Bess is not just fearless, educated and intelligent, she is also highly principled and committed to achieving change.
The only problem is that she has landed herself in the middle of a political party that has many members who are self-interested, or interested mainly in the wellbeing of the business class much more than they are in paying greater taxes to provide for the massive investments that will have to be made if her people are to have a fighting chance of digging themselves out of the massive hole in which they find themselves.
This is a hole partly dug by history in the form of colonialism and racism; partly by some of her own people in the form of individual and family selfishness and tolerance of violence and corruption; but it's mainly just an utterly foreseeable consequence of being born communally-orientated highly social hunter-gatherers with esoteric beliefs about causality and spirits, in an advanced industrial capitalist society - a society locked irreversibly into an increasingly technocratic world that is premised on the universality of scientifically educated competitive individualism.
The investment in the people, systems and equipment needed for finding ways out of the hole must not be underestimated. They include:
- substantial quantities of high quality education systems in remote communities,
- extensive early childhood and social work programs,
- intensive multi-systemic youth work,
- parenting skills programs,
- therapeutic programs for those addicted to alcohol/drugs/gambling and other addictions,
- intensive family support and interventions,
- health workforce development and subsidy,
- essential service infrastructure (including adequate accommodation in remote communities for the workforce needed to implement all these services and programs),
- sufficient secure housing for community members, and
- economic development for suitable job creation for the Aboriginal workforce, given its under-educated and low skilled composition.
(to be continued)

(continued from above)

Mal Brough, John Howard and Kevin Rudd had no idea about the actual need for most of this work, nor about the massive amounts of money needed for it, and the current conservative (and Labor) leaders at Federal, state and NT levels are not showing any signs of acknowledging that several billion dollars more need to be found immediately to pay for a rolling development program across remote Australia as a matter of urgent necessity.
The consequences of failing to do so will be an ever-escalating need for police, parole officers, prison guards and private security providers, and for turning remote towns into fortresses and government infrastructure into secure bunkers, plus armies of lawyers and magistrates and judges and court officials, and construction of police stations, courts, prisons, rehabilitaion facilities, and housing for all these workers, where money will be spent at the tail end of problems which could have been substantially prevented.

Hi Dan,

Sara consistently writes well and with a very acute understanding of the situation as I see it. I agree wholeheartedly that Bess Price is a courageous, decent and dedicated woman, and I certainly wish her well in what she is trying to achieve: she stands head and shoulders above so many other so-called leaders.

And your list of things-to-do-and-fund seems pretty spot-on. My views on 'community' are a bit more jaundiced and, as a socialist, I have to admit to the limits of communal ownership and responsibility: in my experience, they never seem to have worked, much as I would have wished it otherwise. Everybody seems to want to be a 'free rider'.

As for enterprises, if 'communities' can't even get vegetable gardens going, then I don't see any hope for more complex - and inevitably expensive - projects. However, employment in outside enterprises, especially since mining is going to have a major presence for many decades to come, is probably what will 'encourage' - even provoke - greater involvement of young Aboriginal people in genuine employment.

In other words, I'd put my money on the Andrew Forrest approach prevailing over the Jon Altman paradigm. We'll see :)

Best wishes,

Joe

Sara

I don't mean to be difficult here but your article is aimed at people who already have considerable background in this story.. you need to say high up in the story who Bess Price is, what she is done and why she is being criticised.. then you can launch into the passionate defence of her..

Dan,

It's time for the Left to swallow its pride and admit that leftist policies have been an unmitigated disaster. When missionaries left many communities there were often working cattle stations with stock hands, abatoirs, small aero companies, and more. Since the Left 'owned' indigineous policy the whole lot has fallen apart.

As your list shows about the only thing you don't want the government to do is to wipe their back sides for them. Instead of the usual leftist calls for.....you guessed it....more money, why not encourage personal responsibility? After all they managed without handouts for the first 40 000 odd years so it's been quite an accomplishment to destroy their independence over the last 40 or 50.

How long will remote Aboriginals have to suffer because of the vanity and pride of people like you?

