Driving 1,500 km to shop - “Rudd should hold his head in shame”
By Diet Simon
Sydney, 17 February 2008 -- How would you feel having to drive 1,500 kilometres to buy your household supplies, limited to 60 dollars per person?
How would you feel about police and troops with guns swarming through your community, your house, your possessions totally accessible to them without any legal instrument?
How would you feel about not being able to spend your own or your dead husband’s war veterans pension after he served in Vietnam?
All of that and more is happening in the intervention in the Northern Territory, which is moving up community after community from the South Australian border to the coast, terrifying people.
And now the architect of it, former army man and minister for Aboriginal affairs under John Howard, Mal Brough, has been invited by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to be part of his “war cabinet” to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage.
“The people are screaming in horror at this,” says Aboriginal leader Michael Anderson, “in one fell swoop he has unwound all his good intentions in the sorry speech.”
“People are terrorised by the number of police around them, their limitless powers, soldiers with guns.”
Workshop with elders
The prime minister should hold his head in shame, says Anderson, who workshopped on Tuesday with key leaders from NT communities in Canberra before parliament opened. The workshop was held in the grounds of the Aboriginal Embassy, founded in 1972 by four black power activists, of whom Anderson, aged 56, is the sole survivor.
Those leaders described what was happening in the communities as the imposition of martial law and charged that the media and politicians are misrepresenting the whole situation.
“They told me of extreme police powers, with total access to communities, vehicles, homes – they need no legal instrument to do whatever they want, they can stop and search wherever and whoever they want,” Anderson told me.
Anyone found with an empty beer can in their car faces a fine of $1,000 the first time, $2,500 the second time, Anderson reports from the meeting. “At the third time they are classified as a supplier – without any definition of quantity – which carries a minimum fine of 75,000 dollars.”
No vehicles of white people, just those of Aborigines are searched, the elders told the workshop, which they ran to try to get public attention.
“The quarantining of war widows’ or veterans pensions is hurting in a big way, it’s the biggest hurt,” Anderson quotes the community leaders as saying.
Shopping 750 km away
Most of the people in the communities affected by the intervention have to shop at Centrelink-approved stores a long way from their homes in the bush, up to 750 kilometres in some cases. They’re all Coles, Woolworths and K-Mart stores. They are not allowed to shop in their own community stores.
“The leaders say this is forcing people off their land to come into the cities. They see it as a stealthy move to seize Aboriginal lands,” Anderson quotes from the workshop. “It’s a very well thought-out move.”
To shop and get their welfare benefits, people have to prove their identity to get ID cards, usually by birth certificate. “Most of the old people were never recorded, they don’t have a piece of paper on them. That even applies to some of the younger ones because they were born in the bush.”
“So, they get no card and get no money. How are they supposed to live? And on $60 dollars per person per week no-one can feed and clothe kids. How do they survive? This is worse than the original situation.”
“We don’t need to be treated like this, it’s gone back to the 50s, it’s more of John Howard.”
Anderson, a lawyer by training and the elected leader of the 16 Gumilaroi clans in northwest NSW and southwest Queensland, accused Rudd of “shallow dealing” with Aboriginal affairs.
Talks on the ground
“He has to open his eyes a little wider. He has to talk to the people in the communities, not some bureaucrats in Sydney or Canberra.
“This has to be fixed from the bottom up. He has to get out there and listen to them, community after community. He should just look at his own speech.
“One size does not fit all. There’s been much talk of the culturally appropriate approach. Well, in these communities, not by their choice, there are mixtures of clans and tribes who don’t get on.
“In past mistakes bureaucrats and pollies saw single, homogenous communities and policies have been very divisive.”
Michael Anderson can be contacted at 02 68296355 landline, 04272 92 492 mobile, 02 68296375 fax, ngurampaa@bigpond.com.au.
Black economy
http://boy-on-a-bike.blogspot.com/2008/02/black-economy.html
By black economy, I refer to the economy (or lack of it) in many Aboriginal communities.
I blogged a while back on how 26% of Aboriginies live out in the sticks somewhere. My guess is that they are living in places that have no natural driver of employment. By that, I mean that the townships are not underpinned by say a mine, tourism, the pastoral industry or some other form of activity that generates employment throughout the wider area. In short, they would not exist unless government money was rained upon them like fertilizer in a greenhouse.
I got to thinking about this after reading an article on ghost towns in the US last week. There are thousands of ghost towns in the US. Something happened to attract people (a mining strike, opening of a factory etc) and a town was built. Then things changed, the mine closed over whatever and the town evaporated. All the people moved away, and the houses were also carted away to places where someone could make use of them.
Many inland towns in Australia are shrinking as farms get larger and larger with each passing generation. With larger farms, there are fewer families out on the farms, so demand shrinks in the towns for services like hair dressing and so on and the businesses slowly fold up and move away, and the place goes into a downward spiral until perhaps only a petrol station or roadhouse is left where there was once a thriving town.
That's life. It's the impact of creative destruction.
I imagine that when the iron ore up north eventually runs out, people will abandon towns like Mt Newman as soon as they can. Without the mine, the town has no purpose. No reason to exist. Who the fuck would want to live there unless the mine was paying them $100,000 a year to drive a truck?
