Menzies House

It’s time to Reconcile Reconciliation

David Russell calls for an investigation into Aboriginal Welfare:

It is a legitimate expectation of governments that they spend taxpayer funds wisely, even if this maxim is so frequently honoured in the breach. Almost a Greek tradition, one might say!

In this spirit, we can be grateful to the rowdy ratbags who displayed their true colours on Australia Day at the Lobby Restaurant in Canberra. Such was the heady aphrodisiac of that eventful afternoon that they had a real morning-after outside Parliament the next day with a burning of the national flag.  Just not sure their spittle was intended to extinguish the flames.

Remarkably, the symbolism of these two events appears to have truly registered on the national psyche though in a way quite contrary to what the aboriginal cause may have wanted to achieve. For many, this appears to have been a seminal turning point. And, yes, it is valid to recognise that these were the actions of the few and not the many. As such they should not be used to hold guilty those who neither took part nor endorsed such protests. Yet, as with a genie out of a bottle, getting it back in can be a bugger.

Over the past four decades we have provided untold assistance packages, welfare programs, support services, interventions and just plain handouts to assist the cause of aboriginal betterment. But on every front we are told that things have not improved and may even have become worse. How could this be? It is clear to all that real change has not been achieved.

Update On The Campaign To Close The Illegal, Racist & Divisive Tent Embassy

You know you are making a difference when your opponents are so desperate they resort to insults and threats of violence to try to shut you down.

In the last 48 hours I have had to remove dozens of threats, defamatory comments, and downright abuse from our facebook page made by the “tolerant” left. I have received emails not just filled with abuse, but actually threatening me. 

Janet Albrechsten is spot on when she writes:

Last Thursday, protesters from the Aboriginal tent embassy bashed against the glass walls of the Lobby Restaurant intimidating the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the emergency workers receiving awards inside. Predictably, much of the media moved quickly on to the dark arts of political scheming when it transpired that a Gillard staffer leaked Tony Abbott's whereabouts.

But rewind a moment longer to consider a more important principle. The thuggish activists saw no irony in proudly exercising their right to free speech by using violence and intimidation to shut down those with whom they disagreed.

The protests personify a strain of illiberalism found more often among those on the Left than the Right

You should read the whole thing.

Freedom of speech is under attack in Australia by these thugs supported by our government and our tax dollars!

Is it any wonder under Gillard we have plummeted in our Press Freedom IndexScore and are now ranked worse than Namibia, Poland and Niger? 

That's right, a non-partisan, international media watchdog now admits that Freedom of Speech in Australia is in danger.

It is clear that the radical left are desperate and trying to shut us down. Why? Because they know Australians are waking up to their radical agenda.

Here are just a few news stories from the last few days:

Gary Johns, a former LABOR Minister, had this great piece attacking the “Aboriginal Preferment Industry” admitting it was time to “close the tent” 

Bob Carr, the former LABOR Premier of NSW has said that the Tent Embassy should have been “packed up years ago”

The Australian revealed how the Tent Embassy is BLATANTLY illegal but the government is choosing not to act.

And Piers Ackerman notes in a must-read piece that“The feral rabble infesting the so-called Tent Embassy camped on the lawn opposite Old Parliament House (OPH) has performed a great public service.They have effectively killed any constitutional change enshrining affirmative action for those who self-identify as Aboriginal Australians…The 40th anniversary of this monstrosity should be its last.”  (Read the whole piece)

 

We  are all Australians, and we should all be treated equally. No-one should receive special privileges or extra taxpayer funding on the basis of their race.  To do so is a recipe for disaster. 

But this is what the tent embassy proponents want. To have special treatment. 

We’ve tried years of welfare-reconciliation and it has failed. And indigenous-preferment industry knows this, and that is why they are running scared.

We can't give up now.  With your kind donations, we have been able to finance advertisements reaching over 100,000 Australians in the last two days, and will continue to fight for what is right for Australia – no matter the insults, abuse, and threats we receive.

 

It isn't easy to stand up for what is right. You get attacked, you get insulted, the media call you a 'racist' and a 'NAZI'. But at the end of the day, those who signed our petition showed they cared about our great country, and did what was right.

 

Tim Andrews is the Managing Editor of Menzies House. 