Dane,
it was the evil left that ruined the aboriginal people was it? You might want to take a look at the ruinous effects that the paternalism and racism of the conservative right created before the left were able to have a go and implement their ideas.

Can we all stop using the Aboriginal people for political point scoring?

There are some great programs featuring interviews with Bess Price on Radio National

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/bess-price-welcome-to-my-world/3725896

And SBS has a wonderful series that traces the history of white settlement/invasion (whatever; it's only a word - can we stop being so easily offended?)

http://www.sbs.com.au/firstaustralians/about

Hi Dane,

I would hazard a guess and suggest that Dan would agree with your first paragraph.

Remote communities are in a terminal mess. The people who are condemned to live there do not deserve to be ignored, or have their ghastly existence papered over. The question is: what to do ?

In my rather biased view, forty years have shown that nothing much will come from 'community', but that the eighty thousand or so people in remote settlements still are entitled to the same opportunities as other people. How to effect this ?

Forty years of bilingual education have destroyed much of their potential to access the world, and appropriate forms of education are urgently needed, from top to bottom, to assist people to re-connect to the outside world, to gain employable skills and seek employment, even in the most menial positions, anything to get a toehold in the real world - if not for themselves, then as examples to their children.

If people don't actually want to do this - if they have a mistaken belief that the outside world will, forever and a day, feed them, tend to them, house them, shield them from having to actually do muc hfor themselves - then there will have to be a sustained education program to put them wise, to get them to understand that whites don't get houses free, or cars for free, or perpetual benefits from a money tree in Canberra. That all of the money that they live on, somebody else has had to work for.

And no, it's no good going on about the dreadful evils of the past - much of all that did not effect people in current remote communities, but mainly people in the 'South', who do not have land rights or phony non-work schemes like CDEP, who mostly have to get up every day and go to do real work.

And are better for it.

Cheers,

Joe

Bess Price gives me more hope for our first people than all the left wing academics together who have inflicted diaster for decades. Thanks Sara for also giving hope that we have a few young woman academics willing to speak the truth and not bow to the usual dogmas.

Dane (Posted by dane, Wednesday, 23 May 2012 6:11:47 PM): as Joe intimates, I wouldn't argue much with your first paragraph.
However, when you speculate that "about the only thing you don't want the government to do is to wipe their back sides for them", it is ironic that you don't realise that the governments are already having to wipe many back sides, for the simple reason that the petrol sniffing, alcohol-related road accidents and FASD epidemics in remote Australia have reduced many of these people to incapacitated states, with many more following courtesy of the early onset of diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, alcohol related haemorrhagic strokes and other degenerative diseases.
I actually have been calling for a lot more personal responsibility for many years, and a number of the costly programs that I have recommended here are precisely aimed at engendering an understanding and practice of personal responsibility by individuals, and the overcoming of dependence on handouts.
If you want taxpayers to have to pick up more and more of the wiping, that's your choice, but please don't complain about it as the costs keep rising at astronomic rates.
I’m not entirely sure what my vanity and pride have to do with it.

there is nothing that i don't agree with in this article, well perhaps one thing, and that is the absence of any textual analysis of how the media generally constructs Aboriginality as this would reveal a bigger story about how the producers of various 'genres' of Aboriginal are both naturally or unnaturally received by the audience.

Some of the common constructions are:

• The Native/ Inferior Other
• The Deficient/ Depraved/ Negative Other
• The Activist/ Radical/ Excessive Other
• The ‘Noble Savage’
• The ‘Ignoble Savage’
• The ‘Romantic Savage’
• The ‘Historical Savage’
• The ‘Dying Savage’

Bess Price (perhaps unwittingly) milks one of these constructions (the romantic?) for nothing more than her own political ambitions. And the question becomes not one of whether one likes Bess or not, but rather whether you think her public persona of the 'bush Aborigine' is accurate, right or otherwise. On many occasion Bess Price has openly declared that Aborigines from the urbs lack culture, have no 'real identity'.

Which raises another important question about the author, how Aboriginal people does she know in her own suburb/city. Not many I would assume, and therin lays the real problem with this article.

