Archive for the 'Indigenous' Category

Northern Territory Election

Published
by
Mark
4 days, 10 hours ago
in Indigenous and Northern Territory election 2008
. 5 Comments

Paul Henderson, the Labor Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, has called an early election for 9 August.

I’m not sure there’ll be a lot of commentary on LP about the campaign, because I don’t think any of us are well placed to blog it - not being Territorians. If there is anyone out there who’d like to contribute some guest posts, please let me know.

It will be interesting to see if it’s discussed in terms of federal implications - and if the intervention becomes an issue. No doubt we’ll have something to say about that.

In the meantime, Troppo Territorian Jacques Chester has a post up, as does The Poll Bludger. And Antony Green had a feeling it was going to happen.

Northern Territory Intervention one year on

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Culture Wars, Education, Health, Indigenous, Parenting, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Race
. 29 Comments

Crikey is reporting today that a leaked progress report demonstrates that the Northern Territory Intervention, now just short of a year old, is “a shambles”. It’s worth reading the full story, but it’s also interesting to note that Mal “who will think of the children?” Brough has admitted that the thing was cobbled together in 48 hours, as just about everyone suspected at the time.

When Jenny Macklin announced the composition of the panel who will oversee the review of the Intervention earlier this month, commentary predictably focused on whether those appointed were “critics” or “supporters”, which seems an idiotic yet predictable angle given that the whole point of the thing is to see whether it’s attaining its actual goals, something recognised by Peter Yu who was named as the review’s chair. Most of the coverage of the Intervention has continued to be framed in ideological terms, not least from those who claim that we need to move on from ideology.

Continue reading ‘Northern Territory Intervention one year on’

What’s with the AMA?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 1 week ago
in Government, Health, Indigenous and Politics
. 99 Comments

Interest group politics following a change of government is always interesting. It’s not always quite as simple as rewarding your friends and locking out your enemies (though maybe it was with Paul Keating and John Dawkins), but some repositioning always goes on - for a smart lobby, in advance of the election. That occurred last year with business groups - some were prepared to cut the Howard government loose and go public with concerns about lack of infrastructure investment, population policy, climate change, productivity and federalism. From early 2007, blind Freddy could have seen the defeat of the Howard government coming, even if the national news media couldn’t, and the agenda of groups like the BCA was well articulated to the policy direction of the Labor party, thus guarenteeing influence both before and after the election itself. Even on the touchy issue of IR, it became fairly clear that ideologues such as Peter Hendy aside, most business interests had reasonably happily accommodated themselves to the end of WorkChoices well before November, and in fact that they extracted significant concessions in their favour. Those who really kept their head down when urged to put it above the parapets by the Howard government - such as the AIG - have had their reward in spades under Kevin Rudd.

The Australian Medical Association seems to be an exception to this rule. As Tim Dunlop writes:

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has obviously decided they don’t like the Rudd Government and seem to be doing everything in their power to criticise, annoy and/or embarrass them. Since before the election, the doctor’s union has made clear that they don’t like the approach the Labor Party takes to health and were, for instance, critical of Labor’s plan to—potentially—shift control of hospitals to the Federal Government.

Since then, they have taken every opportunity to attack the Government’s plans to change the criteria for the health care rebate, and have been particularly upset about moves to allow nurses to increase their role in the provision of general practices services.

The degree of self interest in the positions they’re adopting is a bit too blatant for comfort, I’d have thought. Continue reading ‘What’s with the AMA?’

Gleebooks Haebich event tonight

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Immigration, Indigenous, Notices, Sociology and Sydney
. 3 Comments

Folks might remember I attended my erstwhile colleague Professor Anna Haebich’s book launch earlier this year, and invited her to write a guest post for LP on her book Spinning the Dream. I’ve just received this via email from our friends at Griffith REVIEW. If you’re in Sydney, this event would be well worth attending.

