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The former Northern Territory Indigenous policy minister, Alison Anderson, says a plan for a new body to represent Aboriginal people will have board members who do not really understand the problems of people in remote communities.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, yesterday released a report calling for a new representative body with a 128-member council.

But the independent Member for MacDonnell, Alison Anderson, says she does not think anyone from remote areas will make it onto the board.

She believes it will be filled with people who are already well represented.

“These are the people that are educated enough to get themselves over to Canberra, to advise the federal minister,” Ms Anderson said.

“And I think [Indigenous Affairs Minister] Jenny Macklin and [Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd should be setting up a body that represents the whole nation, and not just a little body that is not really going to work.”

Mal Brough, the minister who oversaw the Northern Territory intervention, has angrily dismissed claims by a United Nations human rights expert that the measures are overtly racist.

United Nations special rapporteur James Anaya says intervention measures such as compulsory income management and direct government control of Aboriginal land and housing overtly discriminate against Aboriginal people.

He said while extreme solutions may be needed, some government measures breach international human rights treaties.

Professor Anaya’s comments have prompted an angry response from the architect of the intervention, Mr Brough, who was Indigenous affairs minister in the Howard government.

“Let’s get real, look these people in the eye, instead of coming in and telling us that we’ve offended some law rather than offending the right of a child to be healthy and happy and to have a future,” he said.

“I get very annoyed when I hear people pontificating about human rights when today there will be children sitting out there in abject squalor with diseases they don’t have to have, with inadequate education, poor nutrition and poor access to health and we have some nicety about human rights legislation.”

The Rudd Government is looking at changing the emergency response legislation.

Rachel Siewert, Greens spokeswoman for Indigenous affairs, says the Government should act on Professor Anaya’s remarks.

“We expect the Government to listen and pay attention,” she said.

“The Government did not listen to the report that they themselves commissioned, the report on the intervention, the review of the intervention, which also said the Govenrment should restore the Racial Discrimination Act. Hopefully they’ll listen this time.”

Senator Siewert called on both major parties to listen to the assessment.

“I’m very glad that we’ve got an independent, outside voice telling the government the facts as he sees them, and we now expect both the major parties to listen to them and to support immediate restoration of the Racial Discrimination Act,” she said.

Members of the Indigenous community have given mixed reviews to a proposed national Indigenous body, with many hoping the new council will usher in an era of self-determination.

But despite the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Justice Commissioner Tom Calma’s promise that the new body will be “radically different” from anything seen in the past, the ghost of ATSIC still lurks.

Some leaders fear it will not be long before the new body resorts to what they call “business as usual”.

They worry that the interests of all members of the Indigenous community will be sacrificed for the interests of a few.

But Sam Jeffries, the chairman of the Murdi Paaki Regional Assembly – the peak Indigenous representative body in western NSW – says he is optimistic about Mr Calma’s proposals.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been looking forward to this moment,” he said.

“Whether there is agreement on what the national body looks like and smells like and tastes like and all that sort of stuff, is probably not the conversation we need to have at the moment.”

But that is the very conversation that has been taking place ever since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner outlined his vision for a new, national Indigenous council.

Mr Jeffries supports the recommendation for a 128-member national congress and an eight-member national executive.

“I think one of the things that was probably a negative impact on ATSIC was having to rely on an election process to get people to represent the interests of others,” he said.

“So not all people were happy with the election process and at least the arrangements in what Tom has outlined is that there are options available to communities, and to groups and to individuals on how a national body or the national arrangements are pulled together or composed.”

He also backs the proposal for a male and female co-chair.

“Certainly it’ll bring some diversity to the board or the national arrangement, whoever that, whatever that arrangement might be,” he said.

“A lot of these will be, I suppose, a trial and we’ll just see how those things work.

“I have no doubt that there could be some real arrangements where a co-chairmanship can and will and does work, and I think that there’s a demonstration that it can work in a national Indigenous body also.”

Missing the point?

But not everyone in the Indigenous community is as enthusiastic as Mr Jeffries.

