black deaths ... Bess Price speaks out

Bess Price, the Member for Stuart in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly and a full blood Warlpiri woman:

I now take this opportunity to talk about an issue that has always been close to my heart. Within the last four months, two more young mothers related to me were killed in Alice Springs Town Camp. One was injured mortally in the public, in front of several families. Nobody acted to protect her. Dozens of my female relatives have been killed this way. Convictions usually lead to light sentences. I was told by a senior lawyer that no jury in Alice Springs will convict an Aboriginal person for murder if the victim is also Aboriginal and he or she is only stabbed once.

We all have done nothing effective to stop this from happening. It has been going on for decades. This week we heard outrage from the Stolen Generation Association because this government wants to put the safety and wellbeing of our children first before their (inaudible) culture. I am not talking about the children of the Stolen Generation. It is our children.

Why hasn’t there been the same outrage over the continuing killing of our women and abuse and neglect of our kids? If these women victims were white, we would hear very loud outrage from feminists. If their killers had been white, we would hear outrage from the Indigenous activists. Why is there such a deafening silence when both victim and perpetrator are black? I believe that we can blame the politics of the progressive left and its comfortably middle class urban Indigenous supporters.

Because I have spoken out on this issue and others close to my heart, I have been routinely attacked by the left. Professor Larissa Behrendt claimed that what I say is more offensive than watching a man having sex with a horse. Her white professional protester colleague, Paddy Gibson, told the world that I was only doing it for the money and frequent flyer points. The Queensland educationist, Chris Sarra, said that I was ‘pet Aborigine’ who only said what the government wanted me to say. Chris Graham, the white editor of Tracker magazine called me a ‘grub’.

A white woman in Victoria, Leonie Chester, calls herself Nampijinpa Snowy River, on the internet. She tells the world that my people, the Warlpiri, are ‘her mob’. She and her friends have obscenely insulted me on the internet, over and over. Marlene Hodder, a white woman from Alice Springs and her protesting friend, Barbara Shaw, have called me a liar several times.

The Crikey blogger, Bob Gosford, who calls himself ‘the Northern Myth’, calls me Bess ‘Gaol is Good for Aboriginal People’ Price and accuses me of ‘vaguely malevolent and populist buffoonery that is designed to capture the attention of the tutt-tutterers and spouted by politicians that inevitably have a short tenure in power’.

In Brisbane, Tiga Bayles, using an Indigenous community owned radio station, told the whole world that I am ‘a head nodding Jacky-Jacky for the government’ and that I am ‘totally offensive and arrogant’ because I do not want people like Tiga who know nothing about us, speaking about my people. He and his friends laughed as they told the world that I am only interested in money.

When my daughter went to Sydney for the Deadly Awards, an Aboriginal interviewer for the Koori Radio Station in Redfern advised her not to tell anybody who her mother was. This is how these people show respect for family. In the last month, I have watched three of my sisters and a grand-daughter being buried.

These racists and sexist hypocrites sneer at our grief and care nothing for our suffering, but they are the darlings of the left. I wonder what would happen if Andrew Bolt had used insults like these against any Indigenous Australian. The hypocrisy of these people is incredible.

But I am in good company. When Mantatjara Wilson, a wonderful strong compassionate women I called mother, told the world about the crimes against her children on national TV, back in 2007, with tears streaming down her face, the left-wing activist moved to undermind her. They went into the communities not to protect the kids but to find women who would oppose Mantatjara.

They talked about outrage and shame, not because of the crimes you all know about but because somebody else was brave enough to tell the world about them and ask for help. That was what they called shameful.

They worry about the shame felt by perpetrators once they were exposed, not because of the agony of the victims and families. It is easy to find women who will support their men even though they are killers and rapists. Families are always stand up for their own and those who call themselves progressive will always find those willing to stand beside them and betray their own women and kids.

A few others have stood up and faced the vicious criticism of the left. I acknowledge the wonderful work of Dr Hannah McGlade in Perth and Professor Marcia Langton in Melbourne. Warren Mundine and Noel Pearson have also spoken out. A conference of Aboriginal men in Alice Springs publicly apologised to Aboriginal women and kids for the violence and abuse men have inflicted on them. None of those people have received support from the left or from Labor governments.