 

Invasion Day - A Response

Timothy Gow responds to those calling for Australia Day to be renamed "Invasion Day":

It’s 5pm on Australia Day as I begin this article.  A day ostensibly for celebrating what it means to live in a first world country, with a short albeit rich history, full of both great moments and bad.  No matter whom you are, so long as you are Australian, Australia day means something to you.  Maybe it’s the day in which you swore your allegiance to your new country, and received your citizenship.  Maybe it is the day you listen to Triple J’s hottest 100, or another excuse to party with your friends, to watch the cricket, or the tennis, or relax.  It is supposed to be a day where we remember our greatest value; freedom.  I think it is important to note that nothing about these things is political.  Even Freedom, a contested topic in its own right, is something most Australians are demonstrably in favour of.  It should therefore be, a happy day, a day immune to the tug of war between those who blindly hate this country, blindly love it, and those in between.  Yet, it is not.

Race Riots and Responsibility

Yesterday, Tony Abbott, leader of the Federal Opposition and Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia were chased by protesters from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.  This dramatic event led to our nations PM being tackled, and 50 riot police engaging in an evacuation operation, as protesters cried ‘Shame, Racist’ and intimidated their targets; the Nations two leaders.

The reason for this is allegedly a response to Tony Abbott.  The Opposition leader suggested that the Aboriginal Tent Embassy may need to be taken down.  Given he was near Old Parliament house (location of the Tent Embassy) at the time, this is apparently grounds for a spontaneous march.  Later, a member of the protest went so far as to blame the whole event on Tony Abbott;

"What he said amounts to inciting racial riots."

So it is daring to express your view, to have an optimistic and positive outlook on the future of the Aboriginal people within Australian society pins to you responsibility for race riots.  I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that these people have a poor view of all Australians, including Aboriginals, that rioters are not to have responsibility for their own individual actions, and that they are not in control of their own anger, own aggression, that it would be Tony Abbott’s fault if they were to engage in rioting. 

The Latest Addition to the Political Portfolio Indigenous Issues Bureaucracy

Chris Ashton argues that a secure economic future for Aboriginal people is impossible while they remain treated as a seperate category of people by the government: 

I never thought (nor thought possible that) an ABC news show dealing largely with political and social issues would become my favourite regular TV viewing, but the Drum has easily won that title. And it's website too is - like Menzies House! - a must read. Where else, for example, would I have found out that there actually exists a National Congress of Australia's First People. Yes, I know, it's a pretty gummy name, but more on the name and the organisation in a moment. 

In another recent article on the Drum, Anthony Dillon (an aboriginal academic who can get away with such statements without being labelled racist) said of aboriginal studies as a course of university study:

Typically, students are taught that the problems Aboriginal people face today are due to the events of colonisation, failed government policies, the current wording of the constitution, and government and community conspiracies to keep Aboriginal people on the lowest rung in society. We are told that high incarceration rates are due to racism and targeting of Aboriginal people, and not high crime rates. Implicit in such a curriculum, is that Aboriginal people will be helped, if non-Aboriginal people in this country are made to feel guilty.

He actually said that. But obviously he could have added that another way that it is implied that aboriginal people might be helped is to establish more bureaucracies to deal with so-called "indigenous issues." Obviously more bureaucracies is, always and everywhere, a terrific idea. Who wouldn't benefit from one more bureaucracy to oversee some other part of their life?

But the interesting thing here is that the National Congress of Australia's First People - or, at it likes to be pretentiously known, "the Congress" - is not just the latest in a long line of departments, quangos and commissions foisted upon aboriginal people by governments, left and right. No, no, this one is a completely organic innovation. It's independent of the government (you know the kind of independence that happily accepts $29.2 million in funding), and is in fact a public company limited by guarantee, meaning that, unlike most "Congresses" it bears the indignity of having the word "Limited" appended to its already cumbersome name. Perhaps its preferred abbreviated form should be "the Company"?

But I digress. The problem with all of this is two-fold. Firstly, and as I alluded to above, bureaucracies don't generally solve problems, and they never solve problems of that are societal and cultural in nature. Surely the shameful history of so-called indigenous affairs in this country will testify to that.

