I also appreciate the standard of this blog. Usually I find blogs on Aboriginal issues become a forum for race hate or ignorant prejudices (is there any other kind?) or thereabouts. The standard here, even for opposing views, is much better.

I decided to wade in on one particular point, and that is that Aboriginal people have the right to decide our social, cultural, economic and, yes, even political development. Colonisation of Australia did not give that right to alien forms of government. Do-gooders (a term often used in the 1970s but now forgotten) might be ‘right’ in their opinions or even clairvoyant in seeing outcomes but they cannot assume to have a right to decide for others. We do not tell Indonesia how to run their country and we do not want them to tell us. The same stands for Aboriginal people. Considering all the cultures in the world you could not find a bigger chasm between the ‘british’ culture – call it what you like – and Indigenous culture, especially Aboriginal culture.

So Australian governments and mainstream media should swallow the bitter pill – we are not ‘your Aborigines’. Stop fixating on our problems as a means to control us, and start providing the overdue measures to remove the disadvantages derived from two hundred years of white arrogance. In turn we will agree not to fixate on your problems – yes, you must have some, to talk about giving out billions and trillions of ‘taxpayer’ dollars – or control your lives to meet our expectations.

The isolated communities in NT have not only a right to decide their futures but also the rights to have those futures assisted by government. Equal standard of education, for example, became an inherent right when Captain Phillip landed in Australia to take possession. ‘Equal’ means in Aboriginal languages, despite the cost. If that is too much of a burden give up the right to a sovereign nation on Aboriginal land. And stop ripping the wealth out of Aboriginal land.

Having reached to the fundamentals, back to the blog topic. The NT politicians are absolutely blind to good governance. The exercise of democracy in the NT has something to do with promoting and protecting the rights of the Aboriginal people and a lot to do with the rights of isolated communities. Perhaps the NT parliament should be reviewed to ensure that its structure, poorly borrowed from the Westminster system, is representative and responsive. Maybe a territory parliament should be replaced by community councils with greater powers. (The ’shire council’ model is an invention from the ivory towers of COAG.)

They are different people to “Westerners”
They do not wish to be like “Westerners” (thank goodness I would say)
Their current problems are due to colonisation
Unfortunately they can not now be what they were prior to colonisation.
Up until now all Government attempts at helping these people has essentially failed, because they do not address, or may even worsen, the underlying problems of “poverty, dispossession, marginalization and despair”.
After 200 years it is probably about time that the Government, and the public, realised this and they should bloody well do something about it.

You ask for my alternatives to the policies I am critical of – I’ll most likely disappoint you in this regard because I don’t see that as my role – my real concern, as should be apparent from my Crikey pieces, and posts and comments here – is with the repeated failure of policy design and delivery by government.

I’ve taken this line right from the first day of the Intervention in late July 2007 to the present – there were undoubtedly good elements to the Intervention as the Howard Federal government set it out but it was more concerned with the political impact of the Intervention rather than getting the policy design and implementation right.

The Little Children are Sacred report gave them all the justification they needed (which they used) but also gave them a good outline of the scope and nature of the problem and some pointers to how to proceed.These they ignored.

I said then and believe now that the Intervention was doomed from the start – it’s only real success has been to bring some aspects of Aboriginal disadvantage in the NT to the attention (for a while at least) of the Australian public. This, and the other aspects of the Intervention, that have largely been an inordinately expensive failure, could have been achieved far more efficiently and effectively had a little more reason and respect been incorporated into the design of the Intervention.

But, through political manipulation of both the public imagination and a compliant and lazy media, they have been able to reduce the issues to ‘protecting the women and children’, control over money, movement and alcohol and taking control of land with spurious justifications for unclear ends and using extraordinary legislation.

But the real policy failure here is that, as has been said too many times before, the whole intervention was a ‘top-down’ exercise – designed in and for the Federal government’s purposes. One issue from Little Children are Sacred was cynically used to justify an exercise in social engineering unseen before in this country (and hopefully never to be attempted again) – and at no time during the whole of the Brough/Howard administration of the intervention was any real consultation undertaken with Aboriginal people – Canberra knew what was right for them.

There was a time here in the NT when local governments vigorously resisted such efforts from the south – but Clare Martin’s Labor government was so incompetent that it could neither see the Intervention coming or react to it appropriately. Labor in the NT became, and remains, supine at the feet of Canberra.

And when Howard was thrown out in late 2007 there were many, myself included, who thought that Rudd & Macklin would/could/should fundamentally transform the Intervention into a program that might at least give some accord to the views of Aboriginal people in the NT.

Sadly that did not happen – Macklin quickly became a sort of Mal Btough lite – and has continued along that path – though with a sense of mean-streaked smarts that Mad Mal never had. The best indicator of this is the Yu Review into the Intervention – it made wide and sweeping recommendation to bring some humanity and commonsense into the Intervention – but Macklin ignored it (she and NT government have just now released, ten or so months after they received it, their comprehensive response to the Yu Review – but I’ve not yet read it).