Brian Butler, a former South Australian commissioner for ATSIC, who is now an advocate for Indigenous elders, says Mr Calma’s promise that the new body will be “radically different” from anything seen in the past, in particular ATSIC, misses the point.

“ATSIC wasn’t responsible for all the things that went wrong. And by the way, I subscribe to the fact that ATSIC was the best model and I still do think that that’s the model we should have now, only it should be run differently so that it’s more accountable to the people,” he said.

But he does hope the proposed council ushers in a new era for self-determination and a better relationship with Government.

“One would hope that that was the way it would and should go,” he said.

“I just hope that it works. And I hope the Aboriginal community don’t get further behind the eight ball in waiting for it to happen.”

Mr Jeffries is calling for patience.

“I think we should maximise our opportunity in getting behind that and supporting it,” he said.

“Obviously in two or three years’ time it’s going to probably change a little bit. It’s like most things – it’ll have a few teething problems then it will sort itself out to be able to operate efficiently.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for an end to the divisive debate on the past that became known as the “history wars” in Australia.

Mr Rudd made the comments as he launched a new book by the author, Thomas Keneally, at the National Library in Canberra.

Mr Rudd said it was time “to leave behind the polarisation that began to infect every discussion of our nation’s past”.

His comments mark a change from the previous prime minister, John Howard, who decried what he called the “black armband” view of Australian history.

In 1996 Mr Howard publicly ignited a cultural debate which has raged ever since.

Mr Howard believed Australians did not need to apologise about their past and wanted more histories to mark Australia’s achievements.

“The black armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other intellectual forms of discrimination,” Mr Howard said.

It became known as the history wars; a debate about the interpretation of Australia’s history and most particularly, what impact British colonisation had on Australia’s Aboriginal population.

But Mr Rudd thinks it is time to move on.

“I believe the time has now come to move beyond the arid intellectual debates of the history wars and the culture wars of recent years,” he said.

If it was a war, then Robert Manne, the Professor of Politics at Latrobe University, was one of its warriors.

“I used the term often because there’s something very real that it was describing… which was that around about the time of the Howard government, a group of intellectuals, often associated with Quadrant Magazine, began to challenge what was perhaps 20 years or so of history about Aboriginal dispossession and regard it as a kind of left-wing fraud,” he said.

“And the history wars were really an attack on the developing school of history in the area of mainly Aboriginal dispossession.”

One of the intellectuals he is referring to is the current editor of Quadrant Magazine, Keith Windshuttle.

In 2002 he published a book questioning the number of Aborigines killed during European colonisation, particularly in Tasmania.

The book was a focal point for the history wars.

As a key player, PM asked Mr Windshuttle to comment on Mr Rudd’s remarks but he was not available.

Professor Manne says the most important part of the history wars was Mr Windshuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history.

“I thought there was a responsibility to argue against it and to mount the evidence where I thought it was clearly wrong,” Professor Manne said.

“I think when there is a challenge put to what was a body of evidence and a body of interpretation, a challenge that it was fraudulent, it was important to answer it in detail, so I without apology engaged in the history wars, but it was a defensive move on my part.”

‘Call a truce’

Now Mr Rudd says the time for defence and offence is over.

“To go beyond the so-called ‘black arm’ view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish,” he said.

“But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers and of our entrepreneurs.

“Any truthful reflection of our nation’s past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story called Australia.”

The Prime Minister believes that it is important to acknowledge a core chronology of events in Australia’s history. But chronology should not be the be all and end all of understanding the country’s past.

“It’s time we called a truce to the history wars between a straight narrative history that brooks no contradictions, and an extreme relativism that is only about interpretation and not about events, is in fact unsustainable,” he said.

“In a liberal democratic society, we can agree that events happened while we agree to differ in how we interpret them.

“On this basis, we can all engage in the debates about the complexities of the good, the bad, the ugly and the vast ocean that lies between where most of us all reside.”

Professor Manne has praised the Prime Minister’s views on neo-liberalism and he is also a supporter of Mr Rudd when it comes to the history wars.

