Chris Graham, 19 July 2009

In late June, the federal government helped launch a paper entitled Bridges and Barriers: Addressing Indigenous Incarceration and Health.

It was prepared by the National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Committee (NIDAC) and called for new efforts to improve Indigenous health, and thereby reduce Indigenous incarceration.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin, health minister Nicola Roxon and Attorney-General Robert McClelland all gave the event a wide berth. Which is not all that surprising when you consider it was the Rudd government that this year (and last) slashed Aboriginal legal aid funding despite promising prior to the election to “strengthen funding to Aboriginal Legal Aid agencies”.

And of course it has been predominantly state Labor governments locking up Aboriginal people at record rates since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, a four-year, $40 million exercise that was supposed to reduce incarceration rates. But in the decade immediately after its release, the Aboriginal prison population rose by 107%.

So it’s perhaps logical Labor wheeled out Warren Snowdon, the new Indigenous health minister, and his colleague Brendan O’Connor (home affairs minister) to launch the report.

But Labor’s failings aren’t the only story here. The report had some startling findings, and in the context of the ongoing Mulrunji Doomadgee outrage, and the horrendous death in custody in Western Australia of Mr Ward, I had hoped the media might get at least half as “excited” about the issue as they do when reports emerge of Aboriginal children being sexually abused.

How naive. For whatever reason, black men and women being jailed at astronomical rates apparently doesn’t pique their interest.

The story got a sparing run across the nation, and was restricted in most cases to a breaking news story on websites, courtesy of an AAP yarn.

It included some startling statistics, such as: “One in four prisoners in Australia is Indigenous and their over-representation in the jail system is only getting worse”.

One in four is no mean feat given that in the general population, Indigenous Australians make up one in 40.

And there was this:
”The situation is worst in the Northern Territory , where 83 percent of the prison population is Indigenous.” That’s 83% in a jurisdiction where Aboriginal people constitute less than 30% of the total population.

And this:
”In Western Australia , the figure is 41 percent. Victoria has the lowest proportion of Aboriginal prisoners — 6 percent of that state’s inmates are black.” All pretty alarming stuff, but apparently not enough to really capture our attention.

So I thought I should try and “sex” it all up a bit and put the figures in some sort of context that might resonate a little more, which of course required me to read more than the government press release handout.

The following figures come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In the first half of 2008, there were 8411 Indigenous people enrolled in tertiary education. At the same time, there were 6605 Indigenous people in prison.

By comparison, for the same period there were about 696,279 non-Indigenous Australians enrolled in tertiary education, while there were 20,072 non-Indigenous Australians in prison. You can do the math … or I can do it for you.

If you applied the same principle to white Australia — that is, the number of people in jail is only about 22% lower than the number at university – our total national prison population would expand to over 546,000 people. That’s a population larger than Newcastle , Australia ’s seventh-largest city.

Nowhere else on Earth would you see figures where the Indigenous population in jail almost matches the Indigenous population at university.

Indeed, Australia ’s Indigenous jailing rate is the highest on Earth. But that’s not the most startling “figure in context”.

This one is. The jailing rate of black males in South Africa at the end of the Apartheid era (1993) was 851 per 100,000 population. In Australia today, we jail black (Aboriginal) males at a national rate of 4364 per 100,000. That’s over five times higher. In the Northern Territory , the rate is almost six times higher.

In fact, no state or territory of Australia — not even the ACT — jails black males at a rate less than South Africa under apartheid.

The closest is Tasmania , at 1169 per 100,000 population.

So Australia ’s “best performer” is still almost 30% worse than the regime considered one of the most racist on Earth.

Our worst performer — Western Australia — jails black males at more than eight times the rate of South Africa during apartheid. With figures like that, maybe it’s not really all surprising Rudd, Macklin, Roxon, McClelland and the media found something else to report.

• Chris Graham is the editor of the National Indigenous Times
• This article was the NIT editorial published on July 9

KEV Carmody’s first reaction when he learned he was to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame was to laugh.

