grim depiction of reality for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds

I'm reprinting this because in spite of some traces of journalistic hyperbole I believe it does describe accurately the reality of life for many indigenous in Alice Springs and surrounds.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/special-features/in-depth/community-in-crisis-the-fight-to-protect-indigenous-children-from-abuse-and-neglect/news-story/bdd869155c403dd1977fa0f786aa8d83

use https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall to bypass paywall to see the pictures and video

Community in crisis: The fight to protect indigenous children from abuse and neglect
Paul Toohey, News Corp Australia Network
May 26, 2018

ON the south side of Alice Springs, a Thursday afternoon, five adults are gathered around a sedan at the entrance to the showgrounds. A man king-hits a woman and she goes down, hard. She is helped up, then carefully lined up and smashed again, in the face. She’s so drunk she has no hope of defending the punch. She goes down again.

Sitting on the window ledge of the car, watching, is a child. This is what she thinks is normal: incoherent adults enacting the brutal afternoon rituals of total alcohol dysfunction, as desensitised locals drive by with barely a glance.

Alice Springs is at Australia’s spiritual heart: the creation point in our landscape, where raw earth blends seamlessly with the cosmic, and even diehard atheists confess to sacred encounters with the almighty red rock. Now that heart is broken.

There’s deep trauma here. Some Aborigines blame white settlement and loss of culture; others see income support as the driver of destruction, because it buys alcohol and obliterates self-reliance.

The tragedy for the child is that she has already been traumatised, by her parents, for whom acts of ultra-violence carry no shame and rarely result in repercussions, other than visits to the ICU.

She has no opportunity to start life clean but is at the vanguard of another broken generation, same as the last. She doesn’t know it, but she is already caught up in a hopeless hunt for answers in which blame will always displace solutions.

Tired and self-interested politicians; overworked and numb cops; distraught and confused welfare workers; cries for more money from all directions. The spotlight never tracks on the parents causing the harm, because of a shielding instinct that says they have been injured by history.

The middle of Australia, from Tennant Creek down to Alice, is at the statistical epicentre of Australian child neglect and abuse. Each attempt to intervene becomes a forced retreat about saving culture, rather than saving kids.

LIFE IN HARM’S WAY

CALABRIA Family Wines, makers of 2017 Richland chardonnay, recommend it be served with grilled polenta and wild mushrooms. In Alice, where it sells in plastic weapon-proof bottles for $8, it’s served with brain-jarring punches and stomps to the head.

When adults hurt each other, children are hurt. The crisis in Central Australia is decades old, going back to the 1950s when the painter Albert Namatjira was prosecuted for buying alcohol for family and friends in the Morris Soak town camp, which led to the murder of a woman by her husband.

It’s been happening ever since. A month ago, a 62-year-old woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her husband at Charles Creek town camp, just near Morris Soak.

The town camps were once stopover places for out-of-towners that became squalid permanent homes; nowadays, they are crowded as people from remote areas stay longer, seeking services and alcohol — and also because life in the bush communities can be bleak, with few luxuries.

Though liquor is banned in the camps and all public places, the rules are in constant, visible breach.

John Boffa, a veteran Central Australian doctor who drives the People’s Alcohol Action Coalition, wants a total lockdown, with police stationed full-time at takeaway outlets refusing alcohol sales to all but those who can provide proof of a permanent local residential address.

He’s got stats to prove when takeaway sales are totally controlled, violence drops accordingly. But point-of-sale prohibition doesn’t address Central Australia’s estimated 4000 problem drinkers, who are chronically dependent and remain free to drink in the town’s bars.

Boffa is extremely reluctant to criticise the Aboriginal constituency, but some statistics cannot be avoided. “The Territory has the highest rate of substantiated child neglect in Australia, and the lowest rate of children in out-of-home care,” he says.

What this means is that children who live in at-risk situations often remain there, without help. Such was the case in Tennant Creek, where Territory Families, the welfare department, received 21 notifications over two years about disruptive behaviour at a notorious address on the town’s eastside.

It was decided there was no basis for intervention because — as reporters were told at the time — the notifications did not directly relate to the small children in the house.

Then, in February, it is alleged a two-year-old girl was raped at the house by a 24-year-old relative.

She would be left with gonorrhoea and require a blood transfusion due to injuries to her genital area.

It was subsequently learned there had been numerous notifications related the girl’s siblings, and the behaviour of her parents, stretching back years. The department’s inaction appears to imply a view that indigenous children have a higher threshold for living with sustained violence than non-indigenous children.

