http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/06/29/indigenous-state-of-emergency-one-week-on/

For a contract of lease to exist there must be agreement between both parties.

Pardon me, but if the indigenous owners of the communities agreed to any lease of their land I am yet to hear of it.

What I did hear was a unilateral declaration by Mr Howard that the Liberal Federal Government would take over possession of the communities and usurp the indigenous proprietors’ rights over the land.

Excuse me, Mr. Howard but you, as a suburban lawyer in another life, are being too cute by half,

What you are imposing is compulsory sequestration and acquisition, without compensation, for an unspecified and undifined period, which you anticipate to be five years, but which is subject to extension, such extension perhaps being subject to some nebulous , vague and unformulated discretionary compensation, if in your absolute opinion, it is warranted.

That is the distilled essence of your pronouncements on this issue, pure and simple.

Your proposal is contrary to International Law and various UN Charters and International Treaties to which Australia is a signatory.

I should not be surprised, adherence to International law and universal principals of human rights has never been your strong suit.

You Sir, are a disgrace to the Commonweath of Australia, to you profession, and to the Australian Community.

What I want to know is how come the Friday Morgan Poll hasn’t been posted yet? It has been out between noon and 6.00pm for months now.

Yeah, I’m hanging out for it as well - I wonder if the footage of the troops playing Footy with the kids will affect how people respond to Newspoll ?

How naive, Mark. Of course they will - well at least until after the election.

Yep, sure looks like I was giving them far too much of the benefit of the doubt. Oh well, back to grubby politics as usual, it seems.

WRT Aboriginal land title, it looks like Ratty has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

How embarassment!

And it seems Noel Pearson has been taken along for the ride as well.

It was never about the Abused Kiddies at all, it was all to appease Howard’s Uranium Push and giving Niners access to that land cause the Blackfellas would’ve blocked them from digging that Yellowcake out.

How embarassment!

http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/06/29/1965919.htm

How naive, Mark. Of course they will - well at least until after the election.

If I was Howard I’d be pursuing a strategy of repeated ‘mini-Tampas’ like this. In fact I think that is exactly what he’ll do, especially as Rudd’s advisers don’t seem to know how to respond (Keating was dead right on them, BTW) and most of the press can be depended upon to be supportive (to put it mildly).

I don’t think it’ll be enough to get Howard back into government because people are just sick of him, and many will start to see through the tactics. But it’s his best chance.

A Family Responsibilities Commission, comprised of senior members from each community and a legal officer, would administer the scheme, with payments affected if parents failed to send their children to school, were convicted of drug, alcohol or gambling offences, or were found to have abused or neglected their children.

Pearson’s approach has two essential differences from what Brough seems to be contemplating.

First, Pearson wants to take payments from only those who are not acting responsibly. Secondly he is setting up an institutional structure where Aborigines themselves will decide.

Brough seems to be saying he’ll do it to designated communities as a whole, but the criteria for deciding which is far from clear.

BTW I heard an interview with Aidan Ridgeway yesterday. He made it very clear that Pearson was not speaking for all Aborigines. He indicated that by Pearson’s criticism of anyone, black or white, who queried Howard’s approach, Pearson was in effect assuming such a role.

Brough has decided that not only is the medical testing announced last week sunk, but also the whatever it takes financially promise was noncore.

So an attack on NT Housing costs and whether they are part of the plan to stop sexual abuse and whether the plan should be short or long term anyway is the best he can do at the moment.

Well in Brisbane it is either the calm before the storm or the issue has lost oxygen and died. The Beattie meeting finished at 5.00pm and the Martin meeting with Howard was before that and so far the journalists can find nothing to write about.

Sterve, here is Martins written response tonight (cross posted on the Grog thread before i read your post.)

Those who sneer at the Prime Minister’s motives over his radical plan to stop indigenous child abuse are oblivious to the heavy risk he is taking.

It’s interesting that Judy Atkinson has been training the very type of people that will be needed.

TONY JONES: But you’ve got specific programs more or less ready to go if you have the numbers and the money, is that what you’re saying?

PROFESSOR JUDY ATKINSON: If we had the money. I’ve got the students, we’ve got the need and we’ve got the requests and we’ve got people who can do it.

If you are interested in some background on Judy herslf go here. From the transcript:

I can still sit with a doctor as I did this last Saturday, who told me that he had no indigenous studies in all the years that he studied to become a doctor. And I think what is also important for us to understand, that it’s not about cultural awareness, it’s not about spears and boomerangs, it’s the deeper sense of knowing the value that is implicit to indigenous cultures and ways of being in the world. William Stanner, in looking at Aboriginal cultures, I guess we would call them traditional Aboriginal values, and you struggle to understand them, said, The whole ethos, the whole profession, the whole activity of (and he called it Aboriginality) was his business, on a day-to-day basis of uniting hearts and establishing order.

Now I want to relate that to what we see in the world today. Aboriginal people before Cook, were about the business of relatedness, relationships. What Western society has been about is industrialisation, building guns or ships, bombs, bigger aircraft carriers, and we see that as the height of civilisation. For me, the height of any civilised societies is how we relate to each other as human beings and the world around us.

Relatedness, relationships, uniting hearts and establishing order. It can be done.

Leadership beckons?

Not a chance.

Btw - i hear Prince WIlliam harbours a desire to be our GG.

(as above)