“I agree entirely with the Prime Minister’s desire for an end to the history wars,” he said.

“The main thing the history wars did was to force everyone into kind of simplifications and into a kind of battleground.

“Most people who’ve written the history of the dispossession say over the last 20 or 30 years knew that kind of combative atmosphere was an enemy of truth and an enemy of nuance.

“So that if we can end what I think is something associated with culture wars and is associated really with a period of neo-conservatism; if we can end that then we’re much likely to get much better and nuanced history.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for an end to the divisive debate on the past that became known as the “history wars” in Australia.

Mr Rudd made the comments as he launched a new book by the author, Thomas Keneally, at the National Library in Canberra.

Mr Rudd said it was time “to leave behind the polarisation that began to infect every discussion of our nation’s past”.

His comments mark a change from the previous prime minister, John Howard, who decried what he called the “black armband” view of Australian history.

In 1996 Mr Howard publicly ignited a cultural debate which has raged ever since.

Mr Howard believed Australians did not need to apologise about their past and wanted more histories to mark Australia’s achievements.

“The black armband view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other intellectual forms of discrimination,” Mr Howard said.

It became known as the history wars; a debate about the interpretation of Australia’s history and most particularly, what impact British colonisation had on Australia’s Aboriginal population.

But Mr Rudd thinks it is time to move on.

“I believe the time has now come to move beyond the arid intellectual debates of the history wars and the culture wars of recent years,” he said.

If it was a war, then Robert Manne, the Professor of Politics at Latrobe University, was one of its warriors.

“I used the term often because there’s something very real that it was describing… which was that around about the time of the Howard government, a group of intellectuals, often associated with Quadrant Magazine, began to challenge what was perhaps 20 years or so of history about Aboriginal dispossession and regard it as a kind of left-wing fraud,” he said.

“And the history wars were really an attack on the developing school of history in the area of mainly Aboriginal dispossession.”

One of the intellectuals he is referring to is the current editor of Quadrant Magazine, Keith Windshuttle.

In 2002 he published a book questioning the number of Aborigines killed during European colonisation, particularly in Tasmania.

The book was a focal point for the history wars.

As a key player, PM asked Mr Windshuttle to comment on Mr Rudd’s remarks but he was not available.

Professor Manne says the most important part of the history wars was Mr Windshuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history.

“I thought there was a responsibility to argue against it and to mount the evidence where I thought it was clearly wrong,” Professor Manne said.

“I think when there is a challenge put to what was a body of evidence and a body of interpretation, a challenge that it was fraudulent, it was important to answer it in detail, so I without apology engaged in the history wars, but it was a defensive move on my part.”

‘Call a truce’

Now Mr Rudd says the time for defence and offence is over.

“To go beyond the so-called ‘black arm’ view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish,” he said.

“But time, too, to go beyond the view that we should only celebrate the reformers, the renegades and revolutionaries, thus neglecting or even deriding the great stories of our explorers, of our pioneers and of our entrepreneurs.

“Any truthful reflection of our nation’s past is that these are all part of the rich fabric of our remarkable story called Australia.”

The Prime Minister believes that it is important to acknowledge a core chronology of events in Australia’s history. But chronology should not be the be all and end all of understanding the country’s past.

“It’s time we called a truce to the history wars between a straight narrative history that brooks no contradictions, and an extreme relativism that is only about interpretation and not about events, is in fact unsustainable,” he said.

“In a liberal democratic society, we can agree that events happened while we agree to differ in how we interpret them.

“On this basis, we can all engage in the debates about the complexities of the good, the bad, the ugly and the vast ocean that lies between where most of us all reside.”

Professor Manne has praised the Prime Minister’s views on neo-liberalism and he is also a supporter of Mr Rudd when it comes to the history wars.

“I agree entirely with the Prime Minister’s desire for an end to the history wars,” he said.

“The main thing the history wars did was to force everyone into kind of simplifications and into a kind of battleground.

