Category: Aboriginal Issues

Show me the evidence, then the $$$

Posted by Chief Blogger – 19 November, 2009

I always regarded Rudd’s apology to the ‘stolen’ generation as hollow. If children were really forcibly removed from their parents solely because of race and culture, then it seems a miss carriage of justice for no compensation to be offered by Rudd. For this reason I’ve maintain previously that Rudd does not really believe in the claims made by members of the ‘stolen’ generation. He was only looking for kudos with the chattering classes and victimology groups so as to distinguish himself from Howard. The latest from one of these activists:

Kevin Rudd’s apology this week to the forgotten Australians, those whose lives were scarred in institutional care, was a reminder that there is still unfinished business stemming from that first Government apology – to the stolen generations….

…a national tribunal to facilitate these claims, and assist people with a legitimate legal right in accessing compensation. The proposed tribunal would be a partnership between governments, churches, indigenous organisations and the stolen generations community, but would also be independent. The premise was that governments should stop tenaciously defending claims by the stolen generations and instead facilitate appropriate compensation in situations where it was merited.

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre will tomorrow release Restoring Identity: Final Report. It puts this option squarely back on the table.

Activists seek a national tribunal for two reasons. So far all attempts to obtain compensation through standard legal means have failed because clamants have been unable to prove they were in fact ‘stolen’.   A national tribunal can then dispense with standard legal practice and be politically manipulated to ensure the ‘right’ outcome. Devoid of evidence – bring on the cash!

What about all the stealing?

Posted by Chief Blogger – 22 August, 2009

How vain and vacuous then was Rudd’s apology to the ‘stolen’ generation of yesteryear:

WELFARE workers have swooped on the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge in northwest NSW, removing more than 40 Aboriginal children from decrepit homes in shanty towns…Aboriginal women, stunned by the removals, say it amounts to a “modern-day Stolen Generation”, but the most recent statistics on child removals show Aboriginal children are being taken from their parents in numbers much greater than the Stolen Generations…Nationwide, Aboriginal children comprise just 4.4 per cent of all children, and yet make up 24 per cent of all children in care.

Is it any wonder that Rudd has declined a UN request to offer compensation to the ‘stolen’ generation. And of course the ABC covers the issue like the ‘stolen’ generation is an established historical fact, not some ex post made up story.

The myth continues

Posted by Chief Blogger – 21 July, 2009

AAP has hit rock bottom with an error riddled article about activist Lowitja O’Donoghue receiving some made-up award from the Governor-General.

Born in 1932, Ms O’Donoghue was taken from her parents and raised by missionaries before beginning a career as a nurse.

No, she was abandoned by her father. Given that she perpetuated this falsehood for so long – probably to garner sympathy and support - is it any wonder that she no longer refers to ‘the stolen generation’ but ‘a stolen generation.’ Continuing:

Her advocacy on behalf of aboriginal people reached new heights with the 1967 referendum that, for the first time, recognised indigenous people as Australian citizens.

Wrong again. From No Republic:

There is a widespread belief, reported in the media, that the 1967 referendum gave the Aboriginal people, for the first time, Australian citizenship and the right to vote. But they were already citizens. Moreover the right to vote had been granted in a piecemeal way, in four States, at least in law, if not in practice, before Federation.

A secondary purpose of the 1967 referendum was to remove provisions from the Constitution against counting Aboriginal people (then considered mainly nomadic) in reckoning the number of people for electoral purposes. The principal purpose was to give the Federal Parliament a power, with the States, to legislate with respect to Aboriginal people.

And then we have this ridiculous statement from an equally ridiculous minister:

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin told the function the award carried congratulations from every single Australian.

“It does place you among the greatest of Australians, the greatest,” Ms Macklin said.

You can count me out, thanks. This is what Lowitja O’Donoghue said in April 2009:

Ms O’Donoghue said she did not support a directly elected body because Aboriginal people would always want to support their own people. “My view is that we are not a democratic people…”

So we should have a referendum to take away the vote from Aboriginals then, like the 1967 referendum in reverse; cause apparently Lowitja O’Donoghue lobbied so hard for the vote to begin with? If you believe AAP’s take on history that is.

