Desert sweep (fwd)

[Ponsonnet Maia]

Thank you very much for this article. I work with Aboriginal communities of 
Northern Australia myself, and I am really glad that this piece of news is 
eventually coming up on this list.

May I emphasize an aspect of the Australian government emergency plan that 
is not that clear in the article from the Australian?

The plan is many fold and most of its points can plausibly impact the 
welfare of NT Aboriginal community members, children in particular. But the 
land rights aspect of the plan, consisting in scrapping the permit system 
and taking hold of some territories that were previously the property of 
indigenous inhabitants for 5 years, is more pernicious. The government has 
never explained the link between scrapping the permit system and the welfare 
of children. To all those who know the context, this scrapping can only make 
things worse. And there are many reasons to think that the 5 year 
confiscation of territories is part of a more general agenda targeting to 
scrap indigenous Land Right more generally. The underlying motivations for 
this agenda are economical, ideological, political, etc.

So yes, the law, that the government wants passed today despite vigorous 
protests, is the beginning of a new era, for better and worse. But, if 
nothing comes to stop the current government, today may also be remembered 
as the day when the indigenous people of Northern Australia will enter the 
process of loosing the legal Land Rights they have gained 30 years ago. That 
is, they are loosing their own land; and this could kill many of them.

With many thanks for reading this.
Maïa Ponsonnet


>From: phil cash cash <cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>
>Reply-To: Indigenous Languages and Technology <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
>To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
>Subject: [ILAT] Desert sweep (fwd)
>Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:21:41 -0700
>
>Desert sweep
>
>Nicolas Rothwell | August 11, 2007
>http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22223488-28737,00.html?from=public_rss
>
>ABORIGINES across the Northern Territory can feel it like a hot, fierce 
>wind
>from the southeast, blowing through their communities and pulverising the
>old established order and its familiar routines.
>sweep
>
>[photo inset - One of the most significant changes advocated by the reforms
>is a strong police presence in the Northern Territory. Picture: Renee
>Nowytarger]
>
>The 500-page NT National Emergency Response legislation - passed by the
>House of Representatives in Canberra on Tuesday, examined by a high-speed
>Senate inquiry yesterday and due to become law early next week - aims at
>nothing less than the refashioning of indigenous northern Australia.
>
>Constraint and education, health checks and modernisation, surveillance and
>opportunity: it holds out the prospect of all these things. It begins from
>one key, all-justifying assumption: the federal Government sees a social
>breakdown in the bush so deep that the life and wellbeing of young
>indigenous children are at risk.
>
>The plan comes with a large price tag. Its implementation will cost more
>than $500 million in its first year, a sum that equates to $8 million in
>additional funding for each of the 73 main target communities.
>
>These new laws, which give Canberra wide control over remote Aboriginal
>lands and confer a heavy responsibility on the nation, rescind a range of
>basic rights granted to indigenous bush communities only a generation ago,
>or restrict those rights drastically, to guarantee a future of promise.
>
>The legislation is unapologetic about this and quite clear about the
>reasons: "In the case of indigenous people in the NT, there are significant
>social and economic barriers to the enjoyment of their rights to health,
>development, education, property, social security and culture. The
>emergency measures are part of the action to improve the ability of
>indigenous peoples to enjoy these rights and freedoms."
>
>But few observers have yet grasped just how coercive the new regime will be
>and how much it will change life in the remote world.
>
>Family heads who repeatedly fail to send their children to school will not
>only have the cash part of their welfare or community work payments cut
>back; the remainder will be supplied in vouchers that can be spent in the
>local community store only, essentially producing a kind of movement
>control. Until now, bush Aborigines could collect their payments in town.
>With that system drastically changed, a lifestyle of subsidised nomadism
>will be much more difficult to sustain.
>
>The Community Development Employment Program that provided most of the 
>wages
>in remote settlements and served as the low-grade fuel of their economies 
>is
>being scrapped across the NT. In its place comes training and work for the
>dole. The same principles will apply to the new labour programs as in
>mainstream society. If remote community members regularly fail to discharge
>their appointed tasks, they will be held to be in breach and lose their 
>work
>slots, and money, for several weeks. This is a big change from the CDEP
>system, which had an opt-in, opt-out flavour: people often worked only when
>convenient.
>
>Remote community members also will need to prove they are job-seekers, in
>training or looking for employment through their registered local work
>provider, or they will lose their weekly payments: a sharp departure from
>the days of unconditional money and yet another mechanism for keeping
>people close to their communities.
>
