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The Alice Springs Town Council says it has had to delay preparations for the next fire season because of issues with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority.

The council has expressed concern that the authority wants to charge a fee of almost $38,000 to do sacred sites assessments in the Todd River as part of the council’s new fire management plan.

Council CEO Rex Mooney says the council has written to the Northern Territory’s Indigenous Policy Minister, Malarndirri McCarthy, asking her to intervene.

“It’s a time imperative now but the council just has to now await the outcome,” he said.

“The council has given a deadline of the middle of October to seek a response from the Minister and the council will be reviewing the situation at its October council meeting, just to see what other options might be available if a deal can be brokered.”

An Aboriginal group in the Pilbara has welcomed a decision to evict up to 20 people and 10 dogs from a heritage-listed homestead in Roebourne.

The Shire of Roebourne has moved to condemn the Mount Welcome homestead which has been on the state heritage list for more than 10 years.

Concerns have been raised about the lack of drinking water, sewerage and power at the property.

The Ngarluma Aboriginal Corporation’s Paul Hales says he hopes replacement housing can be found as soon as possible.

“The people living at the homestead are living in pretty poor conditions, so any action by the Department of Housing to move those people into better accommodation is a good thing,” he said.

POLICE across Australia are far more likely to arrest young Aborigines and see that they go to court than non-indigenous juveniles, who are considerably more likely to be let off with a warning or caution.

A groundbreaking study by the Australian Institute of Criminology to be published today paints a disturbing picture of young Aborigines’ contact with police. It may go some way to explaining why indigenous 10 to 17-year-olds are 28 times more likely to be in detention than non-indigenous youths.

Pulling together for the first time comparative national data on young people’s contact with police and the courts, the AIC report reveals the differential treatment of indigenous children doesn’t stop at the front gate of the juvenile justice system.

In at least two states, Western Australia and South Australia, young Aborigines are more likely to be convicted in children’s courts than non-indigenous juveniles for the same type of offences, the report shows. No other states provided data on conviction rates.

In Western Australia, the one state that issued statistics on sentencing, young Aborigines are more than twice as likely as non-indigenous juveniles to be given a jail term after being found guilty.

The AIC study, “Juveniles’ contact with the criminal justice system in Australia”, finds that in NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, police are more likely to arrest and refer to court young Aborigines, compared with non-indigenous youths. Information from Victoria and Tasmania was not available.

“(In NSW in 2007-08), 48 per cent of indigenous juveniles were transferred to court, compared to 21 per cent of non-indigenous juveniles,” the report says.

“And 32 per cent of non-indigenous juveniles receive warnings compared with 18 per cent of indigenous juveniles.

“(In Queensland in 2006-07), indigenous juveniles were more likely to be processed by way of arrest (39 per cent) than any other method, while non-indigenous juveniles were more likely to be dealt with via a caution (49 per cent) than any other method of processing.”

In Western Australia, where half of all juveniles arrested are Aboriginal, 71 per cent of the cautions issued in 2005 were to non-indigenous youths, 29 per cent to Aboriginal juveniles.

In South Australia in 2005 (the most recent data available), 55 per cent of juveniles of “Aboriginal appearance” were transferred to youth court compared with 41 per cent of those of “non-Aboriginal appearance”, while in the Northern Territory last year 23 per cent of non-indigenous youths received a caution compared with 16 per cent of Aborigines.

AIC director Adam Tomison said the fact that many young indigenous Australians lived in disadvantaged circumstances went a long way to explaining their increased contact with police.

“In terms of whether there is bias or racism in their treatment, I think you would need to do further studies looking at police contact in disadvantaged communities where there are kids of different backgrounds,” Dr Tomison told The Australian.

“Then we would start to tease out how much of this is an issue of Aboriginality and how much is poverty and disadvantage.

“Also geography comes into play. Authorities in states with more remote communities have fewer options to divert juveniles from detention. If there are two young offenders, and one is from a relatively good home in an urban environment with plenty of treatment options around him and the other is from a remote location where similar options are extremely limited, who is more likely to be put in detention?”

The report notes that once indigenous juveniles reach children’s courts, data is harder to come by, as indigenous status is not reported in most states. Only WA and South Australia provided figures on indigenous outcomes in court.

“(While they) cannot be considered representative of the other jurisdictions or of Australia’s children’s courts generally, they nonetheless provide an important, albeit partial, insight into the contact that indigenous juveniles have with the children’s courts,” the report says.

“(In South Australia), 29 per cent of juveniles of ‘Aboriginal appearance’ were found guilty of charges of larceny and receiving offences, 21 per cent of offences against good order and 20 per cent of criminal trespass. This compares with 18 per cent of juveniles of non-Aboriginal appearance found guilty of larceny and receiving, 17 per cent of offences against good order and 12per cent of criminal trespass.”

