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Amanda appoints without a mandate
Issue 68 - 10 Nov 2004
The NIC has been named. That’s the National Indigenous Council or the No Idea Committee depending on where you sit on the political spectrum.
To those who support the Howard Government’s decision to abolish ATSIC, turn its back on 30 years of Aboriginal self-determination and replace the democratically elected body with a self-elected one, it’s the National Indigenous Council.
To those who don’t it’s the No Idea Committee.
A body composed of Aboriginal people with no idea what damage their decision to self elect, ie accept an appointment to it, has done to the aspirations of those Aboriginal people who aspire to progress self-determination and those who fought for it.
It was no surprise that the story was leaked to The Australian, the American-owned national daily which has led the sustained mainstream media mugging of ATSIC.
The story announcing the make-up of the Council appeared on the front of The Weekend Australian which hit the streets across the country on Saturday under the headline ‘PM’s Blacks not that sorry’.
I’ll repeat that... ‘PM’s blacks’.
The rest of the headline was in reference to a statement by the head of the NIC, Sue Gordon, a magistrate from Western Australia, who was taken from her parents as a four-year-old.
She told The Australian she was not interested in an apology to the stolen generations, nor did she see herself being used for political purposes against other Aboriginal leaders.
“I don’t believe I’m a sell out to any community. I belong to an Aboriginal organisation and they won’t think I’m a sell out.”
I’m not sure what Aboriginal organisation she was referring to but I know at least a couple that think she is... and anyone else thick enough not to know they are... the PM’s blacks.
Is there anyone other than The Australian’s Aboriginal Affairs reporter who believes an apology from Howard was higher on anyone’s agenda than fixing the practical problems bedevilling Aboriginal Australia?
This is almost as laughable as the claim, deep in The Australian story that Labor “heavy” Warren Mundine’s acceptance of a place in the PM’s blacks “is expected to send shock waves through the Labor Party”.
If it does then they clearly know little about Mr Mundine, the national junior vice president of the party.
His decision to accept the offer of a spot on the NIC does raise some interesting questions though.
The first: just how “heavy” is a political gadfly? The question has no doubt occurred to the other “heavies” in the Australian Labor Party, particularly the newly appointed Federal shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Kim Carr.
His initial public reaction to the announcement of the NIC was that federal Labor was opposed to the concept of an unelected body “no matter who was on the council”.
“I disagree in principle with the concept of a hand-picked group of experts, no matter how prominent or respected they may be individually,” he said.
Mundine was not mentioned by name but the statement does raise the question: who now speaks for federal Labor on Aboriginal Affairs?
The PM’s blacks or the party’s shadow Minister?
How can the shadow Minister oppose a body which contains one of the party’s vice presidents?
Who did Mundine consult before he accepted the appointment?
When was he invited and when did he accept?
Basically, what the hell is he doing there?
You might recall that federal Labor announced its Aboriginal Affairs policy during the recent federal election in Darwin through its then Shadow Minister, Kerry O’Brien.
Despite L-plate Latham’s prior announcement that he intended to abolish ATSIC, O’Brien made it crystal clear that Labor, in Government, would replace it with another elected body.
He made it clear Labor opposed Howard’s plan to replace ATSIC with the NIC.
Sitting beside him was, you guessed it, Mr Mundine.
At about the same time Howard’s Indigenous Affairs Minister, Amanda Vanstone announced that the NIC had been selected but no announcement would be made until after the election.
One assumes that Mundine must have known at the time he sat next to O’Brien in Darwin knocking the NIC that a Howard victory would see him appointed to it.
At the very least he must have received his invitation to be a part of it.
Unless I’m mistaken opposition to the NIC is still Labor Party policy.
Mundine’s participation on the NIC is even more curious given he’s the Chief Executive Officer of Native Title Services in New South Wales.
It is funded by ATSIC, an organisation he’s now helping the Howard Government destroy, by fair means or foul.
He’s also largely come to public attention in New South Wales by assisting the Sydney Morning Herald in a relentless campaign to have the democratically-elected New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council dismissed.