The Queensland Aboriginal songwriter, who lives at Ballandean on the Granite Belt, said today: “I must be getting into the Hall of Fame with the lowest record sales in history.

“But I do feel proud and humbled to accept the induction on behalf of my culture, my commmunity and my family.”

Carmody was inducted at a ceremony in Melbourne on August 27, alongside Little Pattie, John Paul Young, The Dingoes and Mental As Anything.

Performers including Missy Higgins and Bernard Fanning also took part in the Cannot Buy My Soul tribute concert to Carmody’s music as part of the Queensland Music Festival, at the Brisbane Riverstage on 1st Aug 2009.

Kevin Daniel Carmody is an Indigenous Australian singer-songwriter born in 1946 in Cairns, Queensland. His father was a second generation Irish descendant, his mother a Murri woman. The family moved to southern Queensland in early 1950. Carmody grew up on a cattle station near Goranba, 70km west of Dalby in the Darling Downs area of south eastern Queensland. His parents worked as drovers there, moving cattle along the stock routes. When he was ten years old, Carmody was taken from his parents under the assimilation policy and sent to a Christian school in Toowoomba, after which he returned to his rural roots and worked for seventeen years as a country labourer.

In 1967 he married Helen, with whom he has three sons. He has since divorced but remains “good mates” with his ex-wife. He lives with his current partner Beryl on a 27-hectare bush block in south-east Queensland.

In 1979 at the age of 33 Carmody had the opportunity to go to university where he attended the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, at which he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honours. He later undertook postgraduate studies and completed a Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland, eventually finishing a PhD. While at university Carmody used his guitar as a means of implementing oral history in tutorials, which led to his career in music.

His first album, Pillars of Society, was released in 1989 and drew heavily upon country music and folk music styles. Rolling Stone Australia described the record as “the best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia”. In subsequent recordings he has adopted a broad range of music styles from reggae to rock and roll.

On 31 October 2007 Carmody was a special guest at the TV music channel MAX’s “The Max Sessions: Powderfinger, Concert For The Cure” singing alongside front man Bernard Fanning to the controversial ‘Black Tears‘ and also joined in with the encore of ‘These Days‘. The concert was a fundraiser and thank you to the “unsung heroes” of breast cancer with an invite-only audience, made up of a special group of people – those who have suffered and survived breast cancer and their support networks. The concert closed Breast Cancer Awareness Month and was the brainchild of 20-year-old Nick Vindin, who lost his mother Kate to the disease a few years ago.

Carmody regularly tours Australia and internationally and is highly regarded by audiences and critics.

He co-wrote “From Little Things Big Things Grow” with Paul Kelly on the The Gurindji Strike.

~ Source: Wikipedia Kev Carmody

By Julian Drape, AAP, June 25, 2009 12:01am

ONE in four prisoners in Australia is indigenous and their over-representation in the jail system is only getting worse, a new report states.

Aborigines are 13 times more likely to be locked up than other Australians, while the proportion of indigenous women being incarcerated has tripled in the past 20-odd years.

Half of the 10- to 17-year-olds in corrective institutions are indigenous. ”The fact is, every year it gets worse,” Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) executive director Gino Vumbaca said. ”The investment in prison cells is clearly flawed. It’s not working.

“If you build more prison cells, invariably you’ll fill them with more indigenous people.”

In the decade to 2007, the number of indigenous Australians in prison rose by 6.7 per cent a year, on average.  Aboriginal people went from comprising 18 per cent of the prison population to 24 per cent.

The situation is worst in the Northern Territory , where 83 per cent of the prison population is indigenous.  In Western Australia , it’s 41 per cent. Victoria has the lowest proportion of Aboriginal prisoners – 6 per cent of that state’s inmates are black. (In South Australia 20% of inmates are Aboriginal)

The statistics are collated in the ANCD’s National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Committee (NIDAC) report Bridges and Barriers – Addressing Indigenous Incarceration and Health.

Mr Vumbaca says the report proves tinkering around the edges of the problem hasn’t worked and it makes economic sense to invest more in rehabilitation. ”What we need is greater investment in things like residential treatment services so judges, magistrates and the police have options other than incarceration.”

