Insert tinnie/tinnie joke here

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, has announced an exemption to the alcohol bans in 70 remote indigenous communities in the NT that were announced as a core component of the government’s Indigenous Emergency Plan to combat the sexual abuse of indigenous minors. The exemption applies to rivers being used for recreational fishing on or adjacent to Aboriginal land.

Why is such a core measure being undermined?

The professor of indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, Marcia Langton, said yesterday that relaxing the bans would open the floodgates for alcohol to be smuggled into the 70 communities where it was banned.

“It will allow illegal grog runners to sell grog into the communities,” she said.

“It’s the kind of loophole that can bring the whole system undone, by giving the big tick-off to the grog runners. It’s not going to work.”

What could be more important than protecting the children who are the whole justification for the sweeping authoritian emergency plan in the first place?

Filed under: authoritarianism, indigenous, law, racism

Linkalicious: Big Tuesday Edition

A veritable smorgasbord for you!

1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.

2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.

3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.

4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.

Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism

Our own desert places

I have succumbed to the July lurgy, so today: an invitation to join me in Stuff I Have Been Reading. Don’t miss the stuff below the cut. Jane Simpson is amazing.

Aboriginal Poets

We are tired of the benches, our beds in the park,
We welcome the sundown that heralds the dark.
White Lady Methylate!
Keep us warm and from crying.
Hold back the hate
And hasten the dying.

The tribes are all gone,
The spears are all broken:
Once we had bread here,
You gave us stone

