You asked for links regarding the success of the NT intervention. Here’s the one re the fall in STDs among indigenous kids http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23625735-5013172,00.html

Regarding school attendance: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2220371.htm

Here are the money shots: “Attendance rates at remote Indigenous schools have jumped 20 to 30 per cent since the Federal Government intervention in the northern territory.”

“The Northern Territory Government’s latest surveillance update on sexual health and blood-borne viruses revealed that 62 children aged under 14 were diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections in the Territory in the first six months of the intervention. Three of the children diagnosed with chlamydia between July and December last year were under the age of 10.

The figures also showed that total diagnoses of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and trichomoniasis declined in the second half of last year, compared with the first half, following the intervention. ”

I think both Noel Pearson and John Howard are owed one big apology.

“Take or leave it, but please believe that Mel & Kim form a very respectable pair with their interleaved comments #11-17 on this thread. Children of the 80s will know what I’m talking about.”

Do you think we’re channeling Tim and Debbie?

For three months in 1976, I believe. Not before or since.

I’m not sure anybody is interested in your ‘non-posting’ activities Mark - you simply don’t post. Not too difficult, I would hope!!

Pearson also uses the rhetoric and dichotomies of Cape York Elders, applying the European philosophies to his Aboriginal knowledge base which puts him, I suggest, in a different intellectual category altogether than the authors you or he mention.

Any new policy paradigm must begin without precedence of success or failure. While there may be no statistics yet on Pearson’s model there is ample evidence of the failures of status-quo policies. What is distinctive about the Cape York trial is it is an Aboriginal initiative, argued about for 10 years within Cape York Aboriginal politics as well as lobbying governments. The model has broad (but not unanimous) support in the Cape because the black business was done as part of the process instead of the usual mode of imposing pre-packaged policy onto unsuspecting communities.

The Cape York trial is a four year trial and I am sure there will be plenty of statistics for sociologists to analyse before too long.

If you want to get past Pearson’s gobbldeygook I suggest you look at the Cape York Institute’s website http://www.cyi.org.au/

Also, the CYI’s agenda has to be understood in the context of the ongoing land rights struggle in Cape York of which Pearson has been a significant leader. He established the Cape York Land Council and focused his legal attention on land claims. This focus has not been abandoned as evidenced in a news story today “New law an attack on land rights: Pearson” http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/05/13/2242828.htm

The left seem to have reached a consensus that Pearson is a puppet of neo-liberalism, but I challenge anyone, not just Mark, to say what is wrong with Pearson’s perspective or the Cape York Institute’s agenda beyond a Hansonesque “I don’t like it”.

But I’m not that interested in parsing Pearson this afternoon. I have a PhD to finish. But I think you’re taking him at his word far too blithely, so I wanted to answer that.

You prove my point by defining Pearson in terms of the authors you have read rather than what he says himself and more importantly what the Cape York Institute have done.

If you are looking for an academic context to categorise Pearson you might try the likes of Fanon instead of the European ideologues.

I disagree that it is all bullshit. Such a blanket dismissal is not one that an open minded academic would make. Can you substantiate this critique with anything other than cross referencing vocabularies?

It is wrong to equate Pearson’s “quest for a radical centre” with “third way-ism”. For Pearson the radical centre is the synthesis of the dialectict of pragmatism and idealism, it has nothing to do with left/right/third way.

Really, John? “The third way” was always sold in those “dialectical” terms - by its inventors in Britain, and by Mark Latham in his turgid tomes in Australia. It might be “wrong” according to Pearson’s latest attempt to claim some originality, but anyone who’s read (and it’s not an enviable task) the literature on this, knows that it’s anything but. The “radical centre” - as a political position - was the invention of Roy Jenkins in his celebrated address in 1978 which led to the formation a few years down the track of the SDP in Britain, and it was then taken up - to provide a point of contrast with Blair - by Schroder and his ideologues in Germany. And “the third way” like “the radical centre” was always supposed to “transcend” left and right.

It’s all bullshit, really.

As for personal responsibility in the U.S. Louis Farakhan preaches personal responsibility and this is a central theme in black Islam from Malcolm X through to the million man march.

Noel Pearson (a christian), Malcolm X, Louois Farakhan and the nation of Islam do not fit neatly into a left/right dichotomy but are perpetually defined and interpreted by leftists and rightists within their own frames of reference that totally miss the point of the black perspective.

The connection between Pearson’s conservatism and X’s radicalism is the issue of personal and collective (black) responsibility. The common wisdom is that white people will give up nothing, it will be a futile wait for the oppressor to be converted to the point that justice will begin to flow. Whether from a basic class, race or gender analysis, the focus on the powerful giving up power voluntarily is absurd. Yet it is the only option for change inherent in the left wing paradigm of “protest”.

It is wrong to equate Pearson’s “quest for a radical centre” with “third way-ism”. For Pearson the radical centre is the synthesis of the dialectict of pragmatism and idealism, it has nothing to do with left/right/third way.

Pearson’s essay “White guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre” describes his notion of radical centre as well as an analysis of Obama and U,S, politics. http://www.boomerangaustralia.com/source/newsflash/Pearson_%20Indigenous_Australia.pdf

WTF! It was absolutely terrible. I read it standing at the Newsagent’s magazine shelves-(no, I won’t be apologising). The sheer idiocy and political absurdity of implicitly linking Australian indigenous policy debates with the candidacy of someone who is manifestly not ‘indigenous’ but rather, ‘half immigrant’, in the US context and who by any stretch is a member of the educated elite in the US, and a Senator to boot, is simply insulting to what I presume is TM’s readership base. So Noel is ‘not white’. Obama is ‘not white’ ergo, each have valuable insights about the politcs and policies that must inform both of them. What absolute claptrap, even for the tepid and boring TM..

The bottom line was they could not tell if rates for chlamydia changed through time. The problem is that the rate is highly dependent on how you measure it. Reporting rates, which have increased, do not accurately reflect infection, especially given the rather nasty process of diagnosis.

I would be highly skeptical of a claimed 15% reduction in STD rates. You probably could do the epidemiology over 6 months but it would be tricky and 10-20% would be the sorts of error margin you would expect.

Writing from the U.S., this would seem to be the second attempt by Australian news media to understand the Barack Obama phenomenon here that has got it completely wrong. Chris Masters’ Four Corners story missed the whole issue because (1) he went to the wrong city (New York rather than Chicago); and (2) he insisted on seeing the whole thing through the prism of the 60s civil rights struggle. As a result the show had endless and irrelevant waffle about white girls in Harlem bars and black people profiting from the gentrification of Harlem. I’m surprised that he didn’t find out that rappers own big houses and that white Americans watch Oprah!

For The Monthly, the question is why - aside from skin colour - would you assume that Noel Pearson would be an authority on Barack Obama. A much better starting point would have been to find someone who was knowledgeable about Jesse Jackson’s campaign in the Democratic Party primaries of 1984 and 1988 (and Jackson got 29% of the popular vote and the Democrat delegates in 1988), and consider how Obama’s campaign has differed from that of Jackson, and indeed how he is different to the better known black Democrats in the U.S., such as Jackson. This article in The New York Times is one place to start Linked text.