WA’s data from 2005 also shows discrepancies between the conviction rate for indigenous and non-indigenous youth.

“Eighty-two per cent of indigenous males were found guilty compared with 76 per cent of non-indigenous males before the children’s court,” the report says. “For female juveniles, this disparity was even more pronounced, with 79 per cent of indigenous females found guilty compared with 66 per cent of non-indigenous females.”

If convicted, jail was a more likely outcome for Aboriginal youths. “A considerably higher proportion of distinct indigenous juveniles (22 per cent) were sentenced to custodial penalties than non-indigenous juveniles (9 per cent) during 2005,” the AIC found. “Conversely, a considerably higher proportion of distinct non-indigenous juveniles (35 per cent) received a fine than distinct indigenous juveniles.”

An eye surgeon providing services to Bourke for more than a decade says the planned cut to federal funding for cataract surgery flies in the face of a new report into Indigenous eye health.

The Outback Eye Service will hold its last surgery in Bourke at the end of next month because the Government is set to halve the Medicare rebate for cataract operations from November.

A national report released this week found the rate of blindness in Indigenous adults is more than six times higher than the general community and the major cause is blinding cataracts.

Dr Ashish Agar from the Prince of Wales Outback Eye Team says the funding cut will have a devastating impact.

“The standard cataract patient who’s on the waiting list - and we’ve got a whole bunch of them now - we’re really concerned they’re going to be forced to travel to a regional centre or forced to travel to Sydney,” he said.

“I know some of my Indigenous patients and elderly patients - this is going to be an enormous dislocation and some of them simply won’t go.”

Dr Agar is urging his patients to lobby the Government to reconsider the changes.

He says eye doctors have taken a 78 per cent pay cut over the past 20 years.

“Every one of us that comes out here isn’t in it for the money,” he said.

“The Government peddles this line that we’re just greedy doctors, well I can tell you travelling seven hours to see a few patients and earning about a third or a quarter of what you would in the city, it’s not really the sort of stuff you do if you’re in it for a buck.”

The Nationals’ Member for Calare, John Cobb, says next month the Coalition will attempt to block the legislation in the Senate.

“Our intention is to disallow it along with the independents and I don’t believe we could in any moral or other judgment do otherwise,” he said.

“I think this is more about a commitment to wipe out public health than it is about looking after people.”

A group of Alice Springs men concerned about the desecration of a memorial cross for an Aboriginal man have erected a new one.

Kwementyaye Ryder died in July and five men have been charged with his murder.

A memorial erected in his honour was burned last weekend, prompting concerns from Mr Ryder’s family about racism in the town.

Alice Springs resident Scott McConnell says people have banded together to erect a new memorial, made from steel.

“Myself and a group of other concerned Alice Springs men thought that we should take some responsibility, show some initiative and do something positive to show that Alice Springs has a heart and has compassion.”

The West Australian Government has officially responded to the coroner’s findings in the case of Mr Ward, who died of heatstroke in a prisoner transport vehicle.

The coroner said the Aboriginal elder’s death in searing desert heat was a disgrace, as the van was “not fit for humans”.

But the Government has decided not terminate the contract of the private company which transported Mr Ward.

The Government says it supports all the coroner’s 15 recommendations- some of which have already been acted on.

But the full response has come three months after the coroner handed down his findings, and 20 months since the tragedy occurred.

The Government agrees there should be more training and monitoring of staff, and there should not be transportation of prisoners over long distances.

But the Attorney-General Christian Porter says the contract with private operators G4S is likely to continue.

Mr Porter has suggested the company may have to pay a penalty.

“The penalties that you’ve spoken of, for a death for instance, I understand are $100,000 which seems to me to be ridiculous in the scope of what occurred here,” he said.

“But again, the question about termination is very unfortunately a question about the legality of being able to terminate under the terms of the present contract.”

The coroner called for the prisoner transport fleet to be completely replaced. This will not happen until the end of next year.

Mr Porter says responsibility for transporting prisoners could be brought back to the public sector.

“The final decision as to whether or not this service will be public or private has not yet been made but I can say that if a determination is made to keep this service in the private sector, the contract that governs the process will be a completely different type of contract to the one that presently exists,” he said.

The Deaths In Custody Watch Committee says Group 4 and GSL staff have contributed to the deaths of six people in Australia.

The committee’s Marc Newhouse says the contract should have been terminated.

“We’re completely outraged that the contract with G4S - he hasn’t announced the termination of it, it has to be terminated,” he said.