The left has tried really hard to call us liars and to put us down for speaking the truth and for wanting to stop the killing and the sexual violence. But they have put no effort, none at all, into protecting our kids and women. The exception to this has been a determination of Minister Jenny Macklin, who I acknowledge for her courage in the face of strong criticism from her own party and the Greens.

I recently went to Sydney for the launch of a book called Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence by wonderful caring friend of mine Dr Stephanie Jarrett. My words are on the cover of her book. We need to support those who tell the truth.

Dr Jarrett does that and she cares, maybe too much for her own good.

I have seen the tears in her eyes and heard the passion in her voice when she talks about her murdered and bashed ones. I trust her completely, but, of course, those who are not interested in the truth are out to bring her down.

She has been attacked in the Monthly magazine by its editor John Van Tiggelen in an article called Thinking Backwards. Dr Jarrett is saying there are elements to our traditional culture that we must change if we are to stop the violence that is destroying us, and she is right.

Things are much worse now than the old days because of the grog, the drugs and the awful welfare dependency that is sucking the life out of us. There are elements of our culture that are really good and should be kept, but we should be prepared to do what everybody else in the world has done and change our ways to solve the new problems we have now and that our old law has no tools to solve.

Some people call this integration, others call it simulation because they want us to continue to live in poverty, violence and ignorance so we can play out their fantasies on what the word culture means. I call it problem solving and saving lives. The left has its own agenda and liberating our people from violence is not part of that agenda.

Van Tiggelen talks about the book Black Death – White Hands written by Paul Wilson in 1982. In that book Wilson argued that when a man called Owen Peters killed his girlfriend in Queensland it was actually because of white colonialism and racism.

It was not the killer’s fault it was the whitefellas’ fault. This argument worked. Peters was only given a short sentence. Dr Jarrett started to worry about Aboriginal women’s rights when she saw David Bradbury’s film State of Shock. This was made in 1988 and was based on the same case.

Bradbury brought the film to Alice Springs and brought Owen Peters with him. In the film, Bradbury gave only the story of Peters and his family. Nobody from the victim’s family was given a chance to give their point of view. They would not have backed Bradbury’s arguments so they were ignored.

I remember Alwyn Peters telling us, ‘She has ruined my life; he was talking about the one he killed’. He went on to say, ‘She comes to me in dreams’. This made me feel sick.

When my husband asked David Bradbury, ‘Why did you not talk to the victim’s family, you would have got a different point of view?’. He said, ‘Alwyn Peters’ family are victims too’. In other words, all our sympathy was meant to be for the one who killed and his family, and not for the one he killed or her family.

In 1991, Audrey Bolger of the ANU’s North Australian Research Unit, wrote a wonderful little book called Aboriginal Women and Violence. At last, somebody was taking notice. At last, a white woman was trying to get governments to act. She was ignored and, as far as I know, nobody tried again after that.

Her voice was drowned out by the politically correct who took their lead from Wilson and Bradbury: just keep blaming the whitefellas and everything will be fine. When governments says sorry, everything will be fixed. Audrey Bolger said in a book way back then, that in the final analysis the problem of violence against Aboriginal women will only be solved by Aboriginal people themselves.

The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody said the same thing. In a way, she was right: my people need to act now to stop our own violence. But, in another way, this has given governments and the wider community an excuse for the big cop-out.

Okay. We whitefellas caused the problem but only blackfellas will solve them, so we sit around waiting for that to happen.

She also said: The problem is a complicated one, bound up as it is with other issues connected with changing lifestyles. Working through these issues towards satisfactory solutions is crucial to the future wellbeing of all Aboriginal people.

She was right, but in the 22 years since she wrote that, there have been no satisfactory solutions found and things are much worse now. It has not happened and I am sick of sitting around waiting for my loved ones who are being killed. We have had committees and research projects, and advisory councils, and ATSIC, and now we have A National Congress of Australia’s First People. Billions of dollars have been spent. We have had visits from the United Nations special rapporteurs, and Amnesty International Indigenous officers.

Not only have solutions not been found, but the most important issues are not even raised and talked about. I want to work through these issues and find solutions. For the left and for many Aboriginal politicians on the national stage, it seemed the only issues worth talking about were the Stolen Generations and Aboriginal deaths in custody.