“Most people who’ve written the history of the dispossession say over the last 20 or 30 years knew that kind of combative atmosphere was an enemy of truth and an enemy of nuance.

“So that if we can end what I think is something associated with culture wars and is associated really with a period of neo-conservatism; if we can end that then we’re much likely to get much better and nuanced history.”

The United Nations says Australia is breaching its international human rights obligations by continuing the Northern Territory intervention.

The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous people, Professor James Anaya, says the intervention is also discriminatory and has urged the Government to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act.

Professor Anaya has just completed a 10-day fact-finding mission of Aboriginal communities across the country.

He has described the intervention as an extraordinary measure which infringes on the rights and self-determination of Indigenous people.

“In my opinion, as currently configured and carried out, the emergency response is incompatible with Australia’s obligations under the convention of elimination of forms of racial discrimination and the international convention on political rights,” he said.

“I hope that amendments to the emergency response will diminish or remove its discriminatory aspects,” he said.

The Howard government initiated the intervention in 2007 in response to reports of widespread sexual abuse across Indigenous communities.

To do so it had to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act but the Federal Government has already indicated it will introduce legislation to reinstate the Act later this year.

When the Labor Government was elected in 2007, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised to take steps to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in areas such as health and education.

Professor Anaya has also urged the Government to take more holistic approach to tackle Indigenous disadvantage.

“It would seem to me that the objectives of the Closing the Gap campaign, the emergency response and other current initiatives and proposals of the Government would be best achieved in partnership with Indigenous people’s own institutions and decision-making bodies,” he said.

He has also welcomed today’s proposal released by Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Justice Commissioner, Professor Tom Calma, for a new Indigenous representative body.

Canberra, 27 August 09 – - A NSW Aboriginal leader suggests that an address by Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, today is timed to draw attention away from one just after it by James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples, to report on his recent findings in Aboriginal communities.

I smell a rat!  I believe that Tom Calma should not be competing with the UN Rapporteur’s press conference in relation to his journey around Australia, including Aboriginal communities affected by the NT Intervention, says Michael Anderson, elected spokesman of the 16 tribes forming the Gumilaroi nation.

The timing of Tom Calma’s address to the national press begs the question as to whether he is the right person for the job as Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and Social Justice Commissioner.

Anderson says his query is prompted by the fact that Calma’s address ‘Creating a sustainable National Representative Body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ to the National Press Club (12.30pm 27 August) is immediately prior to Anaya’s press conference at 2.15pm at the National Library on 27 August.

Anderson’s statement in full:

The timing of Tom Calma’s address to the National Press begs the question as to whether he is the right person for the job as Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and Social Justice Commissioner. I smell a rat!  I believe that Tom Calma should not be competing with the UN Rapporteur’s press conference in relation to his journey around Australia, including Aboriginal communities affected by the NT Intervention.

It doesn’t surprise me coming from an Aboriginal Human Rights Commissioner, appointed by the Australian Government, who is known as saying that Australia is not a racist country, when he commented on the attacks on Indian students. This was after the introduction of the Northern Territory Intervention.

I would like to know what part of Australia Tom Calma lives in if he thinks Australia is not racist!

If this is his true belief, then he should not continue on as Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and Social Justice Commissioner and he should stand down, because this is not the view held by many black races, who now live in Australia. From my perspective the Australian Human Rights Commission is a very lame dog who also has no teeth. For Tom Calma to be saying Australia is not a racist country is a total betrayal of trust.

Like people in many other countries we, in Australia, expect to live in a country free of racial inequality and injustice. But when we have an Australian Constitution like ours that provides the basis for any government to pass ‘special laws’ for  ‘… the people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary’, albeit good or bad laws, it begs the question of the real political leadership of this country to allow this to continue.

As members of the human race, we Aboriginal people demand equality and an end to racism.  The Australian Human Rights Commission fails miserably in its duty to comment both publically and privately about the true level of racism that exists in this country, including demanding that section 51 (xxvi) be put to a national referendum so that the race powers can be deleted.  Or are we still living in a country where Australians are:

… struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan race; and to the Christian faith; to the letters and arts and charms which we have inherited from the best of times.’ [see background]

Is Australia destined to be the last bastion for the supremacy of the Aryan race and the Christian faith?  It is time Australia has this debate as a nation and we must confront these issues.

