Current Indigenous debates, CDEP and ‘cultura nullius’
Bree Blakeman & Nanni Concu; 3/8/09
Debates about remote Indigenous communities, with very few exceptions, are crafted with a discourse of negation: people on the ‘margins’ of society, on the ‘margins’ of the economy with ‘little or no education’ who are nothing more than exiled economic citizens. The implication is clear; as Helen Hughes said recently, Indigenous people can’t read, they can’t write, they don’t have skills, [and seasonal fruit picking] is about the only thing they can do! Their communities are rendered as socio-economic vacuums in our thriving settler state. When the debate is cast in these terms, one can understand the sense of urgency to educate Indigenous people, ’skill’ them up and make them ‘job ready’ so we can break down, in Marcia Langton’s words, ‘the apartheid system of employment’. They are waiting for us to fill them out and colour them in with education and skills, to bring them into the real world and the real economy.
See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/03/2353864.htm