These are real issues that have to be addressed, but they were not the only issues. In the meantime, women still died, children did not go to school, epidemics of renal failure, diabetes, cancer, heart disease grew worse, suicides increased, young men went to gaol, and we kept killing each other and ourselves.

Australians were not told that the death rate amongst our young men was higher outside custody than in, and that more Aboriginal women died at the hands of their menfolk than Aboriginal men died in custody. Since then, so many more women have died and have been sexually abused, assaulted …
- from Alice Springs News Online

Russell Skelton on the Northern Territory leadership coup

Russell Skelton tweets about Adam Giles replacing Terry Mills as the new Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (CL stands for Country Liberal Party):

Don't write off Adam Giles as CLs leader, he is a cut above Mills (12th March)

Adam Giles most capable CL leader since Jodeèn Carney, not to be under estimated (13th March)

Adam Giles makes history, will also make a difference in NT. Smarter than Mills (13th March)

I have a very high opinion of Russell Skelton since reading his amazing book The Betrayal of Papunya

alison anderson: "the combination of noble intentions and utter ignorance"

More from Northern Territory Indigenous Advancement Minister Alison Anderson

ABORIGINAL PEOPLE MUST GROW UP

"I look at the men of Yirrkala and ask why they will not drive the 20km to Nhulunbuy to earn excellent money in the mine and the processing plant there."

"It is the kind of question the rest of Australia has been asking for years, as it tries to connect the dots, tries to understand why a long-running mining boom can exist literally next door to a culture of entitlement and welfare dependency."

She criticised those who expected the government to "do everything for them", saying the world was looking on and "wondering if we are children". Ms Anderson said that in her travels to remote communities she would be arguing "with adults who refuse to grow up".

"In the rest of Australia, people pick up the rubbish in their yards. They fix their own blocked toilets," Ms Anderson said.

"When they turn on their TVs and see remote communities covered in litter, and able-bodied men complaining about lack of maintenance of the houses they live in, they wonder why. They wonder why indigenous people in these communities won't do these things themselves."

THE MISSING ADULTS ARE DEAD

In Australia, 3 per cent of the population are indigenous. In the NT that rises to 30 per cent. It does not just rise; it explodes and creates a whole new society, one this nation is still coming to terms with. The state with the next highest proportion of indigenous people is Tasmania, with just 4.7 per cent.

We are different. What does it mean to be indigenous here? Many things, of course, but some of the raw averages are interesting. It means we are young. For every non-indigenous child in the Territory there are 4.5 non-indigenous adults aged 20 to 59. To put that another way, more than four adults to look after each child.

However, for an indigenous child there are only 1.5 indigenous adults. In other words, there are far fewer adults to care for our children, to protect and inspire them, to feed and look out for them. Where are the missing adults? There is no way to put this gently: they are dead.

This is like the reverse of the old story of the Pied Piper, where the children were taken away. Here it is the adults who have gone, in places such as Lajamanu where 29 per cent of people are younger than nine years old. Something has spirited away many of the parents, the uncles and the aunties.

REMOTE

We are also remote. In all Australia 24 per cent of indigenous people live in remote or very remote areas. In the Territory that proportion is 81 per cent.

When I speak of remoteness, I mean not just remote from Darwin or Alice Springs but remote from each other. There are 527 homelands and outstations funded by my department. In many ways, this is a wonderful thing, and this government is committed to homelands and outstations. However, the extent of our remoteness is unusual, not just at the national level but internationally.

In service delivery, remoteness makes everything harder. Take transport, with road cuts during the wet season and expensive public transport. A return trip from Katherine to Lajamanu costs $320 and runs just twice a week. There will never be enough money to change this, not here or anywhere else in the world.

That is something we ignore, but we ignore it at our peril. Again and again. I see programs that do not factor in the true cost of remoteness, the travelling time needed to reach communities and the cost of planes to access them during the wet.

NGOs

Ms Anderson also attacked the commonwealth's reliance on "bright and shiny and run like clockwork" NGOs that "fill in all the paperwork perfectly".

"They're good at lobbying and writing submissions. I don't mock that but I do suggest they're not so good at providing services, because they don't understand the communities ," she said. "Like so many non-indigenous advisers over the years . . . they're cursed by the combination of noble intentions and utter ignorance."