But secondly - and perhaps this is the reason for the first - the approach of the Congress, like those taken by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (a name even more cumbersome that the Congress' full name, and that takes some doing!) is to treat aboriginal people as a political portfolio. In the real world, indigenous issues include illiteracy,  poverty, health, child abuse and education. In the political world, however - and make no mistake, the Congress is confined to the political world as much as any government minister - the emphases are on the vague and vacuous concepts of "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' rights," building "new relationships with government, industry and among communities," having a "fair and diverse membership," and guaranteeing "gender balance for delegates and office holders" (imagine a corps of professional aboriginals without the right gender balance!). 

Another of the stated political portfolio aims of the Congress is to "work towards securing an economic future for our peoples," but here's what should be obvious to all members of the tri-cameral Congress. A secure economic future for Aboriginal people - indeed any meaningful future - will never be possible when this privileged race is an entirely separate category of people whose indigenous issues need to be accommodated at every juncture. To imagine such a future is both bad economics, and bad fiction.

History shows that aboriginal people are not helped by non-aboriginal people being made to feel guilty. But nor are aboriginal people helped by the creation and maintenance of an exclusive web of bureaucracies, however described. Both of these approaches have been tried and have failed. The government, or whoever the heck it is that is funding this latest addition to the aboriginal industry, would do better to stop treating some Australians as a political portfolio, and start spending its money on real projects and on real world indigenous issues.

Chris Ashton is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and a postgraduate theology student. He occasionally tweets @ChrisAshton.

Remembering Wadeye

It is worth remembering why the NT Intervention began, writes Joel Silver.

The Northern Territory National Emergency Response (‘Intervention’) has remained a policy plagued by misunderstanding since its announcement by the Howard Government in June 2007. I have on numerous occasions had to explain to friends outside of politics – of which I seem to have quite a few! – the reasons that prompted the Intervention, and moreover, to counter perceptions that it was political wolf in sheep's clothing, a policy whose motive was to needlessly discriminate against Australia's Indigenous peoples, a new White Australia Policy. The worst part is that most have never heard of the Little Children are Sacred ("Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle") report. In fairness, after detailing the chronic social problems the report found afflicted Indigenous communities (eg. alcoholism, substance abuse, unemployment, pornography), and the impact these have had on children, those friends are quick to change their tune.

Why We Need a Constitution For All Australians

There is little merit in the proposal to recognise Aborigines in our constitution, writes Adam Murphy.

Recently, there has been talk of holding a constitutional referendum, the first since 1999. The object of this referendum would be to insert a preamble, which features an explicit recognition of the Aboriginal people, into our Constitution. Already the wheels of bureaucracy are turning, with the Government just yesterday announcing a consultation group to discuss the issue and reach a verdict. But is this a worthwhile ambition? Unsurprisingly, no. In fact, it is a ludicrous idea, for several reasons.

Firstly, one thing many people do not realise is that the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, an Act of the British Parliament in which our Constitution is contained, already has a preamble. Its first sentence reads as follows:

"Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one dissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established…"

Welcome to humbug country

Hypocrisy is rife in the debate about parliamentary reforms, writes Terry Barnes.

In the current brouhaha about the content and interpretation of the Oakeshott Settlement, also known as the parliamentary reform agreement that we had to have, the focus has been on the speakership of the House of Representatives, pairs, deliberative votes and what constitutes an independent chair.

But as Federal Parliament is about to gather for its ceremonial opening there is one aspect that escaped notice, or perhaps has been deemed too politically sensitive to criticise or reject.  That aspect is Rob Oakeshott’s insistence that “At the beginning of each sitting day, prior to prayers, the Speaker will make an acknowledgement of country.”

Australia appears before UN over human rights

The UN apparently doesn't like the NT intervention...

Australia has appeared before a United Nations panel in Geneva, accused of human rights violations against Aboriginal people and asylum seekers.

The UN panel is investigating whether the Australian Government has singled out Aborigines and asylum seekers with racist policies.

via www.abc.net.au

Can I ask, what would the United Nations know about Australian domestic social policy? They sent their representative Dr James Anaya over for a couple of weeks last year to have a look around and he figured the intervention was racist. The UN has not properly examined and understood the complex issues surrounding indigenous affairs in Australia - particularly when they decide to brand policies designed to help indigenous Australians racist in front of the international community.

Maybe the UN should consider the alternative to the intervention: an unbreakable cycle of rampant child abuse, substance abuse and poverty. How humane.

(Posted by Chris Browne)