And the NT Government has just followed suit by initiating a policy almost completely contrary to the recommendations of a well-conducted review of an issue (remote service delivery) of vital importance to Aboiginal people living outside of the few NT cities. But I’ll save that story for the next few days…

Phew…back to your questions…I don’t think there is any real tension between people living a close-to-traditional lifestyle and at least the rhetoric of the ‘closing the gap’ idea – all it needs is some imagination by government to meet people halfway.

And despite what government may tell us (or omit to tell us – good news stories about blackfellas don’t get a run in government or the press nowadays), there are some excellent remote service providers in the remote corners of the NT – most notably the remote Aboriginal-controlled health services which do a far better job of health service delivery that the NT government agencies ever did or could.
Another example is the Aboriginal land management agencies that have taken over, and extended, land management over large parts of the vast swathes of the NT and northern Australia.

And centralising service administration is most likely a good thing – but centralising service delivery is not.

So, I hope that this has helped – at least to show where I’m coming from – my problem is not that all parts of the Intervention, or recent policy delivery in the NT, is wrong-headed – obviously there are some good parts of these – but my real issue is that the policy design and implementation is almost exclusively top-down – and, in a policy domain where people’s live are concerned, that is the wrong way to do things.

I’m off to feed the dogs and myself.

Cheers and tanks for your time, thoughts and questions!

“Support the right of Traditional owners to determine their own future.
This is the only proper way.”

Sounds great, but what does that actually mean in practical terms? What does this really mean on the ground? Australia has (admitaddly shamefully recently) equal rights for all, so in what way do traditional owners have less ability currently than anyone else to determine their own future? Governments make socially engineering choices about where, when and how to deliver government services that affect all members of the community, not just Indigenous Australians (I mean that’s what governments do), so I’m not sure how different groups are treated differently in this way?

Put it another way, does the Italian-Australian community have the right to determine their own future? Or the Lebanese-Australian, Greek-Australian etc etc? Indigenous Australians do seem to have in fact more rights in this area than others, e.g. the permit system and the notion of ‘Aboriginal Land’ in and of itself. Therefore in what way do indigenous Australia’s not have the ability to determine their own destiny?

As I see it (and please correct my misconceptions) there is a fundamental tension between preserving indigenous culture (in the sense of not being assimilated into ‘mainstream’ culture) and the infamous ‘closing the gap’ approach. If people, any people, want to live in small remote communities and follow a subsitance lifestyle then this appears to be a clear opting out of ‘modern’ livng which entails conveniences such as top notch health care etc. Historically (globally) life expectancies have risen dramatically due to modern, expensive, medical advances. Take this away and life expectancies drop back to where nature intended. It isn’t neccessarily a bad thing, if that is the way you choose to live. I can’t see that it is reasonable for a government to provide world class health care across an area as large and sparsely populated as parts of the interior of Australia. On the face of it, centralising services to a smaller number of larger centres makes some compromise that could be viable.

I’ve also seen in this blog and other articles the inference that there never was any real problem with sexual abuse, and that this was a trojan myth used to justify the Intervention, which is really just a land grab. Now, whether or not the policies of the Intervention were good or not (and I can’t reasonably make that judgement myself) if I for a moment put myself in the position of a politcian reading the report that lead to the intervention, at a time when everyone from John Butler (e.g. ‘gov did nothing: Do you really think the government would do nothing if all those people were white?’) to the UN was demanding Australia fix this problem as a serious human rights issue, I can see that clearly there would feel a need to act. Now whether what was done was a good thing or not is another matter, but plenty of critism seems to be claiming that in fact there was no problem with sexual abuse in the first place. Again, a real nightmare for anyone with responsibility for this policy area. You seem to be violating Human Rights regardless of what you do.

Again, I think this comes down to the fact that whenever I read critisism of government policies the alternatives are rarely spelled out. This may be the media filter (angry words sell more copy than constructive ones) but in neither this blog nor the Sue Jean Stanton do I see practical alternatives, mainly just some vague ethereal concepts, as if the reader should know exactly what they are implying in practical terms.

I am someone who has actively tried to get an understanding of this issue, since I would dearly like the wrongs of the past to be reconciled and the future to be prsoperous for all (whatever each persons personal notion of prosperous is) and yet I find it essentially impossible to glean what should be done by those in power from the vast majority of the almost universally negative commentary. I guess that is why I have a liking for Noel Pearson, since he talks in direct practical terms, rather than vague motherhood statements, and is prepared to work with governments constructively and acknowledge areas in which he feels they are doing well, as well as not being afraid to critise.

Again, I stress that I am speaking from a position of ignorance (though not through lack of some effort), but that is the way I see it. I’d be interested in what anyone with more direct knowledge of the issues has to say.

“Bob, (Gosford), can you be a little (or perhaps a lot?) more specific about what you think should be done as an alternative to the current and proposed policies? Can you maybe direct me (and others) to some of your older posts where a coherent alternative is laided out?”

Thanks

...] as Bob Gosford points out: Lets be clear on one thing – the policy behind this brave new world for remote [...