'Tough Love' in the Outback (fwd link)

[phil cash cash]

JANUARY 17, 2009

'Tough Love' in the Outback
Australia's Push to Help Aborigines Is Upending Tribal Customs -- And Giving
Women an Unlikely Boost

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

YUENDUMU, Australia -- Two dead cows putrefy at the entrance to this Aboriginal
town deep in the Australian outback. Mangy dogs scrape among naked children, as
trash swirls around rusted vehicle hulks and cinderblock homes. Prominent on the
local store's notice board: the bus schedule to the nearest prison.

Yuendumu and dozens of similarly frayed Aboriginal communities weren't supposed
to turn out this way. Four decades ago, Australia enacted wide-ranging reforms
to uplift its long-oppressed Aboriginal citizens. The laws mandated equal wages
with whites, access to the country's generous welfare system and the eventual
transfer of vast chunks of land to near-total Aboriginal control.

Since then, Aboriginal society has experienced a dramatic decline -- partly a
result of these very reforms. Australia's government has proclaimed the upsurge
of violence, child abuse and alcoholism among Aborigines a national emergency.
It is responding with controversial new policies that critics decried as
racist, such as restricting welfare payments to Aborigines but not to whites or
other Australians.

Those policies, however, are starting to show early results, the government
says. They are also shaking up the Aborigines' ancient social structure. In
Yuendumu, for example, the policies have unleashed a nascent feminist movement
which is threatening to erode the vast powers of male tribal elders.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123214753161791813.html