The members of Federal Cabinet might not be able to muster a single vertebra between them, but that didn’t stop some of them from conducting bastardry as usual while the phoney leadership crisis was on. Sharman Stone for example:
Federal Minister for Workforce Participation Sharman Stone denies hundreds of jobs in the Indigenous art community are at risk with the scrapping of the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program in the Northern Territory.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin says around 400 Indigenous jobs at Aboriginal art centres could go if the program is axed.
But Dr Sharman Stone says suggesting art workers will be transferred from CDEP to Work For The Dole program is a deliberate lie…
(ABC News)
That was Tuesday. Yesterday, Stone’s tune had changed a bit:
Federal Workplace Participation Minister Sharman Stone says Aboriginal artists in the Northern Territory will have welfare payments reduced or stopped when they sell a painting.
Some art centres are worried because welfare will be affected much earlier when CDEP is phased out and replaced with Work for the Dole.
But Sharman Stone says it means Aboriginal artists will be treated the same as anyone else in Australia who is on welfare…
(ABC News again)
It seems to me that these two statements aren’t entirely consistent with each other - they can’t both be true. Either Aboriginal artists will be on Work for the Dole - not CDEP - like other unemployed Australians in similar circumstances - or they won’t. If they’re funded to paint under CDEP, and CDEP is replaced by Work for the Dole, then - well you figure it out.
One thing’s for sure, there’s definitely a bit of lying going on here, but I think Stone is pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
More at Crikey and in today’s Age:
Of all the actions taken by the Government to tackle child sexual abuse and disadvantage in the NT’s remote communities, the decision to abolish CDEP is causing the most unease.
The scheme, created by the Fraser government in 1977, has provided the most money flowing into the communities.
But CDEP pays wages — not handled as welfare payments — which means the Government cannot quarantine a portion of the money to be spent only on specified food and clothing.
Good work Gummo. It’s a good thing that Aborinals are a passive people. I’m not involved and this makes my blood run hot.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
Why should the aboriginal art centres be subsidised?
I would like my entertainment and hospitality centre to be similiarly subsidised.
Abolishing CDEP is simply another miserable tactic in the overall government strategy to force aboriginal people off their lands and provide the “buckets of extinguishment” that Howard promised way back in his first term.
Others include whipping up a media storm about the sexual abuse of children, confiscating community lands and leasing back conditionally, abolishing ATSIC and appointing white administrators, abolishing the permit system, and no funding for community housing, health clinics and schools over the past decade.
Anyone wanting to create a “failed state” to justify the crushing of aboriginal land rights would have followed just this strategy. Hello Mr Howard.
With CDEP gone, aboriginal men will have to leave their families and go where they are told there is work-for-the-dole. With no federal funding to support communities, it will not be long before social cohesion is lost and they collapse.
Aboriginal elders, women and children will then drift off their lands and end up in deeper poverty and despair camped on the fringes of mining and farming towns where their men work for pitiful wages.
Just like it used to be.
Aboriginal community lands will be progressively confiscated with minimal compensation because the golden threads linking the people with their lands have been broken. The land will then be sold off for uranium mines and waste dumps alongside the Halliburton railway line that conveniently cuts down the centre of the NT. Dick Cheney and Hugh Morgan will make another lazy billion dollars and our first nation will be but a sad memory.
The Howard Government MUST be defeated before this dreadful plan for cultural annihilation reaches its logical conclusion. The soul of our nation is in deep peril.
If the aboriginal ‘community’ (damn those latte leftists and their hateful words and phrases) won’t behave properly, and submit themselves to the new regime of property confiscation and free labour, then someone just has to do the work.
Till now, the liberal elites in Australia have been a bit queasy about the liberating potential of forced proletarianisation, but thank goodness we have a government that doesn’t shirk from doing what is right. It mightn’t be ‘popular’ with the irresponsibles who run around at taxpayers expense wringing their hands of course, but in the long run, wage labour, without the benefit of any underpinning communal rights has been found to deliver optimum outcomes for everybody. Knowing this as we do, it would be grossly irresponsible not to ensure that indigenous people have the same chances that we all have.
I’ve just spent a couple of hours talking with an ex minister of aboriginal affairs, and he tells a very different story of how aboriginal communities are run, different to the one Howard is happy for people to believe.
Oh my God!
Adults have to go and find work where the work is, instead of waiting for it to come to them, while they receive welfare payments.
How unfair!
Thank you Razor. You put it beautifully.
Despair. despair. That’s all this post makes me feel. But its excellent to see the whole sorry racist plan exposed.
