence. More of the same is not
going to solve them.

ANTaR has worked extensively to support Aboriginal people who are overcoming violence and child abuse. In 2006 we organized a forum in Parliament House, Canberra bringing Aboriginal leaders who have successfully tackled abuse and violence together with politicians
and public servants to discuss strategies to overcome these
problems.

ANTaR is currently campaigning to urge the NSW Government to properly fund its response to the abuse of Aboriginal children in that state.



Please write an email or send an urgent fax to the Prime Minister
and Minister Brough expressing your distress:

Prime Minister John Howard
Fax: (02) 6273 4100
Email form: http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm

Mal Brough, Minister for Indigenous Affairs
Fax: (02) 6273 4122
Email form: http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/memfeedback.asp?id=2K6

Kevin Rudd, MP Federal (Opposition Leader) Member for Griffith, Federal Labor Leader Queensland Office: Ph: (07) 3899 4031
Fax: (07) 3899 5755 Canberra Office: Ph: (02) 6277-4022 Fax: (02) 6277-8485
Email: Kevin.Rudd.MP@ahp.gov.au www.kevinrudd.com

Jenny Macklin, MP Federal Member for Jagajaga Shadow Minister for Families and Community Services
Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Reconciliation Victorian Office: Ph: (03) 9459-1411 Fax: (03) 9459-5721 Canberra Office: Ph: (02) 6277-4045 Fax: (02) 6277-2307 Email: JMacklin.MP@ahp.gov.au

Tanya Plibersek MP Federal Member for Sydney Shadow Minister for Human Services, Housing, Women and Youth
Sydney Office: Ph: (02) 9357-6366 Fax: (02) 9357-6466 Canberra Office: Ph: (02) 6277-4519 Fax: (02) 6277-8513
Email: Tanya.Plibersek.MP@ahp.gov.au
ALP senators: senator.george.campbell@aph.gov.au; senator.faulkner@aph.gov.au;
senator.hutchins@aph.gov.au; senator.stephens@aph.gov.au;

Thanks again for your support.

THE AGE ~ July 14 2007
An entire culture is at stake

Patrick Dodson

JUNE 21, 2007, may well be seen as a defining date in Australian history. That day changed government/indigenous relationships profoundly when Prime Minister John Howard announced that his Government planned to seize control of 64 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and place them under martial law.
The intervention, and the accompanying headline-grabbing phrase "rivers of grog", was used as the political trigger for an unprecedented use of the military and police to occupy indigenous communities. Their role was to support a regime of coercive paternalism in which grog and pornography were to be banned, medical examinations imposed on children, and welfare payments managed and linked with school attendance.

There continues to be a wide perception in the indigenous community, and considered opinion across the nation, that the "national emergency" intervention strategy is motivated by political factors in an election year. It lacks integrity.

At the same time, there is potential to transform the Howard Government's intervention into a historical opportunity. There is the possibility of sustainable community development based on a partnership between Aboriginal communities and both the Northern Territory and the Federal Government.

There is no argument that the urgent immediate priority is to protect children. The welfare of our children and our families remains the key to our lives and future. But this priority is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda.

The agenda is to dismantle the foundations of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act. It seeks to excise residential community settlements from the Aboriginal land estate under special Commonwealth Government five-year leases, and the abolition of an authorisation entry protocol called the permit system.

The Government has not made a case in linking the removal of land from Aboriginal ownership and getting rid of the permit system with protecting children from those who abuse them. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Howard Government has used the emotive issue of child abuse to justify this intervention in the only Australian jurisdiction in which it can implement its radical indigenous policy agenda.

Reforming indigenous land title is central to the Howard Government's national indigenous policy program: an agenda that has been swept along by an alliance of established conservatives forces that have long opposed Aboriginal self-determination and land rights with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility.

In recent years, high-profile think tanks, the Centre for Independent Studies and the Bennelong Society, supported by a network of conservative journalists, have fundamentally changed Australian indigenous policy discourse.

They have argued that only private ownership of land can generate wealth and provide the basis of community cohesion and functionality. They have asserted that communal land ownership and governance structures that reflect indigenous traditional decision-making imprisons indigenous people in welfare ghettos and locks them out of the benefits of modernity.

The fundamental changes proposed for the land rights act that mandates Commonwealth Government control of the Northern Territory communities would be a devastating setback for Aboriginal rights.

The Northern Territory ALRA is the iconic declaration of the Australian nation's intent to restore to Aboriginal people the dignity of their traditional lands.

Under the Land Rights Act, all Aboriginal reserves gazetted during the protection and control era were transferred to Aboriginal ownership and the Northern Land Council and Central Land Council were established as statutory bodies to help traditional owners prepare claims and represent their interests.

The act liberated Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory from their subordinate and colonial status and became an inspiration for much Aboriginal land legislation that has been passed in every Australian jurisdiction with the exception of Western Australia.