Underpinning such attitudes is the overarching welfare policy, mirrored in all states, which holds that if an indigenous child must be removed, the child should be placed (in descending order) with family and kin; with Aboriginal carers in the community; with carers in another Aboriginal community; and with non-indigenous carers as a last resort.

The ultimate aim is to reunify the child with its family. NT Children’s Commissioner, Colleen Gwynne, says it’s nice in theory, but there’s a shortage of indigenous carers who can satisfy requirements of providing a safe environment.

“Child safety is paramount, so if you’re not satisfied the child will be safe or thrive, you have to find the next best option,” she says.

Simplistic media-generated propositions, such as wholesale adopting neglected Aboriginal kids to white families, have no genuine support — anywhere. “I don’t believe there’s this push to have a whole heap of Aboriginal kids with white families, that’s rubbish,” says Gwynne.

In reality, most Aboriginal children who have been identified as neglected or abused are in white homes, anyway. For the more than 1000 kids in foster care in the Territory — 89 per cent of whom are indigenous — two-thirds are with white carers.

Yet Gwynne says Territory Families feels compelled to fast-track the reunification of the children in foster care with kin. “We have cases where a child has been fostered for six years and all of a sudden a decision is made: let’s reunify them back with family in a community, just like that,” says Gwynne.

“We’ve got to go back to the child. If a child is with foster carers, and the assessment is made that the child is thriving, the child is happy and loved, why would you change it? If the biological parents say we want the child returned, they should need to demonstrate that they absolutely have the capacity.”

CHAOS, NOT CULTURE

White couple Leigh Swift and Yvonne Mudford started caring for a little girl named Mikala when they lived in Tennant Creek. The girl’s Aboriginal parents were drinking and fighting, and leaving Mikala unattended, unfed, unclean and wandering.

Before she was one, Mikala was declared a “child in danger”. Her father had 48 convictions and her mother a heavy drinker who at one point stabbed her husband. Mudford and Swift looked at adoption as a way to protect Mikala.

But Swift, then the local fire chief, was legally too old to adopt. They persisted in caring for Mikala in an informal way.

Several years ago, they told the parents they planned to move to southwest WA. The parents demanded Mikala back, but Swift and Mudford were not willing to throw the child back into a damaging environment.

“They said they were taking us to court,” says Mudford. “I went to a solicitor in Alice Springs and it started from there. They said it would it be tough and expensive. But there was a whole history, not just of Mikala, but two older siblings that had been in foster care.”

Mikala’s parents failed to show up to court. In 2015 the Federal Circuit Court made the highly unusual decision to grant Swift and Mudford sole custody of Mikala. More unusually, Justice Michael Baumann’s orders made no mention of Mikala’s “culture”. It might be guessed he took the view that the only culture she had known was violence.

The judge laid out tough conditions — on the biological parents. They can see Mikala once a year during school holidays, and only during the day. The father cannot visit the child unless in the company of a responsible adult and neither parent can be under the influence of alcohol.

Even so, Swift and Mudford pay for the mother to make regular visits. They even took Mikala to visit her father in prison.

Mikala is now aged nine. She currently lives in Alice Springs. She says she loves school and reading adventure stories. Asked if she is happy, she gives a pause and a such a direct look that you know you’re going to get the truth: “Sometimes, I feel alone,” Mikala says.

To his credit, Swift makes no attempt to edit Mikala or explain what she says. She misses the family she loves, but says she is frightened of them when they drink.

What Mikala tells us is powerful: that out-of-home care is not easy for anyone. It can involve great reward but is, by definition, borne of sadness. “Nothing about this is simple,” says Swift.

THE POVERTY DELUSION

Just after 8pm, a Tuesday night. A white ute driven by a white man pulls in by the Hungry Jack’s, located close by the Charles Creek town camp, associated with hard drinking and homicide.

A young woman, possibly mid-to-late-teens, emerges from low bushes. She approaches the driver, handbag on her shoulder, has a short discussion, then gets in the passenger seat and they drive away.

It has often been claimed without evidence prostitution is coming out of the town camps. Now we have footage. But what does it tell us? No culture is immune from prostitution. Slums are slums, wherever they are, and they always provide victims to the sex trade.

Jacinta Price, a Central Australian woman who identifies as Warlpiri-Celtic, says it does matter.