Sources:
My people must grow up: Alison Anderson
My dream: a real future of our own making

Alison Anderson's vision

Alison Anderson, Minister for Indigenous Advancement
Address in Reply to the Northern Territory Assembly.
Darwin 23 October 2012
audio

I speak on this great occasion as we mark the opening of the new parliament with the majority shaped, for the first time in Australian history, by the votes of the electors in Aboriginal communities across the bush. This is a day we will always remember. I give thanks to my constituents and electorate of Namatjira and to the voters of Arafura, Arnhem, Daly and Stuart who together chose to change the course of government in the Territory and to write a new chapter in the story of the north. I acknowledge them all in tender affection and with the deepest respect. I give my thanks to all the Territorians and pledge to work for the good of the whole Territory.

I see people, not categories, divisions, or races. I see people and the potential for us all to work together to bring clarity and progress into the world we share. Our task as politicians is to represent the whole community, and that I pledge to do. This is a moment of hope, a hinge in time. It is a long delayed day of promise for all Territorians and for all Australians. The nation is watching us today and it will be watching in the months to come as we chart the course ahead. We will bring resolve and advancement to the bush and knit the different worlds of our Territory more closely together. We are in this together. We are one Territory and, at the outset of this parliament which will be much more stable than its fractured predecessor, I believe we should dedicate ourselves to debate, to policy making, to discussion, to the highest values we can summon.

With that, I turn to a brief account of the landscape I see and what must be rethought and done anew in the years ahead. There is a weight on the shoulders of all of us today. It is the weight of the failure of most of those who have sat in these seats before us. They failed to educate most of the Indigenous people of the Northern Territory; failed to make them healthy or create jobs for them. It is a failure shared by both parties here and in Canberra, and shared by people outside of politics. It is a failure of Australia. I include in that all Indigenous people who have not taken up the opportunities which were offered to them. It will be hard for some of my friends, for members of my family, to hear that but it has to be said. There are a few heroes in this story.

I mention these things not out of despair but to remind all of us there is no point in being in this place unless we have something new to contribute. Much of what has been done before has failed and it is our job, the one for which we were elected, to do things differently. The first step is to think differently. Behind most failed actions are failed ideas. Often it started life as a noble idea and become corrupted along the way.

This is what happened in the way Australia have treated Aboriginal people. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a great moral awakening when white Australia realised what it had done to us and began to make amends.

That move to acknowledge our sufferings and our disposition was a noble one. The laws to return land to us and encourage independent development were fine achievements that grew out of the best intentions. Yet all this produced the twin corruptions of welfarism and the belief Aboriginal people ought to live forever in a cultural Stone Age. It did not happen quickly; those corruptions crept up on us over time and became entrenched. They have proved almost impossible to change. Now we have the sicknesses and abuse, the ganja and the crowded gaols, the empty schools and suicides. How did all this happen? For the usual reason: because we continued to judge our ideas by their noble intentions instead of by their results. We did this for many years after those results proved the ideas had failed. They also became entrenched because government passed laws and set up agencies and funded them to create jobs. Those jobs were filled by people who build careers based on ideas that separate development was the way forward for Indigenous people.

As the American writer Upton Sinclair wrote: ‘It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it’. That is true everywhere and it is true in the Northern Territory. The idea that separate development was the answer provided hope for many and jobs for an increasingly powerful few. However, it has failed. I suggest the past 40 years of Aboriginal policy has been a sort of experiment; an experiment with human lives costing billions of dollars. Walk through Alice Springs after dark or visit Papunya and speak with my relatives, the people are sick in their bodies and in their souls. They are uneducated, orphaned and widowed. They are in gaol and in cemeteries. It was a great experiment, perhaps even a necessary one, but it has failed.

I said earlier, we have not been elected to this House to despair. We have been put here to face the facts of the past failure and propose solutions and try to put those solutions into practice. We do this humbly aware of how many good people have failed in the past. However, we do it with determination. We know there is no alternative. We know there is no time to be lost.

I am a desert woman from Central Australia who is a grandmother, an artist. I have the richness of traditional Aboriginal life in my bones and in my imagination. I am closely linked by blood to the joys and suffering of many people in Indigenous communities in this nation’s centre and its desert. I attend their baptisms and I go to their funerals. These are the people of my heart, the ones for whom I speak today.

