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Aboriginal kids a no-go zone for health census : Comments
By Andrew Laming, published 13/9/2011Why is the government discriminating against Aborigines in the National Health Survey.
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One part of the answer might be: superficially rational calculation. Please let me explain. An old missionary friend of mine was telling me that, on the day that people at his mission discovered that the ycould get welfare payments for being unemployed, they stopped working on the gardens and orchards, and with the chooks and sheep - didn't even turn off the taps.
Perhaps people in very remote areas honestly have no idea of how people 'outside' earn their livings. They may think that 'we' all get money and houses and cars, given to us by Canberra. It's not that it all just drops out of the sky, or off a tree, but that maybe the elders know the magic of how to induce the whitefellas to pay them forever, perhaps in recognition of their land-ownership, I don't know. But the upshot is that people in remote communities may think - quite reasonably, from one point of view - that self-determination means more power, and more power means that they do less, others do more and more for them.
So now it will be, in the APY lands, that the government (or the Red Cross) will feed their kids, while they gamble or sit under a tree. After all, they get paid to send their kids to school (or not) where somebody else looks after them, paid to go to funerals, paid not to work, to have kids, to get old, to get sick - what a strange but wonderful world it must be to have all this done for them.
I remember once on a community where I worked: a nurse was appointed, and the council wanted her to wash old people's feet, as a standard part of her job. When my wife was running the kindergarten there, some women wanted her to look after the kids 24/7. People take advantage when and where they can, Black or White.
To answer your question, maybe people SEEK dependence if it means getting looked after and doing less and less.