Comments on: NT Intervention: Let’s inject some science to the debate

By: Mirek

Mirek — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

A timely and sensitive analysis, Professor O`Dea, with some important insights into the culture and way of life of the original Australians. Objectively, if the NT Intervention was about the welfare of Aboriginies and their `precious children`, it would not have happened the way it was carried out, and the taxpayers` money that was spent on police/army occupation of communities, the `business managers`, billboards proclaiming no alcohol and p-rnography, together with all the paternalistic bullsh-t of sequestrating welfare payments (sorry, income management), the suppression of the Racial Discrimination Act and the permit system, amongst other measures. And now we have the `economic viability ` test to a people in whose culture and tradition the idea of private property and profit has no place, rather the community, the extended family and the land, which they regard as sacred. Clearly, the welfare of the Aboriginies is not the issue at all, it is really further dispossession, of which we have a 200-year not-so proud tradition. These land tracts contain great riches which the big mining companies and Governments which back them want to get their hands on. The solution seems to be to get the disperate communities to live on American Indian-style reservations, then they will become `economically viable`, that is the mining companies.
So, professor, let`s not hold our breadth, what we have here, is a different agenda, one that was carried out inexorably over more than 200 years by capitalists and their governments..

By: Nic

Nic — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

You say “[p]erhaps the economic rationalists would not call this an “economically viable” community”. Surely your argument depends on establishing that it is not economically viable? Why did you write an article that is perhaps completely irrelevant without checking something so fundamental?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

OK fine, let’s have these fellow citizens get back to their traditional lifestyles and get health levels to pre-invasion levels… But how will they get a share of the wealth that our economy is generating? How do they get the benefits? That’s the real challenge because going back doesn’t solve any equity issues.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Thank you Professor O’Dea! Clearly Nic has not heard of cost benefit analyses, or has any familiarity with the costs (social and financial) involved in dispossessing remote Aboriginal people and forcing urbanisation on them. Many of the social order (substance misuse and family violence), physical and mental health issues that larger (and more narrowly “economically viable”) remote indigenous settlements are currently experiencing are directly related to forced co-habitation by different family and language groups, overcrowded housing, and the breakdown of indigenous cultural law. The push to eliminate remote Aboriginal communities is the Australian version of the “final solution” - forced assimilation. The NTER taskforce (a suspiciously military term) does not seem to understand that Aboriginal peoples will not suddenly become whitefellas if they are kicked off their lands. Well done Doctor O’Dea for coming up with the scientific evidence that remote Aboriginal lifestyles are not as destructive to health and wellbeing as others would have us believe - it is cultural collision and forced adoption of an urban whitefella lifestyle that is destructive to remote indigenous community populations.