|
Click here to endorse 'Women for Wik - Monitoring the Federal Action in the Northern Territory'. Your name will be added to our petition. Your email address will be kept private. You can also have your say at our online forum by clicking here, and there are other things you can do.
Prominent Women
Prominent women supporting Women for Wik - Monitoring the Federal Action in the Northern Territory include Lady Deane, Tamie Fraser, Lowitja O'Donoghue, Justice Elizabeth Evatt, Helen Caldicott, Anne Deveson, Kate Grenville, Gabi Hollows, Faith Bandler, Anita Heiss, Margaret Fulton, Rosemary Stanton, Judith Rodriguez, Drusilla Modjeska, Margaret Pomeranz and Fiona Foley.
"It is up to the women of Australia to get our country back on the path of reconciliation."
Lady Deane
"The NT intervention is patronising and unworkable. We need policies that will take us forward, not backwards."
Lowitja O'Donoghue, former Chairperson, ATSIC
"Once again, the Commonwealth government has ignored the basic right of indigenous people to self-determination. Without consultation, it has adopted drastic measures which undermine indigenous rights. Indigenous people should play a major role in deciding the most effective way to protect their children. The impact of these measures needs careful monitoring."
Justice Elizabeth A Evatt AC
"Before entering politics in 2001 I was the founding Director of an organisation called the Katherine West Health Board ... It was because of the limited availability of unalienated freehold land for claim under ALRA that the Aboriginal people of the main NT pastoral areas (the Barkley and the Katherine West region) were called "the people land rights forgot". Until the Wik case the most that any of them could aspire to in terms of recovering some of their traditional land was a "matchbox" size "excision" living area ... It is timely for us to all remind ourselves of the work that is still left to do to achieve land justice and harmony for Aboriginal Australians living in the pastoral areas like the Katherine West region." Click here to read the full endorsement.
Charles Perkins Oration 2007
Ms Marion Scrymgour MLA, NT Minister for Child Protection
"This a really important website - in monitoring the current interventions, Women for Wik gives us all a way to work for the protection of Indigenous rights."
Kate Grenville, author
The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land in the Northern Territory has nothing to do with child sexual abuse but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory into a global nuclear waste dump.
As the radioactive elements leak and leech into the underground water systems, the water and food will become contaminated for hundreds of thousands of years, thus inducing epidemics of cancer, particularly in children, and genetic diseases for the rest of time.
This is child abuse.
Click here to read the full endorsement.
Helen Caldicott, physician and author
A decade on from Wik, I personally cannot believe that the Australian government has regressed so badly. I am sure that my late husband, Fred, would be outraged at this interventionist approach taken without any proper consultation. Surely the major thing we've learned from our history is that nothing works unless we put control and decision-making in the hands of Aboriginal people and their wonderful organisations.
Gabi Hollows, Fred Hollows Foundation
"The future belongs to our children. They are a sacred trust, a gift
to us all to nurture and protect .But what kind of future will
result from this intervention? Where are the visionary
partnerships, the positive bridges between Aboriginal people and
government? Where is the commitment to building a future which will
honours us all? This situation needs to be independently and
closely monitored."
Sally Morgan, WA
 |
The equally dreadful health, education, welfare and mortality statistics of comparable remote indigenous communities in Canada and the US have been dramatically improved over the last 10 years by concerted efforts and policies, in cooperation with the relevant indigenous people, which have not required the army to invade, the forcible resumption of land or punitive welfare provisions to be imposed etc . Many Aboriginal professionals and experts have visited these North American projects, and have been suggesting the implementation of similar demonstrated successful policies in Australia for some time. All to no avail.
I therefore cannot think the dramatic Commonwealth intervention into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory will be
successful-- on all the evidence, especially the lack of consultation with key Aboriginal professionals and community leaders, it cannot succeed. Worse, I do not think the intervention is wholly sincere.
In particular the land grab and the cancellation of the permit system do not seem to have anything to do with solving the emergency. Any lingering hope I had that the Federal government, though misguided , was sincere, disappeared when the Australian police forces in general objected to the cancellation of the permit system on the basis that it would make illegal access to Aboriginal communities more difficult to police.
Sharon Sullivan, AO, former Director of the Australian Heritage Commission
Christine Kelly, Beswick Community, 2004 |
