ALP strangles Aboriginal communities for land

By Hamish Chitts

Recent reports and revelations have conclusively shown that the Rudd Labor government is using the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) policy to dispossess Aboriginal people. Under the Australian government’s “emergency protection measures”, the situation for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory has become worse. The government and the corporate media then blame Aboriginal culture for the dire situation, rather than the government’s own systemic neglect of the provision of adequate services, and the resulting extreme poverty of Aboriginal communities.

Gap widening
At the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Darwin on July 2, Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin released a report titled Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage. The report, compiled every two years by the Productivity Commission, measures 50 economic and social indicators of disadvantage between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The latest report found no improvement in 80% of the indicators for Aboriginal people. They live in greater poverty and have poorer housing, poorer education and poorer employment prospects. Aboriginal people die on average 17 years younger than non-Aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal children under four years die at three times the rate of other Australian children.

More Aboriginal people in the NT are being imprisoned. Aboriginal people are 13 times as likely to end up in jail as non-Indigenous people. The imprisonment rate for Indigenous women and men has increased by 46% and 27% respectively since 2000. These increased rates not only reflect a racist system in which police more readily target Aboriginal people, and judges more often impose prison sentences on Aboriginal people. It is also due to Aboriginal people in the NT being jailed for minor offences under new NTER laws that apply only to Aboriginal people living in town camps or remote communities.

Capitalist politicians and the corporate media have justified the racially targeted NTER laws by citing high rates of substance abuse, violence and child abuse. These are realities in many remote Aboriginal communities, but are not due to some cultural or genetic quirk. All around the world and in pockets of Australian cities, the same social problems at similar rates can be found among non-Aboriginal people. Contributing factors include poverty, a sense of hopelessness, the sexist values of capitalist society and higher than average rates of imprisonment, especially when any of these factors are combined with overcrowded housing.

Overcrowding
In Darwin, NT Shelter executive officer Toni Vine-Bromley told ABC News on July 5, “Overcrowding creates conflict and family dysfunction and all those kind of problems. It also impacts on people’s health, their ability to study or get an education, or get food in the fridge and all those things that are really what you would just normally take for granted.”

The 2004-05 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey estimated that 127,546 Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over lived in overcrowded households (one or more additional bedroom required). This accounted for 27% of all Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over. There were around 1 million other Australians living in overcrowded households in 2004-05, 5% of all other persons aged 18 years and over. Approximately 14% of Aboriginal people were living in households that required two or more additional bedrooms, compared to 1% of other people. The same survey found the NT had the highest proportion of Aboriginal people aged 18 years and over living in overcrowded households (65%).

Most experts studying Aboriginal disadvantage agree that the main problem in remote Aboriginal communities and town camps is overcrowded and inadequate housing. Yet the July 4 Australian revealed that not one of the hundreds of new houses promised in 2007 for remote communities has been built. NT Aboriginal affairs minister Alison Anderson revealed on July 23 that only 30% of the $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program would go to building houses. She told the Australian: “It was quite openly told to us that there will be 15 per cent administrative costs going to government, 40 per cent for the alliance (building) partners, and another 15 per cent for indirect costs, whatever that is, that leaves 30 per cent that will hit the ground.”

Moreover, the federal and NT governments have refused to offer new housing or services unless Aboriginal people sign 40- to 99-year leases handing their land to both governments. If there were genuine concern about Aboriginal poverty, these governments would fix housing in communities that governments have neglected for decades, without any demands. But the priority of these capitalist governments is the theft of Aboriginal land.

Refusal to consult
The July 6 National Indigenous Times reported on leaked documents revealing that Macklin was advised by her department against formally consulting with Aboriginal people over the compulsory acquisition of their land because it would be “too expensive”, would tie up too many resources and was unlikely to get the outcome the government wanted. The advice was “read, agreed and noted” by Macklin on March 26, just one week before the government endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Some of the documents focus on the NTER legislation and a much-publicised promise by Macklin to amend the laws to comply with the federal Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). The NTER legislation remains the only federal law exempt from the RDA, allowing a host of racially discriminatory government actions, including the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land. When the NTER began, the federal government said it was compulsorily acquiring the land to prevent any delay in the provision of housing. Macklin was also warned that if she brought the NTER legislation under the RDA, there was a “significant risk” the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land would not survive a court challenge.

The federal government is using the threat of acquisition without compensation to push Aboriginal communities to sign the leases. Those communities that were able to resist the pressure may be able to challenge compulsory acquisition of their land when the NTER laws are made no longer exempt from the RDA in either September or October. However, Macklin has been told by government solicitors that “some minor legislative amendments” to the NTER act will reduce the risk of court challenges.

