John Bowler, MP

Independent Kalgoorlie MP John Bowler has raised the prospect of withdrawing benefits to Aboriginals as the State Government admits it has no idea how to close the growing divide between WA’s indigenous and non-indigenous communities.

Mr Bowler, whose electorate takes in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and Laverton, said years of indigenous policies had clearly failed and the Government needed to look at a “tough love” approach.

“I don’t know if that’s the answer – it may make it worse,” he said. “But what’s happening now isn’t working.”

Mr Bowler’s controversial comments fly in the face of established tradition on Aboriginal affairs and suggest a radical rewriting of indigenous policy to cut welfare and make payments conditional on work in a bid to re-energise an Aboriginal population crippled by alcoholism and despair.

It comes after Regional Development Minister Brendon Grylls said that despite money being pumped into the growing crisis, the Aboriginal situation – including alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse – was worse than ever.

Mr Bowler said Aboriginal communities had fallen into a cycle of dependency which needed to be broken if there was any hope of improvement. “There is no incentive to work,” he said.

Mr Bowler said the indigenous crisis was getting worse at a time the State was going through a boom and there was unprecedented demand for semi-skilled and non-skilled labour.

“What’s going to happen when we eventually have our cyclical turn? What happens then,” he said.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Peter Collier said he understood the approach but it had to be looked at cautiously.

“There is an appetite across the community and in a number of quarters for that sort of punitive action,” he said.

“But you’ve got to be careful that if you do do that, you’re not throwing the baby out with bathwater because what that does is create a multitude of social issues that evolve as a result of that.

“In some instances some Aboriginal people in the community will respond accordingly, but you’ve just got to be careful that you’re not creating a rod for your own back and causing a further cycle of despair, particularly in communities that don’t have access to other forms of revenue or other support material.”

Child Protection Minister Robyn McSweeney said she supported income management. She said voluntary and forced income-management was operating in the Kimberley and parts of Perth and was tied to the welfare of a person’s children. Ms McSweeney said she would like to see it expanded to Kalgoorlie and the Murchison.

~ Steve Pennells, The West Australian, 11 June 2011

“Welcome home,” says the sign painted on one of the tin shelters in this grim patch of third-world misery which sits in the shadow of a mammoth mound of tailings from the Superpit, the biggest open cut mine in the country.

The camp is mostly ignored by locals, as are the Aboriginals who stagger drunk through town – temporary visitors who come here via Laverton from the area known as the Lands and camp around the city.

“It’s genocide,” said Pastor Geoffrey Stokes, a big mountain of a man who isn’t prone to understatement. “Look at these conditions they let us live in.”

You just have to drive through the dingy camps around this rich Goldfields city and north to places like Laverton, where children are dumped by their parents and domestic abuse is rife, to realise that regardless of everything that has been done by successive governments, the plight of WA’s Aboriginal population is now worse than it’s ever been.

Years ago, several towns fell into an unofficial and unacknowledged form of apartheid – Aboriginals in one bar, white workers in the other – and there is a culture of resignation and acceptance about the massive levels of alcoholism and sexual abuse that is robbing a generation of Aboriginal children from any kind of decent future.

This week, Regional Development Minister Brendon Grylls brought some refreshing honesty to a debate shackled by years of what talkback hosts would call “political correctness”: “I don’t know what the answer is, mate. If you’re there, I’m hoping you can come up with it.”

For years, successive WA governments have handled the indigenous crisis with a clumsy juggling of ideology and pragmatism, throwing money at problems when they became public.

When The West Australian highlighted the Halls Creek crisis five years ago, millions of dollars were pumped into the town within weeks. When the paper published a leaked report last Saturday which revealed that children were being abandoned in Laverton, Child Protection Minister Robyn McSweeney swooped into town with funding for extra services.

The reactions have been necessary but, like everything with indigenous affairs, they have been knee-jerk and temporary.

Any bigger attempt to address what Pastor Stokes calls “genocide” is often met with hand-wringing resignation, an admission that the task is staggeringly complex and the commissioning of a report to see what can be done – such as the one which has sat on Indigenous Affairs Minister Peter Collier’s desk since February.