At the next federal election, Price will take on Labor’s Warren Snowdon. Snowdon is Australia’s longest-serving MP — a 28-year career politician who presides over the nation’s most troubled electorate, Lingiari, but says nothing on child abuse or parental neglect because, one suspects, he does not wish to upset his crucial indigenous vote base.

“There’s Manila, but we’re not a third-world country,” says Price. “Given the rates of sexual abuse and the violence that exists, and the fact these kids are neglected and don’t have safe homes, it’s too easy to turn a blind eye to it.

“I know there’s young girls out there as young as 13, prostituting themselves. The truth is blackfellas know about it but aren’t talking about it. It’s happening and these are Australian children.”

In Alice and Tennant, you’ll hear that Aborigines in live in “abject poverty”. But this is not Manila, the black townships of South Africa or even rust-belt USA.

There’s income support and child money. The free health system is world-class and education is available to all, without cost. Everyone can eat, if they choose. There’s also work, but that requires motivation.

In Alice Springs, there are hundreds of Africans employed in security, shops and government departments. They’re working remote to build credits for their citizenship applications. Good for them, but why aren’t locals doing these jobs?

A Warlpiri man approaches outside Coles for a friendly chat. He’s waiting for his wife, who’s shopping for a trip to Lajamanu, 900kms northwest of Alice, for a royalty payment meeting from the Granites gold mine. He expects she’ll be paid $50,000, tax-free, directly into her bank account.

He says this is “the small one”. She’ll receive a bigger payment later in the year.

NO WORD FOR RAPE

Talking to youth workers around Alice, who spend time with children who roam the town, they say they would never ask them about sex abuse and, even after trust is built, never hear children volunteering stories.

Like many cultures, parents don’t discuss it; abusers are likely family; talking to authority figures is difficult; there may be different understandings of right and wrong; and kids may have poor English.

In the Warlpiri language, there is not even a word for “rape” — they use “kanyi”, which means take.

The youth workers claim most of the kids have FASDs — or foetal alcohol spectrum disorders, caused by mothers drinking during pregnancy, and which can affect learning and may produce physical symptoms.

The children have not been diagnosed: the workers are guessing. They may be right, but this in itself is a problem.

When every child is assumed to have embedded developmental issues, other real-time causes which are just as likely to hinder learning and attentiveness — lack of sleep, poor nutrition and hygiene, the shame of being dressed in dirty clothes, and repeatedly witnessing violence — take a back seat.

“We have to work with those kids, but from a public health perspective it’s more important to work on the chain of events leading up to it,” says the NT’s former children’s commissioner, Howard Bath.

He points to studies by Harvard’s Martin Teicher, who for 30 years has laid out a clinical case that children exposed to neglect, abuse and violence, such as the girl watching the adults fight outside the showgrounds, suffer brain impairment.

Teicher has written that such experiences “can leave an indelible imprint on [the brain’s] structure and function. Such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development”.

Teicher says childhood maltreatment “is the most important preventable cause of psychopathology” yet accounts for 45 per cent of child-onset psychiatric disorders.

Says Colleen Gwynne: “So many children have violence around them and the damage caused is significant. They can’t develop because they’re under heightened alert from six months old. They stop developing and thriving.”

The money, the concern, the care is already there. There is a solution: that parents start being parents.

AFTERWORD

IN response to the recent killing of the woman at Charles Creek, Central Australian Aboriginal Congress — Central Australia’s largest indigenous health provider, and a political advocacy group — demanded the resignation of the NT Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw for not having cops permanently stationed at bottle shops.

Congress CEO, Donna Ah Chee, said Kershaw had “abdicated his responsibility to protect law and order and promote public safety, especially for our community.”

But what about responsibility from within the community? Ah Chee said nothing about Aboriginal men creating so much violence.

Myself, and another journalist, have heard off-the-record statements from senior people working in indigenous organisations that some of the recent sex attacks on children are “not that bad”.

They’re wrong — the attacks are bad. This defensiveness seems to be about protecting reputations, and diverting attention from their failures as frontline agencies in order not to draw political fire. Yet all they are doing is further marginalising kids.

Greens should just shut up and listen by Jacinta Price

When elders from the communities of Kununurra, Wyndham and Ceduna travelled to Canberra last week with a video revealing the appalling violence on their streets, they delivered a strong message. Those streets are war zones of drug and alcohol-fuelled assaults and child abuse — and they want it to stop.

The video, supported by West Australian mining businessman Andrew Forrest, proves the desperate need for the cashless debit card system that quarantines 80 per cent of welfare recipients’ payments to limit access to alcohol, drugs and gambling.

