THE ABORIGINAL UPHEAVAL

At last the damage wrought by political correctness is in full public view. Four current articles below:

Aboriginal self-management given up as hopeless

But not for want of trying it

Aboriginal community groups would be stripped of responsibility for housing and funding would be tied to the residents' behaviour under a Howard Government plan to improve conditions in indigenous settlements. The proposal follows a departmental review of Aboriginal public housing ordered by Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough, amid claims that overcrowding is contributing to violence in indigenous communities. Mr Brough wants to fund Aborginal housing through state and territory governments and encourage personal responsibility, in an attempt to end the common situation of 16 to 17 people living in three-bedroom houses, departmental sources have confirmed. In some cases, as many as 30 Aboriginal family and extended family members live in one house, causing social disharmony and poor hygiene and exacerbating violence.



Options understood to be under consideration include channelling funding through state governments rather than to Aboriginal community organisations, where staff may favour family and friends. Another option under consideration is to require indigenous housing organisations to undergo training on governance. And funding could be made conditional on fewer people living in the houses.

The government review comes as Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin highlighted "overcrowded housing" as a key contributing factor to family violence, in a letter sent to John Howard at the weekend. Ms Martin asked the Prime Minister to consider putting underlying dysfunction and lack of opportunity in Aboriginal communities on the agenda of the next Council of Australian Governments meeting. Ms Martin is so far refusing to attend a summit of state and territory leaders in the next few weeks, called by Mr Brough to tackle indigenous violence, branding it a "talkfest". But she conceded last night to meeting the federal minister this week, saying it was time to move the media debate on violence and child abuse in Aboriginal communities to focus on practical solutions. "Improving the crowded living conditions of people in town camps would go some way in addressing the unacceptable conditions that exist in some of our indigenous communities," she said.

ALP president and prominent Aborigine Warren Mundine repeated yesterday his view that Ms Martin should attend Mr Brough's summit. Speaking out against Aboriginal violence, Mr Mundine rejected as "a total load of nonsense" a defence that the sexual abuse was "customary law" or "secret men's business". Speaking on the Ten Network's Meet the Press, Mr Mundine said: "What we've got to do is what Mal said. We've got to say, 'no more, no more in regard to customary law'. "When you're talking about sexual abuse of children, you're talking about sexual abuse of women, you're talking about domestic violence. These are criminal changes and they need to be treated with that full length of the law."

Mr Mundine also rated yesterday as "not a bad idea" suggestions that the army should become involved in building infrastructure in run-down communities. And he accepted that some communities might have to consider "moving out" if they were not economically viable, although he accepted that people had a right to live where they wanted. Economic unsustainability, Mr Mundine said, meant two things: "One is you live in poverty or you move - we've got to start facing those realities."

Mr Brough's office declined to comment last night on the departmental housing review, saying the minister did not want to distract attention from "law and order and the summit". "We have no comment in relation to housing," a spokesman said.

Health experts believe poor housing conditions dramatically increase the risk of preventable illnesses, as well as making it more difficult for indigenous children to excel at school. Overcrowding causes facilities such as toilets and showers to break down, while residents living in cramped, stressful environments blame the conditions for rising tensions, including violence, among families. Some community leaders claim overcrowded housing, which are all community-owned, must be fixed before any improvements will be seen in education, health and employment. Overcrowding in the Northern Territory is widespread, with the Government estimating that more than 3500 new houses are needed to meet demand in regional areas. At Wadeye an average of 16 to 17 people live in each three-bedroom house.

Mr Brough yesterday welcomed Mr Mundine's support for the planned summit and said that the NSW Labor Government had indicated it would attend.

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Strange new idea: One law for all

Aboriginal offenders would no longer be able to "hide behind" customary law to get reduced sentences for violent crimes under a proposal to crack down on rampant physical and sexual abuse in indigenous communities. Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough will put a plan to scrap consideration of cultural law as a mitigating factor in serious crimes to state and territory governments at a national summit. As it stands, when state or territory laws clash with Aboriginal law, the former always wins, but customary law can be used by defendants to moderate the severity of a sentence if the offender was genuinely acting in accordance with tribal traditions. Judges are obliged to consider the culpability of the offender in relation to the offence.

But Mr Brough wants to stamp out this practice. "As far as customary law is concerned, I don't believe it has any role ... It has been used as a curtain that people are hiding behind," he said yesterday. "There's no role to play in sentencing or diversionary type things when it comes to these serious crimes. This is regularly brought into mitigating circumstances and the courts take it into account. There's definitely too much opportunity and there are cases there to prove it and judges shouldn't have to weigh up those sort of things, it just should be excluded. "It means one group of Australians are treated unequally to everybody else."

