Mission & Justice

Jo Chandler; 21/6/08

It is a year since a cavalcade of four-wheel-drives and army trucks followed a police car past the oblivious crowds of tourists photographing Uluru and turned down the no-go road into Mutitjulu. This is where John Howard’s emergency intervention into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, to rescue children at risk of abuse and neglect, began. So one year on, what has the intervention has brought to Mutitjulu? “Lots of Toyotas,” an elder, Bob Randall, dryly observes as he drives home past the traffic delivering the day’s quota of bureaucrats. Some changes are starkly apparent. Others take longer to see. And much is as it always was.

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20/6/08

The Federal Government will give $3.4million in grants for special assistance to refugees and others who need it to prepare for the controversial citizenship test. The Citizenship Support Grants program will provide funding for 33 community organisations nationally, including migrant resource centres and English language service providers. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, said: “These organisations will offer a range of services to support up to 35,000 people who may have difficulty in undertaking the computer-based citizenship test”, such as low English proficiency, a lack of formal education, difficulty performing in formal testing, or little or no experience with computers.

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Ewin Hannan; 20/6/08

The Northern Territory intervention has set a precedent of political action that would be impossible to reverse, and Labor risked a backlash if it sought to return to the Hawke and Keating governments’ approach to indigenous policy. Conservative historian Keith Windschuttle said last night the intervention started by former Howard government indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough had been widely accepted by Aboriginal communities, particularly victims of abuse. Presenting the Bennelong Society medal to Mr Brough in Melbourne, Mr Windschuttle said the intervention had been met with a “collective sigh of relief”. “Until Mal Brough came along, the paradigm shift that had occurred in the intellectualisation of the issue had not been matched by a political response of similar magnitude. Today that is no longer true,” he said. “The Northern Territory intervention has set a precedent of political action that I think will be impossible to reverse.”

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Patricia Karvelas; 19/6/08

The Rudd Government yesterday moved to reinforce its commitment to the Northern Territory indigenous intervention, handing down a 12-month report card that argues it has accelerated the rollout of key measures. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin told The Australian the Government was determined to strengthen rather than weaken the intervention in Aboriginal communities, releasing new figures to prove Labor’s commitment. Labor promised to review the intervention, launched in June last year by John Howard in aneffort to stamp out sexual abuse and violence against children, and improve living standards in communities, if it won government. Yesterday’s report card shows that while only 4630 children in 58 per cent of all communities had been visited and given free health checks at the time the government changed hands in November, that figure reached 11,000 this month.

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Patricia Karvelas; 18/6/08

Aborigines in the Northern Territory should be encouraged to leave remote communities in the next phase of the federal Government’s intervention to normalise indigenous communities. In a radical paper in the journal Agenda, written to coincide with the anniversary of the intervention, Keating government minister Gary Johns has asked some tough questions about the viability of the communities. Mr Johns - president of the Bennelong Society, which aims to promote debate about indigenous policy - suggests the Rudd Government should consider more radical welfare solutions than paying indigenous people to live in places where there is no employment. Mr Johns argues it is better to save a child and potentially lose a culture than do the reverse by maintaining uneconomic and unsafe communities.

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Patricia Karvelas; 17/6/08
A labour-dominated Senate committee has called for a “healing fund” to be established for members of the Stolen Generations. The Senate legal and constitutional committee yesterday delivered its report on a bill proposed by Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett that proposed compensation for the Stolen Generations. In February, Kevin Rudd delivered a national apology to the Stolen Generations, but ruled out financially compensating victims. The report says the federal Government should establish a national fund to cover health, housing, ageing, funeral and other family support services for the Stolen Generations. “The committee recommends that the national indigenous healing fund be incorporated within the ‘closing the gap’ initiative as an additional and discrete element of focus and funding,” the report says.

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16/6/08

With a little over a month to go until World Youth Day is celebrated in Sydney, the event is attracting more and more coverage in the media. Last Saturday the Sydney Morning Herald published a provocative article by Adele Horin looking at the event through the eyes of a an unbelieving mother in a household of religiously sceptical young people. In this response a Catholic mother with much experience of the mores of young people today, Kerry Gonzales, responds supporting Adele Horin’s call for the fostering of greater religious tolerance in the wider Australian community but herself also expressing a different kind of scepticism about what World Youth Day is going to achieve. Will it convince the broad masses of young people or is it likely to fan the flames of the sort of religious intolerance recently exhibited in Sydney against the proposal to build an Islamic secondary college in the outer suburbs of Sydney at Camden?

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15/6/08

Australia’s citizenship test has been given a fail by the former diplomat charged with reviewing it. Richard Woolcott says the test discriminates against people who don’t speak English as their first language and is flawed because you can get 19 of 20 questions correct and still not pass. Moreover the questions are on “all sorts of things which you simply don’t need to know”. Mr Woolcott, 81, is chair of a review committee established by the Rudd government earlier this year after the former Howard government introduced the controversial test eight months ago.

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Victoria Laurie; 14/6/08

The windmill stands midway along the Canning Stock Route, spinning lazily in the late afternoon breeze. Beneath its blades, marked “Well 33 Kunawarritji”, a group of Martu women are gathering for a photo. Giggling and grumbling, these Western Desert artists lift skirts to step over bull-rushes growing around the foot of the water tank.  Around its side they’ve draped a canvas decorated with yellow, gold, orange and green circles. Sisters Kumpaya Girgirba, Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter and Nora Nangubar finished the canvas earlier in the day. Now a young indigenous photographer, Morika Biljabu, is herding them together for a commemorative snapshot. “Look out, snake!” someone shouts and they scatter like startled galahs at a waterhole. It’s a false alarm and everyone settles back into position for Morika to get her shots from the top of a Nissan four-wheel-drive. Remote is too weak a word to describe how far we are from anywhere. Our party of 15 artists and a small crew of non-indigenous helpers has gathered roughly halfway along the Canning Stock Route, the droving trail forged by surveyor Alfred Canning in 1906 to bring cattle down from the Kimberley town of Halls Creek southwest to Wiluna, a daunting 1750 kilometres through sand and salt pans.

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Ashleigh Wilson; 14/6/08

Australia’s reputation will be at risk in Muslim countries if aplanned appeal against a council’s rejection of an Islamic school on Sydney’s southwestern fringe fails. Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad accused Camden council of acquiescing to a “vocal minority” by rejecting a planned development of an Islamic school. Mr Trad told The Weekend Australian he did not believe the council’s decision last month to reject the proposal was based solely on planning grounds, as it had stated. “We market this country for foreign students and send exports to many Muslim countries,” Mr Trad said. “So how are you going to show these people we respect them if we won’t even allow our own citizens to have a school for their children? I think it’s already done damage, but people are waiting to see the appeal.” The Quranic Society applied to build an Islamic school for 1200 residents just outside Camden, a small rural town about an hour’s drive southwest of Sydney’s CBD.

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