I have been a leader for a long time and, in all that time, I have been learning - always learning. I have held positions at the local council level and I have been an ATSIC commissioner. I have been in parliament for seven years and served as a minister before, always learning. I am proud of what I have learnt and what I have done. However, I am fully aware how much remains undone. This is why I stand here today and give you my honest view of our situation. It is complicated, of course. Everywhere you look there is something that is broken and needs to be fixed. I have learnt what we need to focus on.

There are two goals I will strive for. I will be doing everything I can to deliver these things - real education and real jobs. I am not the education minister and I am not the employment minister, I am the Minister for Indigenous Advancement. Those are the two areas, in particular, where I will be throwing my weight behind the efforts of my colleagues. Let me tell you why.

Too much of the public discussion about Indigenous people has assumed, whatever the problem, government is the answer. It has been assumed that any problem can be solved with the right policies and the right amount of money. I would have no issue with that if it was correct but the history of the past 40 years, including the Intervention, shows it is wrong. I believe it failed because it came over time to treat Indigenous people as passive and, by treating us as passive, it helped make us passive. It also treated us as different and encouraged us to live in a parallel world that was supposed to be a dreaming but became a nightmare. The time has come to reject those beliefs and say that Indigenous people need to engage with other Australians. In particular, we need jobs and, for jobs, we need education. I mean real education and real jobs. Any policies that interfere with these two goals need to be thrown into the scrap heap.

Of course, we will need government to help achieve this but it needs to be help designed to liberate us, to make us independent human beings and this is possible. Governments can do bad things - we have seen enough of that in the Territory - but can also be a force for good. We Indigenous people need to be more like other Australians. I do not mean we should abandon our beliefs or our language but, like dozens of other cultures in Australia, we must learn to combine our own identities with participation in the broader society that will not weaken us. It will make us stronger in who we are. To preserve the old ways, we must embrace the new ones. There are plenty of jobs in the Territory, in the communities and in government, in tourism and national parks, and mining. My dream is simple: to see Indigenous people filling more of those jobs in the future because of the quality of our education and because we make ourselves the best people for those jobs. Having a job is not mainly about money. It is about getting up in the morning and looking after yourself. It is about staying in the same place for five days a week. It is about wanting your children to be educated so that they can get a job one day. It is about pride and respect but we cannot put the cart before the horse. Many people who have been to Indigenous schools in the past generation are so poorly educated they have never had a real job. In employment terms, they are the lost generation. Our schools stole their futures from them. All we can do now is fix the problem for the next generation. It is a huge challenge but I believe we can do it.

The problem is this: we have been treating education politically but a good school is not political. What is taught and how it is taught should not be determined by the local community. A good education is like good policing or good health care. It is something most people in Australia recognise when they see it. It is the same in Geelong or Townsville, and people are happy for the government to determine its shape whether in public or private schools. Like good health, good education is the same everywhere and we do not need to debate it. The people of Perth and Brisbane do not want to run their local school or tell the teachers what the curriculum should be. They just want to send their kids out the door in the morning and know they are going to learn to read and write and count, to use computers, and find out about the world. That is real education and many of the schools in the Territory are not providing it; in fact, our Indigenous schools are a continuing disappointment.

We tend to speak words of encouragement about the state of things and not confront the facts head on. In doing so, we patronise young Indigenous school students. We fail to tell their parents how poor the results really are. We fail to hold those parents responsible in a rigorous fashion for their part in schooling their children. We mask and soften the truth. At times, it seems as if we still operate a double standard of expectations. For remote communities, we are prepared to ask for, and accept, second best.

I want to draw, for a few moments, on the research done by Helen Hughes and her son, Mark, published by the Centre for Independent Studies. Professor Hughes’ family escaped the Nazis and came to Australia where she became an economist and worked for the World Bank and the United Nations for many years.

For the past five years, she has been researching Indigenous education and doing some work in East Arnhem Land and recently Mark and she wrote a paper about what the latest NAPLAN results were for year three pupils. They showed that the pass rates for Indigenous pupils in the Northern Territory are 47% for numeracy and 32% for reading. That means over half our eight year olds cannot do sums and two thirds cannot read. No other state or territory comes close to that level of failure. If we do not change that, we will never improve the lives of Indigenous people in the Territory.

