indigenous politics
29 Feb 2008
Rations on the Cards
Welfare quarantining is creating chaos and confusion in the Northern Territory, writes Rachel Siewert
Post-apology, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has asked us to "embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed," asserting that the mistakes of Indigenous policy of the past won't be repeated. His Government, however, is persisting in the ill thought-out and ideologically driven Northern Territory Intervention - despite a promise to pursue evidence-based policy.The NT Intervention is racially discriminatory, which is why the previous government had to exempt it from the Racial Discrimination Act. It takes away Aboriginal land and quarantines people's money without cause, forcing them to use 'ration' cards. Hasn't this approach already failed? Aren't we simply repeating the mistakes of the past?
The quarantining of income support is particularly hurting Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people speak of their deep shame of having this system inflicted on them, and how this feels like a return to the ration days when their parents and grandparents got their rations in sugar bags.
It is important that broader Australia understand what impact this quarantining is having, and questions what it will achieve. Is this really an appropriate approach in the 21st century?
This policy is indiscriminate. It applies to everyone living in a 'proscribed' community - irrespective of whether they have kids, or how well they manage their money. Pensioners, who had worked all their adult lives paying taxes, are now having their pensions quarantined and some do not now have the money for medicines and taxis to the clinic. Quarantined money is given out as Store Value Cards and in some centres as a 'gift' card (or as it is becoming known the 'ration card') for Coles or Woolworths. People travelling in from remote communities to attend the Centrelink office in Alice Springs, Darwin or Katherine have been forced to queue all day.
The ration cards have been creating chaos and confusion. People drive in from their remote community, collect their cards, then return home - only to find they cannot use the cards at their town store, and have spent all the money they had on petrol. Community stores and other small businesses (like second-hand shops) are suffering and shutting down.
To add insult to injury those quarantined are apparently being offered no financial support, advice or counselling. There is no point in taking away people's ability to control their own money without then offering them any opportunity to learn and demonstrate financial management skills. When people get a job or the quarantining ends they are going to be left with less money skills and are more likely to get themselves in trouble.
Many people in central Australia were already part of the voluntary Centre Pay scheme to set aside some of their income for bills and food - which ran successfully for three decades prior to the Intervention. In fact, there is a wealth of success stories of community development programs in northern Australia that we can learn from. A key factor in their success is the way in which they engage with and empower the community. For many the main problem has been that they were never properly resourced to address the problems and needs they were targeting, or were pilot programs whose funding ran out just as they started to really deliver.
While the resources put into the NT Intervention have the potential to turn around lives on remote communities, more needs to be done to ensure money is spent wisely on the things that actually make a difference. To date far more money has been spent on implementing the failing welfare quarantining system than has been put into the priority areas of child protection, health and education.
The $72 million spent on the poorly targeted quarantining of welfare payments is clearly wrong headed. By comparison only $7 million has been spent on family-based programs and $14.9 million on child health.
More of these resources need to be focused on delivering basic health services, protecting children at risk and on fixing existing houses and building safe new homes for the future.
Has our Government really resolved to learn from the mistakes of the past, or will we see another awful chapter written right before our eyes? Will a future prime minister be moved to offer a national apology to the victims of the Northern Territory Intervention?
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Newsvine
Facebook
Kwoff
Discuss this article
To participate in the discussion Sign in or Register
Let’s hope that after the "emergency" is declared over, the National Child Protection Framework which is supposed to apply to all Australians on a case-by-case basis, will be used instead.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
Thank you, Rachel, well said! Also, hello, again!
As for the Rudd Government, it seems that unless he made a promise of ‘me-too’ during the election campaign on all aspects to Government, he does not really intend to do anything about it. And with the ‘me-too’ promises, he intends to stick with them, word for word, action for action, Hell or High Water, with no latitude allowed whatsoever. He is scared of being called for making ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ promises, as Howard did. No leftish ideas are going to get past his eagle eye, he promised to be a clone of Howard, and he is sticking to that promise, matter what. He says that if you do not like it, you should not have voted for him. Hmmm! In fact, I did not vote for him, and I certainly do not and never did like what he promised. It was just that the WAS NOT John Howard. That is why so many DID vote for him.
Most of his own Party apparently have an intense dislike of him personally, but he was the only ‘thing’ on offer.
It may be that he does not last as PM all that long, as the glitter blows off. Maybe Julia will have her day soon.
But as for the NT ‘Invasion’, he made a promise that he backed it most of the way, and except for the small items that he wanted amended in the original legislation, he has not and will not make any changes, no matter that the whole thing smells of very long-dead prawns, until such time as the promised review comes up. Pity about all the perhaps irreparable human and structural damage that is being done by the Intervention in the meantime.
