http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/06/24/the-response-to-howards-national-emergency/

Mr Howard’s plan is really, it seems, no plan except to send police in and monster the locals into giving up their ‘pedophiles’ with the implication that all are suspect until proven innocent - by way of invasive inspection of children against the will of parents. I wonder if we would accept that in suburbia? Usually you would need at least some sort of allegation or evidence or admission and then child services come in and gets the ball rolling.

I wonder what the feeling in the communities will be like. No land rights, personal rights, dignity and under suspicion.

The reason Howard has included removal of permits and attempts to free up land rights is the mineral resources in the NT. At the present moment Mining companies have to negotiate with the Traditional owners to search and or mine the land, who can veto mining. Royalities are paid if mining is allowed.

The mining companies will be heavily on Howard’s back to allow free unfettered access. So this may be the thin edge of a long wedge.

Adopting a user pay mentality as to housing and food is a retrograde step - especially if you limit cash income by 50% These things are free at the moment at one has to wonder if Howard is deliberately trying to indebt aboriginals to the commonwealth.

I wonder how they are going to label families bad parents and put limitations on them? And what effect this will have. How are they going to determine who is aboriginal, not always that simple?

My opinion is that this plan will de-humanise the people further, leave them feeling less that people, helpless, hopeless and depressed. They are cut out of the process and there is no rehabilitation, growth, accountability, responsibility mechanisms planned. The aboriginal just sits back and is subject to the big parent - the Federal Govt. Good way to make things worse.

This is however typical of Howard’s methods, aggressive, threatening and intimidating. Jack boot Johnny.

The first order of the day should be to halt any on going abuse. Having done that implement systemic changes that produce systemic results (this of course involves the community’s aboriginals in the primary role) otherwise you are wasting your time and pouring money and effort into a collander.

Give them education, mentoring, counselling, guidance, schools, nurses, police and a community management group of locals and so on - to create responsibity, self-determination, accountabity and self understanding and self pride. People need self determination to get better where there is a problem - which should not be an assumed state.
This will of course cost a huge amount of money, but once fixed and fixed systemically it should be just about fixed for all time. I also wish to qualify - that we should not go in assuming whole communities are corrupt - but like in every community there will be corrupted sections.

And what of the 97 recommendations?

Liberal Senator George Brandis does not deny routinely referring to the Prime Minister as “the rodent”.

He does, however, deny ever calling the Prime Minister “a lying rodent”. He believes John Howard is a truthful rodent.

Actually, we should clarify that further, for Brandis is a barrister, with a barrister’s capacity for fine distinction. He would only ever call Howard the rodent; never a rodent, because the former is a nickname, whereas the latter would be a pejorative term.

Pearson also claimed in his report that this was the major part of his report. He does not believe in collective land ownership.

I don’t have my head fully around Pearson’s ideas, but can offer this background. Not sure how relevant it is.

Noel Pearson was raised on Hopevale Mission, incidentally where rugby league player comes from. I say ‘Mission’ because at that time it was a Lutheran mission. My sister was the teacher at the school in 1958 and 1959. In August 1959 I spent the two-week school holidays there with my mother and two younger siblings. At the time I recall the school enrolment as 72 and there were probably about 200 people on the mission.

The mission was ruled by the Lutheran Pastor. Every morning all the able-bodied males would show up outside the manse at 8am and he would hand out the jobs for the day. We were told that the land the mission occupied was vast and we were told that there were several families who were deemed ‘responsible’ and hence had been given permission to establish separate farms on mission land. This was the presumed aim for everyone.

I recall that the same Pastor got into terrible trouble later through they way he administered the mission. I don’t recall the details, but the insurrection was real and I have vague memories of accusations of communist influence.

Anyway they pulled him out and I went to university, lost my faith and contact with church goings on.

Noel Pearson was born in 1965, six years after I was there. All I can say is that there would have been diverse ideas running around when he was growing up.

BTW as far as I know Pearson is still not an elder of the Hopevale community and would understand in his bones the deference paid to the elders.

Sacha, Steve and all, the concept of the relation between individual land ownership and capitalist enterprise is highlighted in the writings and work of Hernando de Soto. He points out (a) that secure land tenure systems are of relatively recent origin in advanced economies, and (b) that the lack of them in most undeveloped countries means that there is a huge amount of capital there which can’t be leveraged with banks to create further businesses and to expand existing ones.

There is a lot in the pros and cons of the argument, but there was an interesting ‘Law Report’ program in 2001 which featured de Soto’s ideas together with a response by anthropologist Hartmut Holzknecht who is familiar with social conditions in Melanesia. He points out that outsiders, or insiders, who want to exit the system of mutual obligation within those societies often end up building an eight-foot fence with razor wire and so become outsiders within.

