A doctor from Queensland has written of her experience in the Aboriginal Communities of the North. She shows us why some have objected to the saving of innocent lives.
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A free poem, read by a Frenchman, with images from Capra's "A Wonderful Life" Life is Beautiful, My Child
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Update, in comments is a Bolt contribution regarding Rudd on the Stolen Generations issue. Is Rudd a flake, or a fake? Thing is, Rudd has to be one or the other.
2 comments:
Break the cycle of dysfunction
Lara Wieland
IN the eight short years since I started living and working in Cape York communities, I have witnessed a rapid and tragic decline in the environment that children live in.
The older generation, the last few threads holding the social fabric together, is disappearing. The few who survive have become powerless, bewildered and despairing, living at the mercy of their dysfunctional families who harass them for money and steal their food.
Members of a generation who were raised by people under the control of substance abuse and welfare dependence are now becoming parents themselves. Many of these young parents have known nothing other than violence, mostly towards women, neglect of children, and an almost complete lack of understanding of the wider world.
The older generation with the strong morals, parenting skills and courage remember Christmas as a time when functional, self-sufficient families gathered after church to share good food, laughter and traditional dances. All today's kids can remember from last Christmas is fighting and drunkenness and the interviews they had to give police when their little friends were raped.
Worst of all, we are increasingly being left with a population that does not even understand the gravity of its situation. As Noel Pearson says, the dysfunction has become "normalised".
I have been frustrated to the point of pain at times over the unwillingness in these communities to face the problems and a tendency to smack down those who try. I could not fathom the possibility that so many people in a community would "not care" about their children. The dysfunction has become so deep that many people do not even realise the damage that is being done to their young people.
They hardly bat an eyelid at events that would make your stomach churn. A young mother in a drunken state beats her young child with a stick and screams that she is going to kill him. The next day, that same mother, sober, hugs her child and does not even think about the lasting emotional scars. Why would she when her mother did the same to her, and her neighbours do the same, and no one has ever told her that it is wrong?
Children who have had sexually transmitted diseases and have been raped and molested are now parents. No one ever helped them or told them that what happened to them was wrong or not normal. Today's teenage parents grew up in homes with hardly any furniture or toilet paper or soap or toothpaste.
They don't know what it means to make your child wash with soap in the shower or brush their teeth at night. They eat meals that materialise - if they're lucky - occasionally around pay day.
On the days between, they are supplemented by occasional chips and Coke and stale bread, tea, sugar and Sunshine powdered milk. Pots, pans and cutlery that aren't stolen become weapons.
There is little concept of what we would understand as "good parenting" in most households. Families who feed their child like this would be genuinely hurt at any suggestion that they are neglecting their child. Skinny, malnourished kids have become so commonplace that locals sometimes tell me it's the climate that keeps them thin and small because they "eat normally" - if normal is one meal a day. How else do they explain that the kids that go out to boarding school or foster care, come back "fat" (read: normal weight)? Nothing to do with getting three meals a day for the first time in their lives?
Boys raping younger boys becomes just boys "playing gay" - to be "told off". Yes, young boys do often engage in explorative sexual play but that is completely different to non-consensual acts where pre-pubescent boys sodomise little kids with objects while they scream out "no", or where older teenagers or adults watch as they make younger teenagers rape little kids, who then have nightmares. That is no longer "playing" and often suggests the children involved have been molested themselves.
For some, their only understanding of "love" and sex are the perverted images of pornography that they have watched since before their young, innocent brains were capable of processing it, or experienced or witnessed abuse. The sense of what is normal in this regard is also largely lost - what is normal, what is right, what is wrong, what is legal, what is not?
This is compounded by the isolation and the poor literacy and low levels of education, something else that has become normalised.
Some people will be going through pain and heartache but that is also not new, as one "tragedy' simply replaces the one from the week before and it becomes impossible to work out where one grief ends and the next begins in these places, and so it goes on.
