Category: W.A

$500 Mill Cut, Mick Gooda, W.A

Aboriginal people are entitled to be treated as human beings, not just as a fiscal problem

mick gooda

‘Mick Gooda noted that the massive uncertainty taking place is occurring as a result of changes announced without any meaningful engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

The planned closure of 150 remote Indigenous communities will have devastating consequences. The reason behind it is hypocritical in the extreme

Before last year’s federal election, Tony Abbott promised he would be “a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs. The first I imagine that we have ever had.” The Coalition also promised to “continue the current level of funding expended on Closing the Gap activities.” Instead, the first budget of the Abbott government cut $500m directly from Indigenous affairs.

Unfortunately, these cuts are being reflected in cuts to services by the WA state government, including the proposed closure of approximately 150 Aboriginal communities in remote Western Australia. When premier Colin Barnett announced the intention to push Indigenous Western Australians out of their homes and dissolve their communities, it was a shot across the bows of a federal government that intends to withdraw two-thirds of the funding to those communities as it sails away from its traditional responsibilities in a number of areas.

The announcement will have shocked and frightened thousands of people who live in those communities. Still painfully sharp is the communal memory of the actions taken by the WA state government during the 1950s and 1960s in rounding up Aboriginal people from allegedly dysfunctional communities onto cattle trucks in the middle of the night and dumping them on the outskirts of towns, with entirely foreseeable and terrible consequences.

By far the worst aspect of the proposal to close 150 remote communities is the abject failure to communicate and consult with Aboriginal people. Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, noted only last week that the massive upheaval and uncertainty taking place is occurring as a result of changes announced without any meaningful engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Noting the absence of consultation with respect to the WA community closures, Wayne Bergmann, former head of the Kimberley Land Council has said, “The only solution is the government has to empower Aboriginal leadership in the local organisations and the local communities.”

And former federal minister for Aboriginal affairs and this year’s senior Australian of the year, Fred Chaney, has said that proceeding to de-fund and dissolve remote communities will have catastrophic impacts on the lives of Indigenous men, women and children.

His open letter to the premier and the prime minister states:

“I see no sign that any government is prepared for the consequences. If governments simply let things rip by withdrawing services and driving people into towns without careful and comprehensive preparation, the outcomes will be shameful. That shame will reflect on you and your governments and on all of us.”

Aboriginal people are entitled to be treated as human beings, as citizens of Australia, and not just as some kind of fiscal problem, Chaney said. It’s astounding that in 2014 this statement of common sense even needs to be made.

A recent report commissioned by three shires in WA’s northwest has indicated that the quantum of overdue spending on basic facilities and services in remote Aboriginal communities is very substantial, and one can imagine this being proof in some quarters that the situation is not sustainable. Of course what it really shows is that support to those communities has been parlous over an extended period of time – and so we may see here the kind of twisted logic through which neglect justifies further neglect, rather than being a spur to action.

The Western Australian premier has also wrongly suggested that the health and wellbeing of people in remote communities justify their closure when in fact the resilience and sustainability of Indigenous people living in those circumstances may be better than for many Aboriginal people who live on the fringe of regional towns or cities.

We have long followed the principle of universality of service in Australia – and though we haven’t always been able or, in some cases, willing to fully deliver on that principle, it has actually been a reasonably consistent feature of government policy and administration.

That’s why it is hypocritical in the extreme for the cessation of support to Aboriginal communities to be put forward on the basis that the communities in question are small and unsustainable.

As Guy Rundle has written, universality of service is a, “necessary principle for a vast country, where the economic tides come and go. […] If we didn’t respect that we’d wind up half of rural white Queensland, which costs us far more money than Aboriginal communities do.”

In Western Australia we have seen the royalties for regions programme provide funding for many important and a few reasonably curious projects; we have seen the state government prepared go to extraordinary lengths to support some questionable residential property developments in the north-west; and we know that the proposed closures, without proper planning let alone consultation, will in fact produce greater costs in addition to the unacceptable and unconscionable social harm involved.

As a federal member of parliament I recognise that it was the decision by the Abbott government to shirk and shift its responsibility for supporting remote Aboriginal communities that has effectively invited the Barnett government to abdicate its duty of care to some of our most vulnerable citizens.

The continuous and messy skirmishing between state and Commonwealth governments may be the price we pay for federalism, but it is telling that the Australians who so often bear the brunt of this intergovernmental conflict are generally the most disadvantaged.

