ICNN

The Secretary-General of Amnesty International has criticised the Federal Government for its failure to lift Aboriginal people out of dire poverty.

Irene Khan says she is appalled by conditions in the remote Aboriginal communities she recently visited in the Northern Territory.

She says the human rights of Aboriginal people are being violated.

“[That] these violations occur on a continent of such privilege, it is not merely disheartening, it is deeply disturbing,” she told the National Press Club today.

“And the longstanding failure of Australian governments to turn this tide of human tragedy demands much more than condemnation.

“It demands much more than commitment.”

She says elements of the Northern Territory intervention, like compulsory income management, rob people of their dignity.

She has urged the Government to repeal such elements.

“To be brutally frank, I see here an enormous opportunity for change, but I fear that that opportunity for change may be squandered, unless and until there is a profound shift from consultations to engagement and onto empowerment of Indigenous people.”

A new program is bringing Indigenous people back to the Northern Territory cattle industry after a pay dispute 43 years ago sparked a drastic fall in numbers.

Indigenous people were once the backbone of the industry in the Territory, but their numbers dropped markedly after the Wave Hill walk-off in 1966 when Vincent Lingiari and other Indigenous stockmen made a stand for equal wages.

New efforts are now being made to boost the number of Indigenous people working and running cattle stations, with 12 trainees recently graduating from a pastoral program at Waliburru Station, 500 kilometres south-east of Darwin.

The trainees are from the nearby community of Miniyeri, and their training is being run by the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC), which was set up by the Commonwealth to boost economic development on Aboriginal land.

ILC general manager David Galvin says the program is about more than just finding Aboriginal people work.

“I think we’re celebrating trainees graduating through various certificates in agriculture specialising in beef production, but we’re also celebrating a revival of a tradition of cattle work, cattle stations and culture that Aboriginal people have been with for over 100 years,” he said.

The $4 million program at Waliburru Station is just one of many attempts to bring the numbers back up, and Mr Galvin hopes that in nine years’ time traditional owners will not just be working on the station, but taking the reins themselves.

“You’ve got a culture, people who haven’t worked for a number of years and young people coming up who haven’t seen their fathers and their grandfathers working,” he said.

“But I think that’s been overcome here. The people have been fully engaged.”

Harold O’Keefe is one of the Waliburru Station trainees and says he wants to follow in the footsteps of his stockman father.

“[There are] lots of things to do [and it] keeps my life busy. I don’t know, just keeping me fit all the time, just working,” he said.

Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association member Luke Bowen says poor education is an impediment, but says Indigenous employment must be increased in the Northern Territory.

“The Indigenous population in the Northern Territory is roughly 30 per cent. It’s a very young and very fertile population and potentially in 20 or 30 years it will be 50 per cent of the Northern Territory’s population,” he said.

“So we need to collectively improve the circumstance here now, otherwise some of the negative aspects that we see now will be accentuated in the future.”

Police in Western Australia have dropped charges against a 12-year-old boy accused of receiving a stolen chocolate frog.

The boy yesterday pleaded not guilty to the charge in Northam Children’s Court.

Police allege he received the 70-cent chocolate from a friend who had stolen it from a supermarket.

The Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) described the case as trivial and said it showed police were targeting Aboriginal youths.

Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan says the matter will be referred to the state’s Juvenile Justice Team.

“We’ve asked for that matter to be withdrawn from court and sent to the Juvenile Justice Team,” he said.

“It probably should have gone there in the first place, but one of the things is that the police officers had contrary information.

“So we think the court would send that particular young person back to the Juvenile Justice Team and we’ve asked for that to be done straight away.”

Right decision

Aboriginal Legal Service spokesman Peter Collins told ABC Local Radio it is the right decision.

“The bottom line is it shouldn’t have gotten to this. It’s pretty clear the media attention this matter has generated has been the catalyst for this decision today,” he said.

Attorney-General Christian Porter says he supports the police decision to withdraw the charges.

“In all the circumstances, that appears to me to have been a good decision,” he said.

“But there’s more and more information coming to light about this individual case as we move forward and it’s not appropriate for me to comment on it in detail whilst it’s before the courts

A Parliamentary Committee has called on the Federal Government to do more to ensure that Indigenous Australians have access to fresh food.

The committee found that local stores could play a key role in improving the welfare of people in remote communities by selling healthy food.