The report estimates it costs governments $269 per day to lock up a prisoner.  That’s compared to just $98 per day for someone in residential rehabilitation. NIDAC chair Ted Wilkes says treatment provides people with a chance of recovery – which leads to less re-offending.

“Indigenous Australians increasingly fill our country’s prisons and juvenile detention centres at alarmingly disproportionate rates,” he said.

“Treatment is simply far more effective in terms of outcomes and costs than imprisoning people.”

The report recommends making diversion programs more accessible for indigenous Australians, while simultaneously establishing a network of indigenous-only residential rehabilitation centres as alternatives to jail. It also suggests every young Aboriginal person be given an individual education fund “to assist and promote their participation and retention within the education system”.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25687111-421,00.html

Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining

Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society’s Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people.

The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent “or the result of creative accounting”, reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial.

Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of “sex slavery” among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme’s source, described as an “anonymous youth worker”, was later exposed as a federal government official whose “evidence” was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police.

The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been “exonerated by an internal inquiry”. Shortly before last year’s election, Howard declared a “national emergency” and sent the army to the Northern Territory to “protect the children” who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in “unthinkable numbers”.

Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor’s Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? “The Rudd government,” noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, “has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre.”

In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the “national emergency”, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the “unthinkable numbers”. They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was “quarantined”. Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: “To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage.”

What the doctors found they already knew – children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are “economically unviable”. The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world’s biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it.

Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world’s largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root – a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard’s “mate”. “The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,” says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, “but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump.”

What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity’s support.

John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia

This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday October 24 2008 on p34 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 01.22 on October 24 2008.

Bereavement, known as sorry business, is a very important part of (Australian) Aboriginal culture.

Funerals can involve entire communities, and the expression of grief can include self injury. The grieving relatives may live in a specially designated area, the sorry camp, for a period of time. The relatives may also cut off their hair or wear white pigment on their faces.

The community refrains from using the name of the deceased, but can refer to him or her by the name Kwementyaye. People with the same name as the deceased should also be called Kwementyaye. Photographs or videos of the deceased have to be destroyed.

The traditional healer, or Ngungkari, is of central importance in Aboriginal society in central Australia. They are sought for help in all manner of physical, psychological and spiritual problems. They are usually paid a fee and people may travel long distances to see one that has a good reputation. Their treatment involves various magical techniques such as removing objects from people’s bodies, the use of culturally appropriate explanations for symptoms and the use of suggestion. Pharmacological intervention with bush medicine seems less common. I have had few direct interactions with Ngungkaris but have found it very beneficial to work in parallel with them. For example I will often ask a patient if they have seen a Ngungkari and perhaps recommend that they see one if they have not already done so. Even if the patient does not see their problems as relating to sorcery, the Ngungkari can be very useful to the patient. [it is suggested] that they can act in a supportive psychotherapy role. Their high standing within the Aboriginal community suggests that they are likely to provide the therapeutic benefits of making the patient feel understood.

~ Source: Australian Academy of Medicine here

In recent years, more and more of my Aboriginal associates, colleagues and average community members, have joined the mainstream belief that “our kids need to go to school” and that [Aboriginal] parents should be “penalised” — such as in the latest policy/strategy/law in having Federal Govt. payments (child support and parenting payments, and similar) be stopped or suspended — if they do not “send their kids to school”.

I have never been an advocate nor believer in compulsory schooling, and was probably one of the most “difficult”, uncooperative, and rebellious students I know — though I have met many similar children and young people, who were known (labelled) as “problems”, throughout my years in community service work.

Of course, as a very vocal (outspoken and often ostracised) representative and advocate for the protection and continuance of Aboriginal “culture”, I have continued to hold grave concern about the role of so-called [modern] compulsory education on a society generally, and more specifically, its detrimental and subversive impact on real “cultural survival” and genuine maintenance of diversity (differences) into the present day and age …

“Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner-life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centres for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your children have their childhoods extended [adolescent society, as in remain immature], not even for a day. …”
~ Excerpt from “How public education cripples our kids, and why“  by John Taylor Gatto

My further research and inquiry lead me to this view, and also to other well documented articles/books regarding the beginnings and foundations of our most common form of “Western” education …

Be assured, I now feel validated and/or affirmed in what I initially had felt or “intuited” from an early age … that school as I and millions of others know it, was not to “encourage nor bring-out the best in me”, nor can it be the means for “cultural” survival nor revival.