“They’ve been subject to critical reports by the Australian Human Rights Commission. This company is not fit to operate in this country and they should be terminated.”

Noongar elder Ben Taylor says he believes racism in the system is causing Aboriginal people to suffer.

“There’s a lotta racism there and the only ones who’re gonna suffer are my people, Aboriginal people,” he said.

“This is got to go wider, and I’m on the Watch Committee with Marc and we’re going to keep hanging on here because there’s more lives that are going to be taken, and that’s going to be blackfellas, Aboriginal people, my people, and that’s the full stop.”

Mr Newhouse says the committee had also called for a speedier response in the wake of a death in custody.

“That the Coroner’s Act is amended in line with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations, that a system of mandatory reporting be put in place so that government and other relevant bodies have to report within a certain time frame,” he said.

“The point of it is to save lives and to prevent lives being lost.”

But Mr Porter says the Labor state government should have ended the contract with the company. But the Opposition Leader Eric Ripper says there were other considerations.

“You can’t just terminate a contract without there being financial consequences for taxpayers and the government does have a responsibility to both protect prisoners and the interests of taxpayers,” he said.

“That’s why this matter needs careful examination rather than a kneejerk reaction.”

For a short period the Melbourne townspeople tolerated Aboriginal people in their midst

– after all the native people and the immigrant were equally interesting to one another.

The establishment of new settlements involved both civil engineering and socialplanning. Roads, drainage, bridges and fords were to be constructed, business houses and domestic residences were to be established.

Commercial links between townships and their hinterlands were being forged and networks of communication were being developed.

The infrastructure associated with law and order was being developed.

Given these dynamics the presence of dispossessed local clans people was unworthy of concern, unless they began to stand in the way of the emerging spatial and social

organization.

The attitudes of civil authorities to the apparent spatial freedom of Aboriginal people are complex and in the 1840s these views were represented as the result of sensibilities that

dictated that it was ultimately in the best interests of the indigenous people to be removed from settlements.

Interaction with townspeople brought ‘evils’ such as alcohol abuse,increased mortality, prostitution, and the spread of infections including venereal disease,and injurious changes to diet.

Thomas advised Robinson that the changes in diet and

increased mortality rates made it desirable to induce all tribes peoples to avoid the settlement of Melbourne.

This sounds like the policy ASTC would like now to introduce.

The remote community of Ernabella on South Australia’s Aboriginal Lands will have an improved potable water supply after a pipeline is installed by the army next year.

The army’s Aboriginal Community Assistance Program is spending $6 million as part of efforts to improve environmental health in Ernabella.

About 150 military and civilian personnel will be involved in a three-month building program, which is expected to begin in late April.

A 14-kilometre pipeline will connect the community to bores at Young’s Well.

The army will also repair housing, sewerage and electrical services and train the community in specific skills such as construction, welding and cooking.

There will also be support given to local medical, dental and veterinary programs.

Sixty per cent of the population in Australia’s remote communities are still affected by the eye disease trachoma, a century after it was eradicated in most developing countries.

The National Indigenous Eye Health Survey is the most comprehensive study of its kind and the first major survey of Indigenous eye health in three decades.

It says blindness rates in Indigenous adults are six times the rates in the rest of Australia.

The co-author of the survey, Professor Hugh Taylor, holds the Harold Mitchell Chair of Indigenous Eye Health at the University of Melbourne and says the results are a national disgrace.

Professor Taylor says more than 94 per cent of vision loss associated with eye disease is preventable or treatable.

“I think it is scandalous that in 2009, in a rich, developed country now in the G-20, that we have third world conditions that many of our Australian people live in,” he said.

The results of the survey were announced in Melbourne today by Governor-General Quentin Bryce, who described them as confronting.

“It highlights the severity and prevalence of ocular conditions, 94 per cent of which are preventable or treatable,” she said.

“Most distressingly, it says that trachoma is still highly prevalent in remote Aboriginal communities, though it was eradicated from mainstream Australia long ago.”

‘Shocked and aghast’

As shocking as the results of the survey are to most, to those who conducted it the results are also hardly surprising.

Professor Taylor worked with the late Fred Hollows in the 1970s, who restored eyesight to thousands of people in Australia and Africa.

“I’m still shocked and aghast that after 30 years so little has changed, because so much of it is easily preventable or treatable,” he said.

“The rate of blindness in the Aboriginal people is six times higher than it is in white Australians, or mainstream Australia, and 94 per cent of this is preventable or treatable.

“Things like the need for a pair of glasses, for cataract surgery; blinding cataract is 12 times more common in Aboriginal people than in mainstream Australia and even conditions like trachoma still exist and cause about 10 per cent of the blindness we find in Aboriginal people.”