Mr Brough's comments come after an Aboriginal elder in the Northern Territory, who claimed customary law gave him the right to bash and have anal intercourse with a 14-year-old schoolgirl promised to him as a wife, lost a High Court bid to overturn his three-year jail sentence on Friday. Mr Brough said it was an outrage that the 55-year-old man was originally sentenced to just one month's jail by Northern Territory Chief Justice Brian Martin last August, after the judge accepted that the defendant believed tribal law gave him the right to teach the girl to obey him. In December, the sentence for the crime of sexual intercourse with a child younger than 16 was increased to three years on appeal, following a public outcry. The offence carries a maximum penalty of 16 years' jail. The full bench of the High Court in Canberra refused to grant the man special leave to appeal against the three-year term imposed by the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal, which had found the sentence of one month's jail was "manifestly inadequate".

In 2003, the Territory Government passed laws that removed promised marriage as a defence against having sex with under-age children. But customary law, including promised marriage, can still be used as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Also under current proposals, West Australian courts may be forced to take into account traditional punishment, including spearings and beatings, when sentencing Aboriginal offenders. The recommendation - among 93 proposals contained in a report into Aboriginal customary law by the state's Law Reform Commission - is under consideration for inclusion in the state's criminal justice code.

Northern Territory Bar Association president Jon Tippett said Mr Brough's proposal would be racist because customary law was not a defence and non-indigenous people were able to present cultural differences as mitigating factors in appropriate cases. "Customary law is part of Aboriginal communal life. Customary law has never been a defence, never been a defence to a crime in the Northern Territory," Mr Tippett said. "Customary law has never justified offences against children. Customary law does not justify pedophilia and never has. Aboriginal men have never been able to hide behind customary law. "Customary law can mitigate the severity of a penalty if it's shown that the offender was genuinely acting in accordance with his traditions in so far as those traditions may have come into conflict with the Territory's legal system. "It's no different to anyone else in the community, in any community. We have had many people who come here from other countries. There have been cases where people have acted in accordance with kinship systems or social systems resulting in that person breaking Australian law. "It's no offence for an Aboriginal person or any other person who breaks the law to say, 'I was acting in accordance with customary law'."

Mr Tippett said a court with sufficient evidence could mitigate a sentence because the offender was less morally culpable on a breach of the law if he or she was engaging in the customary pursuits that govern that person's life.

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Manhood whitewashed

Keith Windschuttle says that welfare has deprived indigenous men of their masculinity and the only solution is to close remote settlements with chronic unemployment and no economic prospects

Get to the root causes. That was the advice from any number of commentators after the latest revelations about Aboriginal communities. Very few, though, spelled out what they meant. When pressed, adherents of the root causes argument normally fling a familiar list of historical allegations at white Australia - invasion, dispossession, stolen children - but exonerate Aboriginal culture. Even some of the more courageous authors such as Boni Robertson, who first quantified the extent of domestic violence against Aboriginal women, played this historical card. But that interpretation clearly won't wash any more if we want to explain the recent disclosures of child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. The truth is that neither side is wholly innocent.

Traditional Aboriginal society was always harsh on women. From the First Fleet onwards, white settlers saw Aboriginal men routinely heaping blows on their women, while customary law permitted old men to marry girls at puberty. Nonetheless, there are no reports of traditional culture sanctioning the horrific behaviour described last week by Alice Springs Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers. Only recently has anyone heard of such deplorable sexual acts against little children. Their frequency today suggests something else has gone deeply awry.

The root cause is that white Australia has deprived Aboriginal men in remote communities of their manhood. The instrument we used was social welfare: giving handouts that did not require them to work. The social policy of the past 30 years is the principal culprit. The human male is a creature biologically programmed, communally socialised and psychologically motivated to be a provider for women and children. In outback Aboriginal communities, however, that role has been usurped by the state. The social consequences of this should have been entirely predictable. No matter what their race or where they live, men who do not work have no social status, no sense of self-worth and little meaning in their lives. Others think badly of them and they think badly of themselves.

Sociological studies have long shown that in all cultures many men respond to unemployment with alcoholism and domestic violence, one problem feeding the other. The loss of manhood has direct consequences for Aboriginal boys. They have no incentive to go to school. When they reach adolescence, their most attractive and adventurous options are the subcultures of crime and substance abuse. As Robertson showed, some consume vast quantities of pornography.

Few people today are aware of how recent a phenomenon the remote communities are. Most are products of the 1980s, when the Hawke government increased spending on fringe settlements and encouraged the out-station or homeland movement, in which many Aboriginal communities withdrew from larger population centres into isolated areas, ostensibly to revive Aboriginal culture and practise self-determination.