So what is the problem? Is it that our kids are Indigenous? Obviously it is not. Most Indigenous kids in Australia live in towns and cities and do just fine in education. Is it because our kids speak a second language at home? No, it is not. Australia is full of kids who speak another language at home, but do well at school. Is it because there is not enough money? Unlikely. Indigenous kids here get 40% more spent on their education than other children. So what about remoteness? Are small remote schools the problem? Not really, according to Helen Hughes. She points out that while Indigenous pupils in remote areas have a reading pass rate of 25%, for non Indigenous pupils, it is 93%.

So what is the problem? Helen Hughes says, and I agree, that the problem is the quality of the schools, particularly the curriculum and the teaching methods. If we taught our kids the same way kids are taught in Newcastle and Fremantle, their results would skyrocket. The Hughes are not the only people to recognise this. Three years ago on Cape York, Noel Pearson and some colleagues did the report called the ‘Most Important Reform’ that came to the same conclusion. We need to fix our schools. A real education is a basic human right and it has been denied to Indigenous people of the Northern Territory for too long. The beauty of focusing on education is, it is one of the few things governments can actually do. At least if it has the will, there is a way. With the right curricula and policies and funding, we can get properly functioning schools with proper teachers. If you get the schools right other things will gradually fall into place.

Take truancy, which is the curse of good education in the Northern Territory. At the moment we try to fix it with carrots and sticks, by trying to force parents to send their kids to school or by bribing the kids to come, but the Hughes’ research shows that once schools start to provide a real education, the pupils will come anyway. Not all of them, but most of them. Most people are not idiots, they want the best for themselves and their children.

Let me describe how a remote community of the future might look. At its heart would be a proper school, just like a small version of school in Darwin or Sydney. There would be at least one full-time teacher with a university degree and five years experience. We would attract those teachers by paying them well and providing decent housing and community support. There would be a community committee to support the school. Not by telling it what to do, but by helping it run like other schools in Australia. The committee would help the teacher settle in, help care for the school grounds, help feed the kids and take them to the clinic if they were sick. Help make sure they come to school in the mornings.

In other parts of Australia, the parents do those things. It is a sad fact; many Indigenous parents are like children themselves, which is something we have to face up to. For a while we are going to rely a lot on the grannies of the community to make our schools work. We need to ask the grannies who have already done so much, to do some more. To help us make our schools normal.

I hope that one day, parents will start feeling ashamed of the situation, start looking after their kids a lot better, but that day is a long way off. We have to be realistic. I am hoping, if we start to turn our communities into places that welcome education, young teachers from other parts of Australia will want to come here for a few years. Look at the old missionaries and the American Peace Corps. Look at all Australians today who volunteer in third world countries. There have always been people prepared to lend a hand.

The Northern Territory is Australia’s own third world. It is the nation’s internal colony. We have to ask other Australians to help us change that; we cannot do it alone.

One of the things we have to do to make schools normal is introduce normal curriculum just as they have in Melbourne, London, or New York. I am not suggesting we abandon our traditional culture or language, but teaching them should not be done in schools. It should be done after school and on weekends and during the holidays. That is when most of the other cultures in Australia teach their children traditional ways. The job of the teachers in our schools will be to teach what is taught in normal schools around Australia. You can buy the curriculum off the shelf from any state you like. That is the only way our children will grow up to be able to compete for jobs and work alongside people educated in other places. Another thing we have to do to make schools normal is to stop holding events that take kids away - no more sports events that go on for days. Some people say these events are traditional, but I have my doubts about that. Some have traditional roots, but they have grown because of the welfare world, because people have had so much empty time to fill. We need to educate parents to see that a new approach to education will involve some hard choices. There will no more excuses for children missing school. There is something government and local councils can help with. There should be no more support for any type of event that takes children away from home during school term.

Let us imagine we can improve education; we can make it real. That will take many years even if the changes I am describing come in. It will be many years before the first group of kids to receive a real education leave school. However, let us imagine that happens. Where will they go? I see them going for interviews for jobs now automatically filled by non-Indigenous people who often come to the Territory from other places. I see Indigenous people starting to fill those jobs because they are well educated and, sometimes, because of their local knowledge. They understand this place and its people better than the other applicants for the position. That happens in many places; locals have an advantage. It should happen here. I am talking about real jobs, not blackfella ones.