Definately a stickler for his word, is ‘our’ Kevin!
Let us hope that a real emergency does not blow up soon. if he has not already made a promise about it, what is he going to do?
Dazza.
Dazza, You overstate your case. The sorry speech was hardly Howard clone. There is also a more flexible and collaborative approach to land issues, especially long term leases and home ownership. If anything at the moment the opposition is "me-too"ing.
Let’s hope that Rudd sticks to his word and conducts a real review of the intervention after 6 months in government. The indiscriminate (and racial discriminating) application of quarantining should be a high priority for change.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
Oh, dear: so it’s back to ad hominem, is it ? I thought that in this Brave New World, we might all be tempted to comment on the basis of principle, rather than personalities. Oh, well, you can’t change everything overnight.
Kevin, why " " around Emergency ? What would satisfy your criteria for ‘emergency’ ?
* All of the women murdered in the last two or three years in the NT have been Indigenous.
* More than 90% of children with STDs in the NT are indigenous.
* With barely a quarter of the population of the NT, Indigenous people make up more than half the morbidity and mortality figures.
* Every community is reported to experience child abuse, and I suspect that almost every child under fourteen.
* Almost nobody is genuinely working.
* Almost not a single child genuinely finishes Year 12 in segregated communities.
* Almost every girl of sixteen has at least one child to pass on to her own mother to look after.
* Indigenous prisoners make up more than 80 % of all prisoners.
* The average house last only seven or eight years before it is busted up, but costs twice as much as the Australian average to build.
* Vast sums go into communities, and nothing positive worth reporting comes out.
So what would you recognise as a ‘real’ emergency ?
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again:
If it takes a community to raise a child, it takes the brutal rape of a child, or the brutal murder of a woman, to destroy a community. Forever, if the people themselves are complicit.
Joe
Joe
Emergency usually means something new. Most of the issues being tackled by the intervention are both longstanding and long known.
Lots of inaccurate and inadequate statistics don’t help. How many children have been identified with STDs or sexual abuse? Many indigenous people in remote communities have real jobs. Genuine year 12 completers are relatively new in community schools but it is a growing trend (eg 13 In Maningrida in 2006).
We need to understand both the negatives and the positives if there is to be ways forward. What works and what doesn’t. "Nothing worth reporting comes out" is just not true.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
Kevin,
If you don’t think that there is any emergency in the remote communities of the NT - or in those of the Cape, the Kimberleys or SA’s North-West - then you have been off with the fairies too long. Yes, these problems have been around for a while, I certainly experienced them in the seventies down here in southern SA, so God knows what conditions must have been like further North. If what is happening does not shock you, or stir your soul, then regardless of the fine detail, just keep out of the way.
Joe
Joe
Let’s get past semantics. Whatever we call it has been a national disgrace for along time and must be a national priority which is beyond point scoring. The discussion must be about the best ways to address the problems.
Read my blog if you want to know more about what I think.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
So it’s agreed that there is an emergency, then ? Regardless of who is to blame - and there are mountains of it on both sides - what do we do about it ? How do we help our fellow-Australians get out of the mess that they have got themselves in ?
And one way is surely not to repeat the policies of the past, but to find more positive alternatives to welfare, such as training and work for those who can, pensions for those who can’t, penalties for those who won’t, and far more care for and protection of the vulnerable in remote settlements, the women and kids.
It’s easy for people like me down here in urban Australia, in our ergonomic chairs, but surely we all have some responsibility to think through and support the best alternatives, once the abuse, violence and addictions in remote communities have been brought under control. And surely they ultimately have to revolve around employment, preparation for work, enough literacy to avoid injury at work-places, better training for those who genuinely want it (including women), and work either in building up ‘communities’ and ‘community’ enterprises, and repairing houses, on the one hand, and providing pathways to outside employment and education on the other.
Once the dust settles around who wants to go where, then maybe the emergency intervention can get down to the business of providing better housing, perhaps to home-purchasers living on leased land, more likely to pensioner renters. I suspect that there is going to be a much bigger role for southerners eventually than anybody has contemplated yet, and for a very long time too.
Joe
Joe, you are like a cracked record…you keep repeating yourself.
How about some new thinking, please!
Dazza.
Hi Dazza,
I don’t think I repeat myself - can you give me an example ? Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Joe
I’m still back in the semantics of "blah blah". It’s a reference to using a word as it was intended to mean within the speech of another person (presumably Kevin Rennie means Mr Howards use of emergency rather than his own understanding of the ongoing emergency which has been happening since 1788ish).