Its author, former WA governor Lt-Gen. John Sanderson was paid $200,000 over two years to chair the Indigenous Implementation Board and consult with the Aboriginal community on its issues.

Mr Collier says the report will be tabled in Parliament “very soon”.

It’s not that there isn’t the political will to do something about this issue.

Mr Collier, a former Kalgoorlie boy, asked for the indigenous affairs portfolio and Mrs McSweeney’s passion for the welfare of children is well-known since her days in Opposition.

“She’s looked me in the eye a few times and given me a few home truths about child neglect which has changed the course of discussion,” Mr Grylls admits.

It’s just that no-one knows how to solve the problem or, more importantly, how to engage an Aboriginal community which is crippled by despair, negativity and alcoholism.

There is a bigger debate that is needed but few politicians want to risk dipping their toes into those risky waters. The sad fact is that there are very few votes in the powder keg that is the state of WA’s Aboriginal population.

Mr Collier said yesterday that he agrees with Mr Grylls’ admission that the Government doesn’t know how to solve the crisis.

“A lot of the stuff that’s been done over generations is, quite frankly, like putting a band-aid on a broken arm… there’s been a bit of tokenism, an enormous amount of duplication (and) a massive amount of wastage of resources which are not necessarily directed at the right areas,” he said.

Part of that was on show last Friday, when, without warning, a convoy of trucks came thundering down the dirt track towards the group of tin huts which for years had been refuge to itinerant Aboriginals travelling through Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

Within hours, they had levelled every structure in the camp, ironically known as Silver City, which was originally built by the Federal and State governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“They just came past me,” Terry Smith said of the demolition as he drank a beer on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie and questioned where his people would camp now.

“They didn’t even look at me. Why are they doing this?”

The Department of Indigenous Affairs said the site was levelled because the structures were unsafe.

It said people who stayed there could take advantage of new short-term accommodation nearby. But that won’t be ready for at least a year and the demolition came without warning and in the midst of winter rains and freezing cold nights.

It was a bizarre, confrontational act which was understandably seen by Aboriginals from the Lands as an attack.

Up the road, in this boom city with the third-world ring around its edges, Independent Kalgoorlie MP John Bowler selected his words carefully when asked what the solution was.

In the face of years of failed policy, he said a new approach was needed to lift an Aboriginal community which had become impotent by a generation of welfare dependency.

He said he expected a backlash over his suggestion that the Government should consider withdrawing benefits as a way of forcing people to lift themselves out of cycle of despair.

“I shouldn’t have that fear. Are people who are in the mainstream of politics scared of saying what I’m saying because of that?” he said. “The people who are going to send that crap (criticism) … surely they must think what is the long-term answer?”

~ By Steve Pennells, The West Australian, 11 June 2011

In April, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin visited the city, where she announced $100,000 for improving sanitation and security at the camp.

Pastor Geoffrey Stokes called for evidence of the Federal Government’s commitment while examining Boulder Camp yesterday. “Where is it?” Mr Stokes asked.

But a spokeswoman for Ms Macklin said the toilet and showers were “now functional”, the tap washers had been replaced to stop leaks and the solar panel heater had been fixed to ensure there was hot water.

“Community members, along with Bega Garnbirringu Health Services, helped clean up the rubbish around the camp. The council has installed skip bins around the camp and a rubbish collection system has been established,” she said.

She said changes were also being made to make the camp safer.

~ Meera Nambiar, Kalgoorlie Miner, 10 June 2011

The report, from the Goldfields-Esperance Development Commission and obtained by The Weekend West yesterday, claims “increasing incidences” of children being left for days in the town of Laverton, about 950km north-east of Perth, and exposed to “significant personal safety risk”.

“Abandoned children are brought to Laverton by their families from the Lands communities and are left behind when their families or relatives continue on to Kalgoorlie, to be collected, in most cases, on the journey back home,” the report said.

