Intervention

With Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin in the Northern Territory last week consulting on “what’s next?” for the Northern Territory Emergency Response, it’s timely to throw the concept of ‘exit strategies’ into the mix.  In particular, how do people exit the Government’s income management program and take control of their finances?

It’s a very real dilemma for governments at all levels.  Teetotalers and drunks, spenders and savers, good and bad parents - it makes no difference.  If you’re an Aboriginal person receiving welfare payments in the NT, you live under the Emergency Response and half your welfare must be spent on the priority goods like food, clothes, rent and health care. 

You can’t use the money for alcohol, tobacco, pornography or gambling – well at least not the quarantined half anyway…

Continue reading "NT Intervention: Guilty by geography" »

Anthropologist Peter Sutton has a long association with indigenous people.

In his new book The Politics of Suffering, he makes an observation that deserves quoting at length:

The first consideration must be to focus on those conditions that are conducive to the emotional and physical wellbeing of the unborn, infants, children, adolescents, the elderly, and adult women and men. It is remarkable how many people living in the comfort, affluence and healthy surroundings of Australia’s suburbia have, in the debates over indigenous policy and especially the Intervention, covertly promoted the view that respect of cultural differences and racially defined political autonomy takes precedence over a child’s basic human right to have love, wellbeing and safety. It is as if political feelings and political values are more important than one’s emotional feelings and moral values as fellows of those other human beings in the ghettos.

Continue reading "Putting do-gooder politics ahead of helping people" »

The shocking case last week of a two-year-old Victorian girl being savagely beaten has once again raised the issue of child abuse into the headlines.

It has started an important debate about when to remove children from their parents and what constitutes a child at risk.

Despite some horrifying high profile cases in recent years, child abuse is a problem that many Australians still think is limited to a certain section of the community.

While this view might make it easier for us to sleep at night, it does nothing to protect the more than 30,000 Australian children who were abused or neglected last year.

Continue reading "Child abuse is still our national shame" »