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A reply to CIS on the Intervention

intervention_protest

At first I didn’t think it was worthwhile responding to Sara Hudson’s response to me on the Intervention. I thought it was pretty insubstantial, and its ad hominem tone seemed to me suggestive that replying would reduce the issues to one of personalities, rather than the issues. However, I then decided that some comments may help illuminate the issues to outside parties.

So, let us review the state of debate. In April, I wrote:

The mountain of evidence of the failures of the NT Intervention defies summary here. Suffice to say, there is literally no evidence, even in government reports, that it has helped improve the socio-economic conditions Intervention supporters claim to be concerned about. Its supporters are simply backing racist policies because they believe racism is the best way to deal with Indigenous communities.

... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 2-12-2011, 2 user comments

The Bolt decision

By now, oceans of ink have been spilled over the decision against Andrew Bolt. In commenting on the case, I would like to draw out some relevant issues that I think have not been adequately discussed. As I have repeatedly written at ABC Drum and elsewhere in defence of Bolt’s right to be disgusting, I’m not going to focus on my civil libertarian commitments in this post.

A terrible day for free speech: the hypocrites
The front page of the Herald Sun , Australia’s biggest selling daily with 1.3 million readers, declared: ‘THIS IS A SAD DAY FOR FREE SPEECH’. By Andrew Bolt. It may seem that Mr Bolt has not been entirely silenced. There’s no law against his critics – unless of course, they criticised him too harshly, in which case they might have been sued for defamation. Nevertheless, our free media featured a response to Bolt’s first article by Chris Graham, with perhaps around 17 419 readers. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 13-10-2011, 2 user comments

The income quarantine scam

St Theresa jackboot – ABC onlineIncome quarantining has become part of life for welfare recipients in the NT. Originally it was part of the Federal Intervention, rolled out by Howard and his pet bulldog Mal Brough in 2007. Its aim was to prevent welfare money being spent on alcohol and cigarettes, rather than food, and on preventing ‘humbugging’ (demands for money from family members). It worked by quarantining 50 percent of a person’s welfare payment into a barter card, which could only be used at selected shops.

There were complaints and protests about the intervention and the notion of welfare quarantining to no effect. Soon stories began to circulate: a local community shop, where the profits went back into the community forced to close down because it couldn’t become an authorised barter card business. Indigenous people having to charter light planes, or get a taxi hundreds of kilometres, simply to shop. People arriving at checkouts with a trolley full of food only to find the barter card system had failed and they couldn’t buy anything, meaning days stuck in town trying to sort it out. The film NT Intervention: Katherine highlights just some of these issues. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 28-04-2011, 8 user comments

Grief, stolen children and SIEV 221

SIEV 221 – small coffins – Sam Mooy (The Australian)

The controversy over the burial of the dead of SIEV 221 still seems to have the aura of an event that everyone agrees not to speak of ever again. Some things in life, Scott Morrison’s outrage at the SIEV 221 funerals being one of them, are just too creepy to keep talking about. For a moment it seemed as though Morrison had weirded out most of the country with his astounding statements. Even the media, never shy of a lurid headline, struggled with that one. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 13-04-2011, 9 user comments

Non-fiction review: From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story

1194_mary_gaudronFrom Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story
Pamela Burton
UWAP

From Moree to Mabo is the compelling and readable biography of a remarkable lawyer. Although some of the detailed analysis of the key cases and political turmoils of Mary Gaudron’s time as Solicitor General of NSW can be overwhelming, it is hard to put this book down. If you don’t know who Mary Gaudron is or if you cannot explain what is meant by equal opportunity or if you have never heard of section 75(v) of the Australian Constitution, then this is a good book for you. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 29-03-2011, 4 user comments

Speaking of ‘them’…

As 2010 was wrapping itself up in Christmas paper and curled ribbon, my sister-girls Cadie and Kimberlee came to stay with me for a few days. They live in Queensland and it had been months since I’d seen them, so we decided to go out for a couple of drinks. The cute little bar down the road was closed but the local pubs were making the most of seasonal alcoholism, so we walked a couple of extra blocks to the hotel by the railway station.

