Warren Mundine and Tony Abbott – Image, www.abc.net.au

Courtesy of The National Indigenous Times – A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following: “Our people are hurting and are in need of love, caring and putting back on their feet. We need to feel improved self-esteem and resilience and to feel connected before moving forward. We spend enough in resources to heal rather than punish. With every article I try to promote the idea that greater social and cultural capital builds with education and this remains the key but for this to happen we need to feel a sense of belonging.”

Well, with the release of last week’s budget the money we were spending has been slashed and the resources required for this healing to occur decimated. So where to from here?

Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire wrote about the current situation last Friday for The Guardian. The article tells the story of a 12 year-old Aboriginal boy in handcuffs, sitting at court shadowed by police officers in the north-western New South Wales town of Bourke.

Amy gives a personalised account as she sits watching as the magistrate, who she describes as “a fly-in worker who usually lives in the rich suburbs of Sydney”, deliberate on whether to send the boy to detention.

The police had caught the boy out on the streets late at night, in breach of his bail conditions and had thrown him in the watchhouse in the early hours of the morning. This is particularly personal to me as I have a young boy aged 11 and another who has just turned 13.

The reason Amy gives for him being out on the streets was that it was safer than being at home. The magistrate didn’t want to send him back to his family but with no other option, he was leaning towards placing him on remand as he waited for a court date.

As Nelson Mandela once reflected: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

Again, it is a case of how do we help rather than punish? Surely at 12 the boy’s future is not already decided – or is it?

What we are witnessing is an unrelenting attack on traditional Aboriginal ways of being, an attack that is destroying the last fabric of what remained prior to colonisation. In Traditional society this young man would be about to attend his second initiation ceremony as a right of passage. There would have been an intervention regarding his family support system years earlier and counselling provided long before now.

Long story short – we would never have arrived at the situation this boy finds himself in today. And again to suggest such a system doesn’t work using the dispossessed, alienated and traumatised having suffered the indignity of colonisation is no example of the caring nurturing and sustainable relation we had prior to colonisation.

Never were we provided true reconciliation in being given the opportunity for due process and natural justice to restore the damage done to our communities. Never were our resources returned to our people, our intellectual property protected and our law recognised within this nation State.

In the last three weeks we have witnessed Warren Mundine, the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council Chairman, call for an end to the requirement to establish a continuous connection with land in establishing Native Title.

The week after Noel Pearson applauded the Queensland Newman government for the transfer from Aboriginal lands to freehold title saying “there shouldn’t be concerns about the extinguishment of Native Title with the move to freehold and individual ownership.”

That’s right, these two leaders are calling for an end to continuous land connection and that we shouldn’t be concerned about the extinguishment of Native Title.

Then in the third week we witnessed the budget. We anticipated what was going to happen but to see more than half a billion dollars denied to the chronically ill and vulnerable within our own community was still a shock. In attacking the sick, elderly and young it sent shock waves through Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike.

This might be a good time to refer to e-mails and feedback I have received from some of our readers regarding what they think is happening within Australia.

“Yammaa Woolombi. I am so fired up at the moment that I will most likely trip over my words. I agree about where have the marches gone – they don’t count anymore – no one takes any notice.  I was part of 10,000 who marched in 2001(?) or 2002(?) here in Canberra to save the ABC. Yesterday GetUp organised for us to present a petition to our local member here in Canberra to save the ABC and about 70 turned up.  There is another gathering on Wednesday at Parl Hse for the whole nation.  I have asked GetUp to put SBS and more importantly NITV onto that demonstration.  We’ll see if they do and how it goes. One of the most important days of my life was on the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 27 May 2000 and seeing ‘Sorry’ written in the sky. Ganu nhama gandjarra.”

Another said: “Deadly article! My Gunditjmara community has a direct opportunity for everyone to be around the table and to contribute and be responsible for our decisions. Having everyone around the table on country is deadly because it keeps us politically balanced across the left, right, centre, up and down. Government should be supporting and resourcing communities to stay on their traditional homelands because the connection is integral not only to the nations themselves but to the Australian identity.”