But it said this would require logistical and financial support from the Government.

Labor backbencher Bob Debus says that supplying nutritious food is the most fundamental way to improve health in Indigenous communities.

“The statistics are just awful. Indigenous Australian adults are twice as likely to be obese as non-Indigenous Australian adults. The incidence of end-stage renal disease in remote areas of Indigenous Australia is 20 times higher than it is for the rest of Australia,” he said.

“There are a number of statistics like that and we know that a substantial reason for that horrifying health gap is the absence of nutritious foods.”

Mr Debus is the chair of a committee which has spent nearly a year investigating the operation of local stores in remote communities.

Its final report says stores can play a pivotal role in improving the social, economic and health outcomes of the communities but says that successes are scattered.

The committee has made 33 recommendations.

Mr Debus says the most important thing is that the Government set up a national office to coordinate the food supply chain so that remote communities can receive fresh food every week.

“Likely it will work that there is a small number of people in each state who give support to communities or groups of communities to develop ways in which you can supply these healthy perishable goods regularly by whatever means of transport is best available and according to the local circumstances,” he said.

“People who are used to making deliveries of food in the commercial sector tell us that this is not necessarily a terrifically hard thing to do although when you get into the most remote places, obviously you have to be able to adapt.”

The committee also suggested that the Government establish an infrastructure fund to help remote community stores buy equipment like refrigerators.

The inquiry also looked at the effectiveness of the Outback Stores program, which started under the Howard government.

Some communities were initially reluctant to hand over management of their stores to people appointed by bureaucrats, but Mr Debus says the model has worked extremely well

“At the beginning it was conceived as being an initiative that was essentially set up on a business basis,” he said.

“It was essentially a commercial enterprise and what we’ve noticed is that some of the stores are nevertheless ensuring that there is food security in very remote places without actually making a profit or even breaking even and what we are recommending is that there is a review of the Outback Stores to simply acknowledge that there are two different kinds of models that you can have.

“One in the somewhat larger communities which will be business based but another which involve some form of subsidy because it is serving the needs of the most remote or the smallest communities.

“This is I think, not controversial, it is just a sensible way to proceed.”

Chief executive of Djarindjin community near Broome, Andy McGaw, has welcomed the recommendations.

“We were very scared and worried with what they may do, and I think we’ll take heart that the approach they’ve taken to date seems to be quite balanced and one that we’d support,” he said.

But Harold Raunacher, the manager of the local store at Yuelamu in the Northern Territory, is wary about the Federal Government getting too involved.

“Every store has got their own needs. Every community is different,” he said.

Mr Raunacher lives 250 kilometres west of Alice Springs but says he’s had no trouble getting a consistent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables for the past 15 years.

“If you take fresh fruit and vegetables and you sell them at cost, or just above cost, then they’re cheap enough to buy for anyone. If the Government is going to do anything, they should maybe put some money towards the freight of the goods,” he said.

A member of the original Northern Territory intervention taskforce has slammed the Federal Government for not taking responsibility for health services in Aboriginal communities.

The Australian Medical Association’s Territory branch says compulsory health checks uncovered thousands of children with serious lung problems but about 500 have not been given adequate follow-up treatment.

It says only about two of these cases per week are being dealt with.

The federal Minister for Indigenous Health, Warren Snowdon, says money has been given to the Territory Government to ensure health service delivery in remote communities.

But former intervention taskforce member Dr Bill Glasson says the Territory does not have the capacity to deal with the problems.

“The Federal Government initiated this, the Federal Government should finish with this and the Federal Government in washing its hands of the responsibility of this is not on,” Dr Glasson said.

“They can talk all day and all night about closing the gap, they’ll never close the gap.

“So Warren Snowdon, take a bit of leadership, get out there and get this problem solved.”

The Federal Opposition says it is appalling that Indigenous children identified with potentially fatal lung disease are not getting the specialist attention they need.

“This is a grotesque situation, it’s completely unacceptable,” the Opposition’s Indigenous affairs spokesman, Tony Abbott, said.

“It’s a sign that the Territory Government is not taking Aboriginal health seriously and it’s a sign that the Federal Government has no capacity or no will to force them to take it seriously,” Mr Abbott said.

The Federal and Territory Governments have so far declined to be interviewed on the issue.

