The political instability, division and in some cases poor ethical behaviour that have been evident especially over the last 4 years but to an extent over the last decade indicate that there is a need for stronger governance safeguards ensuring greater levels of accountability and transparency from our politicians.
Blacks in the back, cunts in the front and the response to it, is emblematic of how non-indigenous Australia embraces and yet looks away from aboriginal people at the same time. This ruptured thinking process is the stringy bond with our earlier task of occupying, claiming and settling Australia, in particular the ‘wilderness consciousness’ that in its day encouraged mate-ship, an easy going attitude, and above all, manners (you could not swear at the dinner table or in front of your mother) whilst allowing rape and killing to be seen as pragmatic.
Hopefully if enough Territory whitefellas change their identification on the census form it will eventually force the Commonwealth to provide funding based on socio-economic disadvantage and not on identity.
NT housing minister Bess Price admitted that Aboriginal housing was unacceptable. “I’ve visited communities, where the houses have been built in the eighties, and it’s not fit for humans.”
Dickson and others are right to claim that our parliaments are killing Aboriginal languages, but they aren’t doing it by denying their occasional use by parliamentarians. The linguistic killing fields are not in the NT parliamentary precinct but in the dozens of small Territory townships where on every school-day kids walk out of their houses where English is spoken as a third, fourth or fifth language and up the road to spend the day in a mono-lingual classroom.
The reason ministers are supposed to abide by strict standards is not just because they are senior members of the government, but because of the power, juicy information and influence they wield ... If you're on holidays as a minister, it simply means you'll either continue to take work calls anyway and your paperwork builds up in your inbox: Judith Ireland, SMH.
The debacle that has been exposed in the past two years within the NT juvenile justice system shows quite clearly that by deliberate design and policy Aboriginal children in are treated in a barbarous, inhumane and illegal way. Multiple incidents within the juvenile detention facilities have revealed that the NT Government prosecutes policies against Aboriginal children which include spit-hooding, gassing, hand cuffing, shackling and extensive periods of unlawful solitary confinement.
Darwin lawyer Matt Punch takes a close look at the proposed new section 116A of the Australian Constitution and reckons both the progressives and conservatives have got it wrong.
Starting as a copy boy in Glasgow, Lex’s work in newspapers took him all over the globe, including to Manchester, Kenya at the end of the Mau Mau uprising, Argentina and eventually back to the UK. With wife Mercedes, Lex had three children: (Young) Lex and Valeria, both born in Argentina, and Duncan (dec), who was born in Perth where the family ultimately settled.
“We can’t arrest ourselves out of this mess”: former NT Police Association President Vince Kelly.