Another said: “Warren Mundine and the rest of the Indigenous Advisory Council disgust me. It’s time we start giving it to this advisory council who are a bunch of puppets on a string. They have no clue what’s going on. Being Aboriginal is deeper then he seems to understand.”

And another: “Mundine, is unsophisticated. In fact his words and agenda are just plain crude. He certainly is THEIR man for the job. Even with my broad education I could not for the life of me work out what the role of the Advisory Council was and now it seems quite clear what his and the council’s tasks are and that is to clear a pathway for mining and big industry regardless of the damage to the social and cultural fabric of our communities. Alarmingly he chooses to propose that there is industry and commerce on his terms or there is nothing. This is ridiculous. There are many cases where Aboriginal communities and even the maligned Greens have worked with business and industry for a social and community benefit. The crudeness of his argument is shallow, self-serving and ridiculous to say the least.”

Another person said: “The vast majority of Nyoongah people I know don’t support and many more don’t even know who Warren Mundine is other than having him speak on our behalf. How could he understand the struggle and plight of the oppressed when he is an elite upper class black living in the northern suburbs of Sydney? How can he understand the pain and suffering of loss and grief through ingrained trauma when he himself states ‘I don’t know’. Given this why then does his mentality consider and justify the position to be the most senior Aboriginal Government adviser to the Prime Minister? Easy they pay him well and he thinks his academia can create the jargon to fool those already comfortably idle and those who unfortunately are so removed from him they can’t quite hear what he is saying. Yes and whilst he was in Perth addressing the Chamber for Minerals and Energy, HE WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN IN THE NYOONGAH COMMUNITY ESPECIALLY IN THE AREAS THAT NEED TO SPEAK TO HIM THE MOST. He will never convince nor see our people surrender to either the State or Federal Government’s Native Title Acts. May Our Campfires Burn Forever.”

Here is another: “There is an old Hebrew and English proverb ‘your silence indicates your consent’. This decision is disgusting, yet if the Indigenous people of Australia say nothing, are they not ultimately giving consent? People have every right to be disgusted that the Indigenous Advisory Council are selling out the very people whose interests are meant to be paramount to their role. Yet unless there is visible outrage, Indigenous Australians will collectively be choosing to consent to both this sort of utterance and the current mentality of the IAC. The question ultimately is one of what will the collective decision of Australia’s Indigenous community be – to condone the current state of play or to send a message through mass mobilisation that it’s not on? I sincerely hope it winds up being the later.”

These are just a number of the many e-mails we receive and no matter how diverse we have become history shows that intolerance builds solidarity for those being oppressed. It’s just a matter of time before we will have to once again mobilise as we did previously in reclaiming our rights as First Nations Peoples.

Even the most privileged amongst our mob realise that land remains integral to our identity – even those who were taken from their families, denied access to their Culture and returned home generations later, understand that land is the very ABC’s of our teaching practice.

And for those who have remained silent until now, those who have benefitted through their compliance, it is just a matter of time before you too will be directly affected through these funding cuts as those on our communities and like the 12 year-old boy in Bourke have been affected for years.

Funding cuts, over 100 services mainstreamed into five initiatives mean jobs taken, perhaps even your jobs. Already those in the public service are being told that thousands of jobs are on the line to go. If you are one of these who will lose your job, again I ask you, what did your silence get you?

I will finish the week on the words of Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist, Amy McQuire, who is also directly involved in this oppressive climate as the editor of New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, Tracker magazine which is being closed down as another Indigenous voice is being sanctioned:

“Mundine remains The Australian newspaper’s chief rent-a-quote but the wages of the Indigenous Advisory Council would be the best budget saving the Abbott government could make in Indigenous affairs. Of course, none of this matters to Aboriginal kids like that 12 year-old boy from Bourke. Most likely he will not see the savings and efficiencies boasted by the Abbott government.”

Amy, you are quite right. All that young man will witness is their rage against him and their complete disregard for his basic human rights to live in a society where he feels connected, safe and belongs.

Dr Woolombi Waters is a Kamilaroi language speaker and writer and is a lecturer at Griffith University. He writes a weekly column for the National Indigenous Times. E-mail: woolombi.waters@nit.com.au