CDEP is not just in remote areas. Its all over the country. The point about it being cut is that removes Aboriginal independence and gives JWH and his cronies control over individuals through welfare cuts.. But other people have said all this time and time again. I’ll just get back under the blankets.
PS. I don’t approve of cutting welfare payments for anyone, black or white.
Under the CDEP program, people do work for their wages.
You’re welcome!
Paul Burns - All adult Australians are independent unless they have a disability that means they need support.
CDEP is a form of welfare.
I moved all over Australia in pursuit of work, and dragged a family around doing it. I can’t see why anybody else shouldn’t have to move to find work. And I will reiterate - CDEP was a form of welfare, just as Work-for-the-dole is welfare.
And there is nothing racist about my attitude - I expect all Australians to have a crack at getting on with life.
Unlike the massive land grant known as Australia post 1788. I mean, we earned that little trophy didn’t we? Until that terrible High Court invented the fiction that someone owned all the lovely views before we arrived.
Something terrible happens to people when they get a sense of entitlement don’t you think? Something about a ‘moral compass’ or something, but I forget what it was. I am so pleased that black Australians are at last learning their lessons.
Mal Brough for PM
CDEP has been a cheap way of providing indigenous public servants for the aboriginal community as well as seed funding for up and coming enterprises. Many of the positions that have been pulled are just essential services that everybody in our community expects and deserves.
Sort of like dragging the family and the tribe all over your country to find game and forage, eh Razor?
That aside, I think you’ll find your views a little at odds with the Government’s view of how things should be. When Glen Milne tossed Mal Brough an obliging Dorothy Dixer on Mabo (paraphrasing Milne’s question, he asked if Brough thought the Mabo decision was to blame for the situation in the NT)at Brough’s National Press Club address, Brough indicated that what he wanted to see was Aboriginal families
paying off mortgages or exorbitant private housing rentalsowning their own homes, like the rest of us, instead of this collectivist native title stuff.For anybody who has not caught up with the munanga linguist, on this subject, go here…
http://munanga.blogspot.com/
Thanks, joe2 for the link. I’d advise Razor to read it as well.
You mean Razor can read? Who’d a thought it.
Well at least he hasn’t forgotten why he is there, like Howard has.
In the words of Devo, Brough’s “a man on a mission, a boy with a gun. With a picture in his pocket of the lucky one.”
His next stunts and rationale could well be:
* Reinstate missions - some good christain values are what they really need
* Revoke Indigenous passports - because they don’t travel and we could save some money
* Ban grog sales - because they don’t really need it
* Take away more children - integration is the go.
But seriously, Brough is heading back to Australia’s racist past on several counts, based on the big lie that he is doing something of consequence about child sexual abuse. Maybe he even believes his own bullshit - in which case he should be sacked.
Well well, Brough’s onto the grog already. Just spotted this in Crikey:
Read it, Adrian - and guess what the biggest issue was - the need to be able to speak English. FFS it’s the language that you need to get on in this country. It is all very quaint trying to maintain stone-age dialects, btu you need to be able to speak, read and write English in Australia.
Razor, yes English competency is a big issue. Most people here are reasonably fluent in that they can hold a conversation and have fundamental reading skills. However, the ability to understand government speak and the nuts-and-bolts of these regulations is a different ballgame altogether.
I can assure that all Aboriginal people would dearly love to understand everything the white man has to say to them, but the reality is that they don’t.
And so as long as these shortcomings exist, I will always advocate for clear communication. Surely the government has some obligation to deliver information in a way that those it pertains can understand.
If you were creating some policy for the deaf community, would you then go and hold a meeting where you stand there talking to them in a nice big voice? Or would you think hey maybe there’s a better way?
(However, Razor, I’m guessing you choose to see things only in your idealistic way and I may be talking to a brickwall…. lol… so next time, I’ll just say it in Kriol!)
Wamut - I’ve got no problem with people addressing an audience in the appropriate style and beauracretese is unacceptable at community meetings anywhere in Australia. The impression that I got from reading the linked blog was that they required translation from English into their own dialect.
I don’t think your example of the deaf is appropriate because a deaf person doesn’t choose to be deaf and cannot learn to hear again. Full hearing adults have the choice of what languages they learn.
And as for being criticised for being idealistic on LP - what was that? Irony??
Interesting coincidence of Gravatar SATP and Razor. Pleased to see the confusion displayed by the Liberals is spreading.
No coincidence steve - my grubby little hands are responsible for that.
drats!
