Virtue signalling over Sorry Day won’t solve Indigenous poverty but it will help pollies feel better

Serious issues in Indigenous communities like poverty, domestic violence and substance abuse won’t be helped by making schools fly the Aboriginal flag.

Housing and health issues in Indigenous communities like Epenarra, south east of Tenant Creek in the Northern Territory, still exist. Picture: News Corp

Like most suburban Australians, I’ve not had a lot to do with Aboriginal communities in the remote regions of our country.

I did, however, when working as a young newspaper reporter see the worst of Indigenous poverty and struggle across South Australia and in the Northern Territory.

Later in life, I have marvelled at Aboriginal music, art, sport and sacred sites in many places.

It’s the bad stuff that sticks though. One night in 1977 I was asked to accompany a Melbourne reporter, Tess Lawrence, to the Point Pearce Mission Station on Yorke Peninsula, west of Adelaide, late at night.

Earlier that morning two teenagers from Point Pearce Mission had been shot dead by publican Antonio Armiento, the licensee of the Wauraltee Hotel in Port Victoria.

The teenagers Gordon Weetra, 15, and Derek Sansbury, 18, along with other teenagers tried to break into the pub.

Armiento said they were armed so he fired his automatic shotgun, killing the two teenagers. The others escaped back to the mission.

Lawrence and I told local police we were headed to Point Pearce to find out what happened, and they refused to come with us.

What we saw has stuck with me for life. At the end of a dirt road were a collection of what could only be called slum dwellings. Some had been burned to the ground and others had broken windows and holes smashed into plaster walls.

A burnt out house in the outback town of Bourke in north west NSW, where Indigenous issues have been tackled head on with a range of innovative initiatives. Picture: Elise Derwin

The mission was a collection of rusting vehicles and in the middle of it all was a bonfire with a group of older men and women sitting around drinking.

We were not welcome given the events of that morning and spent an uncomfortable hour or so trying to find an adult who could respond to the crime at the pub.

Abuse from some men verged on violent and we left. As far as I can work out, the publican was never charged. The Point Pearce shooting event featured in a controversial film called Australian rules.

I’ve also been to Yuendumu, four hours north west of Alice Springs, that is still beset by outbreaks of violence so bad that local medical centre staff closed the facility in 2019 due to attacks.

I was reminded of the 1977 event in particular last week when we found out the Victorian Labor government had passed state laws to strongly encourage schools to mark Sorry Day — on May 26 — which joins Close the Gap Day on March 18 and Mabo Day on June 3, plus NAIDOC week which begins tomorrow.

It seems non-Indigenous Australians are very good at creating special days and weeks of commemoration but not so good at fixing the problems I’ve seen, and that obviously still exist.

The rates of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of education, poor health outcomes, homelessness and unemployment will not be helped by forcing a primary school in Melton or Moonee Ponds to raise the flag of Indigenous Australians.

As usual, it’s virtue signalling at its worst to make white male politicians like Premier Dan Andrews and Education Minister James Merlino feel better about themselves.

The Premier, in defence of the new school policy, reverted to type defending it with weasel words about acknowledging the past as a nation to define our future together.

He said: “It’s about making sure everybody feels equal, everybody feels included and everybody feels safe.”

He’s referring, of course, to well-resourced, capital city schools, not the places I visited.

The problem is, Premier, everybody isn’t equal and the little kids and women in those communities don’t feel safe and won’t feel safe until there is meaningful change on the ground, not talking about it in schools in Brighton or Broadmeadows.

Domestic violence and substance abuse are serious problems in some outback Indigenous communities, which won’t be helped by Melbourne preps marking Sorry Day.

The ineffectual Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy, ignoring the perfect opportunity to come up with a policy that might really help Indigenous communities, instead agreed with the new laws, if they didn’t create division.

His party has also announced they will support a bill to establish a Treaty Authority in Victoria ,to oversee a treaty between the government and Victoria’s Indigenous communities.

Try selling that idea to conservative voters and see how you go - it’s a sure-fire ticket to more time in opposition.

For a ‘Treaty Authority” - read urban Indigenous communities hell bent on driving the idea - a treaty is needed. What exactly this treaty (that now has support from both sides and so will happen) will achieve, no one knows.

All Victorians should worry as we are the only state in the Commonwealth to agree to this treaty idea, as explained in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, from 2017.

While the conditions in those remote communities will continue today, our political leaders —from both sides — will feel good about themselves for telling five year-olds, to mark Sorry Day.

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