My people are being thrown from one end of the spectrum to the other and our males are being dehumanised, based on these racially biased government reports about alcoholism and abuse.  The national statistics tell a different story: only 15% of Aboriginal people drink alcohol, whereas 85% of non-Aboriginal Australians drink alcohol.

Psychologically our male youth are being mentally harmed because of this constant criticism and innuendo and it begs the question what future Aboriginal youth can expect if this is what the Australian leadership perpetuates.

It’s a disgrace that Tom Calma is promoting this National Aboriginal Representative body, when the formative consultations were amongst people hand-picked by the government and who had to be approved by Minister Jenny Macklin’s office.

Tom Calma should be ashamed of the denial of Aboriginal Peoples to a democratic process in having a say as to how a representative body should be created. In my opinion, Tom Calma should be opposing this move by the Australian Government to further control Aboriginal Affairs. It is essential he reconsiders his position.

Contact:  Michael Anderson 0427 292 492

Background:

In 1901 the first Federal Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, advocated for a continent that could be free of ‘contamination’ by foreign and unwanted racial impurities by quoting Professor Pearson:

‘The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes … is in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience … We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilisation … The day will come … when the European observers will look around the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the yellow and black races. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride and place will not be humiliated. We are struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan race; and to the Christian faith; to the letters and arts and charms which we have inherited from the best of times.’

Details of a proposed new Aboriginal representative body will be revealed later today when the Indigenous Affairs Minister accepts a detailed proposal for a new Indigenous body from Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma.

There has been no national representative body for Indigenous Australians since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, fell out of favour with the Howard government and was disbanded in 2005.

After 12 months of consultations with Aboriginal Australians, Mr Calma is expected to recommend a body independent of government and one that will only have advisory powers.

Ms Macklin says the Government will consider Mr Calma’s recommendations “as quickly as possible” and will move to set up the new body before the end of this year.

But she is not backing away from the Government’s decision for it to have only advisory powers.

“We went to the last election demonstrating our commitment for a new national representative body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” she said.

“What we’ve always said is that we will not be creating another ATSIC.

“I made it clear at the start of this process that we would not accept a body that had responsibility for service delivery.”

The director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Jon Altman, says the new body for must be autonomous.

“I think it’s really important that the body has the powers to hold the Australian government accountable in some way,” Mr Altman said.

“And for it to be able to do that, I think it needs to be at arm’s length from the government of the day.

“The only way I can see that would happen is that it has some independent funding source so that it can in fact exercise some autonomy.”

A Northern Territory Aboriginal leader from Arnhem Land says the new body will just be “puppets” for the Federal Government.

Speaking from Elcho Island, community leader Reverend Doctor Djiniyini Gondarra says Aboriginal people have “blindly” nominated for the new body, which he thinks will have an agenda pushed by the government.

He says the new body will divide Aboriginal people as it will not reflect the “pain, the poverty and the struggle” of Indigenous communities.

“It’s going to be another body, another ATSIC, which is always going to be string attached to the government.

“Must follow what the government say, must listen where the government wants to lead Aboriginal people.

“It is always their model, it is always their control. It’s not what we’re looking for.

“We’re looking for where the movement will start from the grass root.”

The Tangentyere Council hopes the compulsory aquisition of Aboriginal town camps in Alice Springs will not be necessary.

A 40-year lease deal the camp housing associations signed with the Commonwealth is on hold pending a Federal Court injunction hearing next week.

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, has recommenced consultation on a proposed take-over, in line with the court’s interim ruling.

A spokesman for the Tangentyere Council says while it will go along with the court’s findings, it hopes the deal that has already been signed will be allowed to go ahead.

The lease deal would see a $100 million upgrade of the camps in exchange for residents becoming public housing tenants.