TONIGHT! Wednesday June 11
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
gleebooks
upstairs at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
6.30 for 7pm. $10 / $7 concession. Book gleebooks 02 9660 2333
Multi-award winning historian and author Anna Haebich will be in conversation with Julianne Schultz to discuss the experience of assimilation in Australia. Anna explores how Australians in the 1950s and 60s were challenged by new visions of the nation. Assimilation was heralded as the mechanism to sweep away divisions and exclusions of the past and absorb Aboriginal and new Australians into a common shared way of life. The rhetoric and reality of assimilation was to have a profound and lasting effect on several generations of Australians before it was abandoned in the 70s for multiculturalism. Today a form of ‘retro-assimilation’ has come to haunt public debate on national identity and nationhood. Anna’s new book Spinning the Dream (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) develops some of the ideas she explored in her Griffith REVIEW essays Retro-assimilation (Ed 15: Divided Nation) and A long way back - reflections of a genealogical tourist (Ed 6: Our Global Face).

More complacent denigration

Published
by
tigtog
2 months, 1 week ago
in Culture Wars, Health, Indigenous, Media, Poverty and Race
. 34 Comments

Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”

Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:

David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.

Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.

It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.

Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.

Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’

Noel Pearson goes to America (well, not really)

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in American election 2008, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Indigenous, Media and USA
. 39 Comments

It must have seemed a bright idea at the time to get Noel Pearson to write an article for The Monthly on Obama. Trouble is - Pearson may or may not know anything about American politics, but almost his entire article is a discussion of Obama seen through the prism of a book written by Shelby Steele. Those who saw the recent (and totally disappointing) Four Corners show on Obama might recall that Steele was the dude from Stanford who kept banging on about how Obama was manipulating “white guilt”. You can watch (if you can be bothered) his entire schtick via this link.

Pearson has the answer for Obama - emphasise “Black responsibility” and end all that liberal rights claimin’… How boringly predictable. Continue reading ‘Noel Pearson goes to America (well, not really)’

No rivers of grog - now for whitefellas in NSW (if they want)

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Indigenous and NSW Government
. 18 Comments

What’s with the Iemma government?

DRINKING a glass of wine in your own home could be illegal under extreme new liquor laws that rubber-stamp the use of no-go alcohol zones in NSW.

All kinds of nanny state madness, I guess.

Apparently, unlike the NT intervention, it’s up to “communities” to request a no grog zone where even drinking in the home will be banned. But who are those communities? And who gets to say whether “chronic alcohol abuse” is going on? All I can see resulting from this is a push from some residents in areas such as Newcastle’s CBD with a big concentration of nightspots in one area to ban takeaway sales. Presumably respectable citizens won’t expect the booze police to knock on their door and confiscate their chardy, and all the bourgie restaurants on Darby Street will fall outside the zone. It may also of course result in all sorts of puritan dogooders forming unrepresentative action groups or whatever in their local hood. Just stupid.

Continue reading ‘No rivers of grog - now for whitefellas in NSW (if they want)’

Marcia Langton says whitefella government’s handpicked advisers got it wrong

Published
by
Paul Norton
3 months ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Federal election 2007, Indigenous and Politics
. 18 Comments

Today’s Opposition Organ reports that the eminent indigenous academic, Professor Marcia Langton, believes that the Indigenous 2020 Summit Stream, consisting of people selected by the Federal Government, was uninformed and unrepresentative, and failed to adequately address policies to secure the learning, health and economic future of indigenous children.

However, Professor Langton’s views are reported in a way which implies that she is also opposed to the creation of an elected indigenous representative body to advise on policies.

As Mark mentioned a few days ago, the establishment of such a body is also opposed by Warren Mundine and Wesley Aird. Yet Mr. Aird was also highly critical of the Summit Stream, suggesting that its outcomes would be as “predictable as a Zimbabwean election”.
Continue reading ‘Marcia Langton says whitefella government’s handpicked advisers got it wrong’

Spare a thought for Jackie Huggins

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 1 week ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Culture Wars and Indigenous
. 55 Comments

She has to “wrangle”, to use Virginia Trioli’s term in a Lateline interview with the co-chair of the Indigenous 2020 summit stream, 100 delegates who include some with very deeply felt and opposed views.