I knew this particular establishment it for its trashy music and not-so-subtle clientele, and I warned the girls before we went that it wasn’t the classiest of places. Sure enough, we hadn’t even been there for ten minutes before some blokes sauntered up and asked if they could sit with us.

Too polite (or perhaps not drunk enough) to tell them to get lost, we assented. The conversation that followed was that kind of awkward, reluctant exchange that is always made more ridiculous by the fact that you have to speak louder than usual to be heard over Rihanna and Eminem - and to compensate for the fact that the people you’re talking to are actually quite drunk. There were three of them and they were in their late twenties. It was their office Christmas party and they were at the pub with a larger group of people, most of whom were milling around some tables about 10ft away, heads together, throwing us occasional glances. It wasn’t long before a couple more blokes wandered over, one of them receiving more of a welcome than the other as the guy directly across from me threw his arm around his friend and slapped him on the chest. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 25-02-2011, 9 user comments

A cure for stuttering

film3It’s true I think, as Adam Phillips remarked in one of his later essays, that we continually speak each other’s unspoken thoughts. We are not as discrete as we appear to be. There are many things in our lives that get spoken over and over, that we can’t stop speaking of, that are, in a sense, barely intelligible markers of things we don’t really know we are turning into utterance. It’s as if there is always something unspeakable inside us.

We all have pockets of unintegrated stuff hidden away within; autistic bits, psychotic bits, dissociated bits, and so on. They try and make themselves known again and again, in all sorts of weird ways. It’s as if we keep stuttering over and over, even stuttering about our stuttering. Those of us who are readers and writers may well be the worst stutterers of all. Writers speak in books, over and over. It’s as if the highly literate are people who just can’t shut up. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-02-2011, 3 user comments

The paddocks of amnesia

3772-84mcnaught_druckmullerOn Australia Day night the moon rose very late. On nights like that the sky is revealed as an event that the word ‘spectacular’ doesn’t do justice. The Milky Way with the Magellanic Clouds hanging off it gives the sky a profound depth. In daylight the farthest you can see is three-and-a-half minutes no matter where you are. At night, the farthest object you can see with the naked eye – Galaxy M31 in Andromeda – is about 2.5 million light years away. Light that set out toward us, as Carl Sagan once memorably put it to his presumably astounded American television audience, long before there were hamburgers or television. It’s the strangest thing looking at the revealed night sky. There’s a kind of ‘Oh, that’s the sky’ moment of understanding. That blue stuff we usually think of as sky, isn’t. We’ve just got the light shining in our eyes and can’t see anything. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 8-02-2011, 6 user comments

I wanna tell you a story

I wanna tell you a story. A story of a house and its history. A story of its building. Its problems. Issues.

community houseI wanna tell you a story of its rebuilding. Of the promises made. Of the restructuring and the re-checking. Of the new paint job that cost $10 000. Of the new kitchen and bathroom that now means cupboard doors and new shower. Of the over-costing. Of the big, big promises made, only to be revoked when proper costing is done and it’s realised there’s not enough money to do all that. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 17-12-2010, 1 user comment

Vale Bobbi Sykes

Bobbi_SykesA fortnight ago Bobbi Sykes died.

When I read the news, I was stilled by sorrow for and about someone I have never met. I am not a practiced obituary writer, nor am I an ‘expert’ on Aboriginal poetry. I write this post because the girl of 18 who first read Sykes’ poems, as an introduction to the world of poetry, still lives inside me and is so thankful.