In respect of housing. The double cost is mainly because of transportation of building materials, and it is wrong to imply that folks are getting built better houses by failing to mention that. Also, if the houses were culturally appropriate in the first place, they would not be getting dismantled.
I happen to believe that if we built things like: six car size car ports, with a sink, and a fire place, that had heavy curtains or canvas walls which could be moved around on curtain runners to form distinct rooms when necessary; and then a toilet further away, but a shower block in a different location from the toilet; and provided such structures in specific locations appropriate to skin name and gender requirements; that the structures might then survive far better.
I don’t say this because of cost necessarily, but because I know that its how I would prefer to be living in if I owned a bit of land to live on instead of being stuck in the poxy city.
I know a man who grew up at Rio Mish in Tabulam. (between Tenterfield and Casino NSW, Tabulam’s population is one third each way red neck, blackfella, and hippy feral types) My mother warned me off being involved with him, even intervening to prevent him sustaining contact with me behind my back, since she knew that during the 1970’s an enquiry had happened at Tabulam primary school, finding that there were no children over 10 who had not been raped. Most often by other children. However, my friend, despite not having escaped being raped as a child, was, when we met, the most dignified and respectful man I could have become close to. I hear he lost the plot a bit however thereafter due to police activities in his presence. Where he grew up, the mission is one of the most idyllic locations I know of houses existing in. On the Clarence river. But most of the houses have six foot tall fences around them, and the place is some what terrifying to venture into on any day of the week and by any person’s standards. I was myself there safe through having met my male friend, even though he was not with me. What became gradually obvious there, is that the fences are being used at times to lock children in to those houses where abuse is being perpetrated. That is in the minority of houses. If other houses have big fences it is because they need the fences since members of their household have tried to speak up to protect women and children. What the bigger crime of the place is, has been that the white community have been behind those blacks whom are the perpetrators of the abuse. Government jobs and the cars that go along with government pay packets, all belong to those whom are known to be secretly siding with the police against other blacks.
Tabulam might be an extreme case, but if that is how politics are being played out in one place, then it might not be an isolated example. I hope every day of my life that no other Aboriginal community is in such bad spiritual condition as I have witnessed there. But at the heart of the whole matter, the children whom have been exposed to abuse, show all the signs of children whom can still recognise the difference between a trustworthy adult and an untrustworthy one, and that is more than I can say about many non-indigenous contexts.
Joe, I find you statement that "almost nobody is genuinely working" to be genuinely offensive. Also, I can not conceive of what you mean by "genuinely finishes Year 12" since your statement implies that there is a way to ingenuinely graduate. Surely educational authorities exist precisely to prevent exactly that. And what exactly do you mean by "segregated" in that context? Gender segregation? Race segregation? or what? I don’t know of any racial segregation in any school in Australia, indigenous or otherwise.
Also, I want to point out that there is a really stark contrast between what Joe is describing above, in respect of how mothers attend upon their daughters, and what Tony Ryan wrote in a post commenting on the MMM article by Richard Agar. Where one person outside of real culture, (indigenous T.O. culture way) says Aboriginal mothers are defined by being extremely protective of their daughters, especially in early motherhood, another person is describing the daughters who have babies young, as though wrong to let their mothers help. While most non-indigenous persons rarely even notice that fact that the Aboriginal cultural paradigm is defined in ideals of accountiblity and well minded appropriate behaviour: therefore, whenever an Aboriginal community is in contact with any behaviour or though outside of those ideals, a different management practise of relationships will manifest. For example, if marital relations enable certain obligations normally, but the husband is using alcohol, then the wife’s obligation to him is fully diminished.
Rebecca Copas
Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last
Forgot to mention at first, I have a friend, who worked for eight years managing a shop at one of the more remote outstations. She was asked by the women there to help them to develop a "book up" system at the shop, which effectively prevented money being spent on grog etc, (things which endanger communities), by forward committing money having been spent on a healthy diet, enough swags, etc. My friend the shop keeper (actually the original shop keeper’s wife) also availed herself of much other unpaid community development work while in Nyripi. Work in health, which caused that she knew to keep up a stock of rehydration salts in the shop, which had not previously been available for dehydrated babies suffering from extreme giardia. (me and my lot caught from also, and its not a problem so long as well managed, but it tends to cause that detoxification from alcohol might need medication for the pain since the liver is already under duress) Work in developing protocols for communication between the community and the Centrelink Aboriginal liason staff based in Alice Springs. All together a whole set of well managed protocols were established. However, after my friend and her husband left so as to put their children through a Steiner school for secondary education, the new shop keeper wanted the shop to be like any town shop in profitability, and so started selling soft drink, and let the book ups system fail its original purpose, until there was almost no worth in even having a shop there.
