Malu Kiwai State School is located on the tiny Torres Strait Island of Boigu, just six kilometres off the coast of Papua New Guinea, making it arguably Australia’s ‘top’ educational institution. Three weeks ago at Weipa on Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula, I met Malu Kiwai’s principal, Damien Gainsford, and 15 of his enthusiastic young students. The kids had come south for the Croc Festival, and a taste of the big, wide world.
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The festival is about Indigenous students having a go. Part careers expo, part concert, the event focuses on education, health, employment and community engagement. Gainsford says that he wants his students to have the option to pursue tertiary study or some other vocational education, rather than stay on their island and work with the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP)’s ‘work for the dole’ scheme.
This year, eight Croc Festivals in locations as diverse as Alice Springs, Meekatharra, Moree and Swan Hill will offer Aboriginal kids the chance to dream big dreams to consider options, make choices and take responsibility. Since the inaugural Croc Festival eight years ago, 70,000 students from 1,500 schools have seized the day.
Thousands of kilometres from Weipa, the remote Indigenous community of Mutitjulu shelters in the shadows of Uluru, one of the largest monoliths on the planet. The National Indigenous Times (NIT) reports that this community has almost no mainstream employment, and that its 500 residents have an average life expectancy of around 30 years less than that of White Australia. Mutitjulu is only a few kilometres from the popular tourist destination of Yulara, but until recently was a million miles away from public consciousness.
Now Mutitjulu has joined the Northern Territory township of Wadeye at the top of the list of remote communities we love to hate. On 21 June this year, ABC TV’s Lateline program ran a sensational piece about the Central Desert community, based mostly on allegations from a source identified only as a ‘former youth worker’.
The NIT’s Walkley-winning investigative team of editor Chris Graham and seasoned campaigner Brian Johnstone recently travelled to the community to dig a bit deeper, after it was revealed in the Sunday Territorian that the ‘former youth worker’ was in fact Federal Government bureaucrat Greg Andrews. They found that Andrews had never lived at Mutitjulu, and had not been employed there as a youth worker. Crikey has also followed the story closely.
Greg Andrews has since admitted being the anonymous source in a statement aired on Lateline on Tuesday night. The story continues to unravel by the day. Graham is following the tentacles of this tale into the bureaucracy and he hints that there may be more casualties from this sorry affair.
But let’s look past the sizzle and examine the sausage. The Howard Government’s policy of ‘practical reconciliation’ is based around compulsion and compliance. Communities are pressured to do deals to obtain services that other Australians citizens receive as a matter of course. The subliminal message is that Indigenous Australia isn’t measuring up.
There has been an undeclared ‘open season’ on remote communities since Alice Springs prosecutor, Nanette Rogers, spoke out on an earlier Lateline program about sexual violence in some remote communities. Little of what she said was news to people closely involved with remote communities, but the high profile of the program made the issue a public talking point.
At about the same time, the remote community of Wadeye, 400 kilometres south-west of Darwin, experienced one of its periodic outbreaks of violence. For five months of the year during the wet season, the only road into Wadeye is impassable. The community suffers from high unemployment levels and a chronic housing shortage potent preconditions for domestic dysfunction. ‘Bring in the troops’ was the well intentioned but ill-informed cry that went up after the most recent disturbance.
Neither Wadeye nor Mutitjulu is a failed nation state. They are Australian communities in need of practical assistance: better policing, greater employment opportunities, youth programs and improved housing stock.
In 2002, Wadeye was chosen as one of eight COAG ‘whole of government’ community trial sites across Australia. Two key objectives of the trials were to ‘tailor government action to identified community needs and aspirations’ and to ‘cut through blockages and red tape to resolve issues quickly’.
In March 2003, the Thamarrurr Regional Council at Wadeye signed a Shared Responsibility Agreement (SRA) with the Federal and Northern Territory Governments. In a bitter irony, the SRA identified three key regional priorities for the region: women and families, youth, and housing and construction.
Thanks to Bill Leak. |
Three years on, we continue to read sporadic newspaper accounts of women and children in Wadeye being terrorised by gangs of youths in a community where 2,500 people share 148 habitable houses. Why doesn’t Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, make a Ministerial Statement about the effectiveness of the COAG trials in achieving their stated objectives? Could it be that there is political capital to be made in demonising remote communities while fudging the matter of government accountability?
The Howard Government’s ‘new paternalism‘ reared its head again just recently, with Mutitjulu again the victim. The community’s public funding of around $2.5 million a year was cut off from 1 July, and they were asked to ‘show cause’ why the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations should not appoint an administrator. Mutitjulu’s name was mud, and mud sticks. Predictably, Brough’s office issued a statement saying that it welcomed the decision to allow an administrator into the community.
The community successfully sought an injunction in the Federal Court to prevent the administrator, Perth-based Brian McMaster, from exercising his powers. The community’s lawyer, George Newhouse, was scathing. ‘All [they are]asking for is for the Minister to sit down with them, talk with them rather than impose a 19th century colonial administrator.’ The Federal Labor member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, has spoken of a ‘Commonwealth vendetta‘ against Mutitjulu.
But the bitterness engendered by generalised smears against remote Indigenous communities cannot change one simple truth: some of these settlements need help from governments to rescue themselves from difficult circumstances which are not of their choosing. A 2004 survey found that almost two-thirds of the houses in Mutitjulu have no working stove,
and that over 25 per cent have no flushing toilet. Overcrowding is rife, with many houses having more than ten occupants.
Back in Weipa, 1200 kids from right across Cape York and the Torres Strait are wide-eyed at the career opportunities that are on offer at the Croc Festival. Olympic sprinter Kyle Vander Kuyp has the rapt attention of children from Badu Island and Lockhart River. He is telling them that they can be anything that they want to be. ‘Stay at school and take care of your bodies’ is his advice.
The kids are an enthusiastic blur as they descend upon career advisors from Comalco, Queensland Police, James Cook University, Centrelink, Cape York Land Council and a host of other organisations. There is no need for compulsion or compliance here. These Indigenous kids are wired up on self-belief, and keen to find out what the rest of the world has to offer.
Memo to Mal Brough: it’s not about getting tough. It’s about getting smart.
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