Thursday, August 30, 2007
Australia: Aboriginal rights under siege by Jerome Small
In early August, former Northern Land Council president Galarrwuy Yunupingu issued an inspiring call for people to fight the Howard government's takeover of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.
Describing the intervention as "the lowest of anybody's form of policy",
Yunupingu said: "We in the Northern Territory are about to be dispossessed of everything, everything that we've got left from the original dispossession of our land and lives."
And in a welcome contrast to the likes of Noel Pearson who have welcomed Howard's intervention, Yunupingu called for resistance. "I am just reminding people that this is a struggle. I appeal to you to stand beside us to fight the rottenness...of this government setting out to simply take away what's rightfully ours."
Howard has a long and shameful history of attacking Indigenous rights.
One of the first acts of the incoming Howard government in 1996 was to cut $400 million out of the ATSIC budget. Along with infrastructure, programs to reduce family violence were cut. Now, more than a month into the latest "intervention", its real purpose has become clear. It's not about combating child abuse or improving Indigenous living standards. Instead, it is aimed at undermining Aboriginal communities and opening their land to capitalism in general, and to mines and waste dumps in particular.
Galarrwuy Yunupingu expressed it perfectly when he said that Howard is "not worried about us but worried about himself and...[the] rich people and business people that...put them back into government to run amok in the nation."
The Howard government's real agenda can be seen on the one hand from the pathetic reality of the "results" for Aboriginal people. As the National Indigenous Times said at the end of July, six weeks after the "national emergency" was declared: "They promised a band-aid intervention. They didn't even deliver that".
For instance, despite promises of houses, Northern Territory government sources confirm that "The only emergency housing currently being planned in remote Indigenous communities is temporary accommodation for Commonwealth officials moved into the Territory as a result of the intervention". This in communities where people are forced to live 17 or more to a house, such as in Wadeye.
On the other hand, the government has been hard at work putting together laws that will gut the few rights that Aboriginal people in remote communities have.
The CDEP scheme - a work for the dole scheme which forms the basis of income to many of the remote communities in the Northern Territory - is being scrapped. As Nicholas Rothwell explained in The Australian on July 30, "A month on, the project's key, and heart, is not child protection but pushing through the economic transformation required to fill the space left by CDEP...". The result in many remote communities will be that "numbers will drop until some of the smaller outposts become untenable".
CDEP is a $20 million program that is a lifeline to remote communities "where traditional society is at its greatest distance from the standard Western economy. In this sense", writes Rothwell, "the Brough program is one of neo-assimilation, and it marks the inglorious close of the era of self-determination".
Fundamentally, the Howard government does not want healthy, strong communities living on their land because there is nothing profitable about such a situation. In fact, as the Mirrar people of Kakadu showed by stopping the Jabiluka uranium mine, strong Aboriginal communities can be a hindrance to making money.
So last year the government passed legislation to amend the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. The explanatory memorandum read: "The principal objectives (of this bill) are to improve access to Aboriginal land for development, especially mining..."
Quelle: Neil Williams, United Kingdom
(BRANCH SECRETARY FOR MILTON KEYNES RESPECT. CHAIR OF MILTON KEYNES CAMPAIGN FOR STATE EDUCATION.)