But the point is that the models for how outstations can work well exist already. It is a total absurdity that the federal government legislated for something which is clearly making goods and services harder to deliver, when perhaps all that needed to happen was a pay rise for the land council employed shop keepers, so that the right people could be attracted to the work. I reckon that there are the right people in existance, but we tend ourselves to be unable to afford the travel to even know what roles we could be fulfilling, which would make outstation communities far safer places. Just having a few more folk who abide within Aboriginal cultural conditioning, and are fluent in the mainstream white culture, is all that is required. But the government didn’t want to pay for what might enable indigenous people whom abide within traditionally oriented culture.
The problems on the ground among public servants, of managing the load of changes in legislation which were touted as enabling of cost savings, are not yet accounted for. I was in a housing office just the other day, and waited a good half and hour while the time of two public servants was absorbed in finding out how to navigate a situation caused by an change to immigration legislation from 26th February 2001
Word Sword Sworn
At Hath
That Hat
Inshallah no poetry farce
By Solomon’s Seal will my past
No word not true can last
Becky, I guess both of us have our hearts in the right place, but perhaps we are coming at the Aboriginal predicament from different angles. Of course, making a wish list about education, or health, or housing ,or government, or self-determination, or human relations is all good fun, but potential is not actuality: like a fool, I myself have put together scenarios of sequenced projects for a particular community, great fun, and all possible if only …. as recently as two years ago.
Models are usually no more than models, we can all fantasise about them. But what is REALLY likely to be put in place ? What is REALLY going to happen ? What are going to be people’s responses to government policy changes, REALLY, and how can anybody influence these response in the most positive way ? I don’t think that we have even begun this process yet, the decks have not even been cleared to begin a proper dialogue about the Aboriginal people’s role in their own future, their own salvation if you like: there is still the smug attitude of ‘what more should the government do for us?’ and nothing yet of what the Aboriginal people can, and should, be doing for themselves.
I’m sure that, in the odd settlement here and there, there may well be people working, perhaps as many as 2 % of the population across the North. But really working ? I used to pick up the garbage at one community where we lived for a few years, and I could do it on my own in two hours, twice a week, loading up the trailer, dumping the load, bringing the trailer back and hosing it out, unhitching it, and home for morning smoko by ten. Twice a week. Last I heard, the community had two guys doing it full-time: four hours work each week stretching to eighty (at least, before the community was put under administration). Call that working if you like, Becky, but not in my book.
‘Genuinely finishing Year 12’: yes, graduating in recognised subjects that actually count for something, not ‘community studies’ which is nothing more than knocking up your on life story, or home studies or carer studies or whatever which is nothing more than staying home, or cutlery arrangement, or the host of bullshit subjects which will get Indigenous kids nowhere. The measure of Year 12 is where do students go afterwards - do they go to TAFE or university or on to apprenticeships or straight into employment ? How many of those kids who were supposed to have passed their Year 12 went anywhere ? Sometimes I think the whole world is a giant fraud against Indigenous people, and this is one of them.
Segregation of Aboriginal kids in schools ? Yes, in all sorts of subtle ways. Yes, I would assert this even for many urban schools, not all, and certainly not private schools or schools with very few Indigenous kids (where they seem ot be doing best). I would go futher and suggest that Indigenous kids are regularly pulled out of class in many schools and stuck in ‘their own’ class, and that teachers are complicit in this act of racist bastardry. Further, that Aboriginal teachers are routinely expected to take responsibility for Aboriginal kids and not just around NAIDOC Week and Hug-a-Blackfella Day either. And yes, Becky, I have contemplated migrating, many times.
Joe
Of the 13 students I mentioned who finished the NT Certificate of Education in 2006 at least 6 gained a TER (Tertiary Entrance Rank). There were 4 TERs in the same community the year before. They needed to take subjects other than Community Studies to do this, in open competition with both NT students and those from
sSouth Australia who are part of the same system. From little things…
Education has a long way to go. We need to have high expectations of indigenous students and their teachers if real progress is to happen. These expectations need to be backed up with real resources including training.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
Thank you, Kevin, I’m happy to stand corrected. Education must surely accompany any future pathway for Indigenous people, edu cation for economic development, eduation for careers, education for understanding anything about the outside world - and given that there are no school text-books in any Aboriginal language past a certain level (Grade IV?) and the undeniable fact that employment is in English, TV is mostly in English, newspapers are in English, the internet is in English, and all Australian universities teach in English, it is pretty clear that all Aboriginal children must do the bulk of their schooling in English. In Finland, all university courses (?) are in English. East Timor has adopted English as one of its official languages.
