On permits: clearly, nobody opposing permits is suggesting that outsiders or visitors should have access to private houses or property being rented from councils or other housing bodies, so let's draw a line under that.

However, publicly-funded facilities are in a different category: at indigenous settlements, schools, clinics, airports, roadways, council offices, are almost all paid for out of public funds, as they should be. The question is: if they are publicly-funded, does the general public have the right of free access to them, to use them much as anybody from the settlements can ?

This is not an academic question: down here in southern South Australia, back in the twenties, the Protector tried to ban Afghan traders from entering captive settlements on the grounds that they engaged in immoral activities. But even the Education Department pointed out that, since the schools on government settlements were government schools, publicly-funded schools, the roadways to those schools had to be kept open to any member of the public: in other words, the roads to schools were public roads. The Afghan traders could not be kept out, provided they kept to the roadways.

So ....

Joe

2. So, this raises a few questions: of course, outsiders should not be able to enter private houses, but apart from that, at Indigenous settlements, what is private and what is public ? The land itself, apart from that on which publicy-funded activities are going on, surely must remain private: perhaps legally, the land on which publicly-funded facilities are operating is under some sort of implied lease to the funding body or its agent. So those two conditions limit what might be available to the public: the roadways, the school, clinic, council offices, airport, mechanic's workshop, perhaps the store ?

Of course, if the public does have access to these publicly-funded facilities, then the next vexing question is: can they take photographs from publicly-funded facilities, photographs even of people ? Can they talk to people who live at the settlement ? Presumably they can, provided they stay on publicly-funded land. Can they cause any disturbance or hurt or insult, or interfere in what people might be doing ? Of course not, no more than anywhere else.

But perhaps a lawyer could clarify whether or not the members of the public, going about lawful business, can use publicly-funded facilities in Indigenous settlements ? Having lived in one for several years, I am aware of the permit system in operation and its enormous expense relative to 'returns'.

Just wondering.

Joe

“It is their land and they should have the right to decide who visits it. Just like every other Australian.”

“Every other Australian” has rights over a small plot of land and house which they either own or pay rent on. That is hardly the same as a very small minority of people, totally beholden to the state, wanting to hog thousands of square kilometres of land rightly belonging to all Australians.

It’s amusing how aborigines want to be like ‘other Australians’ when it suits them.

It is easy to understand why some aborigines, living in isolation, might want to keep the permit system: to keep themselves free of the constraints of investigation and civilized behaviour and accountability under which ‘other Australians’ live.

The disclosure that mining rights earn these people “more than $1 billion a year in the Northern Territory” brings up the question as to why taxpayers are still forced to pour money into isolated, rundown communities where many of the inhabitants cannot even speak English and have no chance, or no intention, of being like “every other Australian”.

David Ross even has the gall to complain about “…huge distances, very small markets, lack of transport and communications and poor infrastructure….” .

And, of course, the Government is to blame for neglecting aboriginal education. But, when a government tries to encourage children to be sent to school, by carrot or by stick (as with ‘other Australians’) we have ‘racism’, ‘discrimination’ and all the usual nonsense.

This article is not so much about permits as it is about another opportunity for an aboriginal activist to have a good whinge about the dreadful white man. Mr. Ross would be much better employing his time and energy working out how to get his people out of isolated blacks camps so that they could enjoy the same benefits as ‘other Australians.

Really - Loudmouth and Leigh - what petty-minded comments!
Not content with us whiteys having forcibly taken away the great majority of this country, and having managed to pretty much ruin it - you guys want to remove the rights of the aborigines to have control over what bits of it are left to them.

David Ross has pointed out that permits have been readily given to people from many kinds of organisations. It hasn't been that hard to get a permit, as I have found myself, in travelling through areas in NT and WA.

I guess that the cultural notion of communal land is just something that some whiteys can't get their heads around, coming from our individualistic, materialistic, private property-mad Western culture.

Anyway, I hope that the permit system is maintained, especially to put the brakes on rampant uranium exploration and mining, and the desecration of environment, water, and sacred sites.
Christina Macpherson www.antinuclear.net

I thought better of you, Christina.

Forget the permit system and all the other side issues. It's difficult to believe that anyone can think that it's OK for people to live in squalor and poverty in remote ghettos.

I am so sick and tired of hearing leigh's racist crap about Aboriginal issues that she obviously knows nothing about jugding by her uneducated and misinformed remarks on article on Indigenous matters in this forum.

If the justification for change is based on the notion that only whites pay taxes which is what leigh is saying, than I have news for her/him Aboriginal people have been paying tax and levies since federation on half the pay of whites.

Aboriginal people could not use public schools or hospitals or any other service paid for by our taxes and and since we could not vote we couldn't visit parliment either. Some how this didn't prevent us from being called up to defend white Australia in times of war to protect leigh's right to free speech which she conviently forgets.

My taxes as an individual and as a business heavily support farmers, the racing industry and other assorted parasites, yet I have to seek their permission to be on land that Aboriginal people had lived on for thousands of years. So if its good enough for us it should be good enough for you and other whites.

White's with your attitude have removed fossils and sold them overseas, damaged artwork thousands of year old not to mention the huge enviromental damage they have created with their four wheel drives and dune buggies or the bush fires and rubbish they leave behind whilst illegally camping or the dumping of toxic chemicals.

White gubberments have made no efforts to protect our rights against whites and its high time this situation was reversed. When I go back to my community in the north I have to seek permission to come on the land so why should't whites have to do the same.