The survey found over a third of Indigenous adults had never had an eye exam.

It also revealed that Indigenous children are born with better eyesight than their non-Indigenous peers.

‘Basis in childhood’

Professor Ian Anderson, the director for the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health at the University of Melbourne, says the study shows how eye diseases affect Indigenous populations over time.

“Some of these problems do have their basis in childhood,” he said.

“But I think it underscores the tragedy that Indigenous kids, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids have much better eye health compared to non-Indigenous Australians but by the time they get to adult life, the rates of blindness and other vision threatening diseases is much higher.”

According to the survey, Indigenous eye health in cities is just as poor as it is in remote communities.

Professor Taylor says there are problems with reaching Indigenous communications.

“A lot of it is about cultural awareness and cultural appropriateness of services and making services that are accessible and comfortable for Indigenous people to use,” he said.

“And it can be as simple as the attitude of the reception staff in the clinic.

“It can be the need for the Aboriginal health services to establish linkages with the eye care providers, whether they be optometrists or ophthalmologist or the local hospitals and so forth.

“So I think there’s a lot of work that can be done there with developing those community liaison and Aboriginal health worker coordinating people.”

Earlier this year the Federal Government pledged $60 million to eradicate trachoma.

It is understood up to 20,000 children are affected by it. They will not notice its effects until they reach adulthood.

Joy Murphy Wandin is an Aboriginal elder with the Wurundjeri people of Melbourne.

She says the survey highlights the problems affecting Indigenous Australians.

“When we talk about low education and the fact that our community are not doing AB and C and all of that, if you have poor vision, or no vision, or serious eye disease, well then that has to be one of the answers and there has to be a solution,” she said.

More evidence has emerged of delays to Government housing programs for people in remote communities, with some houses in Aboriginal communities uninhabitable because of a lack of repairs.

In the desert community of Santa Teresa, south-east of Alice Springs, three houses that had their roofs blown off in a severe storm 10 months ago still have not been fixed.

It has added to the overcrowding which people in the community fear is about to get worse.

Torn corrugated iron hangs still hangs off the top of Stefan Smith’s home in Santa Teresa.

It is just another defection on the house that has not had a roof since November last year, when it was blown off in a severe storm.

Mr Smith says he has somewhere else to stay but his rent is still being collected for the house with no roof.

“Me my wife and three kids were in it when the storm came,” he said.

“[It] just blew off the roof. It was rough.”

Mr Smith says he wants to move back into his house if it is fixed soon.

Walls crumbling

But now his house, and others damaged in the storm, need much more than their roofs fixed.

They have been left vacant and locals say children have been playing in them. Most of the walls are crumbling.

A spokeswoman for the Northern Territory’s Housing Minister, Rob Knight, says the roofs should have been fixed by now.

He says the money has been allocated to the local shire to start the work but it appears the delays mean the repairs will be much more expensive.

Ursula Hoosan, a health worker in Santa Teresa, says the lack of repairs have also added to the problems of overcrowding in the community.

“This is the room that me and my partner sleeps in. We’ve got two beds here; one goes here, one big double one and another double one goes there,” he said.

“Me and my partner and my daughter sleep next to me in one bed and I’ve got my son and my nephew and yeah when he brings his friends over they sleep in one bed.”

Dr Alex Hope, the GP at Santa Teresa, says patients mention overcrowding more often in consultations.

“Some people who are living in a two or three bedroom house and there’s only a couple and in other cases I know there are about 10 or 15 people sleeping in a two bedroom house,” he said.

“So it varies enormously. I would really like to see the survey data to know what the level of overcrowding really is across the board.”

Housing uncertainty

Santa Teresa is set to benefit from the Federal Government’s $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP).

The community will get refurbishments but no new houses, even though a map produced by the Northern Territory Government shows 22 out of 100 houses in Santa Teresa are beyond economic repair.

Dr Hope says the community is worried about where some residents will end up.

“We have been told by the rumour mill that there are no new houses going to be built at Santa Teresa,” he said.

“The big question is what will happen to the people in the houses that are beyond economic repair?”

The community has not been told how many houses in Santa Teresa will be refurbished under the SIHIP.

The local Shire authority also does not know.

Dr Hope says more than two years after the beginning of the Federal Intervention in the Northern Territory, people in Santa Teresa want to know what housing they will receive.

“We’ve had an increasing number of enquiries from patients seeking assistance with housing matters and so it really does seem time to get the official data,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the chief executive of the NT’s Department of Housing says the alliance delivering the SIHIP in Santa Teresa is still finalising the package for the community.

She did not comment on what would happen to the people in the 22 houses the Territory Government believes are too expensive to fix.