Published by Arena Publications, Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia is the first book to cover the Northern Territory Intervention. Crikey will be publishing a series of extracts of the book, due to hit bookshelves on the 1 October, over the next week. Today, Pat Dodson.
Indigenous people
Is nixing CDEP Howard’s assimilation solution?
Many people have been searching for reasons behind PM Howard’s abolition of the C.D.E.P programs. None was given when this was announced as part of the N.T Emergency Response. It has been assumed that it was done, in part, so that 50% of their income could be “quarantined” – something that could not be done with wages, but only with Centrelink payments.
Scrapping CDEP is just dumb, dumb, dumb
Ministers Joe Hockey and Mal Brough’s decision to abolish the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme in remote Indigenous communities in the NT will have marked impacts on the arts industry, the management of Indigenous Protected Areas, and community based Caring for Country ranger projects. And it’s not just these success stories that will suffer; it’s likely that there will be wider local, regional and national costs from this myopic ill-considered policy shift, writes Jon Altman.
What is needed for the Howard/Brough plan to work
Here’s what experience might tell us about the chances of success of the Howard/Brough plan for Aboriginal Australia, writes David Coles, former Northern Territory public servant, in Club Troppo
Will the bureaucrats be happy to let Aboriginal Australia take over?
The irony of the PM’s rescue mission of Aboriginal Australia hasn’t gone unnoticed. Here’s a policy of helping a disadvantaged group to overcome a major social ill by using the resources and the personnel of the central government. No wonder Labor is not opposing it. It’s a good socialist policy.
Tom Calma: More questions than answers
My concern with the Federal Government’s proposal is that it doesn’t put in place the preventative measures that indigenous people need to stop the violence, and then prevent it from reoccurring, writes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma.