The newspaper succeeded in pressuring the Carr Government to dismiss the Council in one of the sorrier chapters in the history of Aboriginal Affairs in that State.
The campaign was at its height when Mundine was endorsed as an ALP federal presidential candidate by delegates to the 2003 annual conference of the ALP in NSW.
That vote came on the same day Mundine moved and had endorsed an Aboriginal Affairs policy that gave lip service to the principles of self-determination inside the conference while seeking to bury a duly elected Aboriginal council through the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald.
If you are getting confused, spare a thought for those Labor Party members who used to think their party officials and elected members were meant to abide by the party’s principles and policies.
According to my arithmetic, Mundine is due to assume the national presidency of the ALP in the run up to the next federal election.
Cynics in the Howard camp would suggest it’ll just be in the NIC of time.
But back to Ms Gordon, a West Australian Children’s Court magistrate who headed, according to The Australian, “a watershed inquiry” into domestic violence.
She said her focus as chairwoman of the National Indigenous Council would be on stamping out child abuse and domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.
One can only wish her luck.
She might begin by asking Minister Vanstone why, as Justice Minister, she sat on a watershed report on violence in Indigenous communities for 18 months before publicly releasing it?
She might also ask why the federal government ignored the “watershed” work done by ATSIC on domestic violence in the early 90’s and began claiming in its first years in office that the Commission had done nothing about the crisis.
She might also ask why, after spending hundreds of million of dollars in this area, a new report commissioned by the federal government says services for victims of domestic violence are in a “tragic” state and getting worse.
The report’s author, Julie Oberin from the Women’s Services Network, said last week that in some states refuges are turning away as many women and children as they are taking in.
Ms Oberin said that while governments were encouraging women to seek help from domestic violence, many were forced to return home because help was not available.
“Research tells us that post-domestic violence separation is actually more dangerous for women and children up to 18 months after that separation, and we set them up to fail, or set them up for further danger if there’s no appropriate response there for them,” she said.
The federal Family and Community Services Minister told the media when the report was released that she and state ministers responsible for women’s affairs would use the study to lobby for more funds from their Cabinet colleagues.
Ms Gordon might ask Ms Vanstone what happened to the report she sat on and why the need to “lobby.”
Is there a crisis or not?
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty thinks so.
He said the statistics were shocking, and many men and teenage boys still regarded violence against women as acceptable.
“The statistics show that mostly women will allow themselves to be assaulted something in the order of 35 times before they actually initiate a phone call to police,” he said.
“Sixty per cent of these domestic violence situations are witnessed by the children themselves and if you look at most police shootings, the majority of them have come out of domestic violence situations.”
This is nothing new to all of the Aboriginal women who have lobbied for years through ATSIC to have something done about the scourge of violence in their own communities.
The more they lobbied, the more they were ignored.
I have many memories of the five years I worked at ATSIC.
One of the most enduring was a meeting in Brisbane on the Ministerial Council of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs (MCATSIA).
The council comprised the federal and all state Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs.
If you followed the mainstream media at the time, particularly the Brisbane Courier Mail, you would be forgiven for thinking domestic violence existed only in Aboriginal communities and ATSIC had done nothing about it.
ATSIC organised a delegation of Aboriginal women to travel to Brisbane for the meeting.
It was the first time Aboriginal women had ever addressed the Council.
Their submissions were heart-wrenching.
I’ll never forget sitting behind the then Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Philip Ruddock, watching him earnestly flicking through a thick folder of ministerial briefs he’d hauled to the meeting from Canberra.
Not once did he look up at the women.
I’m sure he heard not a word.
When the women stopped talking, the politicians started squabbling.
It was all about responsibility, territory and money.
Nothing came of it. It never does.
Good luck, Ms Gordon. You’ll need it.
banjoe@webone.com.au
* Brian Johnstone is a fortnightly NIT columnist and a former Media and Marketing Director of ATSIC. He is currently also employed on a contract basis to the NSW Aboriginal Land Council.
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