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The Federal Government is spending an extra $16 million on facilities for Indigenous students to board at private schools.

The Government spent $42 million on similar projects last year.

The latest round of funding will go to 14 schools in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia.

New government data on health, education and corrective services paints a gloomy picture of disadvantage for Indigenous Australians.

On coming into office just over a year ago, the Federal Government promised to close the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous Australians and the national average.

A report from the Productivity Commission shows the Government has a long way to go.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have mortality rates up to three times higher than non-indigenous people and the infant mortality rate is significantly higher as well.

The data from services provided by the Commonwealth and the state and territory governments also shows Indigenous students are less likely to meet national benchmarks in reading, writing and numeracy, and they are less likely to stay in school.

The rate of children needing protection is seven times higher than the national average.

Indigenous Australians are also 20 times more likely to end up in prison than the average Australian and they likely to die at a younger age.

Darwin City Council will invite federal intervention representatives and police to address concerns about continued anti-social behaviour in the city.

At the first council meeting for 2009, aldermen relayed complaints from community members about continued public drunkenness and groups of homeless people congregating on Nightcliff foreshore.

Lord Mayor Graeme Sawyer says the council meeting heard strong evidence from residents about the failures of the dry area laws in parts of Darwin.

He says the council passed a motion to invite relevant stakeholders to a meeting to discuss fresh ways to address the problem.

“There’s quite a strong feeling, and I think some reasonable evidence now, that part of the problem with the numbers of people who are in Darwin are in part caused by the intervention,” he said.

“Intervention have admitted there are some issues there that they are happy to talk about and they have intimated in the past that there will be some funding available to help come up with some solutions to that.”

The council is investigating whether people are continuing to get away with drinking alcohol in areas of the city where it has been banned.

Councillor Sawyer says there will be further meetings with the appropriate agencies to discuss whether the problem is the law or the enforcement.

“The story that was talked about was people, police coming along and tipping out alcohol and as soon as they left the people involved had alcohol stashed in rubbish bins and got it out and just started drinking again,” he said.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who want to positively contribute to discussions about a new national Indigenous representative body should nominate from today to attend a national workshop in Adelaide from 11-13 March, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma has urged.

Commissioner Calma said it was crucial that interested men and women nominate from today as places at the national workshop table were strictly limited.

“Attendance at the workshop is purely by invitation and will be decided through a selection process,” Mr Calma said.

“Only individuals who have completed a nomination form addressing the selection criteria will be considered for attendance.”

Nominees must submit their application by 13 February addressing the following selection criteria.

Applicants must:

·         be an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander

·         be nominated by an Indigenous community organisation or self nominated with two written references supporting the nomination

·         have demonstrated leadership capacity and ability to take part in high level discussions on strategic issues

·         be able to communicate and interact effectively with a diverse range of people

·         have demonstrated capacity to represent views and interests

·         be able to make a positive and considered contribution to the discussions and deliberations on the establishment of the new national Indigenous representative body, and

·         be available to attend and participate in the program and events for the whole workshop.

Commissioner Calma said the national workshop would be limited to approximately 100 people and would focus on reviewing submissions and the outcomes of the federal government’s consultations to date on the establishment of a new representative body.

“The national workshop will not be endorsing a final model for a national representative body nor will it be deciding membership of a national representative body,” Mr Calma said.

In December 2008, the Australian Government requested the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission to convene a Steering Committee to develop a preferred model for a national Indigenous representative body.

The Steering Committee is required to: convene an Indigenous Peoples Workshop in March 2009, with a possible second workshop in June 2009; develop a preferred model for a new national Indigenous representative body for presentation to the Australian Government in July 2009; make recommendations regarding the establishment of an interim body from July 2009 which would operate until the finalised body takes effect; and ensure strong community support for such a representative model.

All applications for the national workshop should be sent to the dedicated unit established within the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to provide administrative support to the Social Justice Commissioner. The unit will then forward all applications to the independent Indigenous Steering Committee for selection. 

All decisions relating to the convening of the workshop and selection of participants will be determined independently by the Steering Committee.