In The Age (June 30, 1962):

“Living among the people (in NW Australia) you could never despair of mankind. They have an integrity you don’t find in any white society. If only their unspoilt qualities can be preserved and built upon, I believe we have there the nucleus of a great new civilisation.”

John Hetherington quoted artist Jim Wigley (1917-1999)

]]> http://daownunder.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/preserve-aboriginal-nucleus/feed/ 0 Djubba http://daownunder.wordpress.com/2008/06/14/consensus-the-art-of-manipulation/ http://daownunder.wordpress.com/2008/06/14/consensus-the-art-of-manipulation/#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:25:36 +0000 Djubba http://daownunder.wordpress.com/?p=63 ]]>

Social Commentary: (Please note) I am an experienced ‘educator’, group ‘facilitator’, and human/community services professional, having more than 25 years of working in this area. Policy and politics are par for the course in this kind of work.

In recent months, since the Rudd Government took office in our Federal Government, I have been more overtly concerned by the apparent ’smoothness’ of the political faces now ‘leading’ this country, and how there is no distinct differences from this Government (so-called political leadership), to that of its predecessors, be they Liberal or Labor, going back as far as the Hawke government.

The same ’smoothness’, smiling congenial faces, power-dressed to impress, can now be readily seen operating in numerous ‘leadership’ roles throughout most organisations, be that public, private, governmental, statutory, and or non-govt.

This trend has concerned me for many years; and why so many of my peers, associates, colleagues, and fellow citizens in general, seem to be going along with whatever political/policy changes are occurring, without any real challenge or open dissent, though they often complain, most often outside of the relevant forums/opportunities that they should be ‘complaining’ or ’speaking-out’ in.

I have participated in 100s of forums, meetings, conferences, think-groups, and the like throughout these years, and have often felt disturbed or disheartened at what I believed/felt should have been the outcome “got lost” somewhere in the process, or that I was “on my own” with whatever the issue was being addressed, or ‘discussed’.

In many instances, I truly did feel that ’somehow’ the agenda, or group had been ‘channelled’ (coerced) into a particular consensus — agreement and endorsement of an item that had been presented in such a ‘clever’ way, that it was more the motion of a meeting, without the accompaniment of the passion or emotion of the dialogue …

My ignorance (lack of knowledge, information) bothered me, as I couldn’t ‘name’, ‘understand’ or vocalise coherently why I would feel that things weren’t “quite right”, even though I was witnessing, experiencing such shenanigans time-and-again, on matters where the outcomes would often have major impacts (often detrimental) on many peoples lives and/or livelihood. It was if the ‘group’ couldn’t see, hear or sense that ’somehow’ the decision-making processes had been ‘guided’ to a preordained outcome.

Recently, in my constant quest of learning and researching, I came across The Delphi Technique and sensed I had now an answer (the formula and blue-print) to what had been ‘going on’ in most of those meetings and gatherings.

[I suggest if you're really interested, you do your own reading on Delphi, and then apply that to 'situations' of a political/employment/community nature, that you may have experienced.]