More than half the Northern Territory land mass is Aboriginal land containing more than 700 indigenous communities, the vast majority of which are small homeland communities.

There should be no doubt about what is at stake here. The Government's agenda is to transform indigenous larger settlements into mainstream towns and extinguish by attrition the capacity of indigenous people to maintain small homeland communities.

These settlements have become the lifeblood of cultural regeneration as indigenous people, by their own determination, relocated in extended family groups to traditional country after the collapse of the feudal pastoral industry regime and closure of church missions in the 1960s and 1970s.

A few years ago, assimilation was comprehensively rejected by mainstream Australian society as racist. That it should be back in vogue as this Government's indigenous public policy direction reflects the paucity of intellectual and philosophical discussion about the position of indigenous people in Australian nation building.

While large sections of Australian society can indulge in contemporary grief about past injustices inflicted on indigenous peoples, there is a pervasive silence about the policies of national, state and territory governments.

Public discourse on the social and economic crisis that engulfs many Aboriginal remote communities is dominated by notions of worth within a Western understanding of an ordered society. Central to the indigenous welfare reform debate is an assumption that the provision of welfare without reciprocity entrenches passivity and with that comes powerlessness, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, self-harm, violence and child abuse.

The conservative response to this human tragedy is to advocate removing the barriers that separate indigenous communities from mainstream society. The institutional features embedded in remote communities that protect indigenous people's identity and ways of life are the very barriers that conservatives insist should be removed.

Communal land ownership, indigenous community governance and indigenous control over people entering their settlements are all at stake.

John Howard will exploit indigenous voices in this debate to validate an ideological agenda to absorb indigenous people into the dominant society.

There is doubtless integrity to key aspects of the welfare reform agenda.
Reconstructing Aboriginal society where mutual respect and obligations based on traditional values and customary law is supported across the spectrum of indigenous leadership. But welfare reform must be a subset of an indigenous political agenda that demands the recognition of traditional land ownership as a basis for indigenous people to exist and thrive as distinct peoples.

Australians should try to imagine the consequences of the cultural genocide that the Howard Government's Northern Territory intervention foreshadows. Withdrawal of funding and welfare pressures on homeland communities will cause a drift of population to larger communities. Social problems will simply be transferred. The inevitable breakdown of law and order will result, followed by an increase in arrests and incarceration.

The authoritarian and paternalistic nature of the Howard Government's intervention will inevitably fail. There is no strategy for collaboration and partnership with Aboriginal people. This is an Iraq-style of intervention with no exit strategy or plans for long-term economic and social development.

In response to indigenous demands for consultation, Howard has repeated the mantra that the time for talking is over and that the old ways have not worked.

These are simply weasel words from a Prime Minister who dog-whistled Pauline Hanson's agenda and captured her party's constituency. The essence of Howard's strategy is speed. His goal is assimilation.

While traditional owners have made substantial gains in securing title to their lands under the Land Rights Act, the people living on the lands have been subject to the vagaries of piecemeal housing and infrastructure programs.

The unintended consequence of the Government's intervention has been a focus on the issue of long-term under-investment. Media scrutiny is highlighting appalling overcrowding where on average 20 people share a house. This reinforces a central theme of the Northern Territory inquiry that tackling this issue is fundamental to managing child abuse.

The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in Canberra estimates that $1.4 billion of housing investment in Aboriginal communities will be required just to fix the backlog of housing needs in communities over the next four years. Plans to link child welfare payment with school attendance highlight the appalling lack of education facilities and teacher numbers.

An alternative and inclusive plan should be developed. Such a plan would guarantee the fundamental recognition of Aboriginal land ownership as a basis of partnership. The plan would address issues of land and welfare reform matched by long-term public investment in housing, education and health facilities.

The plan could incorporate original aspects of the Government's strategy such as the ban on alcohol and pornography, and linking child welfare payments to school attendance. However, it would also offer a corresponding investment in treatment and rehabilitation services with an assessment of a long-term investment program in eduction and training.

Excising settlements from the Aboriginal land estate is unnecessary and divisive as is the appointment of administrators to manage Commonwealth programs. A more effective proposal would be to transfer community settlements to the Northern Territory Government under a 99-year lease arrangement. This transfer would enable the delivery of a wide range of citizenship services to indigenous communities while providing a development
approach for housing investment. It would also seek to offer a long-term vision for a partnership with indigenous communities where they would be given an increased role and responsibility over their lives and futures.

In such a possibility, and in such a vision, sexual abuse, violence and dysfunction within communities could be positively and seriously addressed.

This is a possibility and vision that offers hope. The present Government interventions offer little. Policies aimed at improving the long-term quality of life for Aboriginal people must involve Aboriginal participation and decision making.

Patrick Dodson is chairman of the Lingiari Foundation.

