Quayle,

[continued]

Your take on remote-community child abuse: how do you want it, that "it happens in every community", or that in "any community without police, sex offenders run riot" ? Which is it to be ? Yes, like so many other Australians, I was amazed, when the Intervention was inaugurated, to find out that there were many communities which had never had police stationed in them, some large and notorious communities too. So yes, I am very glad that more communities now have a permanent police presence, just like non-Indigenous communities of similar requirements. That might go some way to protecting the lives and integrity of women and children.

Community needs: you mention swimming pools. I did my secondary schooling in Wagga and Darwin, each of which had populations in the tens of thousands and which had (at the time I left) one Olympic-sized swimming pool. I agree that any Indigenous community with a population of ten thousand should have a publicly-funded swimming pool. And of course, that any community, regardless of size, should be assisted to fund its own swimming pool, perhaps from royalties. Of course, this would rule out most Indigenous communities outside of the NT, since the great majority of them don't get any royalties.

Small non-Indigenous communities, towns, villages, have very few facilities, but people choose to live in them: go out into these communities and see if they look like your community. Often, any facilities that they may have access to, have been funded by local councils from rates and other income, roadworks, etc. Indigenous communities should be encouraged to fund whatever services they require like any other communities, from funds which they generate. Good luck with that.

[TBC]

Joe Lane

[continued]

In the real world, Quayle, any sort of service provision has a sort of threshold population that it needs to support it: a general store, for example, needs, say, three or four hundred people buying exclusively from it, to remain viable. A library needs many thousands of residents in its catchment area, in order for the council which usually funds it, to keep doing so. A hospital may need a thousand people within a driveable distance, to warrant being built and staying open. A basic, primary-level school may need twenty kids to stay open, and so a catchment population of a few hundred. A secondary school or TAFE college may need a catchment population in the thousands.

Indigenous people, on their own land, have every right to stay there, and to take the consequences of their choices. They don't have the right to demand facilities which non-Indigenous towns and villages of similar size and remoteness can only dream of. As it is, Indigenous people in public housing on private (i.e. their own) land are already receiving preferential treatment: check out if there is much public housing on privately-owned land in non-Indigenous towns.

Yes, you are right, a few billion dollars here or there of taxpayers' money (including Indigenous working people's money) doesn't significantly affect Australia's trillion-dollar budget. But I look forward to the day when Indigenous people in remote communities start giving back for those billions :)

Of course, that would require the mobilisation of the missing ingredient in Indigenous communities, an ingredient which other populations seem to have in abundance: effort, input, work.

Work: the magic ingredient ! The thought gladdens my Marxist heart ! It seems to have worked for the forty-odd thousand Indigenous people who are either enrolled, or have graduated from, university education. Indigenous people CAN contribute, but not by sitting forever on their freckles.

Joe Lane