The Guardian 13 December, 2006
Brough vows more Indigenous "reform"
Bob Briton
Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, has promised a revamp of the assimilationist policies already inflicted on Aboriginal Australians since the coming to power of the Howard Government. In a recent speech to the National Institute for Governance Brough said that the education of Indigenous children from remote communities in boarding schools would be at the core of the government’s policy offensive. Boarding schools are already planned for Kununurra inWestern Australia; Weipa in Queensland and Borroloola in the Northern Territory.
Brough foreshadowed more mainstreaming of services for Aboriginal people, maintaining that separate services "had alienated people from the broader community and from opportunities". Indigenous Co-ordination Centres will manage the drift of people into towns and away from crumbling under-serviced, under-funded communities. He also threatened to cut adrift Aboriginal people moving back to their homelands, which clearly does not accord with government priorities:
"If people choose to move beyond the reach of education and health services, noting that they are free to do so, the government’s investment package will not follow them … Let me be specific — if a person wants to move to a homeland that precludes regular school attendance, for example, I wouldn’t support it. If a person wants to move away from health services, so be it — but don’t ask the taxpayer to pay for a house to facilitate that choice."
The minister was pushing all the buttons of his conservative voter base with references to indulged Aboriginal people with wasteful separate services, free housing and the like to gather support for further attacks. NT Labor Senator Trish Crossin sees the destruction of the out-station movement as the real agenda of government policy. "This is a move to force Indigenous people off their land and into regional communities", she said last week. No doubt, corporations in the booming resource sector have an interest in these lands being emptied of their Indigenous inhabitants.
During 2006, the Howard Government has painted a lurid picture of the shortcomings of remote Aboriginal communities like Wadeye and Mutijulu in the Northern Territory. Bandaid solutions to the problems of these communities, like meagre additional funds for housing, are now coming with more and more strings attached. Governing bodies of Indigenous people are being pushed aside in favour of government-appointed administrators. Land tenure arrangements are being forced through to allow subletting to individual families buying homes or to businesses. Brough was unapologetic about this attack on collective ownership and Native Title when he spoke last week:
"For too long, governments of all persuasions have focussed on the collective Aboriginal community at the expense of considering the needs and aspirations of the individuals and families. This is a mistake that this new direction will not repeat. It is imperative we pay respect to the individual and their right to choose their own pathway."
Prominent Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson has hit back at the assimilationist policy direction of the Howard Government. Speaking at national conference of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) recently, he noted that Aboriginal people only get to deal with the police, courts and service personnel and not the policy-makers radically changing their lives. "It’ll never be the faceless politicians (we talk to) — they are so gutless they hide behind the media and run around denigrating the Aboriginal people of this country, calling us paedophile harbourers and all sorts of other things", he said.
Speaking again to the 10,000-strong crowd that had walked around Melbourne’s Albert Park Lake in a call for justice for Aboriginal Australians, Dodson accused the government of having a "virulent strain of assimilation". "This particular strand of assimilationist policy is aimed directly at the essence of what constitutes the nature of the Indigenous societies and the psyche of Indigenous peoples," he said.