Such as Warren Mundine, most of whose public interventions are couched in particularly aggressive language. Take, for instance, this story about his call for Indigenous children to be taught better English skills. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with this, though I stand to be corrected. But it’s a “demand” that he’s making and it’s something he’s going to “insist” on. All very Pearson-esque.

Mundine - along with Brendan Nelson - who’s attending the summit to “listen” despite characterising it as a “stunt” - vociferously opposes the creation of a new representative body for Indigenous leaders. So does Wesley Aird, who was one of John Howard’s handpicked advisors on Indigenous affairs. Yet it’s ALP policy.

Whatever the faults of ATSIC, that commitment exists. Continue reading ‘Spare a thought for Jackie Huggins’

The Intervention will be televised (but not financed)

Published
by
Mercurius
3 months, 1 week ago
in Budget 2008, Health, Indigenous and Politics
. 57 Comments

The Oz carries this intriguing report about the upcoming Federal Budget which suggests the previous government did not have any funding allocated for the NT Intervention beyond 1 July this year.

Which reason do you think best explains why Howard and Brough didn’t organise any forward estimates from Treasury?

  • Hubris - They assumed that a problem which took decades to develop could be sorted out by the boys in khaki in about 6 months.
  • Incompetence - They just forgot.
  • Laziness - Couldn’t be bothered. After all, it’s only public money.
  • Rashness - Everything was arranged too hastily to make a proper plan (Eek! it’s been under our noses for years! Quick, no time to waste, it’s an emergency!)
  • Cynicism -The plan was conceived after the Budget, so we’ll let Treasury doze and draw up some estimates once we’ve counted how many votes this brings in.
  • Complacency - They assumed they’d win the election and could write it into this year’s Budget themselves?
  • Disingenuousness - They assumed they’d lose the ‘07 election and left it as a Budget landmine for the incoming ALP? (Which it most certainly is - a $600 million landmine according to the report.)

So after all the posturing and bluster, after all the accusations from blowhards that anybody who questioned the Intervention is a supporter of child-rape, we learn that the “architects” of the “plan” didn’t set aside the provisions to actually carry it out.

What great economic managers. What great defenders of the little children. They fully deserved to lose their seats. As will Macklin and co. if they cock this one up.

White flight

Published
by
tigtog
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Culture Wars, Education, Immigration, Indigenous, Parenting, Race and Relationships
. 152 Comments

That’s today’s big story in the SMH: the growing trend over the last decade, in NSW especially, whereby white parents choose not to send their kids to the local public school, particularly for high school education, meaning the public schools have become predominated by indigenous and immigrant children of Middle Eastern descent. The trend has also started to affect selective public high schools on Sydney’s North Shore with large numbers of Asian children. School principals are expressing grave concerns for the implications this trend holds for social cohesion.

One principal also made the point that it’s not only private schools that are contributing to the segregation of children:

Social cohesion was under threat, Dr Reid said, from increasing segregation in education according to race, class and academic achievement.

Public schools were becoming increasingly selective on the basis of academic achievement, sporting and artistic ability.

“We have increased segregation inside public schools into the smart and the dumb, the sports capable and the creative. It’s that crude,” Dr Reid said. “It has implications for social cohesion. What do we do if kids are no longer growing up together?”

I grew up attending several schools because my dad had a public service job that meant we moved around. My favourite school was in Newcastle, in an area of high immigrant population, where I was surrounded by a bunch of non-Anglo-Celtic Europeans, considered at the time to be very non-U. Certainly I found that those schools were better both academically and socially than several others I attended which were virtually wall-to-wall WASPs, largely because the kids came from so many different backgrounds that ethnicity became a very low-level concern: we pretty much just rubbed along. I have very little reason to believe that things would be that much different these days, even though the ethnicity of the immigrants considered most non-U has certainly changed. So why the changed perception, especially in Sydney, that if one doesn’t private educate one’s kids one mustn’t really care for their future advancement, and certainly not for their current safety?
Continue reading ‘White flight’

Guest post by Anna Haebich: Spinning the assimilation dream

Published
by
Administrator
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture Wars, History, Immigration, Indigenous and Sociology
. 27 Comments

Griffith University anthropologist and historian and Director of the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas Professor Anna Haebich recently launched her new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 at the Museum of Brisbane. This post is an edited version of the talk she gave at the launch.

