Upcoming Events

16 January 2010

IRAG Planning Meeting – venue to be confirmed

Important meeting to plan for the coming year of activities

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30 January – 1 February   Jabal Aboriginal Centre ANU  Canberra

‘NEW WAY’  Aboriginal Summit

For more details contact Michael Anderson on 02 6829 6355 or 0427 292 492

email: ngurampaa@bigpond.com.au

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1 February 2010

Closing date for submissions to the following Senate Inquiry:

Inquiry into Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform and Reinstatement of Racial Discrimination Act) Bill 2009 and the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (2009 Measures) Bill 2009 along with the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Restoration of Racial Discrimination Act) Bill 2009 [introduced by Senator Siewert]

• Reason for referral of the Bills and information relating to the reference
• Links to the Bills:
  • Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform and Reinstatement of Racial Discrimination Act) Bill 2009
  • Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (2009 Measures) Bill 2009
  • Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Restoration of Racial Discrimination Act) Bill 2009
• Getting involved in Senate committee inquiries

For further information, contact:

Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Australia

Phone:	+61 2 6277 3515
Fax:	+61 2 6277 5829
Email:	community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au

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11-12 February 2010

PRESCRIBED AREA PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE MEETING   Mparntwe-Alice Springs

Venue to be confirmed

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13 February 2010     “SORRY IS NOT ENOUGH”
National Day of Action
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Byron Bay,
Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth
2nd Anniversary of the Apology to the Stolen Generations
Still no compensation
Still a racist NT Intervention
Still Deaths in Custody
Less jobs, more imprisonment for Aboriginal people

Mparntwe-Alice Springs

4 pm   Rally     Speeches     March

6 pm   Concert with Singers, Spoken Word, Bands

Solidarity with communities and support for Ampilatwatja Mob

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9-11 April 2010 Mparntwe-Alice Springs

International Indigenous Solidarity Gathering

For more information contact Barbara Shaw on 0401 291 166 or Marisol Salinas on 0413 597 315.

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ART SALE RECOMMENCED

We have now restarted our Art Sale in order to raise funds for major events in 2010. Please visit the Art Sale page to check out the awesome paintings done by local Central Australian artists/supporters.
Most of the money we make goes to our campaign and 25% to the artists. Sometimes they give paintings and don’t want anything in return. They are grateful for the support from our group, the groups around the country and the wider Australian community.

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MEDIA RELEASE 10th December 2009

NT Intervention continues to violate human rights. “Self-determination not assimilation”, say Aboriginal rights activists.

Today, to mark International Human Rights Day, Aboriginal rights activists and supporters Australia-wide call for the immediate and unconditional repeal of the NT Intervention, to be replaced with local community development models of self determination.

The uncompromising call for “self-determination not assimilation’’ comes one week after the United Nations Special Rapporteur Anand Grover described the NT Intervention as a “direct breach of Australia’s international human rights obligations”.

Despite announcements by Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin that the Intervention will be brought in line with Australia’s human rights obligations through the reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), all discriminatory aspects of the legislation are set to continue.

The government continues to ignore the recommendations of the Human Rights Commission and various committees and bodies of the UN to immediately and unequivocally reinstate the RDA and has instead announced in its last parliamentary sitting that the RDA will remain suspended until December 2010.

Monique Wiseman from Stop The Intervention Collective Sydney (STICS) said, “The Rudd government’s commitment to suspending the RDA for another 12 months is a commitment to racism, human rights violations and misery on the ground for affected Aboriginal communities. ‘Special measures’ have been announced to maintain the discriminatory nature of intervention measures such as compulsory acquisition of land”.

Ms Wiseman continued, “The government’s own progress report released last month has proved the intervention is a disaster. Child malnutrition is up 13%, domestic violence is up 61% and substance abuse is up 77%. The evidence speaks for itself”.

The continued suspension of the RDA and proposed expansion of income management has been met with fierce criticism from a broad range of organisations including Amnesty International, ANTaR, St Vincent De Paul and welfare rights groups.

“Punitive welfare regimes have been proven to increase hardship not remedy it. The projected expansion of welfare quarantining will not make it less racist. Indigenous people will remain overwhelmingly affected”, continued Ms Wiseman.

“The answer is empowerment. This is clearly outlined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Self-determination not assimilation! ”, concluded Ms Wiseman.

The suspension of the RDA has been used as a bargaining tool to pressure Alice Springs Town Camps to sign 40 year leases to avoid permanent compulsory acquisition by the government.

Town camp resident and member of the Intervention Rollback Action Group (IRAG) Barbara Shaw stated:

“People are living in third world conditions here and yet the government made the delivery of basic services and rights conditional on the rolling back of land rights. No other group in Australian society would be treated in this way.

“Human rights are for everyone, everywhere. There needs to be more education about human rights and the international treaties Australia is signatory to”, continued Ms Shaw.