“The amount of time that these children are left unsupervised in Laverton varies from days to weeks. Many of the children display evidence of poor health and hygiene, with many infested with lice and have little or no clothing.”

The report also claimed that girls as young as 12 were selling themselves for sex, that there were extreme cases of domestic violence and of severe child neglect.

It also claimed a young boy and girl, believed to be aged between six and nine, lived at the local rubbish tip for several weeks last year.

A Department of Indigenous Affairs spokesman said the rubbish tip claim could not be verified.

Regional Development Minister Brendon Grylls yesterday ordered an urgent briefing on the report, given to his office in January.

A Laverton resident who has acted as an unofficial foster carer, Regina Sullivan, said that while she believed the report over-stated the problem, she had cared for “a lot” of abandoned children, the most recent in April.

Ms Sullivan, who works for the local patrol and has lobbied for a children’s safe house in the town, said it was a seasonal problem that happened mainly between December and February.

“This is when people from those areas come to Laverton for a holiday and get involved in drinking and they leave their children, who have nowhere to go,” she said.

A Department of Child Protection spokesman questioned the credibility of the report, written by a senior project officer based in Leonora, saying it was not official.

“The department has been working on some of the issues as far back as 2010 and has many initiatives in Laverton, including joint operations with WA Police,” he said.

“The department has not received any reports of abandoned children in Laverton.

“At times children may be placed in the care of extended family when families travel to other locations for various reasons such as funerals or medical treatment.

“On occasion, the department has assisted to return children to their family when family arrangements breakdown or financial assistance is required.”

Upper House MP Helen Bullock, who attended an inter-agency meeting in the town last week, said the report was depressing.

“The fact that some parents can mistreat their children in such an appalling way saddened me a great deal,” she said. “But the fact that there was no action taken by the government shows that they acted no better than those parents.”

The report claimed that “in effect, there is no lead agency in the Laverton region that is able, or prepared, to accept responsibility for this issue”.

“The term ‘cultural respect’ refers to the recognition, protection and continued advancement of the inherent rights, cultures and traditions of Aboriginal people. Cultural respect is achieved when cultural differences are respected.”

Source: Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council (2004): Cultural Respect Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health 2004-2009 p. 7

IMO: It’s a pity that many in the Aboriginal affairs arena, know the talk, but rarely, if at all put it into practise!

Australia: Labor moves to shut down remote Aboriginal settlements

By Susan Allan, 27 June 2009

The federal and Northern Territory (NT) Labor governments last month unveiled a series of free-market measures that will deepen the poverty and suffering in indigenous communities.

Working Future [another economic driven ploy to disintegrate Aboriginal spiritual culture] announced by the NT government on May 20, seeks, under the auspices of the federal government’s NT intervention, to force the estimated 10,000 Aboriginal people living in some 580 remote “homeland” settlements into 20 special settlements or so-called “economic hubs”. The homeland communities have been defined as “non-viable”.

Echoing both the former Howard government, and the current Labor government, which has adopted Howard’s 2007 police-military intervention as its own, NT chief minister Paul Henderson claimed that his government would end “indigenous disadvantage” by creating “reservoirs of opportunity” in the 20 hub towns.

In reality, Working Future is aimed at clearing the way for mining, pastoral and tourism interests at the direct expense of Aboriginal [culture and way of life] communities. The policy flows directly from the Rudd government’s earlier decision to prioritise 26 indigenous communities across the country for new housing and infrastructure, marking a drive to shut down many settlements.

The homeland or “outstations” movement emerged in the 1970s when small groups of Aboriginal people began establishing settlements on traditional lands in an attempt to escape the social dysfunction, alcoholism and substance abuse prevalent in many camps on the fringes of larger towns. Recognising that this movement could be utilised to ease social tensions and isolate indigenous people from the working class, federal governments granted the settlements minimal funding for basic dwellings.

The NT government will now freeze funding for existing settlements at $36 million and axe grants to homelands not occupied for more than eight months of the year. Homeland residents requiring regular access to health, education and other basic social services will have little option but to leave [and not just their homes].