>Power in remote Aboriginal societies comes from organisations and their
>funds. Almost unnoticed until now, the new laws have changed this power
>game, giving Canberra full override.
>
>Federal Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal
>Brough gains complete control over NT indigenous community governance. He
>can suspend and take over Aboriginal local councils and any of their
>associations, including art or resource centres, and transfer their assets
>to the new local government shires being designed. An axe thus hangs over
>any bush indigenous grouping that fails to perform.
>
>This all adds up to a new regime with bite. It spells the end to the hazy
>days of many remote communities, of all-day television watching and card
>playing, watched over by a clutch of harassed mainstream advisers. It is
>intervention that brooks no appeal and is designed to change behaviour
>fast.
>
>"In a crisis such as this," declares the commonwealth's background memo,
>"the measures are necessary to ensure that there is real improvement before
>it is too late for many of the children. The bill will provide the
>foundation for rebuilding social and economic structures, and give
>meaningful content to indigenous rights and freedoms."
>
>So runs the extraordinary argument behind this policy revolution. Not since
>wartime has language of this kind been presented to federal parliament, and
>the index of the crisis lies in federal Labor's broad acceptance of these
>startling measures.
>
>Yet the emergency response, for all its high seriousness and deep pockets,
>faces an uncertain evolution as it moves from blueprint to reality in the
>field. There are two fundamental challenges ahead of its architects and the
>teams of experts charged with making a difference on the ground.
>
>The first, and most perplexing, is the sheer resistance of remote 
>Aboriginal
>societies to improvements mandated and delivered from outside.
>
>Many of the observers of this other Australia have come to the conclusion
>that its problems lie much deeper than economics and education, and relate
>more to loss of hope and purpose, to an almost subterranean ailment of the
>spirit that besets many small cultures overwhelmed by the outside world; an
>affliction that may require as much care and compassion as administrative
>guidance and financial transfusion.
>
>The second, more immediate, challenge is political: the commonwealth's
>intervention has a degree of soft popular support but is opposed, in part
>or whole, on practical and moral grounds by a range of interest groups,
>including Labor politicians of radical stripe, the NT Labor Government, the
>established Aboriginal intelligentsia and organisational leadership, a
>variety of academic experts in indigenous affairs and legal voices.
>
>These voices were raised high in yesterday's emotive Senate inquiry
>hearings. Some of them warn of cultural genocide, while some bitterly
>condemn the lack of consultation with the affected communities. Some argue
>that the limited lifting of the access permit system for the larger
>communities, a change designed to promote economic and social connection
>with the outside world, will in fact gravely harm their interests and erode
>their cultural timbre.
>
>Much of this criticism is a form of mourning for an old paradigm that is 
>now
>dismantled: the model that advanced the three-fold agenda of land rights,
>self-determination and reconciliation.
>
>But the reaction has been intense for, like all the most profound reform
>projects embarked on by the Prime Minister, the intervention has a strong
>ideological component. The Aborigines occupy a hallowed symbolic role in
>the pantheon of the intelligentsia and the cultural establishment. This
>social class has a deep influence over national opinion and much of its
>membership is inclined by instinct to oppose the Coalition Government and
>to resist measures that infringe on indigenous rights.
>
>Neither John Howard nor his various Aboriginal affairs ministers have
>prepared the case for indigenous reforms during the past decade.
>
>That task has been left to one man: Cape York leader Noel Pearson who, step
>by step, has argued his way towards a new understanding of the plight of
>remote Aboriginal societies, finding few supportive echoes beyond the
>editorial columns of this newspaper.
>
>It is the Pearson analysis that stands, like a shaping shadow, behind the
>chief measures in the new legislation. One of his core arguments is that
>alcoholism, drug abuse and gambling should be viewed as illnesses, subject
>to treatment, rather than just afflictions caused by indigenous social
>deprivation.
>
>He also contends that passive welfare rots away post-traditional societies.
>On to these Pearsonian ideas another current of thought has been patched:
>the view that collective land tenure stunts economic activity and that
>private leases are essential to bringing security, growth and commerce to
>bush economies.
>
>This view, developed by Aboriginal affairs veteran Neil Westbury when he 
>ran
>the NT's office of indigenous policy, lies behind the federal Government's
>backing for the introduction of 99-year leases on Aboriginal land in the
>NT.
>
>Westbury, significantly, is also the chief proponent, together with another
>former senior NT public servant, Mike Dillon, of the argument that
>Aboriginal Australia is a failed state within the nation: a view that
>almost invites the emergency-response model developed by Australia in
>Solomon Islands.
>
>This, then, is a theory-driven legislative package, and its creators and
>proponents will be looking for swift signs of success to back up their
