Mission & Justice

Natasha Robinson; 16/6/08

It is just after 8am at Papunya School, beneath the Ulambara Ranges in central Australia, and the first students are trickling in the school gates for breakfast. Today it is toast and Milo, but the menu changes almost every day at the school’s bustling kitchen, which turns out breakfast, morning tea and lunch for children five days a week. The school’s nutrition program is so important to the children of this community, 240km west of Alice Springs, that workers in the clinic noticed a drop in the weight of school children over the Christmas school holidays last year. “That’s what the clinic told us over Christmas - that the kids’ weights generally had dropped,” said principal Sue Sifa.

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Natasha Robinson; 10/6/08

Teachers in central Australia have resorted to bringing their own furniture for students to sit on as their under-funded school struggles with an explosion in attendance. The principal of the Ntaria School at Hermannsburg, 130km west of Alice Springs, has begged the Northern Territory Government to properly resource the school, saying secondary students lack even a rudimentary science laboratory. Darrell Fowler said rising attendance numbers at the tiny school had put pressure on resources. Attendance at the school has doubled in the past year. The number of students attending school peaked at 139 last week.

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6/5/08

More mothers and young female students were infected with HIV/AIDS compared to sex workers in the Morobe Province. The Morobe Provincial AIDS Council said yesterday records it has compiled over the last few years indicate the rate of infection among mothers in stable marriages and female students in secondary and tertiary schools was rising at a very alarming rate. “The figures we have showed that over the same period, the rate of infection among sex workers in the province has stabilised, there is no marked increase at all,” the provincial response co-ordinator Charles Pepe said. Mr Pepe said the trend of infection was brought by the rise in the cost of living in town and that married men were involved in promiscuous and unsafe sex in Morobe. “We believe that many young girls between the ages of 15 to 25 years engaged in unsafe sexual activities with men for money because times are hard. “The men pay them for sex so that the girls can pay their school feels or buy much needed items to look after themselves,” he said.

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4/6/08

Israel allowed four of seven Palestinians who were awarded prestigious U.S. fellowships to leave the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to apply for visas to the United States, an Israeli human rights group said on Wednesday. Israel allowed the four Fulbright students to travel to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem for visa interviews. They will return to Gaza later in the day and remain there until their visas are finalized, the human rights group, Gisha, said. Three Fulbright students have yet to receive Israeli approval to travel to the Consulate, Gisha said. A U.S. Consulate spokeswoman was not immediately available to comment.

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2/6/08

Shortly ahead of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s visit to the United States, both the White House and the United Nations on Monday expressed concern over Israel’s contentious plans to build some 884 homes in eastern parts of the Jerusalem municipality. “Our position on the settlements is that we don’t believe that any more settlements should be built, and we know that it exacerbates the tension when it comes to the negotiations with the Palestinians,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters at a press briefing. According to a transcript released by the White House, Perino also said that the expansion of existing settlements “is part of the problem in terms of Palestinians feeling that that is not acting in good faith when it comes to their negotiations.”

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Damien Murphy; 31/5/08

The hair is assisted blonde rather than red, but the rawness of Kate McCulloch’s words curiously echoes Pauline Hanson’s redneck worries about dispossession and the need to curb Muslim immigration, especially in the white-bread community of Camden. Mrs McCulloch, a Catholic mother of four, became the poster girl for Camden’s Muslim-shy residents this week when local councillors voted unanimously “on planning grounds alone” to reject a Quranic Society proposal for a $19 million Islamic school on Sydney’s rural outskirts. Having railed against Muslims who “take our welfare”, Mrs McCulloch, 45, now says she is considering following Mrs Hanson into politics. She met the Queenslander when she pulled into Camden last November to help oppose the Islamic school as part her failed crack at a Senate seat.

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Stuart Rintoul; 31/5/08
As Joe Ross sits talking about a program to propel thousands of indigenous students through some of the nation’s best schools, the name Barack Obama comes into conversation. “Would Obama now be running for the US presidency had he not had access to some of America’s best schools?” he wonders. “What would happen if Obama was an Aboriginal child in Australia?” Is this where he hopes the program will take Aboriginal children? “Why not?” he says. As he looks into the future, Ross imagines Aboriginal students pouring out of the best schools into law, medicine, commerce, the arts, social sciences, trades and politics. He imagines children of a different dreaming. Ross is chairman of the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program, which during the past two years has placed 200 Aboriginal students from remote communities into 40 high-achieving private and government schools across the nation in a pilot program set to enter a second phase in which 300 new students every year will be placed in elite schools. The program is “unashamedly elitist”, he says, “if giving an indigenous child the choice to access the best education Australia can offer is elitist”.
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Victoria Laurie; 29/5/08

You need a sense of humour and a reliable four-wheel-drive to teach science in the outback - and the young educators visiting bush schools across remote Western Australia clearly have both. Lying in the dirt with a giant slingshot aimed to the sky, Reynald Kelly from Yandeyarra Remote Community School is learning a valuable lesson about angles and energy transference. If his water-bomb missile takes its predicted trajectory, Reynald will hit the reluctant target a few metres away - his teacher. Hands-on science lessons are being taken to more than 40 remote indigenous schools across the state, with the focus on Pilbara communities such as Yandeyarra, 145km south of Port Hedland, where mining jobs await Aboriginal students if they emerge from school with sufficient literacy and employment skills.

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Justine Ferrari; 26/5/08

The indigenous community has to discard the misguided notion that gaining an education makes them less Aboriginal. One of the nation’s most respected indigenous educators, Chris Sarra, has called on the Aboriginal community to ensure children take their rightful place in the Rudd Government’s education revolution. Ahead of his address to the National Press Club today to mark Sorry Day, Dr Sarra said Australian society had to stop making excuses for Aboriginal students being chronic under-achievers who failed to attend school, and expect the same of them as any other student. He said the Aboriginal community had a responsibility to embrace the education revolution and discard any idea that it threatened indigenous culture.

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Patricia Karvelas & Padraic Murphy; 22/5/08

Fifteen years after the passage of the historic Mabo legislation, the Rudd Government has flagged sweeping changes to native title to ensure the benefits of the mining boom flow to Aboriginal communities and are not locked up in trusts or frittered away. Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, delivering the third annual Eddie Mabo Lecture in Townsville, said yesterday that native title legislation was too complex and had failed to deliver money to remote Aboriginal communities, despite lucrative agreements with mining companies. She said changes to native title should be used “as part of our armoury to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians”.

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