While the NT government claims it will provide transport to pre-school, primary and secondary schools in the hub towns, scores of remote homeland schools are expected to close. Students who live further away from the hubs will be sent to boarding schools or hostels. The already overcrowded and grossly under-resourced settlements defined as “hubs” will be funded by a miniscule $160 million grant over the next five years. This represents just over $1.5 million per year for each community, nowhere near enough to provide the social facilities required for the anticipated influx of people.

Henderson declared that the hubs would be successful only “if private businesses can get secure tenure on Aboriginal land” [another ploy and condition to over-ride custodial & traditional rights to land]. Private investors, he said, would be given security of land tenure and generous tax incentives. All of the hubs are located on traditional Aboriginal lands and government funding is conditional [economic blackmail, no less] on traditional owners and land councils signing long-term leases in favour of the territory government. The hubs will be run by business managers previously installed under the Howard government’s intervention.

Federal indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin [yeh right!] congratulated the NT government for driving “fundamental reform” and then announced that the Rudd government would compulsorily acquire 15 town camps on the fringes of the central Australian city of Alice Springs . Currently managed by Tangentyere Council, a local Aboriginal body, the camps are home to about 2,000 indigenous residents. The camps’ average home occupancy rate is 10 people.

Macklin ordered the acquisition because Tangentyere Council refused to sign over a 40-year lease to the government in exchange for federal funds for new houses, repair and maintenance of existing dwellings, road upgrades and some infrastructure. Decades of government under-funding have ensured that basic social services are largely non-existent in the town camps.

Labor’s acquisition of the camps sends a clear message to Aboriginal communities, including those in the “economic hubs”, that they will receive similar treatment unless they conform to government dictates. [is this another example of Reconciliation on the dominant cultures terms?] Macklin declared the acquisition was not temporary or under a 40-year lease, but “forever”.

Tangentyere rejected similar lease demands from the Howard government in 2006, when residents feared their rents would be raised beyond their capacity to pay and they could face eviction. These concerns increased in February this year when Macklin directed state and territory housing ministers not to spend federal funds on public housing in remote Aboriginal communities until “tenancy management reforms” were implemented.

Major mining, agribusiness and tourist corporations have long demanded unrestricted access to Aboriginal land, an end to communal ownership and a ready supply of cheap labour.

The move to disperse homeland settlements replicates proposals elaborated in 2007 by Helen Hughes from the Centre for Independent Studies, a right-wing free-market think tank. Hughes’s book Lands of Shame called for drastic cuts to Aboriginal social welfare and an end to all government funding of so-called unviable homelands.

Announcing Working Future last month, NT indigenous affairs minister Alison Anderson told the media the government could not “put infrastructure in every community” and previous attempts to “fill gaps with money” had “failed and will continue to fail”. Homeland residents would be taken “out of the welfare cycle” and would “have to get used to it”.

The fraud of the Rudd government’s 2008 parliamentary apology to Aboriginal people for past injustices could not be clearer. Just over a year after officially expressing regret for the removal of previous generations of indigenous children from their families, the Labor government and its NT counterpart are embarking on a program of herding entire communities off their traditional lands.

Working Future has encountered opposition from NT Aboriginal communities, legal rights organisations and medical academics. Many fear that dislocation from the remote homelands will produce more homelessness, petrol sniffing, alcoholism and other social problems.

The Laynhapuy Homelands Association, which manages outstations in Arnhem Land, denounced Working Future as another crime against Australia ’s indigenous population [Aboriginals will do, thanks]. Association official Waturr Gumana told ABC radio: “The stolen generations—this is happening again. People are going to be taken out of their homes and we know what they are doing. The government only wants the dollars from our land. And our kids, our people who will be taken back to the main communities … history is going to repeat itself.”

The Barkly Shire Council, which is directly responsible for maintaining 26 of the 89 small communities within its area, said it could not provide basic services to outstations with capped funding. The council’s chief executive officer Jeff Sowiak told the media: “The council’s belief is that the categorisation of some communities as outstations is just a means of denying people who live there access to basic levels of services, or a lesser standard of service.”

