Mission & Justice

Andra Jackson; 11/10/08

As one of Western Australia’s last “desert people”, Rita Simpson’s early life was spent roaming from waterhole to waterhole, searching for food and water. She was part of a family mob that included her mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and brother and sisters. The hunt for food was one of the most enjoyable aspects of that lifestyle for her, and she recalls with relish the variety of food sources the desert offered — goanna, snake, lizard, bush turkey, kangaroo and emu. “Around 68 years old”, she lives in the settled community of Punmu in the Pilbara region of northern Western Australia — one of the most remote communities in Australia.

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11/0/08; http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/ theaustralian/comments/nothing_to_hide/

I take issue with Christopher Pearson’s analysis of the issues facing Aboriginal people in Central Australia (”Reflection beckons as intervention bears fruit”, Inquirer, 4-5/10) and particularly his reference to “dysfunctional land councils with plenty to hide”.
The Central Land Council has nothing to hide. It’s an Australian government statutory authority and its annual reports are tabled in the parliament for every Australian to see. Its governance is best practice and is better than many other Australian and Northern Territory government departments. And the point must be made that if there had been proper accountability of commonwealth funding to the Northern Territory government through the Commonwealth Grants Commission in the first place, the so-called emergency intervention would not have been necessary.
The Central Land Council, which represents the views of approximately 25,000 Aboriginal people in Central Australia, is continually, and disproportionately, subject to government reviews and audits and consistently emerges as operationally and financially sound and has been for more than 30 years.
Inalienable collective title to land is not, as Pearson asserts, “an ill-considered fad of the ‘70s”. Nor is it “one of the weakest and most inflexible forms of title ever devised”. It’s a very standard and common form of title freehold held by a trust. Through leases, it has enabled mining exploration, railways, pipelines and telecommunications and has allowed Aboriginal people to work with developers to pursue significant economic development. They are now spending their returns on these developments to provide services for themselves that other Australians take for granted. David Ross; Director, Central Land Council; Alice Springs, NT

Paul Toohey; 11/10/08

The Northern Territory Government is to unveil a radical shift in policy, refusing to fund the creation of any new Aboriginal outstations and arguing that the days of people moving into the bush and demanding government services are over. Northern Territory Indigenous Policy Minister Marion Scrymgour will release a discussion paper on Monday maintaining that the cultural benefits the outstations have provided have come at the expense of children’s education. “Many adults make the decision to live on outstations and accept the trade-off between limited services and a more positive lifestyle; however, children have little choice,” Ms Scrymgour said. “The Government has a responsibility to ensure children living on outstations have access to essential services, including a quality eduction.

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Natasha Robinson; 11/10/08

Stockman Frank Shadforth knows every inch of stringybark woodland and tropical rainforest that thrives at his pastoral station lining the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. But some of the rare animals and birds that were once found in the station’s forests now live only in his memory. “A lot of things are disappearing very fast,” Mr Shadforth says. “There is a bird I used to see in this country when I was small - a woodpecker. In the 1970s, it disappeared. Same with another little kangaroo. It’s always in the back of my mind.” Now the pioneering stockman - whose father was the first Aboriginal stockman to purchase a long-term lease over pastoral land in 1953 - has entered into a historic deal with private conservationists. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a non-profit organisation, has just clinched a deal to sub-lease more than 100,000ha of Mr Shadforth’s Seven Emu Station, 850km southeast of Darwin near the Queensland border.

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11/10/08; http://www.missionandjustice.org/wp-admin/post-new.php?posted=16114; http://members.optusnet.com.au/mruhsam/

The world’s tallest hardwood tree has been discovered in Tasmania. The swamp gum (eucalyptus regnans), dubbed Centurion, stands about 100m-101m. “It is the only known standing hardwood tree in the world to be over 100m tall,” said Forestry Tasmania managing director Bob Gordon. It was the tallest known tree in Australia. It’s the world’s tallest eucalyptus tree, the tallest hardwood tree and the tallest flowering plant, he said. Centurion is 405cm in diameter and its height was measured using laser survey equipment. It was discovered in a state forest near the Tahune Airwalk tourist attraction, 80km southwest of Hobart. A second giant swamp gum named Triarius, standing 86.5m with a 390cm diameter, was found alongside Centurion.

Matthew Denholm; 11/10/08

The Gunns pulp mill proposed for Tasmania has had another setback, with legal advice that itcannot build a vital water pipeline for the project across public land. Gunns had asked the West Tamar Council for permission for the pipeline to cross council-owned land at seven points. Legal advice sought by anti-mill councillor Karl Stevens and obtained by The Weekend Australian concludes it would be illegal for the pipeline to be built on public land. The advice to Mr Stevens, provided by Melbourne-based Bleyer Lawyers, concludes: “We are of the view that the council cannot allow the pipeline to be constructed across its land.”

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10/10/08

Perth’s Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey has issued a defamation writ against the West Australian newspaper for being labelled a hypocrite over his stance on women. An article and cartoon on October 2 referred to University of WA philosophy professor Michael Levine’s view that a television message currently being aired by the church was misleading and manipulative. In the ad Archbishop Hickey asks for women’s rights to be acknowledged. Professor Levine told the paper the Catholic Church had failed to show leadership because it did not allow women to become bishops or acknowledge same-sex marriages.

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Lindsay Murdoch; 10/10/08

There are no doors, no furniture and bare, dirt-caked walls. The toilet is broken. Stinking mattresses are strewn in three small, sweltering bedrooms where at least eight people sleep every night. “I’ve lived here all my life,” says Alfred Thardim, 39. Mr Thardim took The Age to his house in Wadeye, Australia’s largest remote indigenous community, 350 kilometres south-west of Darwin, because he wants a better life for his family. “My wife has diabetes. Living like this is not good for her,” he says, standing in the house that was built from bush gravel in 1975, when Wadeye was known as Port Keats, a Catholic mission community few Australians had heard of.

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Petro Georgiou; 10/10/08

Thirty years ago, when I was director of the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, people asked me whether I had a vision of a multicultural Australia in 2000. I said that I hoped it would be a society where, within a framework of key shared values, people had the opportunity to choose who they wanted to be. If they wanted to maintain elements of the culture of their origins that did not violate Australian laws, they should be able to do so. If they wanted to speak and read the language of their origin, as well as learning English, they should be able to do so. And if they wanted to adopt everything iconically Aussie, and forget about everything else, that was fine too. This is the logic of the policy of multiculturalism.

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Sarah Smiles;10/10/08

A landmark Federal Court decision that allowed a group of immigration detainees with criminal backgrounds who have spent much of their lives in Australia to stay in the country has been reversed by the Federal Government. The group of 23 detainees, some of whom came to Australia as children, were released from detention centres in July after English-born detainee Charles Sales challenged - on a technicality - the Immigration Minister’s power to cancel his particular visa class. Immigration Minister Chris Evans has since amended the technicality in the Migration Act and 15 of the detainees, who are largely from Britain and New Zealand, are being returned to detention centres. The other eight are still in the community while their visa cancellation cases are reassessed.

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