THE AGE
Apartheid to be enforced on Aborigines

Fran Baum
August 7, 2007

THIS will be a week of shame for all non-indigenous Australians if the legislation planned by the Howard Government is passed by Parliament. This legislation, among other things, will make the welfare system an apartheid one with different rules for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and make payments depend on
government-dictated behaviour. It will also take control away from Aboriginal people
over who goes on their land.

Ironically, this intervention is part of the Government's response to the Little Children are Sacred report by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, QC. Anderson's and Wild's report is nuanced, wise and demonstrates deep understanding of the complexity of abuse in communities that have suffered long and hard from the processes of colonisation — processes such as land grabs, stolen children and fundamental lack of respect and racism from the dominant white culture.

Their report called not for the declaration of war, with its echoes of domination and crisis, but for a thoughtful consultative process that stands some chance of achieving meaningful change.

It recognised that there has to be change but that this was likely only if Aboriginal people are listened to and respected — the basis of any functional relationship. Instead, the Government is sending in the army, boots and all.

I write this while attending the Garma Festival, which is organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation and held at Gulkula on the Gove Peninsula, in East Arnhem Land. The festival is a celebration of the art, culture and ceremony of the Yolngu people who are the traditional owners of this land.

We are in the heart of one of the oldest living cultures on earth, one that stretches back thousands of years and reverberates through the heart and spirit of this festival and the land on which it is held.

It is such a privilege for me, a non-indigenous Australian, to experience this. The theme for discussion at this year's festival is "Indigenous health: real solutions for a chronic problem".

The forum was designed a year ago to be a celebration of some of the positive processes in indigenous health: the success of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health services in Central Australia at increasing the birth weight of Aboriginal babies to the national average, for example; or the health services in Katherine that
are as well thought out as any mainstream services in Australia.

Yet instead of this anticipated celebration, the overwhelming feeling is now despair and anger. Despair that a report that bravely named and respectfully described the problem of child sexual abuse is being used by the Government for an assault on fragile Aboriginal communities. Anger at the damage the intervention and associated legislation are likely to do.

One Aboriginal leader said the past month had been one "of the most destructive times in our history".

People are speculating on why this is happening. Is it a bid for the swinging votes in the marginal seats? Is it an attempt to wedge Kevin Rudd as the federal election looms large? Is it a cover for long-held desires to force an assimilationist agenda?

Is it a Trojan horse by which to undo hard-won land rights? Is it because Clare Martin's Northern Territory Government created a vacuum, offering no strong response to the Anderson and Wild report?

It could be all or none of these, but one thing I'm sure about — based on my knowledge of public health — is that the intervention stands a very good chance of being detrimental to the health of Aboriginal people and their communities.

For the past two years I have been serving on the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, which was established by the World Health Organisation and has gathered evidence from around the world about the underlying causes of disease and illness.

A consistent message from the evidence is that when you rob people of control over their lives, it is uniformly bad for their health, whether they be British civil servants or Indian women living in slums.

The commission's interim statement, to be published soon, will stress the importance to health of people having control over their lives and meaningful participation in decision-making processes.

I assume that John Howard and Mal Brough would justify their tactics as a means to
the end of providing safety for children. But what evidence is there that these and
the removal of control will make children safer?

The Anderson and Wild report offered a gentler way with 97 recommendations
designed to invest in communities, build trust by involving people in the solutions
and ensuring that the healing necessary in damaged communities could happen.

Their recommendations should form the basis of some kind of accord across state
and federal governments and with a bipartisan approach about long-term,
sustainable action plans that are developed through real and meaningful
partnerships that ensure control remains with Aboriginal people.

Child abuse is wrong and abhorrent. On that we all agree. But the legislation that is going to be forced through our Federal Parliament this week is equally wrong. It robs Aboriginal people of their rights and respect*. It will undermine trust that is so essential to good policymaking. It assumes that Aboriginal people are the problem rather than the solution. It ignores the evidence on the central importance of control to individual and community wellbeing.

Fran Baum is professor of public health at Flinders University.


*In fact, the 500 PAGES of legislation being rushed through parliament today contains (hidden within it) another piece of legislation that dismantles current anti-racism legislation to enable the government to do the above.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

Our Land, Our Voices
Posted by The GetUp Team, August 10th, 2007

The laws enabling the radical intervention of the Federal Government into the Northern Territory Indigenous communities are currently before the Parliament. Five hundred pages of legislation, a one-day Senate hearing, and only two days of debate for laws that dramatically affect land tenure, welfare and the rights of Aboriginal communities in the NT – and, above all, no consultation with Indigenous people.

The paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs is one of the main reasons for continuing Indigenous disadvantage in Australia, and many hold fears this new Government paternalism will make things worse, not better.


GetUp travelled to Canberra and met with Indigenous leaders from Central Australia, who were in the capital to find someone to listen to their as yet unheard voices. The experience was an emotional one, but an uplifting one. Read their comments below on the changes that will affect their communities.

Read more here http://www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=442