You know that feeling when you’re writing and you get to the point where you think why am I doing this? Surely everyone knows all this already?

Well it was a relief to me to find out since my new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 hit the road last week that quite a lot of people know very little about the history of assimilation. For most it’s an old policy for migrants and Aborigines. But of course assimilation is more complex than this and far more important for all Australians.

Assimilation is woven into the fabric of our nation and will always be with us. It goes in and out of favour and takes different forms but is always lurking somewhere.

Most people aren’t aware of this – it’s the people on the margins who have to assimilate. I was at a conference in 2000 with academics splitting hairs over when assimilation started and ended. Finally a frustrated Aboriginal voice called out ‘it started when you wetjalas first set foot here’.

Assimilation is so ingrained that we can be living it without even realising it. Present governments reject any connection – it has become a dirty word. Yet for the past decade we have been living a dream of retro-assimilation where nostalgia for the past is mixed with current visions of nationhood using today’s spin to create an imagined world of equality and shared values. Global fears and anxieties leave us susceptible to this phoney dream.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Anna Haebich: Spinning the assimilation dream’

“The new civility”

Published
by
Kim
5 months ago
in Culture Wars, Indigenous, Media and Polls
. 43 Comments

The Australian has called for a “new civility” in public discourse. After making the point made by every single culture warrior (most recently Janet Albrechtsen who seems to want more rudeness all round - to help Indigenous people, of course) that the culture wars must continue because it’s all about reasoned debate and constructive ideas (oh, and the war bit was all the fault of teh left, anyway) - in another display of that sturdy independent mindedness so beloved of the conservative commentariat conga line, they go on to claim Rudd for the right, and then make a mea culpa:

Lastly, while the internet has democratised access to the public arena, it has also coarsened debate. We admit we have not been above the odd ad hominem attack ourselves. It’s time for a little more elegance, a return to the debating conventions of earlier times, to the rules obeyed by men and women of letters.

I won’t stop to parse this leader. Gary Sauer-Thompson’s already done an admirable job. Oh, and there’s more from Clive Hamilton in Crikey. Let’s instead, see how they’re doing.

Continue reading ‘“The new civility”’

The case for compensation

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Howardia, Indigenous, Media, Policy and Politics
. 26 Comments

While some prominent pundits continue to fume over the apology to the Stolen Generations, and corners of the blogosphere seem less than willing to head The Australian’s call for a “New Civility”, it would seem that public opinion on the issue has indeed coalesced:

More than two-thirds of Australians support the apology, says a poll taken at the weekend. In total, 68 per cent voiced their approval, up sharply from the 55 per cent who backed the apology two weeks ago.

The Galaxy Research poll, commissioned by the GetUp political action organisation, also showed that the number who disagreed fell just as sharply - down from 36 per cent to 22 per cent.

Rod Cameron made the point on Lateline the other night that there had been a real shift in public opinion on Indigenous issues, and Kevin Rudd has taken it and run with it, in spectacular style. The evidence of this shift gathering further momentum is in, and it demonstrates that political leadership - in this case from the PM - is a powerful instrument in forming public perceptions. But what of compensation?

Continue reading ‘The case for compensation’

Sorry, Brendan…

Published
by
Kim
5 months, 1 week ago
in Asshattery, Indigenous and Politics
. 74 Comments

…It’s not all about you.

Brendan Nelson says Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has not apologised for the actions of Labor staffers who turned their backs on the Federal Opposition Leader as he delivered his response at yesterday’s apology to the Stolen Generations.

Perhaps Rudd should apologise to him… in eleven years’ time.

Elsewhere: James Farrell at Troppo on Nelson’s “apology”.

Update: Possum on Nelson.