Professor Fiona Stanley's Hawke Lecture on Aboriginal Community distress was reported on in Saturday's Age -Nov.7th.The Lecture link is www.unisa.edu.au/hawkecentre/ah/2008ahl_Stanley.asp

The effect on Communities of alcohol removal without support for the alcoholics and their communities she says is "inhumane"and "We would not do it to a dog".

As this great Australian says, white Governments constantly refuse to ask the Question WHY does this happen, this enormous burden of alcoholism, drug taking ,despair and violence in so many communities??

Alcoholics with a now medical need for alcohol or immediate rehabilitation support are walking away from their Communities and families and going to towns that don't want them and can't support them to play out scenes similar to the early press caricatures of Aboriginals bashing each other to death in an alcohol fuelled daze in Sydney Streets 200 years ago.

We white invaders have created this unholy disaster - we are responsible and must demand that the Federal and State Governments with our taxes, help Professor Stanley achieve a decent life and Health for the men ,the women and the children.

All Australians,as we continue to enjoy the spoils of conquest, must work hard to try to repair the wrecked Lives and Cultures of the First Australians.

Alcoholism is an illness. I fully agree with
Fiona Stanley that banning it without providing
any support is inhumane and it does not happen
in the white communities. To allow it to
happen in our Indigenous communities - we need
to ask -WHY?

Our politicians need to be held accountable -
as Fiona Stanley points out - the Aboriginal
communities are audited to death. Yet no one
asks the service providers to account for their
actions when they fall short.

This is neither fair nor just.

Something needs to be done.

Prevention is better than a cure.
We all know what is right and what is wrong.
This definitely sounds wrong.

Things must be put right. There are many lost souls out
there but there must be a cure. Both white and black have
come a long way since the Stone Age days. But what are
modern parents giving to their children of the eternal
values? We need answers - and simply banning alcohol -
is not going to work.

Sir Douglas Nicholls once said,

"You can play a tune of sorts on the white keys of a
piano; you can play some sort of tune on the black keys;
but for perfect harmony, you must use both."

I get the point, it is a terrific one.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=507

" ... Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia
24 Oct 2008
In a report for the Guardian, John Pilger describes the deception behind the pretext for a "national emergency" declared by the Australian government in Aboriginal areas. A political cry of "save the children" can also mean the profits of uranium and toxic waste. ... "

..

" ... The facts are not in dispute. Thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40. An entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities. Suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leach off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3billion was underspent “or the result of creative accounting,” reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children. ... "

" ... In 2005, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination described the racism of the Australian state .. John Howard .. they deployed arguments not dissimilar to those used by David Irving to promote Holocaust denial. ... "

..

" ... What the doctors found they already knew – children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Kevin Rudd has picked up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Mackie, threatens to withdraw government support from remote communities that are “economically unviable”. The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lies some of the world’s biggest deposits of uranium. Canberra wants to mine it and sell it. ..."

...

Excerpts from a good read.

It will never be easy ,talking of this problem I expect yet again to be branded raciest but these are my thoughts.
Talking of invasion, blaming every thing on whites, is no start to fixing a problem we just must fix.
Much of the birth of the sadness we see today came from Church's trying to destroy the very culture of these people.
Much of the stolen generation was at the hands of those Church's.
I will never side with those who saw the NT thing as unneeded.
We had to act.
I take a very much hands on approach to Aboriginal training and employment.
Driving hundreds of klms for just two on site trainees when help is needed.
I am hurt every time some one falls out and walks away from the only job they ever had or may have.
And that happens more often than not.
Success comes far more often if an elder is involved not a well meaning but uniformed professional.
So I think well meaning fools do more harm than good trainers should come from within the community not outside.
And drinking?
White alcoholics exist and we do not do anything for them do we?
Giant problem but we must find answers blaming non alcoholics is not an answer.

Belly says,
"Blaming non alcoholics is not the answer". You are right - that will produce nothing - blame those whose paid work is to ensure All Australians receive a fair share of benefits from exploiting the wealth of the country.

What I am saying and I believe professor Stanley is saying is that those in all goverments with the power and money [some who could be alcoholics anyway], don't care enough to address the problems of those alcoholics and drug takers that have their supply of alcohol taken away without support and that is a disgrace .

White alcoholics have a huge amount of support networks available in towns and cities if they want them . Several I know have responsible jobs and often with the help of their wives working, support their families, albeit with some problems.

Who would be game to take their grog away ??

It is a Racist act done to the weakest and most defenceless in our so called modern and progressive society .

As The Professor reports in her Western Australia - now probably the richest state in Australia, Aboriginal men die at average age 47 - yes, not the 57 as seen as the still grossly low average for Australia.

There are some moves afoot by the mining industry to expose young Aboriginal people to work in this field . As I write my Aboriginal family in Broome has a daughter and her friends off for a week's bus tour of opportunities available .

No doubt the Companies will give the Traditional owners the holes back .

As DreamOn says the underspending on Aboriginal Health needs to be exposed .

In our small town in Victoria the problem of no doctors was addressed by paying them a lot more money. We have an African , Fijjian and an Egyptian doctor all settled in . One has adopted a local footy team .

A serious recruiting effort with huge sums of the money evidently available would work .

Non-performance and apathy by Governments in Aboriginal Health is inexcusable.

Excellent point made.

Further to the story, it is within my own experience to know that many Aboriginal alcohol over-consumers in remote indigenous settlements, suffer from the micro-bacteria giardia in their guts. Giardia is not able to be gotten rid of, and definitely causes a dramatic worsening of any stomache cramping associated with detoxification. A person might only need to be experiencing slight biologically driven desire for alcohol, for the giardia bacteria to effectively prevent a detoxification from happening successfully without medication. Medicated withdrawal is readily available in the big cities, so why not in the bush?

I have the giardia bacteria myself through contact with remote communities, so know that it can only worsen the need for medical care while enduring detoxification. It is not normally active after the first bout of illness it causes, but can flare up whenever the digestive system, and particularly the liver, are under pressure. The stomache cramps are the worst of it.

In addition to that, it is also my experience that Aboriginal men living here in Brisbane, whom have formerly been incarcerated, find that their detoxification is manageable except for the bowel disturbances caused by sodomy perpetrated against them in the prisons. Perhaps prisons in NT are not so awful, but 100% of Aboriginal men from other states, whom I know, and know of, and whom have been incarcerated, have also been sodomised. The acts of sodomy conducted in prison are done often for the purpose of causing drug dependence whilst in prison, which only makes it harder to detoxify once released. This is just another medical fact which needs to be taken into consideration in respect of how to manage removal of alcohol from indigenous communities.