The reason this occurs is that many vulnerable people, including Indigenous Australians, do not have full access to and full participation in our democracy; the defunding of the elected National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples is symptomatic of this. Much work remains if this disabling gap is to be closed. Constitutional recognition will take us one step closer, but there are many more steps, small and large, local and national, that lie ahead.

Sadly, the WA and federal governments are busy shuffling away in the opposite direction – and not nearly enough is being said about it.

The WA government has advanced changes to the Aboriginal Heritage Act which will operate to seriously reduce the rights and input of Aboriginal people and the protection of Indigenous heritage. The Abbott government has stripped funding away from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (NATSIL) and taken funds from language translation services. This is despite the fact that the latest Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report shows that the rate of Indigenous incarceration rose 57% between 2000 and 2013.

I can only hope that the premier of WA and the prime minister, who makes so much of his personal interest in the lives of Indigenous Australians, will come to their senses.

300 jobs, Aboriginal people, W.A

Prisoners guaranteed work through job training scheme in WA’s North West

Prisoners at Roebourne

Prisoners in Western Australia’s North West will be guaranteed full-time work after completing training courses while incarcerated.

Fortescue Metals Group has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the WA Government through the Department of Corrective Services to deliver the Vocational, Training and Employment Centre (VTEC) Fresh Start Program, with an initial intake of eight prisoners from Roebourne Prison over the next year.

It is an extension of the existing VTEC program, which is a $45 million federal project that aims to provide guaranteed employment for 5,000 Aboriginal people nationally.

Under the new program, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) will provide a training course for prisoners at Roebourne TAFE via a day release scheme.

Upon release the students then begin site-based training for two weeks, after which they are guaranteed a job.

While people are within the walls of a prison we need to do everything we can to address their offending concerns, the reason why actually they keep coming back.

Corrective Services Minister Joe Francis

FMG chairman Andrew Forrest said the recidivism rate of Aboriginal offending was about 50 per cent and it was hoped the employment program would reduce the “revolving door of people going into jail and out of jail and into jail again”.

“We’ve just got to stop it and the best way to stop is to give people hope, self sustainability and you give that with employment,” Mr Forrest said.

WA Corrective Services Minister Joe Francis said Aboriginal people represented 40 per cent of the 5,400 people currently in jails in the state, describing it as “a heartbreaking waste of human capital”.

He said the program would help address that.

“While people are within the walls of a prison we need to do everything we can to address their offending concerns, the reason why actually they keep coming back,” he said.

“Whether that is getting them a driver’s licence, which we’ve recently invested $5.5 million into trying to get Aboriginal men within prisons driver’s licences before they get out, or to address their drug or violent behaviour, we need to take every single opportunity to seize that moment to correct their behaviour so we can stop them from coming back.”

Mr Francis said he hoped the program would eventually be rolled out throughout the prison system.

Job gives me something to look forward to: former offender

Desmond Mippy entered the existing VTEC program after a four-year jail term for a serious assault.

A year before he was imprisoned, he had walked out on his partner and 10 children while battling methamphetamine addiction.

Desmond Mippy Photo: Former offender Desmond Mippy has gained employment at FMG through the existing VTEC program.

“Before I did this program I’d not long come out of prison, I was in prison for four years, and now I’ve got a good job, and it’s good to support my family and be a role model,” he said.

“About 12 months before I went to prison I was on amphetamines, I walked out of the house, I didn’t want life to be the way it was and I started to make changes and I didn’t give up.”

Mr Mippy joined the VTEC program in April and by May had a job as a surface miner with FMG.

“It gives me something to look forward to, something to pass onto my kids and something for them to look forward to, to carry on what I’ve started, and hopefully be a role model.”

Mr Mippy said his advice to anyone in prison who was offered the opportunity to participate was simple: “Take this opportunity, grab it with both hands and go all the way with it.”

Employers pledge jobs for Aboriginal people

Also today, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in WA (CCIWA) launched a jobs pledge forum for employers.

Chief executive officer Deidre Wilmott said they were in talks with about 75 WA employers to provide jobs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as part of the federal VTEC program.

“We have pledged to train and place 300 Aboriginal people in guaranteed jobs over the next 18 months,” she said.

She said expanding the program into the prison system was incredibly important.

“It’s seen opportunities for people who have been incarcerated to actually change their lives during that time that they’re in prison,” she said.

“What we really want to focus on is making sure that people have those opportunities to change their lives.

“We can reduce the total number of people in Aboriginal prisons, it’s totally unacceptable that we have such a high proportion of our prisons being occupied by Aboriginal people.