The pro-capitalist Rudd government hasn’t built houses in remote Aboriginal communities in over two years with a budget of nearly $700 million. Compare this failure with socialist Cuba, a poor Third World country, and how it is meeting its housing problems. Last year hurricanes hit Holguin and Las Tunas, two of Cuba’s eastern provinces, destroying many houses. In Holguin, 53% of the more than 124,000 houses affected have been rehabilitated or reconstructed. In Las Tunas, hurricanes Ike and Paloma damaged more than 80,000 homes, of which 32,000 have been totally restored. Cuba can do this because it assigns resources according to social need, not according to the profitability of capitalist businesses.


From Direct Action Sydney, Australia http://directaction.org.au/

Labor steps up racist NT land grab

By Hamish Chitts

After PM Kevin Rudd’s February 13 official apology to the Stolen Generations, media outlets around the world hailed him as a great humanitarian friend of Aboriginal people. That day’s New York Times reported that “Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia’s tortured relations with its indigenous peoples on Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.” In his official apology, Rudd spoke of creating a “future where this parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.”

Rudd would make a great snake-oil seller because for all his lofty words over the past year, his government has begun the biggest and most coordinated attack on the rights of Aboriginal people since the Stolen Generations. Rudd and his modern “protector” of Aborigines, Jenny Macklin, assisted by state and territory governments, have put in place laws and policies that together can only mean one thing for Aboriginal people — cultural genocide.

In June 2007 the Howard Coalition government used the Little Children are Sacred report into child abuse in remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities to invade these communities under what it called the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). At the time, many saw it as just a stunt by an unpopular government looking for ways to boost its chances in the upcoming federal election. However, the Rudd Labor government has not only maintained the NTER, but also extended it.

The real intention of the NTER is the theft of more Aboriginal land through the destruction of Aboriginal culture and links to land where it is strongest. The size of the Aboriginal land holding in the NT is considerable — 45% of the land and 80% of the coastline. 70% of Aboriginal people in the NT live on native title land. Aborigines make up almost a third of the NT’s population. Outside of Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek, 75.6% of NT residents are Aborigines. The first language for most people is an Aboriginal language. Many speak several Aboriginal languages before they learn English. Cultural and social practices continue to be overwhelmingly informed by traditions that predate European settlement.

The NTER measures apply to “prescribed areas”. These include all land held under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, all Aboriginal community living areas and all Aboriginal town camps — some 600,000 sq km. Prescribed areas encompass more than 500 Aboriginal communities, over 70% of Aboriginal people in the NT and directly affect 45,500 Aboriginal men, women and children.

To enable the NTER, the federal Racial Discrimination Act (1975) was explicitly suspended and the protections of anti-discrimination law in the NT were removed. Macklin has said the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act for Aboriginal people in the NT will continue until at least June 2009. Under the NTER, racist measures have been implemented, such as the withholding of 50% of the social security payments of all Aboriginal people in the NT.

Instead of receiving regular social security payments, some 13,000 Aborigines receive store cards that dictate where they can shop and what they are able to buy. Some cards are only for Woolworths, others are for Coles. Therefore, purchases are limited to what these stores stock. Some communities literally rely on the irregular delivery of food parcels. Others have to travel hundreds of kilometers to get to their nominated store. Many can no longer budget, and have no money to attend funerals, ceremonies, or even buy Christmas presents.

A statement from women at a Prescribed Area People’s Alliance (PAPA) meeting in Alice Springs on September 29 said: “For old people the intervention is bringing up bad memories of the past, the old days, the ration days, the dog tag days and the mission days.”

The NTER is forcing Aboriginal people away from their traditional lands to already overcrowded town camps in Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek. As part of the NTER, all Aboriginal land in the NT has been compulsorily acquired by the federal government for five years and instruments of local self-democracy like community councils have been replaced by government-appointed “business managers”.

None of the NTER measures have improved the lives of those it was claimed it would help. Even Rudd’s handpicked NTER review board reported in October that the “single most valuable resource that the NTER has lacked from its inception is the positive, willing participation of the people it was intended to help”. The September 29 women’s statement from PAPA also commented on the outcomes of over one year under the NTER: “There’s no new houses, schools or anything for communities. They’ve only built new houses for the new intervention staff. We had programs created by the community for our community. We wanted more support for them. Community programs have been taken away. They’ve taken away our night patrol, community bus and women’s centres.”

Apparently though for the Labor government and its corporate masters, these measures aren’t working quickly enough to remove Aboriginal people from their land, so land councils in prescribed areas are being pressured to sign leases ranging from 40-99 years giving control of land to the federal or NT governments. If they do not sign, then communities will not receive urgently needed houses and infrastructure that most white people would take for granted.

Macklin has threatened to withhold funding for new housing in the 19 Alice Springs town camps after the Tangentyere Council raised objections to the proposed leasing agreements. “It’s not just about giving the government security for money spent, it’s about establishing absolute clarity about who is responsible for the management of public housing in these communities”, she told the November 25 Melbourne Age. This marks a major departure from the self-management regime established 30 years ago under which all aspects of housing were controlled by Indigenous housing authorities and community councils.

