I would agree with the Salvation Army’s Captain Stuart Glover that something needs to change in the way our country takes care of those aboriginal people who are most desperately in need.
What needs to change is that government needs to hold aboriginal land councils, aboriginal corporations and other aboriginal organisations accountable for the $33 billion dollars they are given annually to take care of those in need.
If there is such poverty, such violence and such misery existing in remote aboriginal communities, then it seems pretty obvious that these aboriginal organisations and land councils are not passing on the money they are being given to improve these conditions.
In Alice Springs, a school that is primarily for aboriginal students wants to become a boarding school so that its students can not only receive an education, but have a safe place to sleep as well.
But in order to do this, this school has had to apply for federal government funding.
This has not been forthcoming.
Other aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory would like to be able to establish boarding schools for their students, too, to save them having to travel such long distances to school.
But government funding for these schools has not been forthcoming, either.
There is a lot that the federal government could be doing to help aboriginal people living in remote communities right now, without advocating to change our Constitution to provide for an aboriginal ‘Voice’ to federal parliament and government.
If the government is not listening to what aboriginal people in remote communities are telling them now, why should anyone believe that they will begin doing so if the ‘Voice’ is established?
As regards the proposed ‘Voice’, there are too many unanswered questions.
Who will be a part of it?
What powers will it have?
The only people who are providing any answers to these questions are the activists who are advocating for the ‘Voice’, and who have drawn up the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’.
It is these people who are talking about a treaty, and reparations they want to be paid for what they claim is inter-generational trauma brought about by European colonisation.
But on these subjects, the government is silent.
If one wishes to talk about inter-generational trauma brought about by European colonisation, then, as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (I apologize if I have misspelt her name) stated in her address to the National Press Club, what about the horrible conditions and the cruelty endured by the convicts who were forcibly brought here?
Are their descendants entitled to reparations, too?
And from whom?
I really believe we need to forget about establishing yet another well-paid city-based aboriginal bureaucracy which will no doubt be far removed from their brothers and sisters in the bush.
Is anybody really listening to the cries of those elders in remote communities who have had far more than enough of the alcohol-fuelled domestic violence and child abuse that is ravaging their communities, and who are calling for the re-introduction of something like the cashless debit cards which have been withdrawn?
– John Hermann,
Gympie