The snippets of media reports that do come through to the community are just interpreted as attacks on them as a community, hard to understand and hurtful. Some react by simply becoming more insular, defensive and reclusive.
I can see now what I couldn't understand before - why a person could feed their child hardly at all, sporadically send them to school, yell at them, criticise them, beat them and then still genuinely be heartbroken, despairing and confused when their child is removed from them. Some people, in their heart, really didn't realise that what they were doing was so bad. In fact, you'll often hear someone say, "But why did I lose my kid for that when I know many other families who are doing the same or worse?"
Dysfunction is so entrenched that large swaths of the population's children could meet the definition for removal because of abuse and/or neglect. It is impossible to remove all the children who would meet the criteria for removal. Certainly, children who are at immediate risk or who are in an unsafe situation must be removed immediately, and away from the community. The nature of many of these communities is such that even the most functional, amazing people in that community - and there are some amazing people - would struggle to keep a vulnerable child safe in that environment.
There needs to be a solution to this problem before we "lose" an entire generation to the dysfunction of their parents. The solutions cannot lie entirely with a government department of child safety, or, indeed, any government, although they must start doing their job effectively and still have a vital role in protecting those children being abused.
The solutions must be radical and urgent. There does need to be a massive intervention into the lives of this generation of children otherwise nothing will change and, indeed, only get worse. But unlike other interventions, this must include the Aboriginal people themselves, and the parents in particular.
Communities need to understand what the problems are and get some perspective on the issues. They need to understand that the shame is not in having the problems but in hiding them.
There needs to be education about what is normal and what is not. People in the remote communities need to know the things that you and I have the privilege of knowing and understanding through our parents, education, literacy and broader life experiences.
Sharing information and education of this nature is difficult, though. Many people will not want to hear it. The more normalised a problem is, the easier it would be to write off the concerns as some white person's perspective and not "how things are for Aboriginal people".
When reading about the NT intervention, I was struck by Aboriginal magistrate Sue Gordon's experience of talking "door to door' with women about the issues and how so many of them wanted to do something once they realised what was going on was not acceptable, that they could get help from the law, and and so on. How important that simple step of breaking the silence and "de-normalising' abuse and dysfunction is.
Firstly, grog must be removed from the equation. Easy access to pornography must also be removed.
Law and order must be provided the same as any other community in Australia would be entitled to, and police must be supported, resourced and adequately staffed to enforce law and order and eliminate sly grog and drugs in these communities, as well as work to share information with them.
There needs to be intensive education, health, nutritional and social intervention for the youngest children and their parents. Give parents a chance to learn how to be parents before they damage their children the same way they have been damaged. If with all the assistance made available they cannot do this, then there should be recourse, such as welfare quarantining and child safety intervention.
Incentives and disincentives for work and education need to be radically overhauled, as Pearson is proposing. And short-term incentives for children to have babies need to be removed.
There needs to be mass remediation in terms of education for those children who are so far behind that they are going through Year 8 and cannot read.
If we don't act urgently, it will be too late for this generation, who will be incapable of functioning in anything other than the surreal world of a dysfunctional community, if that can be called functioning. Children in the middle years - say, Year 4 onwards - need to be given a chance to have a good academic, social and family education so that there is hope that this generation can contribute to changing their Cape York communities into genuine communities and retaining their culture while being able to function in the wider world.
This could be achieved by offering homestays during the school term with loving, functional families - someone has suggested that there must be hundreds of good, functional indigenous families in towns who could take a child during school terms and make a difference.
Non-indigenous families could also contribute to this. Before people start expressing their horror, I cannot tell you how many times I have been begged by people from the communities to take their young children to live with us to give them a better life because, while many can't put their finger on it, they know their child's future is bleak if they don't get out before they hook into that cycle of alcohol, drugs, despondency and teen pregnancy.
Of course, it is far from ideal but it is a lie that the alternative is that they will have fulfilling, healthy lives learning about their culture and their land in many of these communities if they stay - and most of the older people know this.