Note the author readily admits to being conservative and right wing but is unable to clearly define what this means - other than being contrarian to anything she sees as being too Leftist which is the usual excuse for any real interogration in racism and racist textualities.

I agree Joe. I really get into enough internet brawls already but I just think people have to challenge the disaster that left wing views have brought Aboriginal people.

Take the biggest bogeyman of them all - patriarchy. The Left is happy to preserve Aboriginal culture when it suits them, but when it conflicts with their ideological world view, it's bugger culture, Aboriginals must change.

The systemic disempowerment of men is a good example. Here we have a culture under enormous pressure due to its contact with the modern world. Instead of supporting existing power structures inside that society so that it can best cope with the change, the Left in all its wisdom, decides this doesn't suit them and determines to show aboriginals the light; to impose equality. So we get womens centres, women's leaders conferences, mentoring programs for women, health programs etc. the list is endless. Now the men have been successfully disempowered but the question is, have the women filled the void? Were they able to step into the role that the men vacated and hold their society together?

Much of remote society is now in free fall. Men aren't in charge but neither are women. Women like Bess Price are a blessing but they are not enough. We have chaos.

I'm not even a Christian but surely blind Freddy could see that missionaries and their 'right' wing views were infinitely more successful than the destruction the left has wreaked on Aboriginals. Missionaries weren't do-gooders looking for an 'Aboriginal experience' but often dedicated a decade or more of their lives to each place. They became respected members of the community who worked within existing power structures to manage change.

I'm not saying things before Whitlam were perfect but it's been a pretty steep fall since then.

Dan,

My point was simply that spending money doesn't work. It's not money that will solve Aboriginal disadvantage; it's Aboriginals themselves.

We can't solve their problems; government can't. Only they can.

It's nice that we agree on the personal responsibility bit at least. We currenltly have indigenous policy captured by the left. The left are too proud and too vain to admit that current policies are an abject failure.

sara, what do you mean by
"conversion of CDEP jobs into real employment"?

by conversion, perhaps you mean wholesale dismantling?
when the NTER first came in, the majority of CDEP positions were destroyed, and people put on welfare, purely so that their income could be managed. Sure, some positions in some communities were a bludge, with people doing little more than filling in time sheets.
Many CDEP positions were real jobs in everything but payscale. And a few people had built up towards management roles, within the CDEP model, on a decent wage - which was overnight converted to 50% of the dole, and a greencard.

Of course, in some places, after the destruction of community infrastructure that enabled local people to invest their time and effort into building their own communities, interstate contractors were brought in to perform the same function at vastly increased cost. But in others, basic community services just went undone. And community infrastructure (eg lawnmowers bought by the community, with the proceeds of their own work in the community, in order to keep employing members of the community) simply disappeared.

As the few remaining CDEP positions are whittled away, the labor government's Stronger Futures package brings a new scheme, that turns its back on the community development component and enterprise development roots of CDEP, and instead follows the new ideology of forcing people into major population centres.

I really don't think that's the way forward. The insistance that community development is not 'real work', and that people should move to the nearest mining town, is so ideologically bound as to be hamstrung. I'm not certain where the new RJCP model came from; I'm guessing it was born in canberra, or sydney. not here. It's past time to start listening to people.

Dane your only point seem to be that ‘the left’ is evil and they did nothing good for the Aboriginal people. That is so much rubbish; don't be simple and a political stooge.

I’d say it was the conservative idea of Aboriginal people as stupid – less intelligent than white people – and their culture as rubbish, as having nothing to offer to superior white people, that was the most damaging, apart from the actual taking of their land and livelihood, of course.

It was the ‘left’, the anthropologists and psychologists who were interested in Aboriginal culture and admired them for their achievements that brought about the beginning of a change in our attitude. It was this new knowledge that created a climate in which we all see now that there is a problem that needs a great deal of work; the conservatives were happy for them to die out and smooth the pillow of a dying race.