Nobody, I’m sure, would suggest that this is because English is in some way superior - only that it is dominant, that inter-communication tends to be in it, at least in Australia, so it must be one of the competences, like literacy or numeracy or computer use, which is vital for all children, if only for their fifty-year future careers.
Which is why it is also vital that community languages must be funded, to be taught by competent teachers, and taught - as with ethnic languagesd in Australian cities - out of school hours. This should not be the business of schools, but a responsibility of the communities, unless they have become too incompetent to do the job.
Joe
Couldn’t agree more about English. Community languages like many other Languages Other Than English subjects around the country can be taught in schools during school hours as part of the core curriuclum. I hope we all support bi-lingual approaches that work. If they don’t work well then they need to be improved.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
I’ll support and advocate bilingual education when and if it works, not otherwise. It hasn’t done so in the last thirty five years.
The bottom line is that all children in Australia, including Aboriginal children (there’s a phrase that one doesn’t see too often, at least not in practice), need English. So, no, I don’t agree that community languages should be taught in schools, unless and until children have a very firm grasp of English. Gentle immersion works with migrant kids, why not with Aborigina lkids ? I’ll repeat, it’s not a better language, it’s the common language.
Language is not just a possession that one keeps in a cupboard and takes out every so often to talk to one’s in-group, language is a means of communication across groups AND it happens to be the language of the economy, of career structures, of career advancement, and no matter how bourgeois that might sound, Aboriginal children are as entitled to English proficiency for that reason as any other kids.
Joe
‘Segregation of Aboriginal kids in schools ? Yes, in all sorts of subtle ways. Yes, I would assert this even for many urban schools, not all, and certainly not private schools or schools with very few Indigenous kids (where they seem ot be doing best). I would go futher and suggest that Indigenous kids are regularly pulled out of class in many schools and stuck in ‘their own’ class, and that teachers are complicit in this act of racist bastardry. Further, that Aboriginal teachers are routinely expected to take responsibility for Aboriginal kids and not just around NAIDOC Week and Hug-a-Blackfella Day either.’
If any readers are genuinely interested in Indigenous education, they should read Professor Helen Hughes’ article in today’s Australian, entitled ‘Ending educational apartheid will cost’.
How come somebody with a reputation as a right-winger has more courage and sincerity and sense than all the Left put together, when it comes to Indigenous affairs ? Where is the genuine concern from the Left for the Indigenous catastrophe ? Because that’s what it has become after thirty five years of no-work, no-education, no-genuine-community, and there’s worse to come yet.
Joe
I think it’s easy to forget the issues of racism when a large percentage of us (particularly those with time, education and computer access that allows us to read newmatilda), sit in cities - far away from the issues that brought about the NT Intervention.
It’s news reports such as the recent racist behaviour of the Haven Hotel that shock us back into reality.
Yes, Jedi, but let’s not use this incident to excuse the dreadful conditions in remote settlements across the north (i.e. north of Coober Pedy) and to beat the Intervention with. Yes, there is racism in Australian cities and, I believe, underlying much of the Australian ethos (I think that old-fashioned racism has hardly been dented yet). But the horrific conditions of life in isolated and unobserved settlements has to be confronted, and life must be made safer and more productive for the women and childeren. Unless, of course, they don’t matter to the pseudo-Left ?
Joe
We should judge people by their behaviour and what they say. Not by labels, ideological or otherwise.
If we are gong to confront the problems then nothing should be exempt from examination, including the intervention itself.
Kevin Rennie
http://laborview.blogspot.com/
Kevin,
Indeed. And as well, what should be held up to scrutiny, if you want ot push it, is the inaction of so many labor politicians, and of so many bureaucrats (Black and White) who either knew nothing and still took their salaries, or knew what was going on and did and said nothing, who swept horror under the carpet, to protect mates and cronies.
But they don’t count in the long run: what matters is changing the way things are done, so that the ghastly crimes against Indigenous people can be brought to an end, so that people can be persuaded to work, so that children can have some sort of future. Let’s watch the whole Intervention process closely to make sure that no further crimes are committed against the Indigenous people involved, not by politicians, not by bureaucrats, and not by the people with power in settlements.
Joe