Vikki Campion: Labor’s $80m outback gallery pledge ignores kids in need
Labor’s big announcement for the Northern Territory this election is an $80 million art gallery. How is that going to help kids living in abject poverty, Vikki Campion asks.
Opinion
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Ask seven-year-old girls who are fed dinner and safely sleep in bed what they like about school. Playing, friends, colouring-in.
Ask seven-year-old girls who are scooped up by their school bus driver from a corner of the
house each weekday morning and carried over inebriated bodies strewn across the floor what they like about school: “Kitchen.”
As Labor’s last prime minister, Kevin Rudd was issuing the apology to Australia’s indigenous people, his government scrapped funding to feed children in 90 per cent federally funded Northern Territory schools in the Labor-held seat of Lingiari.
Labor’s big announcement for the outback this election is an $80 million art gallery. Who will use an art gallery in Lingiari? Wealthy people from elsewhere.
For seven-year-old kids who travel up to 280km a day from abject poverty, whose school thrill is getting food to eat, who idolise their teacher as a person who loves and cares for them, do they want or need a multimillion-dollar art gallery?
This is proper bush, the centre of Australia, where children learn multiple First Nation’s languages and follow ceremonies thousands of years old, where elders layered in jumpers sweat as they sing in the heat – tradition handed down from kin to kin, not choreographed for the art galleries of 2022.
On her first day of work, the school chef cried. She cooks extra for the hungriest with the meagre resources she has for those who don’t have meals at home.
These children need a safe place to eat instead of being beaten up or molested, sleeping in a corner of a house.
Hard words, sure. Do you want it sanitised so that it’s easier to vote in Sydney on Saturday for your art gallery in the Northern Territory?
Labor’s election promise of 10 days of paid domestic violence leave doesn’t help the boy who has seen his mum beaten to near death so many times that he spends his days in the special needs class because he is so traumatised.
Penny Wong hiring a First Nations ambassador to go on overseas trips doesn’t help the tiny bush Australians who already live in a war zone. Just as we wouldn’t give refugees fleeing Ukraine a gallery, no art hall will fix it.
Canberra-based bureaucrats told the teaching staff in these schools to “meet with parents” over everything from feeding their children to brushing their teeth. The running joke – and it’s a sad one – is that the kiss and collect out front has never been used by a mum or dad.
For a seven-year-old girl who has to be picked up from a family so devastated by the wreckage of human frailty from a place that’s not even noted on a map, who is regularly denied the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an $80 million art gallery is forever
away from being a priority.
How disconnected are we from an issue that should be paramount? Yet an art gallery, a new ambassador, or 10 days of paid DV leave is the solution?
Anthony Albanese preaches at the press club about “no one left behind” and splashes coin on art galleries while leaving swathes of bush communities in red dust.
Is Labor honestly saying the path out of this hell is an art gallery that some of these seven-year-old girls will never darken the doors of if their young lives aren’t graced with nurturing and security? And at night for them it is a hell.
Imagine what outback schools could do with more than $500 million funnelled into art galleries in Sydney’s seat of social justice warriors. There aren’t too many starving kids walking around the harbourside Art Gallery of NSW who don’t own a pair of shoes and only get meals at school.
The sin is mine too. You cry with the school chef in the kitchen and get on a plane. You leave her, who does her best to feed the barefoot kids who go home to starve, with promises.
Isn’t that what we do? We get back on a plane or in the caravan, and we leave those seven-year-olds to go back to the chaos that the fools among us romanticise as a home with that criminal logic that this is culturally appropriate?
Even talking on the Alice Springs pre-poll, directly across from a community art gallery where local artists sell their work, Labor supporters handing out how-to-votes know how absurd the art gallery promise is in a town where crime is the biggest problem.
In Katherine, the indigenous women on pre-poll hand over policy they have written up and printed out themselves – they want boarding schools and cadet units for the kids who idolise the military soldier image.
Boarding schools mean meals and safety at night – it could break the multi-generational cycle of trauma.
No art hall is going to fix it. But a boarding school might help.
Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School, near Tamworth, a publicly-funded boarding school, was built in 1939, and we haven’t made another since. However, the taxpayer has funded multiple art galleries and thousands of painfully pretentious public art projects.
A boarding school won’t be an elixir for all ills, but it will be a place where seven-year-old girls eat dinner and sleep in safety so that she can one day be a teacher like the one she adores.
Vikki Campion is Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s partner
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