In partnership, the federal and NT Labor governments have flagged not providing future funding to smaller and more remote communities, known as “outstations” or “homelands”, that they deem unviable. In an October 26 message, the Gumatj clan, at the MataMata Homeland in northeast Arnhem Land stated: “People out here on the homelands are both saddened and angry. However, they are defiant, that no matter what the government does, they will not leave their sacred lands and their law. The government will be condemning them to a life of extreme poverty. Is this ‘closing the gap’? Is this ‘reconciliation’? They call this a representative democracy. What a joke — what representation do my family have out here? What say do they have in deciding on legislation that directly affects them and their children and their property?”

NT education minister Marion Scrymgour has announced that Aboriginal languages cannot be used in NT classrooms, except for one hour a day in the afternoons. Most affected are nine bilingual schools across the NT where people do not speak English as a first language in some of the few places left in Australia where Indigenous languages are still spoken fluently in everyday life. The governments claim that this an effort to address poor educational outcomes in Aboriginal communities yet the fact that the bilingual schools have better results in English than the English-only remote schools shows that this is another attack on Aboriginal culture. This attack has been fully backed by the Rudd government. Acting PM Julie Gillard said on November 20: “For Indigenous Australia, English is the language of further learning and English is the language of work.”

Attempts to destroy Aboriginal culture assist land theft by trying to break the strong link Aboriginal culture has with the land and which ties Aboriginal people to the homelands. Under the laws of capitalist Australia, if Indigenous culture is lost, if Aborigines move into towns and stop living on or going to their traditional lands, then native title becomes extinct.

Governments are going to great measures to transform Aboriginal land into crown land. Under Rudd’s leadership, these latest attacks on Aboriginal people have been increased in the NT and extended to affect Aboriginal people in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Labor is making these attacks because in recent years remote Aboriginal communities have been successful in opposing the establishment of new uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps.

With an expected increase in global use of nuclear power, the price of uranium has rapidly increased and the big mining companies have been pressuring Australian governments to allow the opening of more mines and the establishment of a nuclear waste dump. The forced or coopted loss of Aboriginal control of their land is an important step to achieving this.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au

NT intervention continues racist land-grab

By Hamish Chitts

The first anniversary of the federal government’s racist “emergency” intervention into 73 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory was marked by protests in Australia’s major cities by Aboriginal people and their supporters. The protests called attention to the real intent of the intervention, which is to continue stealing Aboriginal land.

Governments have practised and fostered racism against Aboriginal people since the beginning of European colonisation. When Pemulwuy led the first organised Aboriginal armed resistance against the invaders of Sydney Cove, from December 9, 1790, until his murder in 1802, senior officers of the New South Wales Corps persuaded Governor Arthur Phillip not to report this resistance for what it was. The governor’s reports to London played down or omitted battles against Pemulwuy’s warriors and characterised the resistance as minor criminal incidents by troublesome natives influenced by escaped convicts.

British military officers saw the potential for becoming rich and powerful landholders, and did not want this jeopardised by any treaty that the British government might seek to make with Aboriginal tribes if they knew there was strong resistance to the colony. As these officers and other fortune seekers established their power and became part of the tiny ruling class of Australia, they set the stage for the distortions of history and racist characterisations of Aboriginal people that persist to this very day. Only through racism can the capitalist ruling class continue to take what it wants from Aboriginal land.

Brough’s forerunners

In June last year, the then-minister for Indigenous affairs, Mal Brough, justified the “emergency” intervention like this: “What I’ve actually done is legislated to say to people, if you want to unlock the value in your land, if you want to again have the chance to be able to aspire to something — home ownership, jobs, cultural awareness, bringing up a child in a healthy environment — then you can do so.”

Brough’s feigned concern for Aboriginal people and their culture is similar (though updated for a 21st century audience) to that expressed by John Bleakley, Queensland’s chief protector and director of native affairs from 1914 to 1942, who in 1919 said of Aborigines, “It is only by complete separation of the two races that we can save him from hopeless contamination and eventual extinction, as well as safeguard the purity of our own blood”. This was Bleakley’s justification for removing Aborigines from their land and confining them to reserves and to church-run missions. While Bleakley was a fervent advocate of racial segregation and Brough advocates racial integration, both policies involve the taking of land from Aboriginal people under the guise of their “best interests”.

Despite claims by Brough and the ALP, which supported the NT intervention, that it is a necessary emergency response to child abuse in remote Aboriginal communities, the measures that have been implemented are more about acquiring land than the safety of children. These included:

• Deployment of additional police to Aboriginal communities, leading to greater repression and incarceration for minor offences.

• Bans on alcohol, which, rather than treating alcoholism or its causes, force those who are dependent on alcohol into bigger towns, where they can maintain their addiction.

