Part 1
Dan and Saltpetre, I totally agree there needs to be more communication from the ground up. This was a key recommendation of The Little Children are Sacred report which was ignored when Howard introduced NTER. These days there’s certainly a lot of resistance to Stronger Futures by those who are impacted by it – but who is listening? Dan, thanks for posting the links. The evaluation report was part of my research but I hadn’t seen the Community Safety and Wellbeing Research Study which asks which changes people found most constructive. In other words it’s aimed at finding the positive not the negative. You are right in saying it is complex. Respondents have found some benefits especially in regard to safety with night patrols and police presence but “Strong negative changes that have taken place over the last three years are perceived to be the loss of control at the community level and resulting disempowerment of local leaders, and the increase in marijuana use.” There’s also a comment that “there is a lot of feedback that the demise of the local Council governance structure has significantly weakened local leadership”.

Another concern is that “There is very consistent and solid evidence from both quantitative and qualitative data sources that gains made over the last three years are much less pronounced in communities of over 1100 people; and that challenges in these large communities are more acute.” Yet the government’s plan is to push people into Growth Towns. In my opinion this is a fatal flaw of NTER.

Part 2
It’s a good point that Aboriginal culture has been very badly impacted by alcohol, drugs, and welfare dependency in recent years and I suspect this may get worse in the Growth Towns. The survey notes that families want help to return to homelands. Why not put housing and schools on the homelands? Dan, you say a strong culture is part of the mix but removing Aboriginal people from their country is a body blow to that culture. Maybe the new way forward is part traditional, on traditional lands and part modern Australian way of life.

Saltpetre, you raise the issue of identifying as indigenous. Too complex to go into here, it’s discussion of its own. As for cleaning up the forum, different points of view are welcome in my view but no personal attacks and no racist comments. We know there are racists out there, no need to hand them a megaphone. As for personal attacks we have someone saying sarcastically that I am of great wisdom and knowledge and shouting at me WAKE UP MY DEAR AND SMELL THE ROSES and someone else saying it’s okay for me to use my real name because I am somehow protected but he can’t because he has integrity. That nonsense should stop

Aboriginal culture has been very badly impacted by alcohol, drugs, and welfare
Amanda J. Midlam,
I have no clear answer as to what it is that makes many indigenous from around the world take to Alcohol like ducks to water. Culture on the other hand has suffered immensely at the hands of the missionaries, the fore-runners of modern-day academia.
I have experienced that myself on many occasions when we just reached a point of things going well when whamm, some "expert" breezed in at 2 minutes to 12 & totally ruined it all because he had "qualifications" & therefore knew better which impressed the bureaucrats who are incapable of thinking past selection criteria.

That nonsense should stop.
Amanda J. Midlam,
Prove that this is incorrect. Show me one instance when an ordinary bloke off the street was granted acknowledgement in favour over an academic expert.

Amanda - Not many people live permanently on most outstations/homelands. More important is the stagnation occurring in the majority of communities, which are neither hubs nor outstations. Many thousands more people live mainly in these smaller remote communities, receiving some boosted services, through Federal money flowing from the NTER via the Shires or NT departments, for things like night patrols, police stations, extra teachers and youth programs, or via community health services; but they are not receiving any extra accommodation for population needs. Generally there is no permanent or temporary accommodation available for them in hub centres or regional towns either, if they did decide to move for work or other reasons. This accommodation deficit in non-hub remote towns or in NT job markets can’t simply be ignored: to do so will make things far worse for many children and vulnerable adults, and cause huge frictions in regional economic and administrative centres, which would eventually be surrounded by desperately poor refugee camps. Provision of housing on outstations would not work either, as this is both massively expensive and largely a waste of resources, because most people – for a variety of reasons - don’t wind up living permanently on the outstations even if they do have housing and schools on them. The majority of existing outstation houses and schools sit empty for most of the time. People generally get bored or lonely on outstations. It is very expensive to live on them, because of fuel costs, distances from stores and more specialised services, and the desire by many to take part in modern attractions.
Re “the loss of control at the community level and resulting disempowerment of local leaders” and “the demise of the local Council governance structure [that] has significantly weakened local leadership”: these phenomena are primarily associated with the NT government’s local government reforms, whereby community councils have been replaced with larger shire councils. This is not part of the NTER – it is a process that had been planned for several years prior to the NTER, and its implementation coincidentally occurred a year after the NTER began.

Saltpetre,
re ‘urban’ influences: I wouldn’t be too worried about that. There are capable established Aboriginal leaders of integrity like the Dodson brothers, Noel Pearson, Michael Anderson and Peter Yu, and newer ones like Jack Beetson, Mary Victor Oreeri, Joe Morrison, Joe Ross and many others, who have emerged from outback communities onto wider stages, whilst retaining respect from many in their home communities. There are others following their footsteps through education, working lives and experience in the politics of institutions like the Land Councils, NACCHO and the new National Congress. These people are capable of handling the hot heads and opportunists who might want to bulldoze the less sophisticated remote community people, many of whom are very unlikely to put up much with being ignored or pushed around anyway.
In relation to the ambiguities of identity and entitlement, I think we have to accept that there can’t be any hard and fast rules foisted on people. The sad history is that many people of mixed heritage were rejected or treated with great prejudice by many in the non-Aboriginal community for too long for there now to be a re-writing of history and forcible re-assigning of identities along genetic lines.
Of greater concern is one issue mentioned by Amanda Midlam in her essay: that of “institutional racism operating through institutions such as police, health and education services”. Much work by Aboriginal organisations and others went into overcoming prejudice over the last few decades, but the fluid circumstances of the NTER period, with sometimes chaotic circumstances and many new untrained workers entering the field, provides opportunities for new prejudices to take root and grow.
I can’t see any quick or easy progress in the near future towards a successful referendum which could really resolve the basic outstanding issue of sovereignty. Regardless of whatever differences of opinion may exist on the Aboriginal side about this, there are probably too many angry bigots and lazy opportunists, encouraged by populist commentators and cynical vested interests, to permit it in our present turbulent political culture.
There is a lot of work to be done.