Indigenous Australia News

I was going to take a break from whinging, but then today the changes to Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) in the Northern Territory were revealed – further Q&As at FACSIA [.pdf]. I can’t say I’ve fully taken in the changes. But it looks like no one is spared; people in all Northern Territory remote communities will go off CDEP.

The changes to CDEP in the Northern Territory are a key part of the broader emergency response to protect children, make communities safer and normalise services for Indigenous communities.

The only link to protecting children seems to be that if everyone’s on welfare and not CDEP, this will make it easier to introduce food stamps and welfare deductions as a way of making parents send their kids to school and making people clean up their yards.
While it’s good to see that the Government is at last thinking about transitions from CDEP (unlike the poor people in communities such as Jigalong which lost CDEP on July 1), it also presumably means the loss of the extra Federal funding that has been put into CDEP businesses and community operations.

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“So I think there may be a misconception that we’re here to fix things. We’re not. We’re here to examine as many kids as we can in two weeks and to send the figures back to Canberra, and also to give the figures to the local health service.”
[volunteer doctor, stationed in Titjikala, south of Alice Springs for two weeks as part of the Government’s response.]
It’s now a month since the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, stood together to announce that There is A National Emergency of sexual abuse on Aboriginal communities, And the Government Will Send Out The Gunships.
We have a right to expect that if the Government sends out the gunships, there is good reason to. There is. We also have a right to expect that when the problems are longstanding there should be a good plan with longterm solutions. The last month has shown that there isn’t.
The gunships were sent off with only a mud-map, under the command of a taskforce which has no member professionally trained to work with sexual abuse victims. Without advice from Indigenous doctors or people who know about Indigenous health interventions, sex abuse or Indigenous children. Without paying attention to the advice of Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, the authors of the report that triggered the announcement. (‘Gunships’ and ‘swarms of locusts’ are Wild’s metaphors). And with no idea of how much the operation would cost.
It’s bright shiny lip-gloss to call the present disastrous state of many Indigenous communities a National Emergency – because emergencies are things you don’t expect, and you can be forgiven for not foreseeing them. The problems in Australian Indigenous communities have been laid out in report after report after report over the last 10 years. Many people have shown the need for long-term solutions, and many communities have trialled solutions, some successful, some not.

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[Jenny Green is a linguist who has worked for many years in Central Australia. She’s currently studying sand talk.]
It seems that it is much easier to post something on a blog rather than write a coherent letter to any paper and make new points about ‘the situation’. In an agitated state of mind I have been agonising about what to say for the last week, and I have not yet completed my 500 words. Several thoughts and images do come to mind though. In the past week I have been out and about in what will probably count as affected areas – if not yet declared as such then maybe soon. I was of course interested to hear what Aboriginal people who I have known for a long time make of the situation, and where they are getting their information from.
A colleague and I were returning from a very pleasant day spent in a dry river bed eating bar-b-qued chops and recording songs and stories with a group of Aboriginal women. On the way back we filled the back of the troopie with the remains of a recently slaughtered bullock – head, feet and a few parts of as yet un-named (to us linguists at least!) guts that we all enjoyed talking about on the way home. This was food for dogs, and part of the practice of a culture that does not usually discard the useful remnants of animals. As we arrived we heard the latest broadcast on ‘the national emergency’ blaring from a radio in a community house, including the list of persons on Howard’s task force. It was one of those juxtapositions of realities that often strikes you when you are out bush. Aboriginal people make the best of their lives, often in very difficult circumstances.

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(1) Details of changes to 7,000 people’s wages
On 1 July seven thousand Australian Indigenous participants in Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) are set to lose their wages. A few will have the CDEP positions converted into real jobs. But most will not.
There’s a worrying lack of detail as to how the Federal Government proposes to manage the transition and the immediate problems caused by lack of money in communities in which CDEP may be the main income. This is highlighted in the Social Justice 2006 report by Tom Calma, the Social Justice Commissioner. The report which was sent to the Attorney-General on 5 April 2007 contains an alarming indictment of the Federal Government and the Federal bureaucracy’s general ability to manage Indigenous affairs. It seems to have got buried in the publicity surrounding Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle “Little Children are Sacred”.
Backtracking, in Western Australia, police in Broome have already blamed changes in CDEP payments for drawing people into towns from the communities.

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Last time John Howard’s ship came in, it was a Norwegian freighter, as Max Gillies observed. Today’s Crikey has a Special edition: Howard’s Aboriginal emergency, which suggests that this time, he’s running the Aboriginal flag up the masthead.
Ten years ago when Howard came to power, his new Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, said that his predecessors had got it all wrong. He wanted Aboriginal ‘self-empowerment and said that the Howard government would adopt ‘practical, commonsense policies’ on health, housing, education, employment and improve Aboriginal people’s lives.
That didn’t happen.

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A link here [thanks to Simon Musgrave!] to international linguistic opinion on Mal Brough’s and John Howard’s poorly informed English-only push. Here’s Geoff Pullum at Language Log today, Punishing speakers of Aboriginal languages:

Plenty could be done to improve the lot of aborigines in Australia without doing anything to insist on their learning English (which is probably going to happen anyway, along with the extinction of the aboriginal languages). Australia has a lot to atone for. Such atonement will probably not occur.

The Australian Greens are better informed than the Government about the language loss that’s happening:

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Lots of opportunities to come up against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues in London these days:

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