Past policies and methods of "implementation" have clearly failed. Therefore, we do not need a rehashing or tinkering of what already exists. We need radical solutions, ones that involve the people still left in the communities who recognise that there is a generation at risk of being lost.
Lara Wieland is a north Queensland doctor who has spent years eight working with indigenous people in remote Cape York communities
Rudd a flake or a fake on this sorry
Andrew Bolt
Tony Wright has been almost as worshipful as any press gallery journalist huddled at the feet of the new Messiah:
That same release — the hope of an expulsion, really, of a national burden — could be felt across the country...
Yet today Wright is having a nagging bit of bother reconciling that Messiah to these squalid tactics of a political mercenary:
SELDOM has Australia witnessed a defter illustration of the political art. As Kevin Rudd wove his spell on Wednesday over the gathered peoples of the old land we inhabit, granting with finely crafted words a symbolic rebirth to the lost and the found, he tossed a rope to Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson.
It was, however, both an instrument of deliverance and a lasso.
Nelson had no choice but to sit there, nodding sagely, as Rudd proposed that he and the Opposition Leader jointly head a sort of war cabinet to tackle — as a start — the lack of housing in remote Aboriginal communities. Nelson had no clue that such a gift was coming his way, and thus could neither refuse it nor accept it. He was, in effect, rendered politically impotent.
Rudd’s gesture, though, was so dexterously crafted, he could receive only plaudits. His stature growing by the minute as an inclusive prime minister catching the mood of the country, who would be so meanly disposed to detect a hidden motive, let alone criticise such apparent generosity of spirit?
He had done something similar, though less transparently, the very day before. With a battalion of painted dancers and didgeridoo players about to perform the first “welcome to country” in the marbled members’ hall of Parliament House, Rudd and Nelson mounted the podium to receive their splendid welcome. Nelson came empty handed — he had been assured by organisers that he would not be required to speak. But as the ceremony reached its zenith, Rudd leant over and whispered to Nelson, “Mate, would you mind saying a few words?”
Meanwhile, new News Ltd columnist Laurie Oakes mentions a fact without noticing its real significance:
The surprising thing is that in his years as a bureaucrat and then MP, Rudd had never really been part of the bleeding heart brigade on Aboriginal affairs. Until nine months ago he had difficulty seeing any real practical value in the push for an apology.
Oakes says it was nine months ago that Rudd, heroically focusing on this issue during a time of personal troubles, finally saw the light:
But he finally put it together in his head when he came to prepare a speech for a function on May 27 last year to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum which gave the Federal Government power to legislate for indigenous Australians.
Yet what Oakes fails to mention is that even as recently as three months ago Rudd wasn’t sure at all that saying the “sorry” word was necessary. Listen for yourself to Rudd dodging four specific questions on that from 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, refusing again and again to answer if his apology would contain the word “sorry”.
As I said at the time:
Three options: he’s unable to give direct answers; he’s trying to hide Labor’s dumber Leftist policies; or he’s walking into a huge ideological battle with Labor after the election. I favor two of those options.
All three of my suggestions were correct, as it turned out.
But Rudd this week rewrote his history of equivocation on “sorry”:
Last year I made a commitment to the Australian people that if we formed the next government of the Commonwealth we would in parliament say sorry to the stolen generations.
False. He refused just three months ago to confirm he’d say that word.
Let’s play options again, and this time there are only two.
First, that Rudd only recently bothered to even think about the “stolen generations”, what he now calls a “great stain (on) the nation’s soul”, and is saying “sorry” now only because he was dragged to it or because he could use it as a political weapon. In short, his sincerity is fake. His interest in Aboriginal issues is utterly new in him.
Second, that Rudd has in truth felt for many months that a “sorry” was needed, but misled the public about his clear intentions, fearing they might vote against it and him at the election. In short, he is not honest and knew his sorry would divide us, not unite us.
A flake or a fake.
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