It’s useless to criticize the extremes of each side. Conservatives, now that they can understand that Aboriginal people are valuable, can have some useful input into their resurrection as a fine and admirable people who had an awful lot of knowledge that we could have used to great advantage if we had been more intelligent when we ‘invaded’. Just think what sort of an agriculture we could have had.

It's possible, but I am suspicious of this new found 'caring' attitude toward the Aborigines from the 'right', it seems politically motivated to me, a great way to score even more points against the evil left, and increase the divisions between us; and Dane is evidence that this 'plot' is working. It's more clever wedging by the right.

I don't think conservatives will ever change their spots and start really caring about the likes of black and poor people.

Dane I was going to ask what you think should be done but you have NFI, do you?

I thought that Ted Egan's book 'Due Inheritance' was the 'best' and most practical thing I have read, what do you think Joe?

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/foraradio/ted-egan-due-inheritance/3152264

Hi Mollydukes,

I'm probably not the right person to ask about that. After being pretty dedicated to self-determination for the best part of forty years, I suspect now that it was really a fraud, that Aboriginal people in isolated communities (perhaps a self-selected population?) on the whole weren't interested in putting any work into their communities, but were more interested in whatever next the government would do for them. Even CDEP, at least where I was familiar with it, was a con-job, where people could duck work by getting paid just to mow their own lawns and for 'home duties'.

No, I don't hold out any hope for communities, on the whole. I'm interested in what people are doing for themselves in urban centres, particularly in the area of higher education, the key to the kingdom, the means for people to get into genuine employment at higher levels. I really don't care about 'communities' any more: they have made their own beds, let them put the effort in - although enormous amounts of help from outside are going to be vital, they have cocked up so much - to get out of the messes they have made for themselves.

Would I lift a finger ever again for 'self-determination' ? Not bloody likely.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe But Ted Egan isn't talking about self-determination, in the same way as the left is he? The book I read had lots of practical ideas.

Anyway, I totally agree that self-determination probably did more harm than good, and I think you are right that the aboriginal people were 'unwilling' to do what they needed to do to make the most of what was being offered to them and it was the left who should have known better how to implement their policies.

I think it is harder than we realise for aboriginal people who have not been raised with white people to understand what we value; like hard work. It just wasn't something that they ever did in their culture unless you needed food or shelter, and it was fine to expect other people to look after you.

It was expecting too much that they would be able to be like us without having a clear idea of what we want from them and why would htey want to be like us when their old life must seem in memory, to have been a paradise.

We are free, but we have to work for that and individuals and we are responsible for our choices; their culture was the opposite. All rules, all about survival of the group at the expense of the individual and all about keeping things the same; no new ideas or technology.

So it's obvious in hindsight that they weren't going to understand the concept of 'self-determination' which is totally alien to their traditional way of thinking in which the elders and the vast intricate complex of unwritten laws left them no concept of choosing a life; everyone knew who the baby was before it was born.

Anyway, although suspicious of the new interest and respect for aboriginal people's welfare by the right, I am pleased that it is happening. And its very reassuring that the CIS is supporting Sara and taking an interest in doing something that works.

Go Sara! I wish you all the best.

In regards to the Northern Territory intervention, whilst it has particularly had positive affects on policing, and teaching it still does not acknowledge what Indigenous people want due to inadequate consultation. In particular, the teaching has been improved, yet Indigenous schools still are not permitted, and bilingual learning is still not accepted. Then the intervention wants students to attend school, and if they don’t attend school their parents get their welfare payments cut. If the government wants students to attend school, they need to begin by accepting that some of these Indigenous students speak 2 or 3 languages before they speak English. School would be very difficult for students who cannot speak the language. Furthermore, increased policing and alcohol bans, have led to broken down families, as fathers in particular, are getting put in gaol more often. This has affects on families and develops attachment issues for children. I don’t condone Price’s views, but I think there are many flaws with the intervention leading to much more disadvantage, and better ways to approach this.