These elders are crying out for the lives of the children being assaulted and abused. In one of these communities, 187 children are victims of sexual abuse with 36 men facing 300 charges, and a further 124 are suspects.

I know all too well the deep frustrations these Australian citizens feel as they are desperate to save their people from the crisis being played out day after day in their communities. They have long fought for our political leaders to recognise the need to take the tough — sometimes unpopular but necessary — steps to make meaningful change that will save the lives of Aboriginal children, women and men.

So why do large numbers of our media and our political leaders (including some indigenous ones) fail to respond to such clear evidence of assault, child abuse and violence at the hands of our own people but are prepared to call for a royal commission when the perpetrator is a white person in uniform or when institutionalised racism is perceived to be at play?

A television report on the horrendous treatment of juvenile inmates at Darwin’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre swiftly sparked a royal commission. Yet footage of an Aboriginal man stomping on an Aboriginal woman and various other vicious acts — which in my view are far more shocking than that of the Don Dale footage — draws criticism by the Greens that the video was simply propaganda for the cashless welfare card. This is not propaganda; it is proof.

We hear regularly that we should be listening to Aboriginal people on the ground to understand the complexities of the problems and to encourage us to find solutions for our horrific circumstances. Well, here is a video created by Aboriginal leaders in conjunction with the wider community, including the police and a mayor, pleading for the implementation of a practical measure to help curb the purchase of alcohol and drugs so the lives of the most marginalised Australians may be improved. No, it is not a magic bullet, but it is a start towards improving the lives of Australian citizens in crisis.

Forrest has been criticised for telling the world that he has been approached by minors willing to sell sex. A 14-year-old I know who roams Alice Springs streets at night regularly witnesses children selling themselves to “old” Aboriginal men for alcohol and cigarettes. We pass such information on to the police, who already know it is happening, yet the authorities responsible for these children tells us they have seen no evidence of it. Just as there was a conspiracy of silence to deny the reality of frontier violence, now there seems to be a conspiracy of silence on the left to deny what is happening openly in our streets.

The evidence of deep crisis has never been so blatant. This trauma is inflicted on our people by substance abuse and violence fuelled by a taxpayer-funded disposable income. However, if a rich white man throws his support behind a group of frustrated and desperate indigenous leaders living with this trauma their plea simply is dismissed as perverse by the politically correct without offering any effective alternative solutions.

The Greens call Forrest paternalistic, yet WA Greens senator Rachel Siewert has the audacity to tell indigenous people how we should think, what our problems are and what we should be doing about it. Siewert and her party chose not to meet the elders who came all the way to Canberra from their remote communities to communicate the real problems.

The Greens reaction is nothing more than the racism of low expectations and egocentric virtue-signalling of those toeing the line of an ideology that is further compounding the crisis. If the video shocked you, good. It should; and what should follow is an appropriate response that recognises the human right of Aboriginal women, children and men to live in safety, free of drug and alcohol-driven violence and sexual abuse. Sacrificing whole generations to violence and abuse does not help the fight against racism. It reinforces it.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is an Alice Springs councillor and a research associate at the Centre for Independent Studies.

three choices for indigenous people

The three choices for indigenous people in welfare state countries such as Australia are:

• passive welfare, which leads to destruction 
• go back to the past, which is impossible 
• go forward to a bicultural and multicultural future 

The correct choice seems obvious but some people just don't get it. See this article: Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress

I found a Noel Pearson article (2004) which is directly relevant to the themes in the above linked article by David Bedford. It’s an essay from his Selected Writings, Up From the Mission. I did find a version (pdf) of this article on line, although it’s not exactly the same as the one in his book.

Economic context is important. Pearson makes some preliminary remarks that aboriginals in countries like Canada and Australia (he calls these First World) do receive significant welfare, unlike aboriginals in poorer countries like PNG (such as Papua New Guinea, which he calls Third World).

This changes everything because the connection between traditional economy and culture is ruptured in these “First World” countries, which have welfare states. He goes onto say:

In my view this distinction, between the indigenous peoples living in a First World welfare state context and those who do not – is decisive, and is not properly comprehended when people think about “the survival of indigenous cultures and societies in a globalised world”. It may not be properly comprehended by Indigenous leaders contemplating the prospects of their people being able to retain their cultures in a changed and changing world.