Applications can be sent by post to the National Indigenous Representative Body Unit, PO Box 7576 Canberra Mail Centre ACT 2610 or by fax to 02 6204 9349 or email indigenousrepbody@fahcsia.gov.au

For more information and a workshop application form visit www.fahcsia.gov.au/indigenousrepbody or call 1800 202 366.  Advertisements will appear in the Koori Mail and National Indigenous Times, be broadcast over Indigenous media services and mailed to Indigenous organisations and peak bodies nationally in the coming days.

Media contact: Louise McDermott 0419 258 597

A politician whose electorate covers more than one-quarter of NSW has called the federal and state governments “lazy” for signing a key indigenous funding agreement in the relative urbanity of Dubbo.

The agreement, which covers 16 towns in the Murdi Paaki region of far-western NSW, was signed at an event closer to Canberra and Sydney.

“It’s the same old story; they’re making the blackfellas come to them,” said Kevin Humphries, the NSW shadow minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

He said the agreement was “null and void”, and that “they may as well have signed it in New Zealand.”

At the event, the state and federal governments promised more than $2.8 million for the Murdi Paaki Regional Assembly and 16 “community working parties” that represent Aboriginal communities in discussions with government agencies.

The state’s first Regional Partnership Agreement, it will pay for training and expenses for Aboriginal representatives to attend regular town and regional meetings.

It continues a governance experiment begun by a five-year Council of Australian Governments trial in western NSW, which was the most successful of eight such experiments around Australia, according to an independent review in 2006.

The system differs from ATSIC in that representatives do not fund programs, but volunteer to advise local, state and federal governments on which policies will work for indigenous people.

But Mr Humphries, who is the state member for Barwon in north-western NSW, said the funding of indigenous bodies to sit alongside mainstream local government “mirrored the old ATSIC days” and had already divided some small towns.

He also said the plan could not work without including local members such as him and John Williams, who belong to the National Party and know remote towns better than capital city bureaucrats.

The Murdi Paaki Region is as large as Victoria and covers Brewarrina, Broken Hill, Cobar, Collarenebri, Coonamble, Dareton/Wentworth, Enngonia, Goodooga, Gulargambone, Ivanhoe, Lightning Ridge, Menindee, Walgett, Bourke, Weilmoringle and Wilcannia.

It was chosen for the 2002 COAG trial because indigenous unemployment there was 23.9 per cent, only two-thirds of indigenous students made it to year 10, and its children had the highest victimisation rate for domestic violence in NSW.

The agreement is designed to help COAG achieve its six ‘Closing the Gap” goals set last year by including Aboriginal input in policy development.

IF THERE is clawing ambition and a monstrous director’s ego lurking in Wayne Blair, they’re well hidden. He’s making his debut as a mainstage director at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) next week but as he ambles out of the rehearsal room in work boots, a checked shirt and floral boardshorts, eating a home-made curry, he doesn’t strike you as the intense type.

In conversation he is laid-back and slightly rambling and is stumped when I ask whether he has any goals as a director.

“I just like working with my friends and people I’ve worked with before,” he says. “But goals as such? Geez. Not really. Sorry, I will think about this.” He stares into the middle distance for a long, long moment.

“Oh, there is one!” he says triumphantly. “I love my housemates but I know that at the end of this year or at the start of next year, I want to get my own energy and my own place. That’s the goal.”

Surely there’s more to it than this. The boy who grew up in Rockhampton excelling in footy and cricket is so in demand as a theatre and film director that he doesn’t have much time left for the acting that launched his career. After directing David Williamson’s The Removalists for the STC, he’s moving on to the mainstage at the Belvoir St Theatre, reprising Brendan Cowell’s Ruben Guthrie, which he put on in the downstairs theatre last year.

But before then, he’s going to Western Australia to direct five more episodes of the television adaptation of Tim Winton’s Lockie Leonard series and the gigs keep coming: next he’s directing Romeo And Juliet for Bell Shakespeare’s schools program and he’s hoping to move on to his first feature film after that.