Solve Aboriginal problems by withdrawing government

Posted by Chief Blogger – 5 July, 2009

That’s the opinion of respected anthropologist Peter Sutton,  talking on ABC PM:

I’m not sure that governments can close gaps by action in this context other than tweaking things around the edges. I wish it were otherwise. I have the view that in the short-term these interventions are necessary, or at least most of them are, but in the long-term that the best action would be to actually withdraw government from interfering so much with people’s lives and racially structuring the community so that there are developing two nations in the way that we haven’t had before, or at least not on the scale that we’ve had before in the last 30 or 40 years.

I don’t see new government programmes, no matter how well intentioned, closing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. If anything, programmes have made problems worse by creating addiction to welfare, creating a sense of economic and political entitlement through a politicised education system and providing remote communities the ability to practice a culture that is inconsistent with modern society. The Howard government spent record sums of money on Aboriginal issues, and we now learn that the gap has only grown larger. At some point remote communities will need to take responsibility for their own welfare instead of just throwing it back on government.

Aborigines get a taste of green medicine

Posted by Chief Blogger – 23 May, 2009

They’ll have to learn what’s good for them like the rest of the community are being forced to, with big government and big green programmes

Cape York leader declared Noel Pearson yesterday he could no longer trust the Rudd Government to properly consult and gain consent from traditional owners after state and territory environment ministers dismissed his objections and moved ahead with the first steps towards World Heritage listing for Cape York.

Mr Pearson is locked in a bitter dispute with the Queensland Government over plans to ban development of the cape’s “wild rivers”, which he argues will destroy opportunities for Aborigines to create economic development in the communities. He sees the Rudd Government’s silence over the issue and its failure to stop the move towards World Heritage listing as a breach of faith.

So out comes a bit of old fashioned racism from Warren Mundine:

“Why should Aboriginal people carry the can for white man’s abuse of the environment and locking us into a non-economic future. In native title, mining companies sign off with Aboriginal people before mining projects go ahead. We expect the same thing from Governments with environmental issues.”

So either you want the benefits of economic development or not? If you want the benefits then you carry the costs along with everyone else. The costs are not unique to a racial group.

Aborigines don’t like democracy

Posted by Chief Blogger – 25 April, 2009

That’s not my opinion, but the opinion of aboriginal activist Lowitja O’Donoghue in the context of the setting up of a replacement ATSIC body:

Ms O’Donoghue said she did not support a directly elected body because Aboriginal people would always want to support their own people. “My view is that we are not a democratic people…”

So I never want to hear again from an aboriginal activist about how they were denied general voting rights by the Federal government (some exceptions were made for military service and previous state voting rights) upon Australia’s Federation.

This whole new body just smacks of entitlement and victimology, with its aim of taking the rights and money off other people. It is also typical of the left, who give token support to democracy and individual rights and liberty. While being funded by tax-payers, the new body also wants:

…a future fund financed via a percentage of mining tax receipts. They also want the body to gain charitable status to receive tax-free donations. The national representative body would play over the next 20 years a leading role in achieving constitutional recognition and a treaty.

In otherwords a seperate government from the Commonwealth, which will be undemocratic, paid for of course by the 56 per cent of families living in the Commonwealth that actually pay tax. Sounds like a great deal for aboriginal self-styled elites.

‘Unlike Rudd, Costello has a moral compass’

Posted by Chief Blogger – 14 March, 2009

So says former Liberal Party speech writer Christopher Pearson in the Australian. On Aboriginal issues:

Costello is in some quarters credited with a more sympathetic approach than the rest of the Howard ministry to the Stolen Generations report and claims that governments were engaged in quasi-genocidal policy. The Costello Memoirs tells a different story. His maternal aunt Frances shared a house in Alice Springs with Eileen Heath and both ministered for many years to mixed-race children. He says he visited them in his early 20s and “stayed for weeks, going to visit outlying camps with them and seeing what they did”. As he puts it in the Memoirs: “Knowing the dedication and selfless work of Sister Eileen, it is impossible for me to believe she was part of a program to steal children away from their parents or to take them without consideration of their welfare or without considering the wishes of their parents.”

