Empty words can't fill black hole

BEFORE the casual reader even opens Commissioner Ted Mullighan's report into the abuse of children in the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands in the central desert in South Australia's northwest, there is a confronting caution.

It reads starkly: "WARNING: This report deals with allegations of abuse of children while in state care and in places contains graphic details which may be distressing." It is not wrong. It takes a great deal of strength to read about the sexual abuse of children younger than four, children who are presented to health workers with venereal diseases, children for whom nothing has been done, or will be done in the near future. Even more distressing is the reality, the horrifying reality, that 30 years ago, before Labor's ideological dreamers launched their social engineering experiment, such children would have been vastly better off. As Mullighan sadly reflected in the preface to his 255-page report: "Prior to the mid-1970s life of Anangu on the Lands was generally healthy, peaceful, safe and content. "There was an effective system of social order, law and governance and mutual responsibility. During the 1980s and 1990s, life changed drastically for the people and sadly for the children." Even former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairwoman Lowitja (formerly Lois) O'Donoghue, a constant critic of attempts by the former Howard government to work toward practical solutions for problems within dysfunctional communities of Aboriginal Australians, favouring the symbolic gestures beloved of the ALP, agrees with that view. O'Donoghue, whose father, a white man, preferred that his five children by a Yankunytjatjara woman be educated at a missionary-run home for abandoned and sick Aboriginal children in Quorn, South Australia, rather than in the desert, has told The Australian that social problems escalated when the church-run missions gave way to "white fellas . . . going in to make money". "Basically what happened is that they got self-determination, the missionaries left and the government came in . . . and they did not give Aboriginal people the capacity to run their own affairs," she said. When asked by the newspaper if indigenous APY residents had been better off under the mission system, O'Donoghue said: "Of course." Perhaps she and her supporters and the ALP generally should consider an apology to the generations of missionaries and white Australians who devoted their lives to working in harsh conditions for people like O'Donoghue and others like her, without reward. Those unsung heroes and heroines of the outback whose dedicated work and memories have been enthusiastically traduced by bleeding heart inner-urban luvvies including the current Prime Minister with his silly Sorry speech earlier this year. Of course, only real dreamers would have been surprised by the former Supreme Court judge's findings. Anyone with any genuine concern for the fate of children in remote and isolated Aboriginal communities would be well aware of the prevalence of ongoing sexual abuse in many, if not most, of the darker recesses of the nation and the attempts by many in the burgeoning Aboriginal industry to keep them out of the public eye through the use of restrictive permits. Though Mullighan unwisely failed to recommend the strongest possible intervention, his findings do go a long way to support the former government's intervention in the Northern Territory, by highlighting the inaction taken by the South Australian Rann Government's agencies. Inaction which continues to this day because Rann's Government has taken a leaf out of the Rudd Labor Government's book and appointed a task force to report on Mullighan's 46 recommendations with a request to respond within the next three months. How can any responsible adult countenance such inaction when it has been known for years that sexual abuse was rife, that the transmission of STDs to children, infants, even, was not unusual and that the sexualisation of such children was taking place when they were as young as two and three years of age? There will doubtless be the usual number of readers who claim it is racist to even mention dysfunctional Aboriginal communities, let alone detail findings of Mullighan's report. They are wrong. It was racist to isolate Aborigines as Labor's "expert" H.C. "Nugget" Coombs ordained, to practise an effectual apartheid on these Australians as if they were museum specimens condemned to exist like wildlife on reservations. It is racist now to withhold the police and medical and educational support these people need to function as Australians today. It is racist not to speak out against the system of intimidation that prevents victims from speaking out. The Rudd Labor Government has let the Rann Labor Government run its own race on the Mullighan report, making the Prime Minister's Sorry remarks look like just so much empty mouthing. The relevant federal minister Jenny Macklin is more worried about the politics than the practicalities of the sort of intervention that is called for. Mal Brough, the former Howard Aboriginal affairs minister, who was active and did achieve outcomes, is seen as a threat to Labor's claims to be superior managers. While Labor's leaders in Adelaide and Canberra waste time, young lives are being wasted. Mullighan says they may be lost forever unless action is taken immediately. These sad toddlers deserve a lot more than a photo opportunity of politicians parading their Sorry sentiments.