“Training for jobs is a really important part of giving people that economic independence so they don’t find themselves in prison.”

Andrew Bolt, Assimilationists, Indigenous budget cut, W.A

When broken promises become tests of character

Tony Abbott visits Arnhem Land as opposition leader.

Beyond the convenient promises of campaigning lie the deeper moral obligations of the state. How will Tony Abbott respond as Indigenous Australians face the prospect of being driven once more from their traditional lands? Jonathan Green writes.

The routine political promise is like a piece of Mary Poppins pastry: easily made, easily broken.

And do we care? Probably not so much. Trust has been worn down by the constant repetition of brazen insincerity. We are resigned.

“No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”

No change either to the post-truth framing of modern politics, a place where a promise is simply a piece of positioning to sway popularity whose impact is immediate and not dependent on execution.

If we wanted truth, we’d probably vote for it. As it is, we seem to prefer a more gestural approach: a sense of plausible coherence rather than too much specific commitment. We want a sense that things will be better, that things will be managed. That we all might quietly prosper and get on.

Truth is as far from the point as conviction.

It certainly wasn’t our issue with the last administration. To take the “Juliar” campaign as a pointed pursuit of honest politics is to mistake the rhetorical veneer for the character assassination it concealed. The carbon promise was a crack in credibility that subsequent consistency and unified confidence could have papered over, the same sense of confident denial the Abbott Government is using now to insist bluntly that black is almost certainly white if you consider the full ramifications of the changing context.

And to be fair, we’re flexible enough to admit that circumstances change and that campaign promises are largely rhetorical gestures that shouldn’t stand in the way of greater responsibilities.

That’s a practical as well as moral convenience, one that saves us from the awkward prospect of holding the simultaneous notions that truth matters while admitting that politics is inherently mendacious. We need that grace of flexibility.

And yet there is another level of political truth on which honesty matters very much indeed. Beyond the convenient promises of campaigning lie the deeper moral obligations of the state … to fairness, justice, equity, opportunity.

These are the sort of issues that draw broad declarations of noble intent, the sort of statements that truly go to something deeper than political character.

This kind of thing:

I want a new engagement with Aboriginal people to be one of the hallmarks of an incoming Coalition government … I hope to be a prime minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

This is more than Tony Abbott the politician, this is Tony Abbott the man dealing with an issue that is at the core of the most fundamental moral obligations of any Australian Government: to attempt some honest betterment of the state of Aboriginal Australians.

As much as any current politician he has put words to the profound necessity of a just settlement between Australia’s first and colonising peoples. As he told the Parliament in February 2013:

Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing – we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago.

We have to acknowledge that pre-1788, this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.

Clearly we are far from achieving that healing. The Productivity Commission report released this week, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage, details a people in a state of psychological crisis. A people amongst whom suicide, self-harm and mental injury are rife.

There are slow improvements in things like infant mortality, but it seems that when many young and adult Indigenous Australians confront their life circumstances, they see little grounds for hope or evidence of opportunity.

And despite the Prime Minister’s declared intention to be “a Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs”, a Prime Minister who might move to heal this “torn people”, they also see a leader who fits, perhaps unwittingly, into the assimilationist orthodoxies of hyper-conservative Australia, of that body of bizarre opinion that sees any gesture toward Indigenous autonomy, self-determination or recognition as some queer inverted racism visited upon long suffering white Australia.

The sort of view promoted with endless vigour by the likes of Andrew Bolt:

I am an indigenous Australian, like millions of other people here, black or white. Take note, Tony Abbott. Think again, you new dividers, before we are on the path to apartheid with your change to our Constitution.

I was born here, I live here and I call no other country home. I am therefore indigenous to this land and have as much right as anyone to it.

It’s a lunatic fringe, but its impact is borne out in documents like the Productivity Commission report, a report that was preceded by news from Western Australia that the State Government intends to close over a hundred remote Indigenous communities, communities now defunded by the Commonwealth and thrust upon the slim resources of a state that sees little future in supporting them.

Their people will be driven, once more, from their traditional lands, by a Government that fully comprehends the consequences. As WA premier Colin Barnett put it:

It will cause great distress to Aboriginal people who will move, it will cause issues in regional towns as Aboriginal people move into them.

And here is a test for the PM, to stand by those principles he presents as deep conviction, as the fundamental tenets of his moral self.

This is as far from a dumb promise shaken out in the excitement of 11th hour campaigning as you can get, and something that might stand as a serious test of character for Tony Abbott, something, that if he is not careful, might yet make a Juliar of him.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.