My sorrow was for what Sykes gave me as a poet and through her political activism, in particular her involvement in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. I mourned for another wonderful woman dying, and for the many Aboriginal people who have died too young. As Sykes herself highlights in her poem ‘Final Count’: ... read more

Written by Elizabeth Humphrys on 30-11-2010, 6 user comments

Anecdotal tales from the ‘Indigenous Industry’

At this year’s Garma Festival a friend told me of a conversation she had with someone who used to work for the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). When she told this guy that she was from Alice Springs, he commented that some people in FaHCSIA are talking of moving to central Australia to take out a second mortgage.

The story was recounted again this weekend while sitting in a cafe in town. Over coffee a couple of friends described the constant strain and struggle of working in Indigenous communities: the repetitiveness of the stories, continually wrestling with the same issues, the failure of any major successful project. The constant pushing and pushing and pushing – and the way working in the field can just wear you out, make you apathetic or burnt out. They spoke about how this status quo of major health, education, short-term funding, etc creates a sort of false economy around Indigenous Affairs in Alice. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 17-11-2010, 2 user comments

Non-fiction review: Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia

' Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia'Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia
Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (eds)
UNSW Press

Labelling something to be ‘in crisis’ can be a fraught activity; when the motivation is to create a rethinking of the issue at hand, it often leads to bandaid solutions to quickly fix the crisis. In this collection of essays, Altman and Hinkson have chosen this approach – divided into four parts: the problem of recognition, the problem of violence, counting culture, imagining futures – to bring many of the discussions that have been taking place among Australian anthropologists to a wider audience. It’s a job well done. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 11-11-2010, 1 user comment

Walmadany: one place fighting against many

The Western Australian Government’s proposal to develop, along with Woodside Petroleum, a $30billion liquefied natural gas plant at Walmadany (James Price Point), north of Broome, is a startling example of how capitalism and colonialism can converge to ensure cultural and ecological destruction. Walmadany is no mere speck on the map. It is certainly no ‘unremarkable stretch of coastline’ as the Premier, Colin Barnett, put it on Four Corners earlier this year. Rather, it is right in the middle of sacred Gularabulu and Jabirrjabirr land. We know it is sacred because one of three major song cycles for the area passes right through it, from north to south. This is exactly why the Gularabulu family, led by Joseph Roe, are so desperate to protect it.

It’s not hard to visit this land either. In fact, each year Roe and his wife, Margie Cox, take a group of whitefellas along the path of this song cycle – the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. For ten days tourists are led across some of the most dramatic stretches of country imaginable: shining plates of aqua blue ocean, blood-red cliffs, clusters of paperbarks shivering in the breeze, fat, rolling sand dunes. The focus is on teaching others about country, and about how to care for it. ... read more

Written by Stuart Cooke on 16-09-2010, 11 user comments

The more things change

So far as I know, the only people who have analysed and criticised Justice Martin’s sentencing remarks on the white men who beat Kwementyaye Ryder are Chris Graham, and me. This case should provoke soul-searching. We should ask why it happened. We should ask how it could happen that a judge would respond in the way he did. And we should ask why the media has not considered it particularly significant.

The major exception was a report on Four Corners. In some ways, the report was significant. It devoted some 50 minutes to the killing. It contained some revealing testimony from witnesses: the families of the victim. It also contained testimony from the families of the perpetrators. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 2-09-2010, 1 user comment

Still colonising Aboriginal land

The story about the foundation of the first colony in Australia is well known; it was about water. None being available at Botany Bay, the First Fleet sailed north, and in a little cove halfway down Port Jackson they saw what was to become known as the Tank Stream. Its original name is now forgotten.

It had its source near the present Hyde Park and tumbled down through the picturesque bush, to cross the beach on the western edge of the cove. This original beauty has been built over and destroyed, but tourists still rave about the how attractive the harbour city is.

And so on. Australia has been progressively settled and developed, and at many sites there was controversy and resistance, starting, of course, with the original inhabitants whose spiritual kinship with country obliged them to protect it from desecration and over-exploitation. ... read more

Written by Stephen Muecke on 4-08-2010, 13 user comments