Stolen Futures: Australia’s Aboriginal people reject racist laws
The Senate Community Affairs References Committee released the findings of its inquiry into the Stronger Futures in the NT Bill and related legislation on March 13. It suggests some minor amendments, but leaves the substantive content of the bill unchallenged.
Intervention laws were made explicitly for people living in remote NT Aboriginal communities and town camps, and included a host of punitive measures that were widely reported and criticised.
Last year, the federal government held “consultations” with affected Aboriginal communities. The intervention laws were due to expire in August and the consultations were supposedly designed to get feedback on the government’s replacement laws.
The Senate committee noted widespread frustration with the consultation, and made recommendations for future improvements. However, it largely ignored the content of the consultations.
Self-harm and suicide has doubled since the intervention began. School attendance has dropped and reports of violence on Aboriginal communities have climbed. Aboriginal imprisonment rates have risen 40%.
Aboriginals chained together, 1906.
Macklin was then asked if she thought there had been adequate consultation about the extension of the laws.
“There were around a hundred meetings that took place,” she said. “They were very important to me, and very important to the Aboriginal people who were talking with me.”
But Macklin’s Stronger Futures bill suggests those meetings were not important enough for her to remember the content. Or maybe she just didn’t care.
Listening But Not Hearing, a recently released report by Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning analysing the consultation process, said: “The Government’s purported reliance upon the Stronger Futures consultations as informing the content of the legislation is either deeply misguided or deceitful.”
Greens Senator Rachel Siewert sat on the Senate committee, and prepared a dissenting report to the official inquiry report.
She said on March 13: “There is an overwhelming sense … that the approach taken in both the intervention and Stronger Futures undermines and disempowers Aboriginal people and their communities.
“The intervention also erodes community governance, entrenches punitive welfare measures and harsh punishments for relatively minor infractions and funnels money into surveillance and control rather than rehabilitation or education.”
Online campaign StandforFreedom.org.au has collected 30,000 petition signatures demanding the withdrawal of Stronger Futures, since it was launched last month.
In a powerful YouTube clip launching the campaign, Yolngu artist and scholar Dhalulu Ganambarr-Stubbs, from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, said: “If policies are ever going to work for my people, we have to be involved in creating them.
“We have been asking for so long that our own elected leaders be listened to. That our langauges and culture be incorporated into the teaching of our children. That we be supported to live and thrive on our own homelands. And that we are given the human rights to control our own futures.”
The government’s new laws will steal the future from Aboriginal people, invading and occupying their lives with another decade of racist, paternalistic policies.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50391
Posted on March 20, 2012, in Counter-Insurgency and tagged anti-colonial resistance, Australia aboriginal, Indigenous resistance, native resistance, northern territory intervention, repression of Australian aboriginals. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
Warrior Publications 
as a white australian women who is the parent of indigenous children the “intervention” always seemed to me to be a product of inherant racism. whilst I lived in an aboriginal community, I was not able to buy alcohol. Imagine telling people in Darwin that you can only have 1 carton of beer a week. or that because you are Chinese ( or German, American Greek ect) you can not purchase alcohol at all, in your own community. Imagine telling parents in the wider community that to insure your daughter had not been sexually violated, their little girls , had to under go a pelvic exam, (which in itself is a violation). I did not feel it was safe to remain in the community because of these personal freedom issues, the government should not have the power to issue these kinds of laws. if it is the choice of the community, fair enough. you can choose to move. if it came to the fact that all indigenous people were subject to these laws, I would not identify my children as indigenous. When I returned from the said community, it was an effort to get my children taken off the list at centerlink, that identified them as being under the laws of the intervention. I won’t go back to that.
What is happening in Australia’s Northern Territory is disgusting and shows what a fascist colonial state Australia is.
It is just the way of man’s, the fear is so great, every one thinks only about his own needs and not about his brother’s. We all see only from our own point view, we have to spend more time trying to understand every point of view and together decide the best way forward. I love in south Africa, we have a history of dominance and a presence of inbalance the future is unsure, it does not matter who feels unloved, it is wrong! Our forefathers set out to find the New land, they found new land and new people, beautiful culture’s. We came in, changed the environment, which changed the culture’s. At what point are we going to be as brave as our forefathers and change the enviroment back just to restore the culture’s. There is no greater urgency in this life. We have to restore what our forefathers destroyed in their ignorance. Their ignorance cost lives, peace and harmony, new ways of living and lots more. To late for tears or is it time to stop the tears from running.
Not everyone should live a modern life, I wish for the bushmen to live as they did 400 years ago, unhindered by modern ways. Here we are removing borders so that the animals can once again migrate as they did before we came here, only becouse it is the wise thing to do.
We are so smart these day’s, how is it that we don’t know how to share and the abundance that it brings.
I send all my love to you the true owners of the land we now call australia. Did it not have a name? And on the behalf of my forefathers, I apologize for their ignorance at the time.
it is my wish to one day walk any land just to experience it as it were before we came. At least parts of it restored and preserved, how splendid would it be to have the privilege to see ancient cultures thrive.
ubuntu!!