Price of Left ego is black despair

UNLIKE the ABC's confused talkback callers and Fairfax's ill-informed editors, Aborigines in the Northern Territory and the northwest of WA appear relieved the Federal Government is moving on the endemic problems of sexual abuse and ill-health in dysfunctional remote indigenous communities.

While a majority of Labor supporters (80 per cent, according to Galaxy) believe the move is an election stunt pulled by Prime Minister John Howard, those most affected see it as an attempt to remedy a disaster long-neglected by governments. Those most to blame for this horror are the promoters of the Aboriginal industry – from H.C. "Nugget" Coombs and his successors to the legislators who disenfranchised rural Aboriginals from the economy through the equal wage case 30 years ago, to the jurists who conspired to concoct the Mabo case and the authors of flawed reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody and the so-called "stolen generations". It comes as no surprise that Labor's true believers – the dilettante North Shore doctors' wives – are loathe to support genuine action – because it focuses attention on the abject failure of the ill-conceived apartheid policies they marched for and in which they placed their deluded, emotive trust. White lawyers who have run the Aboriginal legal services in the states and territories should be placed on notice that the picnic is coming to an end. Labor and Green politicians who convinced the gullible that Tampa was a stunt and attempting to salvage Aboriginal children from a short, disease-ridden life of ill-educated victimhood is another ploy for votes should be horse-whipped around their electorates. On Tampa, they need to be reminded that Opposition Leader Kim Beazley initially supported Mr Howard's call to arms ("We will decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come") and that the Prime Minister's decisive action at that time effectively choked the flow of illegal entrants. Similarly, those who stupidly claim the Federal Government could have acted sooner are ignoring the tens of millions Canberra has given the states and the Northern Territory to deal with the inherent problems faced by those who have been kept subject to abuse in their isolated reserves by the appalling policies so warmly embraced by misty-eyed members of the kumbaya crowd. In talks with Aborigines and others across the northwest and in the NT over the past fortnight, it became apparent that even those who have spent many years attempting to make remote communities work have now realised that, for the great majority, there is no hope. Steve Hawke, author and playwright, son of the former Labor prime minister, achieved some fame with his support for the blockade against mining on Nookenbah station in the late '70s. He told me that, although he agreed with the equal wages decision, it had effectively ended rural Aboriginals involvement in anything but a welfare economy in the pastoral regions. Though he said he was "ideologically opposed to everything Howard does" he confessed he believed government intervention was necessary. Certainly, even the most perfunctory visit and discussions in the region bear this out. One Aboriginal elder I met in Kununurra admitted the traditional law so admired in the leafier suburbs was a mystery to most Aborigines and best known to a handful of non-indigenous experts from museums and cultural bodies. He said he doubted there was a single Aborigine remaining who would be capable of constructing the basic tools, spear heads and so forth, let alone possessing the skills necessary to lead a traditional life. The lack of knowledge of traditional law has led to exploitation by self-proclaimed elders (largely by the uninitiated, or those initiated with meaningless ceremony) of a system already loaded against women and the young. This manipulation of a flawed system was identified in statistics from the Northern Territory, WA, SA, NSW and Queensland, painstakingly explored by Dr Helen Hughes in her excellent study Lands of Shame, published by the Centre for Independent Studies in May. The disastrous effect of passive welfare, combined with an emphasis on distribution of any money earned by an individual through the extended family, has almost entirely destroyed individual enterprise. This was illustrated at one indigenous-owned resort site, where the operators unhappily told how their promising local employee had given up his job after pressure from other family members to share his earnings. As for the heartbreaking figures on child sexual abuse, it should not be necessary to do more than state the recent figures from WA, which showed that, of 86 children diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections in the first six months of the year, 72 were Aboriginal, including some as young as two. The dewy-eyed media handwringers and academics who rarely miss an opportunity to bray their compassion for Aborigines are now silent. Not before time, for it is largely through the ill-judged policies they have used to flaunt their moral vanity that the lives of the indigenous isolated in remote communities are so blighted. It's time these poseurs said sorry to the generations they have so tragically exploited.