He then makes some remarks the “cultural vibrancy” he has observed in Third World countries such as PNG and contrasts this with the cultural disintegration he has observed in Australia. This latter aspect is not stressed in this essay but is a very strong theme in many of Pearson’s other essays, eg. Dr Charles Perkins Memorial Oration, ON THE HUMAN RIGHT TO MISERY, MASS INCARCERATION AND EARLY DEATH Delivered By NOEL PEARSON, October 2001

Pearson then outlines three choices for aboriginal people in welfare states. I would argue these choices are very relevant to the theme of the above "marxist" (not true marxism IMO) essay of which I am critical. I’ll quote this section from Pearson's essay in full (from the online version):

One choice is “to remain where we are”: attempting to retain our traditions and cultures whilst dependent upon passive welfare for our predominant livelihood. For the reasons advanced earlier, I would say this is not a choice at all. If we do, the social and cultural pauperisation of Indigenous society in Australia will continue unabated, and we will not establish the foundations necessary for cultural vitality and transmission to future generations. We therefore need to confront and demolish the mistaken policy that passive welfare can subsidise the pursuit of traditional lifestyles in remote communities.

The second choice is to “go back”: to maintain our cultural and linguistic diversity in the same way as the peoples of PNG are able to, or other such indigenous peoples throughout the Third World. But this is hardly possible. Indigenous Australians are now engulfed by the Australian economy and society, and it is impossible to see how territories could be established where the welfare state no longer reached, and traditional economies could be revived (this is not to say we cannot reform the welfare state within Indigenous regions). For one thing, my people would simply refuse this course in practice.

The third choice is to “go forward” and find solutions to a bicultural and bi- and multilingual future. That is Indigenous Australians must face the challenge that comes with culture and traditions no longer being linked with our economy in a relationship of coincidental necessity, but rather one of conscious choice. This is what I have in mind when I suggest a First World Indigenous people, rather than a Fourth World (1) people. Some of the elements and requirements are as follows. Firstly, it is about being able to retain distinct cultures, traditions and identity, whilst engaging in the wider world. Secondly, Indigenous Australians will need to ensure that the economic structure underpinning my people’s society is “real”. This will require fundamental reform to the welfare system affecting my people so that we are rid of passive welfare. It will also mean that our people gain their livelihood through a combination of all available forms of “real” economic activities – traditional, subsistence, modern – and this will include the need to be mobile through “orbits” into the wider world and perhaps back to home base again. Thirdly, education will be key to enable bicultural and multilingual facility and maintenance – as well as to enable economic mobility. Fourthly, we will need to deliberately and decisively shift our cultural knowledge from its oral foundations to written and digitised foundations. We will need fundamental traditionalists to be learned in our languages and cultures to fight for cultural scholarship and maintenance that can withstand whatever social and economic changes we will confront.

This is a bare sketch of the kinds of policies we will need if we are to survive as an indigenous people within a First World nation.

The programme I outlined is obviously not a separatist programme. I advocate restoration of social order and a real economy, education and proficiency in English that make my people socially and economically completely integrated, national unity and geographic mobility. There should be much common ground for Indigenous people who agree with me and conservative and economically liberal people.

(1) I wasn't clear about Pearson's "Fourth World" terminology. However I found an article by Nicolas Rothwell which clarified the meaning:

But crafting a future for Aboriginal remote communities requires above all else a clear sight of what they are now. The communities are a welfare state and, thanks to Cape York activist Noel Pearson, the rotting effects of passive welfare provision in the Aboriginal realm are plain, and the virtues of work-for-welfare programs are accepted across the board. But the communities form a welfare zone with unusual, complicating characteristics. They have Third World living conditions but they are not in the Third World.

Rather, they are in a much stranger place: a place quite hard to see and understand. We might call it the Fourth World: a deeply deprived space contained within the borders of a modern, prosperous First World state. Absolute poverty is not the limiting economic problem: a controlled, regular, yet inadequate supply of transferred money is, along with its inevitable outcome, relative poverty - a fate both grinding and comforting for those locked out of the productive economy. Capital formation is impossible under such circumstances, unless land use can be traded.

The inhabitants of this zone are welfare pensioners, who have subsisted for decades without strong incentives to acquire skills or seek jobs. In this Fourth World of the communities, there is a strong awareness of positional disadvantage: the men, women and children there know they are at the bottom of the social pyramid of Australian life, but they have no idea of how to change their status. The younger generation's members are encouraged to share the expectations of the wider society but geography and the lack of educational pathways prevent them from taking part in the outside world on even terms.
- Our fourth world

Do Pearson’s three choices represent the real options available? I think they do. Which of the three choices do you support? Argue your case. Obviously I’m with Pearson – choice three.