I also found a further article — correlated to that of Delphi — about sensitivity training:

” …Sensitivity training is based on research on human behaviour that came out of efforts during World War II to ascertain whether or not an enemy’s core beliefs and behaviour could be modified by the application of certain psychological techniques. These techniques have been gradually perfected over the years by efforts of business and industry leaders to persuade people to buy products, including the radio and television industry to ascertain how an audience [population] might [can] be habituated to certain types of programming. …

” The techniques perfected by behavioural scientists to change our core beliefs aim at sowing confusion in the minds of those who would oppose such change. This confusion is created by presenting logical contradictions as equally plausible, valid, and actionable. Those without a strong belief system, be it empirical, scientific, religious, or logical are especially susceptible to the urgings of those who seek change. Those who have strong enough belief systems that enable them to challenge, refute, and oppose this change are coerced by small-group encounter techniques to conform to the ‘majority’ view as determined and sown by a ‘facilitator’ and supported by the core group of ‘believers’ plus the newly recruited ’sheep’ who join the ‘majority’ group for fear of confrontation. If the challenger does not conform to the group pressure to adopt the ‘consensus’ view, s/he is further isolated from the group and/or discarded. S/he is never allowed to participate fully in the process thereafter. … ” etc, etc.

In my view, a classic example of such gross “manipulation” of the nation, was the recently held — by the Australian Government — “The Australia, 2020 Summit”, where processes and procedures were typical of the “Delphi” format. And of course the recent “Sorry” apology being enacted is another “consensus” stratagem.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Aboriginality re-in-forces and represents “the Law”, not the laws of Man as such,
but “the Principle” (or Law) of life and living.

We can all cite examples of the laws of government and religion — and thus of Man — and see how they have all-ways favoured the lawmakers, politicians, and religious enforcers, and thus one group against another. However, no matter how well intentioned, such laws discriminate, and in their application they usually empower the power-hungry at the further detriment and expense of the disempowered. Lawmakers, politicians and the pious as “power-brokers” make up a “triad of evil” that can be understood as all-ways saying, “these laws are for just-us” yet never ensuring nor enshrining justice. Also, such laws and teachings all-ways relate to the principles of humanism, which of their very nature cannot be inclusive of all life.

Aboriginal literally translates to the “absolute original” — the first known — below and beyond all other forms, and in the context of this country (Australia) and its original peoples (“the Aborigines”), it is not just a race or class of people, it can also refer to a state of being, a state of knowing, a Way of Living-Being — an adherence to knowing and living in a manner that maintains “ones” connection to all life — not just humans or “just-us”.
Aboriginal, in its essential implication, is not about separateness from some and acceptance to others.

The “ab origin” means “from the beginning” and trans-relates to the absolute-original-gene within the Aborigines of these lands, and in-term effectively recognises the “absolute original genesis” that is within all — the oneness, or source of beginnings of life that “links” all — “the original-gene-in-all” (genesis).

Aboriginal is the knowing of the origins and the Law of Life that is implicit in all of life, not “just-us”.

Aboriginal really cannot be interpreted logically, nor rationalised or intellectualised, no matter our need or reason to do so; It is an experience and a “knowing”, as It is original, and therefore beyond the limitations and confines of words themselves.

In my case, even though I had a “Christian” father; a Muslim Grandfather (maternal); an Anglo-Germanic Australian Grandfather (paternal); an Aboriginal-Irish Grandmother, I remain uncomfortable and “disturbed” whenever I am being imposed upon to describe who am I. I could say I am all of these and yet none of these. I could also say without confusion that I am one-of-all; an absolute original (ab-original) that is all.

In effect, in our contemporary language, “origin” means just that — the point of beginning — to which in a 3 dimensional world/reality such as ours, the coordinates or point of origin is mathematically written as 0,0,0. At that point and beyond no-thing can make sense, and being “ab-origine” cannot “make sense” either.

May I suggest that none of us stop at any particular religion; continue the search for your origene, your “aboriginality” reality — go through and beyond any religion that you may embrace to the source, to the Seed, beyond the separateness, the split, the alien-nation, and the limitations of humanism — go to the Law, the Principle, not the war of Saddam-Islam or Adam-Christian or Abraham-Judean or any “other” that binds and limits Aboriginality in this country (Australia) or within one’s Self.

Go “deeper” into, not further a-way from The Law, the “Dreaming”, the Tjukurritja Tjukurrpa; The “Dreamtime Story”.

This is my expression and understanding … for now.

Salaam in One
Djubba (David John) Akbar (27 Feb 2003)

This is an abbreviated Version of a longer Commentary I wrote some time ago. Full Version here.