Well this is to complicated for me, I live and do not read too much ( psst.
I have some understanding of how indigenous people might feel, just like broken watch. No way they will get back to who they were ever, white people made sure with integration policy :).
I wish I am able to see how they were before :), wouldn't it be a nice sight?
I think that all of us have no right to discuss and write about it so much, Aborigines are the ones to say their truth. white people even make the Aboriginal truth :)k Give them a break. Or the more we talk the better we are able to hide behind :)
Just some thoughts :)

Hi Zorka,

You raise some very important issues, in relation to 'Closing the Gap': for example, should Indigenous people have equal rights, equal opportunities, equal access to services ? If so, then we should be supporting policies of integration.

I certainly do, if by that, is meant access to educational and employment opportunities. I am very happy that nearly thirty thousand Indigenous people have seized opportunities to become university graduates and go on to productive and satisfying employment.

I am happy that there are record numbers of Indigenous people now at universities, with Indigenous women participating at about 85 % of the rate of non-Indigenous women in spite of the disadvantages that so many Indigenous women face in terms of class, remoteness and cultural obstacles.

I am happy that equal access to health services, especially in the cities, means that Indigenous people's health is improved.

OR should we pull back on any push for equality, if these efforts encourage people to move to cities from rural and remote communities, because - some may say - that push for equality might have negative effects on cultural maintenance ?

In fact, should we be trying to 'Widen the Gap', if closing it means that more people come to the cities and abandon traditional relationships and culture ? Should health efforts to reduce infant mortality and lengthen life expectancy be wound down if they mean that cultural practices, revolving around magic and sorcery, are abandoned ? Would 'Widening the Gap' help to reinforce traditional culture, and does 'Closing the Gap' indirectly act as a threat to traditional culture ?

[TBC]

[contd.]

So, should Aboriginal people be discouraged from coming to the cities, as they were - at least down here in SA - until the seventies, because it might damage their culture ?

Did the old-time governments, perhaps even Bjelke-Petersen's, have the right idea - no equal rights, not even the rights to drink or vote, modified or 'culturally-adapted' education leading to very limited employment opportunities, restrictions on people's right to be in towns after, say, 5 p.m. ?

Should programs at universities be abandoned ? Should it actually be made more difficult for Indigenous people to find employment of any sort, especially in professional positions ? Should hospitals have special wards, along the verandah or out in the open, for Blackfellas ?

All of this just so that cultural practices can be maintained ?

We have to face up to this contradiction:

* yes, of course, in a modern democracy, the integrationist approach suggests: all people should have full and equal rights. But

* no, a more reactionary approach suggests: if Aboriginal people have too much access to too many rights, they will abandon their communities, and their traditional culture. Only an elite should have equal rights (says the elite).

If it is all as stark as that, then which pathway do we support - towards genuine equality, or towards a futile attempt (given the forces and attractions loose in the modern world) to maintain cultural preservation ? The city or - what hell-hole in the name of 'culture' ?

Or can the two be reconciled ?

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Loudmouth,

I think there are some great figures with Indigenous people who have progressed to university qualifications. I also believe if we had the choice of bi-lingual education throughout Australia there would be many more graduates and a much better chance for Indigenous people.

Thus, I also think cultural maintenance is really important too. However, in Australia currently it seems to be one way or the other. No sense of in between, incorporating Aboriginal culture and equal opportunity. There should be equal opportunity. That is a basic right. Currently Indigenous people have no such experiences in Australia.

Aboriginal people need the right to have the opportunity to make their own decisions for their own culture as Zorka has outlined. Is whether old-time governments had the right idea, even a plausible question? These go against all human rights.

Why is there not a possibility for Indigenous populations to make their own decisions? For actual consultation to occur, and Indigenous populations be listened too? Why is that an issue.

I don’t think if Aboriginal people have access to too many rights they will abandon their communitites or culture. They would not need for this to happen if their natural Aboriginal culture is included in Australia’s culture.

Why is it that the New Zealand government has worked this out? How come the Maoris have full access to a bilingual culture? It goes back to a treaty, where basic principles were embedded into every law in New Zealand to protect the Maoris. Yet there is constantly excuses in Australia. Not saying the New Zealand Government is perfect in anyway, but in regards to their Indigenous people they are streets ahead.

Thanks for replying to my post,

Lara