Vikki Campion: Anthony Albanese’s visits to Garma make no difference to Indigenous crisis
How can our PM think that attending a $2750-a-ticket festival in East Arnhem Land via private plane for a red-carpet glamping event is making any difference to the lives of Indigenous people, asks Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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Going to Garma and believing it gives you meaningful insight into the everyday life of Aboriginal Territorians is like going to the Sydney Opera House and believing it gives you meaningful insight into living in Granville.
However, some of our media and federal ministry are operating in a different reality, believing that the only way to understand and connect with Indigenous leaders is to attend a $2750 ticketed festival in East Arnhem via private plane for a red-carpet glamping event.
Yet they tactically sidestepped the not-so-glamorous goings-on of Alice Springs, where third-world camps exist under tarps, on makeshift mattresses in the scrub, in first-world Australia.
It is all good and well for the PM to return to Garma and celebrate the Yolgni tribe yet again, having gone in 2019, 2022 and 2023.
Yet it was galling that during the winter break, he could not take a southern detour to listen to Alice Springs and check in on the $250m of “crisis funding” he announced for the heart of the nation 18 months ago.
It doesn’t matter how many times Albo goes to Garma, he still doesn’t get it.
To understand Granville, you need to go to Granville; to understand Alice Springs, you have to go to Alice Springs.
Garma has merit but no relevance to the vast majority of Aboriginal kids in camps who could never afford the 1770km journey to the cameras and billionaires in East Arnhem Land, no more than the Opera House has merit but no relevance for the vast majority of kids in Granville.
Fixing the crisis in Alice requires people with the courage to make politically incorrect decisions that offend Canberra’s Zeitgeist.
That really will be doing it for the children.
Nothing encapsulates the complete disconnect more than the Prime Minister going to Garma to announce an intermittent power program to solve Alice Springs’s complete social dislocation.
Former NT senator Sam McMahon points out that when asked what First Nations people wanted in their electricity, they chose “affordable, reliable power”, which is culturally correct for all of us but for some Climate-200 owned seats and the rarefied atmosphere of the ACT, which wants to run the economy on part-time power from future landfill.
The NT already has at least four solar factories built, which remain coated in red dust and are waiting to be connected to the grid.
They are just sitting there, not generating a watt of power, at Katherine, Batchelor and Manton, working only as target practice for kids who happen to be handy with a slingshot.
Any reasonable person would realise an arts festival and solar panels cannot fix the issues in Alice Springs, but not our PM.
When asked what tangible outcomes there were from the $250m crisis funding announced in 2023, the government pointed to what had been done over the past four years.
Since last year’s announcement of a $40.4m on-country learning program, with $30m given to Central Australia schools so far, they have yet to see measurable outcomes in school attendance.
Of the $23.4m for improving First Nations health outcomes, $18.4m had been allocated to expanding the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress’s Child and Youth Assessment and Treatment Service, with a 300 per cent increase in assessments. Yet the government could not give actual figures of how many kids were actively included for a better life.
As far as crisis funding goes, the millions in capital and justice are yet to be efficaciously spent to show violence, domestic violence, crime and alcoholism are reduced and school attendance is increased.
The solution in Canberra is to close your eyes tight at an urban smoking ceremony.
But the only way forward is to conduct a massive investigation into service delivery, examining where the current money is going and what tangible outcomes we are getting for it.
It doesn’t matter how much you wish the opera to solve Granville’s problems, it won’t; just like a cultural festival in East Arnhem and photovoltaic fields won’t fix Alice.
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