….Eileen, at the age of 92, whose testimony at the HREOC test case established that Peter Cubillo was removed from Utopia Station with his mother’s consent. As he says, “None of it came as any sort of surprise. What did surprise me was that 30 years and billions of dollars later, things only seemed to have got worse, which is when I started questioning the welfare system.”

Pearson also argues that the NT Intervention could have only occurred under a conservative government and that Costello had grown cautious of some aspects of reconciliation because of the way the left had used it to identify the process exclusively with themselves.

A ‘gee, ya think?’ moment

Posted by Chief Blogger – 12 March, 2009

The Australian:

FORMER ATSIC chief Lowitja O’Donoghue has unleashed a furious attack on the disbanded body, claiming its male leaders were preoccupied with drinking, gambling and womanising.

At a closed-door meeting in Adelaide yesterday, where indigenous leaders were hammering out how the successor to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission should be constituted, Ms O’Donoghue said the organisation she headed for six years in the 1990s “supported the greedy, not the needy”.

Interesting how these concerns were never expressed when Howard was in power:

The organisation was abolished in 2005 by the Howard government, amid heavy criticism of the alleged excesses of some of its male leaders…ATSIC chair, Geoff Clark, was in 2007 found by a civil jury to have led two gang rapes in 1971 of a teenage girl, who was awarded $20,000 in damages for pain and suffering.

…ATSIC deputy chair “Sugar” Ray Robinson was found to have gambled nearly $5million over a three-month period between 2000 and 2002…he was found guilty of using his former ATSIC position for an improper purpose by a District Court jury in Toowoomba. He was placed on a good-behaviour bond and ordered to repay $45,000 to the commonwealth Government, after it was found he had used money from the unauthorised 2004 sale of taxpayer-funded vehicles to fund legal proceedings he was involved in.

But the arrogance does not stop there:

“ATSIC got too close to government at the United Nations, and at the UN we should have an independent seat separate from the Australian government,” Ms O’Donoghue said.

All paid for by Australian tax-payers of course.

While Mr Calma, who is leading the three-day workshop to formulate potential models…when asked how Australians could be sure they wouldn’t get another ATSIC, he responded, “Why does the Australian public need to be assured that that’s not going to happen?”

Because they are the ones that will be paying for it!

More of the same

Posted by Chief Blogger – 15 January, 2009

More Aboriginal ‘make-work’ jobs on offer:

Former rock star Peter Garrett, a one-time member of the elite group of Labor’s super celebrity candidates, and now minister for Very Little of Any Importance announced last week that jobs and training would be provided for more than 80 “indigenous” rangers, in addition to the 130 indigenous ranger positions already created under Rudd Labor’s environmental scheme….the creation of ranger-style jobs panders to the old Labor view that Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are best employed in positions which fit the stereotype of the romantic hunter-gatherer with mystical ties to the land.

These aren’t real jobs, but an attempt to avoid facing up to the destructive nature of remote communities. It is like calling welfare payments wages.

Powdered gravy-train greed

Posted by Chief Blogger – 27 November, 2008

Not even made with the real thing:

A WELL-known Aboriginal activist has demanded the Reserve Bank of Australia pay damages to his family for using his great-uncle’s image on the $50 note without permission.

Gee, an Aboriginal activist looking for government money. Who would have thought, but it doesn’t end there:

“My lawyer has got to be paid for ten years’ work,” he said.

“I want them to pay for the damages for what they put upon us and we want a re-enactment of the celebration of the $50 note … in Adelaide.

A reenactment? Maybe it involves having a ceremony to hand over the gravy. And what else do we have to thank this activist for?

..Mr Campbell was instrumental in the 1972 tent embassy built on the lawns of parliament house..

I wonder if other banknote relatives will receive compensation for the apparent embarrassment of having their family relatives on the national currency. The dollar has taken a bit of a hit lately on the FOREX markets, but it is still worth something.