But according to you, they shouldn’t.
Friday speedmetal!!!!
I wonder if any you can help me out here. LP is - quite rightly - filled to the brim with folks who loudly denounce racism and such. So how can you reconcile this with government policies that focus exclusively on just one race?
Razor,
Yes, at the meeting I interpreted from English to Kriol because the public servants had made no compensation for the English levels of their audience. Do you think there is something wrong with that action? From what I could tell, nobody at the meeting minded (the people that were directly concerned mind you, in other words, not you.)
I think my example of deaf people is appropriate because both conditions (one, being deaf and two, having a first language other than English) are not a choice of an individual but something that is created from birth/a very young age. A person’s first language is no more a choice than is deafness.
Lastly, I’m new here so wasn’t aware that pragmatism was out of bounds, but pragmatism is a big lesson learned for all of us in remote communities working our arse off to try and keep these places rolling along.
Woops, I forgot I was supposed to write in Kriol…
Razor,
Yuwai, langa det miting ai bin interpret burrum Ingglish la Kriol dumaji ola gabmen mob nomo bin jinggibat hau bla tok gudwei la ola blekbala. Yu rekin in nogud lagijat? Ai nomo bin luk enibodi la det miting hu bin wandim mi ba jidan kwait (en det miting bin bla alabat, nomo yu).
Im rait ba tok ba def pipul, dumaji im wulijim bunjum yu def o bunjum yu tok langgus. Nomeda yu def o yu tok langgus, dubala mijimet burru beibitaim en yu kaan abum eni sei ba wanim yu langgus o if yu defwan.
En det natha ting, mi nyuwan iya la dis blog en ai nomo bin sabi yu gan tok bla wanim im rili laik iya. Wen yu jidan la bush im had ting bla len gudwei iya en yu gan kaman garrim ola bigwanbigwan aidiya.
Gen, ai bin foget, ai bin tok bla raid garrim Kriol…
That’s great Wamut. Is the bin used to indicate past tense? (And if want to run through any other features, I’m all ears.)
Opposing government policies which knowingly reduce people’s incomes and place them under odious levels of supervision of how they spend their income, purely because of their race, isn’t that difficult for someone who denounces racism JG. It would be more difficult to reconcile not opposing such policies.
right on! steve at the pub…much better to subsidise car manufacturing plants and pulp mills, they’re doing so much to improve the quality of our environment. Bunch of 40, 000 year old layabouts have got nothin’ to offer this Country.
Good stuff per usual Grace.
“Mal Brough for PM”
hey amused!… is he planning on beheading King John? If not, he’s got Buckley’s chance of ever sitting in that throne.
“Adults have to go and find work where the work is, instead of waiting for it to come to them, while they receive welfare payments.”
that’s right Razor, artists don’t work, only people sitting in cubicles gambling w/ other people’s money. Seems to me stock brokers and others in the Share Market are nothing but glorified Pokie players.
“Opposing government policies which knowingly reduce people’s incomes and place them under odious levels of supervision of how they spend their income, purely because of their race, isn’t that difficult for someone who denounces racism”
The thing is, when you go for the Pauline appeal vote, you need to move beyond the troublesome natives, to what is happening on the unwholesome, crumbling, white veranda.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22414476-910,00.html
Gummo Trotsky
You have answered a different question. It is the policy that you claim is being undone that was racist.
Many parts of the Arts industry across the whole country, including visual arts is heavily subsidised. All major towns and cities have publicly funded galleries and arts projects as well as publicly funded tertiary courses. Virtually none of this reaches the bush so I think it’s only fair that remote communities get a share of the public arts money.
Having said that, the Art Centre at Ngukurr doesn’t get any free rides - as far as I know, it operates solely on CDEP and art sales. Some of the art here is stunning but artists struggle to promote their art to bigger markets. With a bit of assistance, artists here could be making good money and creating the sort of economic development that the whole country wants to see in these remote communities.
That’s why Ngukurr Arts centre has every right to be subsidised (should the powers that be decide to subsidise it to any decent extent).
JG,
Is your obtuseness wilful, or is it a natural talent?
Good Point Wamut. Subsidising development in rural industry would have a similar effect on jobs and international competitiveness of our rural sector.
Subsidise arts.
Subsidise university educations.
Subsidise farming?
Subsidise manufacturing?
Subsidise research?
Subsidies pubs? (please please)
Licensed victuallers buy into a government-controlled monopoly.
Many pubs have government-allocated pokie licences. Those pubs are therefore government-licensed tax farmers.