I would add that Noel Pearson’s practice has gone far beyond outlining these choices. He has influenced governments in Australia to implement his option 3 in Cape York Peninsula. This I regard as a remarkable achievement of truly progressive practical politics starting from a reality so grim that people can’t imagine and seem to continually want to forget about once they have heard.

managing versus stripping welfare

This is one of the conversations I had last week with teachers at my school. There is a profound difference between managing welfare (Pearson) and stripping welfare. If this report is accurate then Rudd / Gillard have got this wrong:

Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson says the Federal Government's plan to strip Centrelink payments from parents whose children skip school is tougher than the welfare trials currently underway in Queensland.

Legislation is before Federal Parliament to freeze welfare payments to parents for three months if their children are frequent truants.

Mr Pearson is the director of the Cape York Institute and says he has been at pains to ensure that in the Queensland trials payments are managed, not stripped, from families.

"The Cape York approach is that we don't take money away from families," he said.

"There is a lot of mention that we [are] stripping people from welfare, [but] nobody loses any money.

"A clamp might be put on your money to make sure that you spend it on your children's clothes and so on but our approach does not deprive people of money.

"We want to put people in a position where if they are taking responsibility there should be no interference.

"It's only where there is a breakdown, where people have failed to send their kids to school or are not abiding by their obligations, that's when there should be intervention."
- Welfare cuts tougher than Cape York trials: Pearson

How do miserable people progress in the world?

Noel Pearson has emerged as Australia's most significant political leader tackling our most important moral issue: the deplorable life expectancy (less than 50 yo) and life chances of indigenous Australians

I was lucky to hear Pearson speak in Adelaide a few years ago and was inspired by his powerful and logical rhetoric to dig further into his writings and analysis (found at CYI). I'm reminded of this when I listen to Pearson's recent speech to the Queensland Media Club, the full audio can be downloaded from this page

He raises these questions:

• How do miserable people progress in the world?
• How does this ruthless society work?
• What are the rules of the game?

He then goes on to explain in detail the three parts of the staircase metaphor:

• strong foundations, strong social norms
  
• responsibilities as well as opportunities
• rational alignment and incentives to climb

Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winning economist, is praised by Pearson for exposing the glaring conceit in liberal thinking that we only have to give people the opportunity to make free choices. If you are not healthy and not educated then you are not in a position to make good choices.

Pearson's analysis draws on aspects of both the conventional left and right of politics. To understand Pearson you have to be prepared to think outside of a conventional mindset. If you read Pearson carefully you will understand that he is philosophical profound as well as an effective practical, policy mover and shaker. See his radical centre paper or Charles Perkins Memorial Oration paper.

The great failure of "progressive" thinking is that there is no magic mass elevator or social justice forklift. Each individual has to climb the stairs, one by one. Everyone has to climb. Social justice is the sum of individual progress.

self interest: Indigenous people are influenced by self interest just as other cultures are
ecology: Why should indigenous people be more politically correct than anyone else wrt protecting the environment? Why should indigenous people choose to live in poverty because of their cultural heritage?
welfare: If an indigenous person can make $220 per week on the CDEP (Commonwealth Development Employment Projects) compared with $170 per week in a Traineeship then they will naturally make a price calculation and choose welfare

Due to welfare dependency things have deteriorated markedly since 1968 (the year aboriginal people gained citizenship and voting rights). Obligation free income is profoundly corroding. In the current situation the way forward is to mandate individual responsibility for those receiving welfare:

1. Send your kids to school
2. Protect your children from abuse and neglect
3. Obey the law
4. Look after your house

These interventions are currently taking place in four communities in the Cape York Peninsula. There will be no more funding for irresponsible behaviour. Governments and society cannot afford to continue to keep funding drug addiction.

Rights (to Land, culture) were an important first phase of Pearson's work but he realised early on that Rights alone would not work, Responsibility is essential too. Pearson has been pushing this for the past eight years.

"We've made more progress in the four months of Anna Bligh (Queensland Premier) than we did in the four terms of the Beattie government prior to that"

Progress requires a generational committment across the party politics political divide.

If you haven't heard him speak then don't miss the chance to listen to this audio. Pearson talk (59 minutes), Questions (10 minutes).

The mechanism put in place in Queensland by the Bligh government is better than that of the Northern Territory intervention, where there is a blanket quarantine of a certain percentage of welfare.