The brainchild of the policy was Labor's long-term adviser H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, whose manifesto was the book Aboriginal Autonomy. He wanted Aborigines to have a separate economy based not on capitalist notions of industry, agriculture and mineral development, which he regarded as exploitive and environmentally degrading, but on "sustainable development, stable populations, limited-growth economies and an emphasis on small scale and self-reliance". Today, his legacy is more than 1200 remote Aboriginal communities spread across northern Australia.

But without capitalist institutions such as consumer markets and private property, both of which the homeland movement actively discouraged, sustainable development was always a pipe dream. The result is that, although more than half the land in the Northern Territory belongs to Aboriginal communities, their economic participation is abysmal. Only 15 per cent of NT Aborigines of working age are employed in real jobs and many of these are in reserved public-sector positions. Another 16 per cent are engaged in the make-work welfare scheme Community Development Employment Projects. The other 69 per cent of working-age Aborigines are unemployed or not in the labour force. This is at a time of economic boom in the NT, when the non-indigenous work-force participation rate is more than 90 per cent.

The remote Aborigines are thus loaded with twin economic burdens: they inhabit regions that have no jobs or business opportunities and the state gives them an income with no effort on their part. The only solution is to stop funding and thus close down all those settlements where unemployment is chronic and where there are no economic prospects, which is most of them.

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough does not need a talk-fest with state government leaders to tell him this. It is a decision he should take himself. He should set a timetable with enforceable deadlines. Obviously, such a choice is fraught with difficulty. No one in this country can be forcibly removed anywhere. The commonwealth has power over welfare payments but would need state and territory co-operation to provide housing and education services for a civilised relocation process. Brough could potentially entice key roles from those church and charitable bodies that recognise that a new start is necessary. Indeed, some of the latter have recently begun providing boarding school places for children from remote communities. Little would be gained by simply shifting the culture of violence from one location to another.

The Aboriginal ghettos of Redfern in Sydney and the Gordon Estate in Dubbo, NSW, are as dysfunctional as any in central Australia. Nonetheless, that Sydney and Brisbane house Aboriginal populations of 35,000 and 28,000 respectively, most of whom enjoy suburban lives indistinguishable from other Australians, shows none of this is insurmountable.

If he seriously threatens the present regime, Brough will generate resistance from those academics, Aboriginal activists and bureaucrats who created it. They will mount a propaganda campaign to argue they were right all along. Some will even revive the furphy that assimilation equals genocide. But there are enough Aborigines who have made the complete transition to modern, urban life while retaining a pride in their identity and ancestry to give the lie to that charge. Last week's revelations confirm a growing public awareness of the terrible truth among us. Most people will see the opponents of change as defending the indefensible.

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Not the Third World, just Australia's first war zone



Gang violence has turned the remote indigenous community of Wadeye into a war zone. Scores of Aborigines have fled their homes and are living in squalid refugee-like camps as two rival gangs, the Evil Warriors and the Judas Priests, fight for control of the Northern Territory's largest black town. Wadeye's chief executive, Terry Bullemor, said yesterday the local council was considering evacuating about 300 people to Darwin and elders called on politicians to send in the army to help the town's five full-time police officers keep the peace. However, the only road to the town remains blocked by floods.

Even the gang leaders have voiced concern. "Somebody's going to die," said Gregory Narndu, 32, a leader of the Evil Warriors. "What can we do? That other mob attacks us with rocks, boulders, spears and anything else they can get hold of." Wadeye, formerly the Catholic mission of Port Keats, has been plagued by warring gangs for years but three months ago the violence started to increase, reaching a crisis point last week. The rioters have caused more than $450,000 worth of damage to houses and other property.

"Our cry is for help," said town elder Theodora Narndu, Mr Narndu's mother. "Seeing what's happening, my tears are never dry. I hear the screams at night . terrified women and children . It has never been like this before. Our kids are not safe." She blamed the problem on the lack of police and a lack of resources. "When there's trouble around here and I call the police to come and protect my mob they never come," she said. "Where are the resources that the politicians kept promising us?"

Almost half of Wadeye's 2500 people are under 15 and cannot speak English. Life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians and an acute housing shortage - set to worsen over the next 20 years - means an average of 20 people to a house. The camps, created in response to the recent bouts of violence, lend an air of Third World poverty to the town.

Wadeye's only doctor, Patrick Rebgetz, said the violence had put the town's 1300 children at risk and accused the territory's Health Department of trying to gag him. "Australia should be ashamed at what's happening in remote indigenous com-munities," Dr Rebgetz said. "We as Australians need to stand up with these people to reclaim their town from the groups that are trying to destroy it." He said the Health Department had told him not to speak about a six year-old rape victim.

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