In the face of this anger, sections of the Aboriginal leadership have begun criticising Working Future, including ex-NT deputy chief minister Marion Scrymgour and former federal government commissioner Patrick Dodson, who both earlier participated in its drafting. Scrymgour was in charge of drawing up the plans and commissioned Dodson to hold consultations with homeland residents.

On June 4, Scrymgour resigned from the Labor Party in protest, ending the NT government’s one-seat majority. She told ABC television that the policy was “insulting” and that Labor had “lied to Aboriginal people”. Dodson told the media that Working Future was “not just brutal but a ‘die on the vine’ policy” aimed at “forcing people into the major towns against their wishes”.

The record shows, however, that Dodson and Scrymgour [so-called Aboriginal leaders! hmmm...] have no fundamental differences with Labor’s measures. Dodson has proposed that homelands with more than 100 residents should be designated as communities and serviced to the same level as other similar NT communities. This would still force the closure of many smaller settlements and merely perpetuate the existing under-funding for the remainder. While medical surveys suggest that homeland residents have better health results and lower mortality rates than those living in town camps and urban centres, social conditions remain desperately inadequate for all Aboriginal people.

… If the homeland settlements [and similar cultural enclaves] are finally shut down, this will constitute yet another chapter in the shameful history of dispossession and dispersal [and disease] of Australia ’s indigenous population [Aboriginals]—carried out to clear the land for capitalist [monetary] exploitation.

Source: World Socialist Web Site

Responding to references by the Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott, on the weekend that the practice was tokenistic and paternalistic, Commissioner Gooda said such acknowledgements were a statement of fact and critical to the nation’s ongoing reconciliation process.

“The High Court of Australia in the Mabo decision recognised the fact that Australia was occupied when the British came here and that the land (and the seas) continued to be cared for, occupied, utilised and identified as the land of different tribal groups, operating in accordance with their customary laws and traditions,” Commissioner Gooda said.

“It was more than 200 years before the courts finally recognised this fact in 1992 and it, along with the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, has steered us along the reconciliation path that we are still travelling on.

“Acknowledging Traditional Owners is a contemporary and practical way of enshrining the High Court decision in Mabo,” Commissioner Gooda said. “As a nation, we have now moved beyond debating what is a self-evident truth about our history. Acknowledging Traditional Owners is a matter of respect,” Commissioner Gooda said.

Media contact: Louise McDermott on 0419 258 597 02 9284 9851

Australian Human Rights Commission, Media Release, 15 March 2010

Source: Australian Human Rights Commission, Media Release

Rock of Ages

“Aboriginal people believe that the spirit child comes from the earth … I haven’t seen this belief about the spirit child in any other culture, even Indigenous ones. We come from this earth; we are born from the earth. We believe that the whole of life is a spiritual experience and that we as Aboriginal people are actually more spirit than matter …

“I really believe that emotions can create chemical reactions in the body. If we don’t face those emotions, it can create sicknesses… So for Aboriginal people, the whole of life is a spiritual experience, and so the whole of sickness is a spiritual process. The spirit can not be in balance if it is out of balance with the body.

If you’re spiritually unwell, you can’t help but affect the whole of your being …See, the impact of colonialism has been huge … we Aboriginal people are spiritual people and we are still recovering because of colonialism …

There’s not a lot of understanding about the part of white Australia because they have this misguided belief that colonialism doesn’t affect them. Of course it does! It’s made them into the people they are today, which mean they cannot hear what Aboriginal people are telling them … Many are trying to run away from their own history … As they get older and more mature , hopefully they’ll have a better understanding … You see, that mouth of the snake… our people has retreated into the belly of the snake. It’s our consolidation of our Aboriginality, a renewing of our identity. Only recently have we begun emerging from the mouth of the snake with renewal and consolidation of who we are …

You see, it’s the white [non-Aboriginal] terms of reference, it’s their misinterpretations that have given definition to Aboriginal illnesses.”

~ Aunty Lilla Watson (acknowledged Aboriginal Elder, Brisbane Qld)