Trust Labor? You are Dreamtiming

WHEN voters begin to focus more closely on this year's federal election, they must ensure they carefully examine what Labor says and what the party actually means.

Labor's indigenous affairs spokesman Jenny Macklin demonstrated the need to scrutinise the ALP's words when she committed a Rudd government to signing the United Nation's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Of course, the mere mention of the "UN," "Rights" and "Indigenous Peoples" will usually send True Believers into a state akin to that normally experienced after sloshing down a box of Kath and Kim's favourite Chateau de Cardboard, but that should not prohibit others from attempting to understand Macklin's words without succumbing to giddy intoxication. Macklin told The Australian that the UN's declaration provided "in-principle support by the international community for improving the lives of indigenous people and their children," adding, "Australian law would always prevail". Macklin is wrong. There is nothing in the declaration which would improve the lives of indigenous people or their children. Nor is she in any position to guarantee Australian law would always prevail. What would actually prevail is the sort of muddled, half-pregnant humbug that the Aboriginal industry and its Dreamtime-deluded supporters have been promoting since H.C. "Nugget" Coombes conned them into believing that indigenous people would happily live in humpies if they were only permitted to gather their own bush tucker from dawn to dusk and practise a primitive form of collectivism. As for the UN, the ALP likes nothing more than to pass the policy buck to the bloated bureaucracy on New York's East River, as if the imprimatur of failed Third World diplomats gives Labor's dopier views some moral sanctity - embracing the UN declaration will ensure an unworkable dual law system is imposed on Australia. Though she said the ALP's support was only "in-principle", try telling that to the league of fifth-column lawyers and activist judges already engaged in attempting to undermine the Constitution with forays into psycho-analysis to interpret their visions of what the framers of the document might have had in mind, only to discover such conceits as implied rights and other notions of legalistic fantasy. Macklin's populist position was supported by Labor insider Peter Botsman, a former ALP worker and director of its think tanks, the Evatt Foundation and the Whitlam Foundation. "Jenny Macklin has given indigenous Australians a reason to vote Labor again with some hope. If a Rudd government is elected it has agreed to ratify the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples ratified by the great majority of UN nations on September 12," he wrote on his social change website. Not if they want to live in modern Australia in a modern economy and share the expectations of modern Australians. The ABC, Labor's broadcast arm, also threw its support behind Macklin in her appreciation of the mumbo-jumbo UN declaration as a bleating Karen Barlow betrayed during an interview on last Saturday's AM program. By turn interrogating and attempting to browbeat the fairly up-front and straightforward Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough, Barlow at one stage petulantly whined: "But there is 200 years or more of catch-up that the Aboriginal people have in this country. They're not being treated equally at the moment, they have catch-up." Catch-up or ketch-up, who knows? What we do know is that in areas where the observance of customary law has been encouraged by the keep-them-in-humpies crowd, a number of self-nominated indigenous elders have claimed recently-invented "traditional" rights to rape young boys and girls, sometimes under the guise of conducting initiation ceremonies. This rorting of traditional and customary lore has been carried out despite numerous reports from indigenous women's organisations and has been one of the factors behind the Federal Government's intervention in the those Labor states with significant remote indigenous communities. If the ABC's Barlow is keen on "catch-up" she should refrain from promoting the UN and the ALP's "forward-to-the-past" policies and ask whether distressed indigenous women want to be treated as chattels and worse - as they would uncomfortably discover under the provisions of the declaration. Macklin's pledge of (shallow) support for the UN declaration again demonstrated the ALP's weak and indecisive leadership. As Brough pointed out in Parliament yesterday, the Opposition cannot walk both sides of the street at the same time. It cannot attempt to garner publicity by offering "in-principle" support of the UN declaration and simultaneously claim it would not pass the necessary supporting legislation, nor cannot it support the Government's intervention in the Northern Territory and back rorted customary law. Labor's policies would permit its supporters to parade their hearts on their sleeves but ensure indigenous people continue mopping up their blood with theirs.