Marisol Salinas, from the Melbourne Anti-Intervention Collective said, “The disempowerment of local Aboriginal organisations through the abolition of community controlled CDEP and, in particular, the mainstreaming of Indigenous housing services, is a disgrace. The top down imposition of the intervention has attempted to paralyse communities.

“Current CDEP workers are no longer paid through their local Aboriginal organisation but instead through Centrelink. Many are working for income management, being paid with basic cards. This marks a shameful return to the ‘working for rations’ days. Aboriginal workers are entitled to basic rights not basic cards and that means equal pay”, continued Ms Salinas.

“We need to replace the intervention with a genuine community engagement model that supports communities to develop and implement their own solutions. Funding needs to be channelled to grass-roots communities, not ineffective government bureaucracies. Aboriginal people must have full access to their inalienable human rights”, continued Ms Salinas.

“We will hold a national day of action on February 13 2010, the two year anniversary of the Apology, to call for an immediate end to the NT Intervention. We will chant from our hearts, as we always do, “Self-determination not assimilation. Stop the Intervention, Human Rights for All!!”, Barbara Shaw announced.

Click here to download the ‘Will they be heard?’ report

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‘Inept’ consultations ignored Indigenous views

By Samantha Donovan for PM

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/23/2751313.htm

Posted Mon Nov 23, 2009 9:12pm AEDT
Updated Mon Nov 23, 2009 9:30pm AEDT

Protesters during a march against the Northern Territory Intervention. (ABC News: Penny McLintock, file photo)

• Audio: NT intervention deliberately ignored Indigenous views (PM)

A new report accuses the Federal Government of deliberately ignoring the views of Aboriginal people on the Northern Territory Intervention.

It concludes that the Government’s “consultation” sessions were a sham, which offered the communities no choice on the intervention’s future.

Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser launched the report which is co-authored by former chief justice of the Family Court Professor Alastair Nicholson.

The “Will They Be Heard” report has been put together by a community group called Concerned Australians.

Professor Nicholson says he and his fellow researchers reached their conclusions after watching video footage of three government consultations in the Northern Territory that took place in the communities of Utopia, Bagot and Ampilatwatja.

“What you see is extremely articulate Aboriginal people who are expressing enormous concerns about the fact that they’re being singled out as alcoholics, pornographers and so on and they’re saying ‘look, what about the problems in the rest of the white community? Why are we being singled out in this way?’,” he said.

Professor Nicholson says the meetings cannot be called genuine consultations.

“I’m not thereby saying that the people trying to conduct them were not genuine, they were public servants and I think that in itself’s a problem,” he said.

“I think there should have been independent consultants brought in to do this rather than public servants who really are not independent of government.

“But the fact is that they were very inept consultations. There was very limited facilities for interpreters.

“[In] one I recall the interpreter was supposed to come and didn’t and some young person was asked to do it and here they are talking about quite complicated subjects like the Racial Discrimination Act and special measures.”

This week the Federal Government is introducing legislation to reinstate the Commonwealth’s Racial Discrimination Act in the relevant areas of the Northern Territory.

Professor Nicholson says this would normally lead to the abolition of the more controversial aspects of the intervention.

But the Government’s consultation process is an attempt to get support from the communities for the retention of some features of the intervention which would be designated “special measures”.

But he says given the flaws he and his colleagues have identified in the consultation process, the meetings cannot be considered evidence of consent to special measures under the Act.

“I think that if anything they prove the opposite,” Professor Nicholson said.

“It’s fair to say of course that we only saw three out of many consultations because they were the only ones that we were able to get film of, and as well as that we did see that the Government prepared summaries of all their consultations.

“They are interesting also because they really bring the point out that the strong opposition amongst the people to income management and in fact on compulsory income management the Government really didn’t give the people a choice at all.

“What it said was, well, you can either keep the present compulsory system, or we’ll introduce a system where individuals can apply to Centrelink to be excused from it.

“And of course that was met with a fair degree of derision by most of the people that I heard speaking about it because they said that the chances of them being able to persuade some official in Centrelink that they were responsible financial managers was negligible.

“It’s what’s omitted that’s also significant. For example, the intervention legislation changed the method of sentencing and granting bail so that you are not allowed to take into account Aboriginal law and culture. Now that wasn’t even mentioned in these consultations, yet that was a clear breach of the Racial Discrimination Act.

“So it’s very difficult to me to see how these consultations could be used for any useful purpose whatever.”

Professor Nicholson strongly supports the reintroduction of the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory but says it will not fix all the problems outlined in the report.

“What the Government needs to do is in effect start again,” he said.

“To work on such positives that have emerged from spending on education, health and so on, but above all to really sit down and consult with the communities and involve them as well in the decision making process.

“And if they were to do that, I think they’d get a much better response from these people and I think overall the activity would be much more effective.”