>prescriptions for remote Australia. The deeper problems confronting the
>indigenous world, though, may take decades to address.
>
>Housing shortages can be remedied with money, which is beginning to flow,
>but the behavioural problems that doom houses to short lifespans are more
>difficult. Educational failure and illiteracy can be stemmed by systematic
>improvements in the quality and permanence of teaching staff, and by the
>availability of boarding school places or dedicated regional colleges, but
>the two generations of ill-educated, quasi-illiterate bush Aborigines now
>in their maturity present a more disquieting problem.
>
>Healthcare and nutrition for the young children who are the chief focus of
>the intervention can be quickly boosted, but what of the middle-aged desert
>and Top End Aborigines whose kidneys are failing and who will need lifelong
>dialysis?
>
>Alcohol and drugs can be banned in communities, and their smuggling by
>grog-runners more thoroughly policed, but who will stop the drift of bush
>drinkers into towns, where they are already prone to congregate, or fill
>the void in their lives that drink and drugs once occupied? The blanket
>alcohol prohibition and the quarantining of welfare payments, two of the
>most urgent measures in the Brough plan, are at best a stop-gap solution
>rather than a step towards a cure.
>
>If the emergency response does succeed in creating calm and order in bush
>communities, it is clear - though not yet conceded by the Prime Minister -
>that a further, generational commitment to educating and developing
>indigenous remote Australia will be needed.
>
>And in this natural progression, the Howard Government's thinking, and
>multi-billion-dollar spending package, inevitably converges on the most
>expansive blueprint for Aboriginal progress advanced by the idealistic
>Left.
>
>It is also clear that a transition time lies ahead. As soon as next week,
>the new regime will be imposed on some central Australian communities.
>
>Hard choices loom: Brough made it plain late in the week that the
>continuation of full-scale funding for the NT's remotest outposts, many of
>them mere shells in the deep bush, was not guaranteed.
>
>This warning came on the same day as the leak of a report from his
>department suggesting remote outstations may be economically viable. The
>divergence of views illustrates how much depends on the framing of initial
>assumptions.
>
>The truth is that a particular vision of remote Aboriginal society is under
>threat. Until now, development experts and anthropologists have favoured
>the idea of far-flung outstations or homelands, sometimes occupied by only
>a single family group, and developing a "cultural economy" based on pillars
>such as art, ranger patrols and land care.
>
>But the federal intervention will concentrate services in regional core
>communities. These will be offered 99-year leases and will become, so the
>plan goes, economic and educational centres.
>
>If there are 70-odd communities in the NT today, that number will shrink,
>perhaps to as few as 50, while bureaucratic streamlining will follow the
>establishment of the new, shire-based local government system.
>
>The soft, introductory phase of the emergency response is over. Already, 
>the
>new government business managers, all drawn from the senior ranks of the
>public service, have been appointed to the communities they will run.
>
>An atmosphere of cautious, expectant waiting fills some of these small
>societies. Among older women of the central desert, in particular, there is
>a palpable hope that the new measures will have positive effects and reduce
>the crushing poverty.
>
>In the NT's political domain, though, the perfunctory support of the Darwin
>Government for the emergency response has been continually undermined by
>the furious criticisms levelled by ministers against key parts of the
>program.
>
>Meanwhile, regional Aboriginal spokesmen, ranging from veteran Yolngu 
>leader
>Galarrwuy Yunupingu to Central Land Council director David Ross, have
>condemned the sweep and effects of the plan.
>
>Such attacks, of course, form part of the environment in which the
>commonwealth reforms will unfold and help to cue the popular reaction.
>
>But Brough is not courting love or popularity with his scheme, and a degree
>of sharpness seems built in with his measures of constraint and control.
>The first striking signs that some Aboriginal communities see the logic
>behind the broader lines of the Brough philosophy and its aim to set up
>long-term futures for the bush, even at a high cost, began to emerge this
>week.
>
>The tiny, well-managed Anindilyakwa Land Council, on Groote Eylandt in the
>Gulf of Carpentaria, announced on Monday the completion, after a year's
>talks, of a regional partnership agreement with the federal Government: a
>landmark deal that, in return for the grant of 99-year leases to three
>communities, secures Groote a tightly targeted $20million first package of
>extra federal investment, designed to craft a viable remote economy, with
>substantial further funding to be agreed later. By no great coincidence,
>the conceptual architect of the 99-year leasing scheme is Westbury, an
>adviser to the Anindilyakwa, an Aboriginal group of impeccably traditional
>slant.
>
>Transformation, rather than continuity. Constraint, rather than license.
>Imposition, rather than consultation. Obligations, rather than rights. Such
>is the novel language of Aboriginal north Australia. These are new tones 
>for
>the remote world and for the whole nation: the future of a distinct domain
>hangs in the balance.

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