Blair makes it sound as if all this just happened. “I feel like I’ve been at the right place at the right time.” But it’s hard enough to make it as an actor-director, let alone an indigenous actor-director. Director Lee Lewis argued in a much-discussed essay in 2007 that Australian theatre companies were not proactive enough in creatively casting non-white actors and Blair agrees with her. Her book appeared when he was starring in a Bell Shakespeare production of Othello, the first indigenous Australian to play the title role in a mainstage show.

“I think her essay was very accurate,” he says, “because people of different ethnicity have had a hard go in this country, let alone in the theatre. People in the theatre tend to think they’re very left but when you look at it, sometimes they can be very safe.”

WHAT is more Australian than the tall poppy syndrome? Every Australian of the Year has to expect to cop a bagging, especially on Australia Day. It is our national sport.

Mick Dodson, our latest titleholder, doesn’t appear particularly fazed by the criticism, however, which is another dinky-di Australian trait.

Moments into his reign he stirred the pot by declaring we should change the date of Australia Day because, as he told ABC TV, “To most indigenous Australians [January 26] really reflects the day on which our world came crashing down,” although he personally didn’t “have a problem with the 26th of January”. He just wanted to start the “conversation”.

Since then he has been bagged for lots of things, including for not being Warren Mundine or Noel Pearson – which is the most reasonable criticism.

It is true that Pearson and Mundine would have been better choices as inspirational indigenous leaders, as the federal Opposition MP Tony Abbott said. While Dodson, a distinguished law professor, has not been influential at all in recent years, they have genuinely changed the national conversation about real-world improvements to the wellbeing of underprivileged Aborigines, including inspiring the Northern Territory intervention, which Dodson once condemned as “storm trooper tent diplomacy”.

But if you started giving the award to real movers and shakers, such as Pearson and Mundine, it would soon become apparent that Australia is a small nation, relatively speaking, with a commensurate talent pool. You’d soon run out of candidates and have to bring on the B-team. The Australian of the Year awards committee is just averting any future disappointment to the Australian people. Maybe we should spread our talent a bit thinner and have an Australian of the Decade.

In any case, given the choices the states threw up to the national committee, Dodson was the standout candidate. Tasmania offered up the ABC’s former gardening presenter, for crying out loud. Peter Cundall already has an AM. Enough said.

Perhaps I am not being altogether fair to the other candidates, chosen from more than 3300 nominations from the public. Each could be seen as “inspirational role models [who] have contributed in a significant way to our nation”, as the award criteria put it.

The Northern Territory’s blind musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s haunting melodies are stunning. South Australia’s candidate, Ivan Copley, also is an honourable man of action. Of Aboriginal descent, he has dedicated himself to practical good works, including raising money for the first clean drinking water purifier in the Aboriginal community of Leigh Creek. But no one has heard of him outside his home state. Maybe they should.

I can think of no better choice for Australian of the Year in this International Year of Reconciliation than Mick Dodson. Mick is a man whose achievements are myriad and who has earned respect as a leader from all who have worked with him. He’s a straight talker, at times a tough talker but also someone who is at ease in any company, always self-effacing, always ready to share a joke.

These are quintessential Australian characteristics, some would say stereotypes. We are a country rich in stereotypes, perhaps none more so than those applied to Indigenous Australians, mostly as negative reflections on their character or worth. How significant then it must be for Indigenous Australians to witness an Aboriginal man of high achievement recognised in this way – a worthy representative of us all, but also a man true to his heritage and a fighter for the rights of Indigenous people – indeed for all people.

True to his nature, Mick approaches his new role with optimism and spirit, seeking to reflect on “how we might bring ourselves together more than push ourselves apart”.

So it was with a great sense of disappointment that I witnessed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd categorically rule out Mick’s raising, in the name of inclusiveness, the need for a national conversation about the date of Australia Day – a date that for many Indigenous Australians signifies invasion, loss and survival and acts to exclude them from the national celebration.

In this country it is a sad truth but a sure bet that swatting down Indigenous challenges to the status quo, however mildly framed, will resonate well in much of mainstream Australia. It demonstrates ‘strong leadership’. In this respect Mr Rudd’s response begs comparison with arguably the pre-eminent nay-sayer to Indigenous Australians of recent times – former prime minister John Howard.