Jack Davis, ‘Desolation’, published in The First-born, p. 36. Sourced from “Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988″ , chapter 8, Adam Shoemaker. Go read the link, it’s worth it.

~~~

See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.

To our father’s fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
The glad tomorrow.

excerpt from Song of Hope by Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Filed under: Politics, Read 'ems, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, racism

What do disabled people, fat people, and indigenous languages have in common? They’re not disposable.

Read ‘Ems for today:

Sunday Telegraph: Quadriplegic left on train

Mark McCauley, a man with quadriplegia, was abandoned on a New South Wales CityRail train for four hours when the train lost power. The ambulatory passengers were all evacuated one hour into the debacle. Luckily, he had his mobile phone on him. His first call, to CityRail, wasn’t so helpful:

“I rang CityRail and told the lady I was stuck . . . and at the end of the conversation she said ‘That’s fine sir, somebody will get back to you in two or three days’.

His second call was to 000. They just rang CityRail and had a manager call him back. McCauley reports:

“She said we can’t get you off the train until we restore power – it could be in the early hours of the morning.”

Mr McCauley was in need of medication by then. Luckily, construction workers volunteered to remove him from the train with a forklift.

CityRail’s apology? Two one-day free rail passes.

~~

Filed under: Read 'ems, disability, fat-hating, history, indigenous, moral panics

Picture worth a thousand words of the day, and rally for Aboriginal justice

NAACP GOP Presidential Forum, originally uploaded by by JillNic83

The picture is via Jill of Feministe, and her post title is a cracker: But Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! That’s good enough, right?

—

There are rallies around Australia today (and internationally) for a National Day of Action For Aboriginal Justice to mark the end of NAIDOC Week. Being the anniversary of Bastille Day won’t hurt the symbolic significance either. I only found this out from New Zealand blogger Maia, and the Sydney march starts with a gathering at The Block in Redfern in half an hour!

Stand up with the Aboriginal community on Saturday 14th July at 10:00am at the Block to demand:
* Stop the genocide, end Indigenous deaths in custody
* Land Rights not mining rights – no mines and no dumps
* Funding for community controlled services not cops and troops

Rally at 10:00am at the Block (next to Redfern Station) for the march

I’m too late to get to the rallying point, and I can’t find any information about the march route. Bugger.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity, indigenous

Living Black

First, a news snippet:

The Age: Indigenous land takeover angers NT govt

NT Attorney-General [and Member for Nhulunbuy] Syd Stirling said Aboriginal communities territory-wide were angry, confused and talking of legal action. He said the territory government was seeking advice from the Justice Department about what shape the commonwealth’s proposed amendment to the Land Rights Act might take “and then what we as a government might do”.

The Central Land Council and Northern Land Council (NLC) were expected to support any legal action and “present a united front”, he said. “If your rights are taken away there is generally a legal recourse and a legal challenge. This is critical to indigenous people in these communities… that permit is a signal to everybody else that they own that land. If that is taken away, and the views are that this is the first step, then you are beginning to unwind Aboriginal land rights.“

LIVING BLACK

But on to the meat of this post – SBS’s Living Black last night was a special on the Federal government’s Northern Territory “emergency plan”. I made a few notes, in case you missed it (or are following along from overseas). The “quotes” are paraphrase – I hope I have represented people’s statements accurately. I have added bits ‘n’ pieces ‘n’ links from the Web. My own comments and extra snippets not from the show are in italics. Bits I found particularly head-explodey are in bold.

Maningrida

First, a snapshot of the self-governing Maningrida community in Arnhem Land, home to 2600 people and a “high profile” abuse case. Their system for alcohol rationing is said to be working well, with everyone rationed two cartons of beer per fortnight. People worry that by banning alcohol completely, more people will go to Darwin to drink, leaving their children behind. The community is working on alcohol-related problems, with community “strong women” having started their own night patrol, getting children off the streets.

Filed under: Politics, Sociology, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism

NT Plan Read ‘ems: “white man’s burden”, Howard’s poll plunge, and reactions from Pat Turner and Lt Gen Sanderson

Here are your Northern Territory Aboriginal “emergency plan” read ‘ems for today! I’ve included excerpts, but do read the whole articles for context and elaboration.

Mark Lawrence: The white man’s burden: Howard’s attack on Aboriginal self-determination

Excellent post on the new paternalism, Howard’s “white man’s burden” mentality and his “classic ‘Pauline Hanson’ lies about Aboriginal self-determination, resources, and “special treatment”.

The Howard-Brough plan clearly attacks self-determination through such moves as seizing control of 70 Aboriginal controlled communities and townships in Northern Territory and forcing Aboriginal parents to meet stringent conditions in return for their welfare and family support payments. All this on top of the ‘law and order’ approach of sending in extra police and military to spearhead the ‘campaign’. This is the ‘shock and awe’ aspect of the Howard-Brough plan, (the overtly militaristic tone in the government spin is no accident).
[...]
By effectively saying ‘your way failed, now make way for our way – we will do what is needed to protect children,’ Howard is simultaneously trying to wash his hands of over a decade of neglect, chronic under-funding (and in many cases de-funding), and destabilisation of organisations, initiatives, resources and basic services for Indigenous people by his government, and blame the problem on Indigenous people and their leaders to justify his jackboot actions.

It also allows him the grandiose (or rather grotesque) gesture of taking up the white man’s burden and inviting the rest of Australia to join him.

[I've been brewing a post myself on militarism and 'othering' in the NT plan - bear with me.]

Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism

Triple J youth radio’s “Hack” panel on the NT indigenous plan: Davis, Wenitong and Doyle

Youth radio station Triple J’s “Hack” Indigenous Panel yesterday had a look at the Howard/Brough Northern Territory “emergency” plan. The full mp3 is available here.

Triple J’s Alice Brennan asked: “Who haven’t we heard from yet? The next generation of indigenous Australians – the ones who will be carrying this plan into the future.”

The panel participants were:

Megan Davis: director of Indigenous Law Centre UNSW. Davis is currently completing her Doctorate in Law, focusing on Aboriginal women in Australian democracy.

[image credit: UNSW]

Mark Wenitong: Australian Indigenous Doctors Association

[image credit: RHEF]

Floyd Doyle: Coordinator at the Remote Indigenous Radio, Alice Springs. You can listen to CAAMA Radio online here (it’s only working in Safari for me, but give it a go!).

A map of remote radio stations in central Australia.
[image credit: Australian Community Broadcasting Online. Modified slightly.]

My detailed show notes follow, arranged by panel participant. Most of this is paraphrase, with bits and pieces of my own commentary. (in italics)

Filed under: Media, Politics, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism

1Q: Is there merit in governments playing catch-up politics?

Tim Dunlop’s blogging experiment, One Question, has the third round happening. (For full details see Tim’s original post.)

The current question is this: the government is accused of playing catch up politics, but is there some merit in such an approach?

The other participants have their answers up already, and I’m behind because of more interest in other questions this week, to be frank, as well as a horrid day of HTML coding yesterday rescuing crashing websites which ate into my writing time. (At least this post is shorter than my other efforts.) The other answers are:

Andrew Bartlett | Joshua Gans | Kim Jameson | Robert Merkel | Harry Clarke | Tim Dunlop | Ken Parish (still to come)

I’m with Tim: the obvious answer is that yes, there certainly is merit in governments playing “catch-up” with adopting policies which have been initiated by others and which offer an effective approach to addressing current issues. To ignore good policy crafted by others would be foolish and arrogant, surely.

However, the term is disparaging, and Tim unpacks why. It implies that the government has been belated in its response, and that its commitment to the policy may be incomplete and merely a matter of politicking i.e. the government is less interested in actual policy than it is in politics.

This week’s question was Joshua’s, and he asked it before the Howard emergency plan was announced, referring to the examples of broadband policy and climate change. It’s hard, now, not to apply the question to the indigenous emergency plan, which we have written about quite extensively here at Hoyden. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Filed under: 1Question, Politics, authoritarianism, indigenous

Fear, funding, and failure to listen: today’s indigenous news roundup

Today’s News Headlines:

[Edited to add:] The two transcripts from tonight’s 7:30 report have just gone online:

7:30 Report: Police, military arrive in NT for intervention plan talks

Journalist Murray McLaughlin reports an “argy bargy” with an officer from Minister Mal Brough’s Department of Community Services who didn’t want reporters at the arrival of police and military personnel at the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu near Uluru. This came after a meeting of the local community who decided that they did want the media present.

McLaughlin reports that a senior army officer present addressed assembled police thus:

“you’re going to be there kicking in doors, maybe, but we are concerned that we are there to be seen as the good guys.”

7:30 Report: Mal Brough talks to Kerry O’Brien about the intervention plan

[If you read only two of today's links in their entirety, read this one and the Crikey one below the cut.]

O’Brien had a solid go at pinning Brough down on the details of the health-checks plan, and any ongoing plans to properly resource healthcare. Brough steadfastedly refused to answer his questions.

At one point, Brough completely panics and tosses his cards into the air. When asked, “For instance, the concern has been expressed and the question has been asked: “Are children going to be physically examined for signs of sexual abuse?’”, he responds: “Well, Kerry, it’s very interesting how we are having this discussion because, let’s turn it around. Let’s do nothing.”

~~~

ABC News: PM urges Aboriginal communities not to fear intervention plan

ABC News reports that John Howard and Tony Abbott are attempting to cast a Spell of Soothing on Aboriginal people who fear another Stolen Generation with the new NT “emergency plan”:

Prime Minister John Howard has urged Northern Territory Aboriginal communities not to fear his intervention plan to curb child sexual abuse.

Aboriginal leaders claim some parents have fled with their children fearing heavy-handed tactics by police and the military.[...]

Health Minister Tony Abbott says he is confident that once it is properly explained that the Government does not want children to be taken away, parents will allow their kids to have the checkups.

~~

Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, bigotry, indigenous, moral panics, racism