• Compulsory acquisition of townships, currently held under the federal Native Title Act 1993, through five-year leases, which removes community ownership of the land.

• Removal of customary law and cultural practice considerations from bail applications and sentencing in criminal proceedings.

• Suspension of the permit system that required permission from Aboriginal communities to enter their land.

• Quarantining of a proportion of welfare benefits to all recipients in the designated communities and issuing them with electronic debit cards that can be used only at Coles or Woolworth stores in larger regional centres.

• The abolition of Community Development Employment Projects.

These measures, not surprisingly, have resulted in an exodus from the affected communities, with people moving into larger regional centres like Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs. This is putting extra pressure on already inadequate housing in these towns. Small community-run stores in the targeted Aboriginal townships no longer receive income because their former customers must travel — hundreds of kilometres in some cases — to a Coles or Woolworths store where they can use their debit cards.

Clearing out remote communities

Now the federal government is considering a report from the heads of the intervention taskforce that recommends assessing which communities are “viable” in the longer term and planning future investment based on those assessments. Asked by reporters on June 21 if this meant moving people from smaller communities to larger centres, Jenny Macklin, the federal Labor minister now responsible for the intervention, replied, “It certainly recommends that this is an issue that needs to be examined”.

Macklin added: “I think it’s critical to look at this from the point of view of making sure that children go to school and that parents can get work. We are concentrating the new homes in the larger communities, they are growing rapidly, there is very significant population growth. There will be upgrades in some of the other communities, but we are concentrating the largest effort in some of the larger communities.”

Under the present laws, this removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands could have permanent ramifications. A key part of the process of gaining native title over crown land is proving to a court that those making the claim have maintained a connection with the land. If the intervention continues for 10 years, traditional owners of land may legally lose their native title claim. This would also have a devastating effect on the cultural heritage that Brough and Macklin claim to be protecting. As particular places and the ceremonies and stories connected with them are central to Aboriginal cultures, any disconnection from their land amounts to an erosion of their culture.

Taking the children away

The federal, state and territory governments, which are now all in Labor’s hands, are also establishing government-funded boarding schools for Aboriginal children, but run by private Christian organisations like the new boarding college on Melville Island. In March, Macklin said the federal government was committed to building three extras hostels in the NT as well as the one in the north Queensland town of Weipa.

The Labor governments seek to encourage Aboriginal parents from remote communities to send their children to boarding schools by threatening to quarantine all of the parents’ social security payments, or through the promise of “good education” in comparison to under-funded and neglected local government schools. Macklin asserts that children are better off at boarding school because, as she claimed on April 2, “What’s happened in these communities has been an insidious creeping decline. It’s been generations in the making, producing dysfunctional, despairing communities paralysed by violence, abuse, neglect and despair.”

A similar justification was made the Queensland parliament in 1965 during debate on a bill to allow the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents: “No group of children is more neglected than those who are living with their coloured parents in the fringe-dwelling areas of many of our country towns. I want that unfortunate group of people to be included in the children and youth of the state whose well-being it is proposed to promote, safeguard and protect by the introduction of this bill.”

A better example

As mining companies and pastoralists in Australia look forward to getting more Aboriginal land, something very different is happening in Venezuela. There, the government of President Hugo Chavez, which is leading the effort to build “21st century socialism”, is working with indigenous communities to eliminate the injustices they face.

In 2002 the Chavez government changed the name of Columbus Day to Day of Indigenous Resistance. Can anyone image Australian PM Kevin Rudd even suggesting replacing “Australia Day” (the officially sanctioned annual commemoration on January 26 of the beginning of European colonisation) and making December 9 an officially sanctioned Day of Indigenous Resistance?

The Venezuelan government has set up Mission Guaicaipuro, a government-funded program that seeks to restore communal land titles to indigenous communities and to protect their cultural rights. Named after an indigenous chief, Guaicaipuro (1530-1568), who led native resistance against the Spanish colonisation of Venezuela, the mission is run by the indigenous communities themselves, in partnership with the government.

On February 25 the Chavez government announced that it would confiscate at least 3000 hectares of the British meat-packing tycoon Lord Vestey’s 13,600-hectare Charcote cattle ranch so that indigenous people can move about freely. The Vestey Group had fenced in 200 Yaruro people, who could not leave the property without the company’s permission.

In the 60s and 70s the racist policies of segregation and forced assimilation, including the kidnapping of the Stolen Generations, were presented by governments as in the best interests of Aboriginal people. Far too many non-Aboriginal people took those governments at their word. Today there is no excuse for doing so. Regardless of how the policy is justified, the real intent has been and remains the theft of Aboriginal land for exploitation by the same class of wealthy people who enrich themselves through exploiting the labour of all working people.

From Direct Action, Sydney, Australia www.directaction.org.au