My sister-in-law has been a teaching assistant for 25 years and, although she is a good worker, it is a dead end. She can never use that experience to move up or on. We need to phase out all the jobs we created for Aboriginal people: the teaching assistants and the special positions for Aboriginal police and healthcare workers, and all the rest. They imply that Aboriginal people cannot do normal jobs. We need to replace them with real jobs that require real education; jobs that are not dead ends but that could lead on to other jobs, including jobs in other places if that is what some people want.

In that way, education can set us free. It can make us independent for the first time of all the non-Indigenous advisors who have tried to control our lives. At the moment we are being advised into the grave by people better educated than us. This needs to change. We need education to set us free - free of dependence, unemployment, welfare and victimhood. Education has set billions of human beings free; it can do the same for us. Once we are independent we will have choices. Most 25-year-olds in Sydney can work anywhere in the world. They have the education and the work experience. I want our 25-year-olds to have the same choices.

Of course, many young people will want to stay in their communities, but even to do that requires education, if they are to take advantage of the job opportunities that exist. There are opportunities, both existing ones and jobs we can create, to grow food, make bread, and fix cars. For people who can read and write and use computers to keep learning there are plenty of job opportunities in the communities.

It always surprises me how hard it is to get fresh food in remote places. There has to be a potential to change that. We have the land and the sun, and we have the example of the old missions where food was grown successfully. I see hundreds of new jobs across the Territory in that one area. Again, we will need help. Again, I suggest we ask other Australians to assist us. Not bureaucrats or soldiers, but gardeners, bakers and mechanics to stay with us for six months and share their knowledge. However, that is a vision for the future. First we need to make our communities places outsiders would want to live in.

I know there is much to be done; however, I believe the rest of Australia cares about what happens here and is just waiting for us to take the first step. It has more to offer us than a view of Indigenous people defined by their victimhood - more than welfarism or the intervention. We need to convince it that the Territory is not a museum and is not a nightmare. Above all, we need to show our fellow Australians we want to be normal. We want the right to be just like them and keep our identity, but to live fully in the 21 st century.

Today I have been describing a dream, but it is not a romantic dream. I hope it is not an impossible one. It is a dream based on looking at the past and being honest about what has gone wrong. It is a dream that does not aspire to the creation of some Utopia of a sort that has never been seen on the face of the earth before. My dream is we should get real and, for the first time since Europeans came to this land Indigenous people should be thought of and treated just like everyone else. To someone in Melbourne, Shanghai or New York, that might sound like a very modest dream; however, as all of us here today know, it is actually a big one to suggest that Indigenous people in the Northern Territory should live normal lives with real education and real jobs. That is the most radical dream of all.

the Territory's new Indigenous politicians made impassioned maiden speeches on the first day of the new parliament

Anderson calls for schools to be made equal

Indigenous Advancement Minister Alison Anderson says Aboriginal languages should not be taught at remote Northern Territory schools.

She says Indigenous schools should have the same learning requirements as those in capital cities.

Ms Anderson has told told the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly that Indigenous languages should be taught by parents during holidays and on weekends.

The call contradicts a commitment by Education Minister Robyn Lambley that a Country Liberals government would fund bilingual education in remote schools.

Ms Anderson says Indigenous children should be taught in the same way as students in Sydney if they are to compete for the same jobs.

"I am not suggesting we abandon our traditional culture or language but teaching them should not be done in schools, it should be done after school and on weekends, and during the holidays," she said.

"That is when other cultures in Australia teach their children traditional ways."

Ms Anderson says local schools must form the centres of remote Aboriginal communities.

"Let me describe how a remote community of the future might look," she said.

"At its heart would be a proper school, just like a small version of a school in Darwin or Sydney.

"There would be at least one full-time teacher, with a university degree and five years experience.

"We would attract those teachers by paying them well.

"We need education to set us free, free of dependence, unemployment, free of welfare and victimhood.

"Education has set billions of human beings free.

"It can do the same for us.

"My dream is that we should get real and, for the first time since Europeans came to this land, Indigenous people should be thought of and treated just like everyone else."

