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The news should all be good for outstations which are models for fighting disadvantage...but tell that to the government. |
TERRITORY TALKIN': News from a flailed state
ISSUE 190 - 12 Nov 2009
ISSUE 190, November 12, 2009: In Darwin, GRAHAM RING reports on those making friends and influencing people around the Territory.
It's unlike Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin to hide her light under a bushel, but TT can't help noticing that an intervention review report has been posted on the FaHCSIA website without the usual drum-roll and fanfare of trumpets.
And it's not even called the 'intervention review' anymore, having morphed into the warmer and cuddlier title of 'Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory'.
"Why is it so?" Julius Sumner Miller would doubtless have wanted to know.
The report opens with a wicked spin on the NTER Review, concluded by Peter Yu's team in October of last year, which would have the innocent reader believing that the review team offered a ringing endorsement of the intervention.
They didn't.
The document goes on to make much of the subsequent 'consultations' that were undertaken in various locations in the NT, but neglects to mention that many Aboriginal people living here expressed serious reservations about both the process and content of these pow-wows.
As usual the paper is written in the kind of soul-destroying bureaucratise that discourages all but the bravest hearts from trying to extract some meaning from the mush.
There's a blizzard of statistics and factoids which serve to clarify and confuse in roughly equal amounts.
For example, we are told that a total of 10,603 child health checks were carried out in the two years to June 2009, and we are assured that "primary heath care has reached over 78 percent of these children".
This is such an unusual piece of phrasing that those with a more cynical cast of mind than TT might wonder exactly what is going on.
If it means that these children have been successfully treated for the key problems identified in the health checks then why not say so? There's a distinct whiff of rodent in the air here.
Meanwhile, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) have unveiled a campaign called A Better Way to "focus on the punitive and discriminatory measures" which remain in place in prescribed communities in the NT.
Darwin-based ANTaR stalwart Dr David Cooper tells TT that the campaign, which has a particular focus on young people, is designed to pressure the Rudd government into putting some flesh on the bones of its commitment to close the gap.
Interestingly, ANTaR has provided media outlets with a list of Aboriginal people actually on the ground in the NT who are available for comment about the intervention.
TT reckons it would be a nice change to hear some different voices to the usual 'dial a comment' merchants who pronounce from afar on the situation in the Territory.
Getting the general idea
The news that former Howard Government intervention supremo Major General Dave Chalmers will leave the military to take over the running of the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in the Northern Territory hasn't met with universal applause.
More than one sleeve-tugger has suggested to TT that, while Chalmers may have achieved great things in military operations on foreign shores, he is too closely associated with the 'disaster relief' model of Indigenous policy.
This approach hasn't worked in the past, isn't working now, and won't work in the future.
There wasn't a tsunami in the NT, just decades of policy failure.
News from a failed state
Oz scribe Nicholas Rothwell put a panther amongst the pigeons with an incendiary piece in a recent Weekend Australian which highlighted the decidedly dodgy state of affairs here in the NT.
While there was little that was actually new in the article, his careful marshalling of the evidence and mapping of the big picture is persuasive.
He's called the Territory out for what it is: an economic basket case that relies excessively on Commonwealth funding, doled out on the basis that it is to be used substantially to address Indigenous disadvantage on remote communities. Of course, a fair chunk of this largesse doesn't get anywhere near the bush. It's spent pork-barrelling the voters of Darwin's relatively populous northern suburbs - the land of hip-pocket suburbia, where elections are won and lost in the NT.
Rothwell writes of a "culture of vociferous announcement" and describes the blind faith in large-scale private development in the Territory as being reminiscent of Pacific island cargo cults.
He laments the lack of public intellectuals and what he calls the "failure of serious conversation".
TT reckons he's on to something here, given that the news cycle lasts no longer than the spin-cycle, and issues of complexity are too easily banished to the backburner.
This brave and perceptive piece of journalism will win Rothwell few friends in the Top End, but it may just provide a useful template for the analysis of events as they unfold in this troubled Territory.
Homelands are the future
Last week the boffins gathered in Canberra under the auspices of the impressively named Academy of Social Sciences in Australia to have a yak about outstations in the NT.
The forum made a series of recommendations to government calling for greater recognition of the progress in health, education and general living standards being made in homeland communities.
More and more evidence is emerging to demonstrate that outstations are both a success story, and a model for making progress in the fight against Indigenous disadvantage.
That's why TT believes that the stories we keep hearing about the Feds and the Territory government white-anting these communities can't possibly be true.
Larrakia people acknowledged - praise the lord!
At the instigation of Greens councillor Greg Jarvis, the slightly-more-progressive-than-we-thought Darwin City Council has finally agreed to kick-off its meetings with an acknowledgment of the Larrakia Traditional Owners.
It's a fine thing to see the Council stagger into the 21st Century.
By way of aside, TT notes that at the same meeting a push from some quarters to ditch the recital of the Lords Prayer at the beginning of council meetings was unsuccessful.
Lord Mayor Graeme Sawyer explained that the prayer would remain as a matter of tradition rather than religion.
"It's not there as a religious artefact - it's there as an artefact of the Western democratic principles that local government comes out of," he said.
Whatever that means.
The Empty News
The NT News is a piece of Darwin ephemera full of tripe about crocodiles and flying saucers, with some lightweight political analysis thrown in.
The locals recommend that you 'read it as a comic' and thereby render the whole thing pretty harmless.
However, last Saturday the paper printed an unsigned letter, which began as follows: 'It's about time someone had the gumption to come out and call asylum seekers scum.'
Like so many of the cheap shots that turn up in the letters column of this rag, the identity of the correspondent was "with-held by request".
TT is under the impression that inciting racial and religious hatred is against the law, and we wonder if the Empty News is sailing close to the wind when it publishes this sort of trash.
ringy@nit.com.au
*Graham Ring is a fortnightly NIT columnist and writer. He is based in Darwin after stints in Alice Springs and Melbourne.
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