A north Queensland mayor says Indigenous communities need to know more about the 40-year leases being offered by the Queensland Government in exchange for better housing.

The three-day Indigenous mayors round-table starts in Cairns in far north Queensland today.

The Government says the 40-year leases would allow it to build, manage and maintain houses in Indigenous communities.

But Palm Island Mayor Alf Lacey says many people are concerned about why the leases are necessary.

“No doubt people are saying we need investment in our communities, we need extra housing in our communities to address our social issues, our housing shortage problem,” he said.

“I think the sticking point, at this point in time [is] why do we have to give up Aboriginal land for the houses?

“Does any community or any other place in the country, mainstream Australia, do they do that?”

He says the proposal continues to be contentious.

“What I’ve heard from other communities throughout the state is that housing is a very critical issue in all of our communities, given the poor social standards of living and the massive social issues that are in our communities and housing goes a long way to address some of that stuff,” he said.

A 12-year-old Western Australian boy has made a brief appearance in the Northam Childrens Court charged with receiving a stolen chocolate bar.

It is alleged the Freddo frog was given to the boy by a friend, who had stolen it from a supermarket.

The court was told the boy plans to plead not guilty to the charge.

The boy’s lawyer also told the court he had an objection to the original police interview.

The boy was granted bail and is due to appear in court again in February.

Aboriginal Legal Service spokesman Peter Collins says the charges are over the top.

“The fact of the matter is he’s 12 and these are the most trivial charges imaginable. It can hardly be a justification for this kid to be brushed up against the courts to teach him a bit of a lesson,” he said.

“It’s hard not to imagine that if this had have happened to a non-Aboriginal kid from an affluent Perth suburb with professional parents that we wouldn’t be in this situation.

“We’re strongly of the view that Aboriginal kids in Western Australia are chronically over-policed.”

The Secretary-General of Amnesty International says she is shocked at conditions at a remote Central Australian Aboriginal community.

Irene Khan visited the Utopia region yesterday to assess the impact of government policies, such as the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

She says intervention policies such as the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act are contributing to Aboriginal poverty in Central Australia.

Ms Khan says Aboriginal people who choose to live away from service centres are among the worst affected.

“They see that as part of their culture, as part of their heritage, as part of their responsibility,” she said.

“And yet they have no support there at all, no services, no even basic living facilities.

“So the conditions of poverty were quite shocking to find that in the middle of Australia, a developed country.”

Ms Khan says Aboriginal people are struggling to deal with discriminatory measures such as the Basics card for quarantined welfare money.

“They felt that it stigmatises them, that it actually has not helped the situation at all, it has made it much more difficult for a number of, for people to use the cards,” she said.

“They feel they they don’t have the flexibility to manage their own lives anymore.”

She says she will be taking the concerns of remote community residents to Canberra.

“I’m going to Canberra from here tomorrow and I’ll be meeting with Government and I’ll obviously want to raise with the Government the human rights issues underlying the situation of the Aboriginal peoples.”

An Aboriginal elder is calling for a separate jailing system in Queensland in a move to stop Indigenous Australians from reoffending.

A report released by the Productivity Commission in July showed Indigenous people were 13 times more likely to be sent to jail, and they were highly likely to reoffend.

In Queensland there are more than 1,500 Indigenous inmates behind bars and Aboriginal elder Duncan Johnson says the time has come for radical solutions, like a new prison owned and operated by Aboriginal people.

“We could put programs in place that would be more suitable and we can’t do that within the restrictions that we have within the corrective system,” he said.

Queensland Prisons Minister Neil Roberts agrees the problem is serious, but is not open to the idea of a separate jail.

“I personally don’t think that would be an approach the Government would pick up,” he said.

Aboriginal elders believe they would have a better chance of stopping Indigenous people from reoffending.

The New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees says he will create more than 2,000 public sector jobs for Indigenous Australians.

He made the announcement at the state Labor conference in Sydney yesterday.

The State Government has pledged to create 2,200 jobs over the next four years, specifically for Indigenous Australians.

The New South Wales Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Paul Lynch, says the scheme will have a widespread effect on the whole Indigenous community.

“It will inevitably lead to more income coming into a family, a much more stable model of how to live your life,” he said.

“Individuals with jobs will then become role models within their community, it will grow the resources within the community.

“The statistics which suggest this also connect it to better health outcomes.”