Opinion: Indigenous people aren’t all impoverished, many are doing just fine

City-dwelling Indigenous elites demand truth telling and compensation, out in the bush it’s a different story, writes Mike O’Connor.

Liberal Senator for SA Kerrynne Liddle

The Irish, contrary to what some might say, are not stupid, nor the Scots all mean nor all Americans loud and insensitive, and equally not all Indigenous people are disadvantaged.

It’s a point that has been made by the Liberal Party’s new voice on Aboriginal affairs

Kerrynne Liddle, who standing amidst the smoking ruins of the Coalition, was so bold as to question the prevailing view that the term “Indigenous” equates with an automatic right to and need of government handouts.

An Arrernte woman from Central Australia, Senator Liddle said it was disingenuous to suggest that every Aboriginal person was impoverished, because that was simply not true.

She said there were many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working well and effectively in business, and what truth-telling activists failed to point out was that two-thirds of businesses which identified as Indigenous were operating successfully without seeking government grants or preferential treatment in tendering for government contracts.

“What we don’t do enough of is asking those people who have been successful: How did they get there?” she said.

Could it be that instead of draping themselves in possum skins, waving flags and blaming white “colonisers” for their real or imagined ills, they just got on with their lives and made a go of their businesses by working hard and making smart decisions.

If you want to be accused of being a racist in this country, it is only necessary to make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that in the interests of transparency, all Indigenous bodies receiving government grants undergo an independent audit.

Senator Liddle’s colleague, Senator Jacinta Price, asked the government to do this in the last Parliament, a request which was met with a stony silence by Prime Minister Albanese.

Senator Liddle gives voice to what many suspect which is that a crackdown on service providers in Aboriginal communities is long overdue, saying too many of these organisations were not accountable to their impoverished Aboriginal clients or to the taxpayer.

Senator Liddle might be new to her shadow portfolio, but has been quick to show that she is not afraid to take on the vested interests in the massive industry that is the government’s Indigenous grants program.

Firebrand senator Lidia Thorpe

“At the moment there are over 3000 Aboriginal-community-controlled organisations registered and half of those haven’t actually complied with their reporting obligations with the regulator,” she said.

“It is not good enough when they are on the frontline... we have had organisations that have hoovered up government grants that haven’t delivered what they said they were going to deliver.”

Occasionally when the maladministration and abuse of process becomes too blatant to ignore the government is forced to act but in the main it looks the other way and just keeps signing the cheques. Don’t expect anyone in government to start asking embarrassing questions like “where’s all the money gone?” anytime soon.

The city-dwelling Indigenous elites demand treaties, truth telling commissions, reparations, compensation and rail against “white invaders”.

Out in the bush where Senator Liddle has travelled, her people tell her that what they want is housing, sanitation, security and a safe domestic environment.

There was no mention of these needs, however, at a meeting of Indigenous leaders held in Brisbane last week titled the Bandarran Marra’Gu Gathering Strength Summit.

Instead, the attendees issued a statement accusing the Queensland government of perpetuating “targeted harm” against Indigenous children and young people, and saying it was feared that it was the state’s intent to “destroy our First Nations by forcibly transferring our children from our responsibility, out of our care and out of our communities”.

The statement talks about human rights, truth and justice but nowhere in the 25-paragraph statement is there a single mention of the responsibility parents have towards their children and of the rights of children to expect that their parents will nurture and protect them.

Nationally, there are 50 Indigenous children out of every 1000 in state care compared with fewer than five non-Indigenous children per 1000.

The Crisafulli government has said that it will hold an inquiry into the state’s child safety system but governments can only do so much and suggesting that the state government, and by inference the people of Queensland are attempting to destroy the Indigenous population by putting children into care is a gross distortion of the truth and blame shifting on an industrial scale.