Meanwhile, the Territory's new Indigenous politicians made impassioned maiden speeches on the first day of the new parliament.

The Member for Arnhem, Larissa Lee, raised an issue few previous conservative politicians have backed.

"The Australian government never fulfilled the request for a treaty that was called for by our leaders," she said.

"We must never forget what they fought for."

The Member for Arafura, Francis Xavier, lamented the state of indigenous education.

"Many young Aboriginal people cannot read and write," he said.

"Why is this allowed?"

The Member for Stuart, Bess Price, defended free debate of Indigenous policy.

"I am tired of the racist notion that we Aboriginal people can't speak for ourselves and, when we do, should all speak the same like a bunch of brainless robots.

She said Indigenous people should be able to disagree without trading accusations of racism.

Ms Price also said English language skills are vital for Indigenous people in a modern world.

"We should keep our languages and those parts of our cultures that still work for us, but that should not stop us from making sure that our children get the best possible education," she said.

"They must learn English, as I have, they must learn to use mathematics and all the other knowledge that the rest of the World uses to understand the World and to prosper."

winners: northern territory

Bess Price: new member for Stuart
Alison Anderson: new member for Namatjira

Mr Mills named Alison Anderson Minister for Indigenous Advancement and for Regional Development. She will also head a cabinet sub-committee on regional affairs that will include the CLP's four other new bush members, three of whom are Aboriginal
- Alison Anderson secures another ministry

I'm celebrating and I hope you are too.

Why have aboriginal people in the bush turned against Labour?

Northern Territory Votes, August 25, 2012

The swings against Labour to the CLP (Country Liberal Party) indigenous candidates in the Northern Territory bush are enormous.

Arafura 17% swing to Francis Maralampuwi Xavier
Stuart 16% swing to Bess Price
Arnhem 29% swing to Larisa Lee
Namatjira 29% swing to Alison Anderson

Alison Anderson was a former Labour Minister but she resigned from the Labor Party in August 2009 over the failures of the Strategic Indigenous Housing Infrastructure program.

The money spent on aboriginal people needs to actually assist aboriginal people and not the public servants who are meant to be assisting aboriginal people. Another way to say the same thing: "The historical pork-barrelling of Darwin's white folk from blackfella budgets is likely to be much curtailed"

Francis Maralampuwi Xavier:

His decision to stand as a CLP candidate followed a long period of contemplation, in which he came to believe Labor policies he once supported were in fact "condescending".

"Labor has not taken Aboriginal people's desire to work seriously," he says.

Casting an arm towards groups of people gambling in the dust on welfare payment day, he continues: "Look, many people here, no jobs, playing cards. That's what I want to change."
- Indigenous leaders desert Labor for CLP

Some more extracts from The Australian coverage:

Ms Lee said she had won her seat in large part on the back of dissatisfaction with NT Labor's shire reforms, which centralised control of local government and left the new "super shires" effectively bankrupt. Her opponent, Ms McCarthy, presided over the changes.

"The first thing is to give people back their voice," Ms Lee told The Australian yesterday. "Over the weekend, people have shown they need change, they want change and so they've voted for change."

Ms Price echoed those views, saying that while each community in Stuart had its own issues, dissatisfaction with the shire reforms was a common theme. "People tried to convince Labor it wasn't working, but it fell on deaf ears," Ms Price said. She said the voters of Stuart had told her that, as a traditional woman born and raised in the bush, she would better understand their issues.
- Left sent message as Northern Territory Labor rule ends

However, it is clear the (CLP) party's dramatic victory records a shift in bush sentiment towards local control and the traditional lines of Aboriginal authority. It also records attempts by indigenous people to clasp the political process and mould it for themselves.

Voting in all major indigenous settlements in the Top End recorded a pronounced swing towards local language-speaking candidates.

The result leaves the CLP as a party of the bush and the working-class outer Darwin suburbs, while the public service strongholds of inner Darwin bought into a fear campaign and stayed with Labor.

Labor looks likely to have only one or two Aboriginal members, while the CLP ranks will be much more evenly weighted. It's hard not to imagine Aboriginal ministers. The historical pork-barrelling of Darwin's white folk from blackfella budgets is likely to be much curtailed.
- Northern Territory cry over loss of faith in progressives