The irony is that it was precisely because of Mr Howard’s unilateral, outright rejection of the recommendation for a government apology to the Stolen Generations and their families that we had to wait over a decade for a prime minister visionary enough to make that historic but ultimately small step of a simple apology. So starved was this nation for a measure of justice that its impact was immediate and immense, delivering huge kudos to Mr Rudd both at home and abroad.

Yet here too, Mr Rudd’s historic gesture also included a slap down for Aboriginal people – the rejection of compensation for the Stolen Generations, as recommended in the landmark Bringing Them Home report. But nowhere in either his apology speech or subsequently has Mr Rudd provided justification for why a single group of Australians, the Stolen Generations, should alone be denied the opportunity for compensation for the devastating impacts of past government policies on their lives. Or why Stolen Generations people should instead be expected to feel compensated by the provision of measures aimed at closing the considerable health and disadvantage gap experienced by Indigenous Australians generally.

While Mr Rudd’s commitment to closing the gap measures is commendable and welcome, this is not compensation but simply government belatedly meeting its responsibilities to provide Indigenous people with services and treatment that have already been provided to the rest of the nation as a right.

In truth, Mr Rudd’s rejection of compensation to the Stolen Generations merely ensures that it remains part of the unfinished business of reconciliation.

A similar lesson can be drawn from Mr Howard’s rejection in 2000 of Indigenous calls for debate about a national treaty process – despite the fact that polls at the time showed that Australians were receptive to the idea. A decade on, settlement of the basis on which our nation has been founded, including recognition in our Constitution, also remains as unfinished business of our journey towards reconciliation.

Here, Mr Rudd’s support for consideration of constitutional reform is welcome. However, as Mick Dodson has urged, the reform needs to be substantive, including removing existing racially discriminatory elements of the Constitution and ensuring principles of equality and non-discrimination apply.

Already in his brief time as Australian of the Year, Mick Dodson has provided us with a most important insight. He has reminded us that reconciliation is not primarily an agenda but a process. It’s about relationships, not things, about conversations, not the exercise of power.

Top-down leadership that seeks to dictate what is in or out of the reconciliation agenda has never worked and never will. Until we can sit down as equals and freely engage in national conversation towards resolving the unfinished business between us, we will surely remain a nation divided and diminished.

A LAUGHING police officer instructed a drunk Aboriginal man in Katherine to sing and dance while he filmed the event, footage of which was then posted on YouTube.

The video shows a heavily intoxicated Aborigine lying on the ground. He starts singing The Rivers of Babylon at the behest of a police officer who is filming the incident.

A second officer then drags the man to his feet while the officer taking the footage laughs and tells him to dance and say “Happy Birthday, Blake”.

The Aboriginal man, who is staggering and appears close to falling, continues to sing and dance about in a circle before being directed towards a police car.

The officer filming the incident then turns the camera on himself and says: “This shit is f..ked up, f..ked up.”

The video has prompted outrage from some online viewers.

“Disgusting is not the word for this,” one blogger says. “I have reported this to the minister of police. Sick and tired of so-called police who abuse their power.”

Others described the video as racist and called for the officer to be sacked or jailed.

Northern Territory police issued a statement on Monday saying the officer who filmed the event had received counselling after an internal investigation found his treatment of the man to be humiliating and demeaning. It said the matter was investigated last month by the Ethical and Professional Standards Command.

“A member was counselled and police acknowledge that the making of the video and posting it on YouTube was highly inappropriate,” a Territory police spokeswoman said. She said the other officer had not been reprimanded.

Willem Westra Van Holthe, the Country Liberals local member for Katherine, told ABC radio in Katherine the officer had not conducted himself in a professional manner.

The man who posted the video, who appears not to be one of the police officers involved, told online critics he would take it down if the Aboriginal man asked him to.

“But I’m more than certain he would rather his 15 minutes of fame,” he wrote.

Territory police said a number of attempts had been made to remove the video from the website but they had been unsuccessful.