So the natural pattern for white people is that if it is not viable to live in an area, then you don't. You up stumps and move to somewhere that is viable, like the city. Cities have been sucking in people from the countryside for about 5,000 years now. Just look at the enormous migrations in China, where hundreds of millions of peasants have moved in to the big cities from the countryside. It's a normal process in most societies. Tokyo and Mexico City didn't get to have 10 million people each by the residents having lots of kids. All those people moved there from somewhere else, generally as increases in agricultural productivity displaced surplus labour from the land.
I sometimes wonder whether Aboriginals are the only society on the planet that are immune to this phenomena. Why the hell are they staying put in dumpy shit holes in the back of beyond where the social services are crap, there is never a hope in hell of having a proper job, and the future for the kids is bleak.
For a group of people that like to go walkabout, they are the most stubbornly immobile people on the face of the planet.
Hell, look at non-Aboriginal Australia. There are about 19.5 million of us. Where did we all come from? Some of us were born here, but an awful lot of us are here because we moved from somewhere else in search of economic betterment and freedom. My in-laws came here from the other side of the planet. I've worked with people who came from an uncountable number of countries - people are always on the move from here to there and back again.
Except blackfellas it seems.
And don't give me this crap about being attached to the land as an excuse. I just don't buy it (and I will blog on that at some later date). I like my possessions, but if I had a choice between losing everything I own (in say a fire) and losing my family, I'd say "bugger the possessions - they are not that important". I would happily sacrifice everything I've got for my family.
I don't love the stuff I have that much.
The blackfellas have a choice. They say they are attached to their land. But their kids are growing up in shockingly shit conditions. So what do they care about more? A bit of dusty dirt or their offspring?
If they really loved their kids, they'd close down and abandon every back of beyond non-viable township tomorrow and move to a place where work is a possibility, schools are a-plenty and hospitals and all those things dot the landscape.
No patch of dirt is worth the future of my family. Fuck the dirt. They come first. So what the hell are these blackfellas thinking?
Re:“Rudd should hold his head in shame”
This commentator is right. The writer of this article above should be the one to hang his/her head in shame.
We said we were sorry didn’t we now lets get on with the business as usual.
“So the natural pattern for white people is that if it is not viable to live in an area, then you don't. You up stumps and move to somewhere that is viable,”
Capitalism is a process of driving the people from the land into the cities and a minority in some societies can get rich in the process.
Japan’s Tokyo was re- built on poor cheap labour refugees after WW2 .This is one city that eventually did get rich and get to be counted as honourable white people.
Mexico city ? Don’t ask. Still coloured folk there.
Sydney done OK but then our small population had a whole country of free land to exploit.
All those underemployed blacks should move to Sydney. And voluntarily clear the land for whites to move in if they have capital to invest to make a buck.
Hey it will help us to grow to a great city like Mexico city one day with lots of cheap labour available a bright future.
That’s capitalism and there is no contradiction between cities and country or community interest now , their lands should all be privatised and individualised so that some blacks can take ‘personal responsibity” for their lives as individual property owners.
(Except for some anarchists who think about town and country and dream of getting a back to nature herbal farm/holiday tourist homestay /business demonstrating permaculture one day.)
Some Blacks will get rich in that civil society of property owners.where incomes can flow to capital and property owners ,and wages to workers even if they have to move to the city in search of work.
Brough and others have capital to invest . So move on.
The community in ‘civil society” is nothing O.K ,just individual property right as the basis for individualism .
“Rudd should hold his head in shame”
Ouite some time ago there were comments made on indy media. About Australian soldiers being trained to “deal” with non service personal / citizens. That’s right we were training our fighting men and women to do what occurs in places like Timor Indonesia China under dictatorships of sorts even the good old USA whose military dish out democracy at the point of a gun. People like Rudd have reason to worry about civil insurrection it is the peoples response to marshal law.
Edward James, Umina CBD
"Sorry" for the whites, "compensation now"
- Controversial expat Australian journalist John Pilger says Sorry Day is an event "without substance" geared towards white Australians, not indigenous people.
- Indigenous activists: ‘Sorry’ not enough, compensation now!
http://anticapitaliste.blogspot.com/2008/02/pilger-tears-strips-off-sorry-day.html
Re: hold his head in shame”
What’s with this anti -family community values humanitarian crap.
That writer should indeed hang his head in shame for opposing the great white way arrogantly thinking his own communalist values might be superior to the current business and family value and private property system now in place .
So the natural pattern for white people is that if it is not viable to live in
an area, then you don't. You up stumps and move to somewhere that is viable,
like the city.
I would happily sacrifice everything I've got for my own family.
No patch of dirt is worth the future of my family.
Fuck the dirt.
They come
first. So what the hell are these blackfellas thinking?
So what, if this means outright plundering of the earth itself for the short term interest of me and my family at the expense of future generations and creating a heap of ghost towns in the process. That's life. It's the impact of creative destruction.
I would happily sacrifice everything I've got for my family
Stuff the earth and stuff community values. Me for now and go for it. Family first
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