This may sound melodramatic, but it does highlight the radical nature of the change Brough is proposing to the basic social relations, which bear on personal and social identity.

It’s no trivial matter and Brough is wrong to tie funding to his ideology, as he has done in the past. And it’s appalling, whatever the merits of the rest of his response, that he is using the current emergency to muscle in these attempted changes to the Aborigines’ way of being.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/black-aid-plan-could-do-harm/2007/06/23/1182019436617.html

I should also comment on Howard’s announced cancellation of the permit system for entry to Aboriginal townships. Not only does this abolish one of the most central attributes of private property (and therefore take a major step towards what one suspects is a covert ideological aim of abolishing land rights), but it has nothing whatever to do with Howard’s professed objective of tackling child sexual abuse in indigenous communities. In fact it is likely to prove counter-productive in that regard. The recent Wild/Anderson report highlighted the incidence of sexual predation on young Aboriginal girls by white miners and others. Removing permit restrictions will create open slather for these predators to enter indigenous communities without restriction, not to mention others trying to peddle alcohol, illicit drugs pornography and so on. Removing the permit system will make it much harder for the handful of additional police Howard is supplying to enforce the new restrictions he professes to wish to impose.

Howard’s plans also involve a proposal to deliver school breakfasts/lunches to Aboriginal children, at parents’ expense. In fact, such schemes already exist in many indigenous schools, but are currelty delivered free of charge. Far from assisting Aboriginal families in need, this proposal is actually reducing existing programs and imposing a “user pays� system on the kids Howard professes to want to help.

His announced taking of control of Aboriginal townships also apparently involves a commitment to charge “market rents� for housing. That too will cause drastic financial hardship among the very people Howard professes to be trying to help. Most indigenous housing associations charge their tenants concessional rents, because not only are many of those tenants unemployed, but the cost of food, transport and just about all other necessities of life is vastly higher than in major towns and cities. While a significant hard core minority certainly squander welfare money on drugs and alcohol, increasing the cost of living indiscriminately to the poorest Australians hardly seems a sensible way to address that problem.

Part of the agenda, as Peter Lindsay’s made clear, on places like Palm Island where the land is potentially valuable, is to facilitate the sale of leasholds of same to developers.

It makes a complete nonsense of native title as well.

He wants to get rid of the notion of collective ownership and replace it with individual ownership. Brough would see that as the only way to create the conditions where individual enterprise can flourish.

If I’m right, it is the most radical of the measures being taken.

Brian, my impression is that many people in the general community think that having individual ownership may mean that people can borrow against their individual “ownings” and thus invest (in businesses, or whatever), regardless of the particular motivations of the current federal govt. It could be similar to what I’ve read to be the movements for land titles to be delineated in Cambodia and other third world countries.

Brough has also had recent problems with Alice Springs locals knocking back his Housing offer.

He has been a Minister unable to get people to accept his lousy deals lately but by taking over ownership it is all much easier. Wonder if the Disability funding quandary will be solved in a similar fashion.

I’m a little suss on this “land grab�. What would be the motive?

Ideology, basically, Howard doesn’t like land rights and collective forms of title.

The reasoning is supposed to be that allowing leasehold and alienable individual title will bring within its wake economic opportunity. I don’t know that all that many people will be rushing to lend on or buy houses in remote Indigenous communities.

This has been on offer for some time, but most communities haven’t agreed to it. Brough has been in trouble and lawsuits have been filed over bullying people into it.

Now they get to take control of everything and impose it.

But the link with the problem really isn’t there.

Nothing will make them back off. Howard has made it clear that this is his big chance to look like a hero and he will pursue it with a vigour that will surprise many.

I do not doubt him when he says that the welfare payment cuts are to be extended to all welfare recipients. This will go some way to getting around the ‘Racist’ tag that could be applied if it was only indigenous people being affected by these changes. Some things like the Land Grab are Indigenous only problems but the simultaneous crackdown on all welfare recipients will mask this problem for him.

If authoritarianism is the cure for child sexual abuse, poverty,over crowding, and violence - then we are about to get cure in spades. If it isn’t the answer and the cure turns out to be worse than the initial problem then it won’t matter much to Howard as he can retire pretty much retire whenever he chooses from now on.

The last I heard was that police were due to begin the crackdown on Monday so they certainly are developing an amazing sense of urgency giving the blind eye turned to myriad reports handed to the Howard Government in the past eleven years.