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Dear all,
Some of you have contacted us about an opinion piece published by Marcia Langton in the Australian, 12th December.
We acknowledge Marcia's outrage about the appalling case that's been in the media this week, and we recognise that her opinion piece was prompted by a deep concern about these issues.
Different views about strategies are legitimate debates. While different people may have different answers to the particular issues, we are confident that all of us are concerned about abuse against children, and that we want all children, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, to grow up in a safe environment.
Our primary concern is that the intervention is causing great distress to many Aboriginal families, and this is not creating a safer or happier environment for their children. There are serious problems which are having a direct and immediate adverse impact on children. These include disruptions to income from the movement of people from Community Employment Development Projects to a Work for the Dole scheme (which has left a significant number of families without income for food), and the growing displacement of people from bush into town, which is further contributing to homelessness.
These problems are causing additional stress in a situation where there is an absence of community based programs/services, such as police, children and family services, and alcohol and substance abuse programs. The recommendations of the Anderson/Wild report were not addressed by the previous Minister and have not been actioned by the current government.
In her opinion piece, Marcia presented Women for Wik with two questions, which we answer here:
What suggestions do you have that could prevent incidents such as this one that took place in the heart of Wik country?
This response comes from all of us, but especially from Eileen Cummings, who developed the Northern Territory government's strategy on family violence, suicides, alcohol abuse and related issues, and who has spent the last 20 years working to address these issues in partnership with Aboriginal families and communities in the Northern Territory. Our answer to the question posed above is that both the Commonwealth and Territory governments need to work together in partnerships with communities, and that they should implement the recommendations presented in the various reports on this topic, particularly the Northern Territory government's Family Violence Strategy, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Ending Family Violence and Abuse in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities and the Little Children are Sacred report.
And will you cease using the name of the once proud Wik people, now reduced into a vicious, violent and miserable existence by failed sentimental policies such as those you advocate and that utterly dehumanise them?"
Women For Wik began 10 years ago as a grassroots organisation in support of Native Title and the Wik claim, in particular. The original use of this name was negotiated with senior Wik women at the time, including Gladys. Our use of the term 'Women for Wik-Monitoring the Federal Action in the Northern Territory' has the endorsement of senior Wik women from both Arukun and Edward River.
Finally, since re-forming on 1st September, 2007, Women for Wik has allowed 3000 plus people, mainly women, to express their concern at what is being done and how. We support the strategies of groups such as the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory who seek to ensure that Aboriginal women in communities, who abhor the violence, are heard as part of the process.
All the best,
Eileen Cummings, Olga Havnen, Raelene Rosas, Christine Olsen, Eva Cox, Claire Smith and Rosie Scott
Douglas Chalmers - Response to Marcia Langton
Dear Prof. Marcia Langton,
Firstly, to answer your idea of what you would do in remote communities, I agree that permanently closing all alcohol canteens is a first move. Sadly though, it won't work - and you know why. If people want to drink, they will eventually find alcohol of whatever kind and wherever or at whatever price. You cannot effectively imprison people on remote communities and imagine that it is any kind of protection of their welfare. The churches and successive governments have already tried that for generations and we who are old enough are all aware of the results.
Neither will a permit-for-entry system work - and it has never really worked. The grog shops which operated in the 1970's on the non-native reserve side of the East Alligator River in Arnhem Land and the grog shop at Roper Bar (near the police house/station) in the Eastern part of the Top End were prime examples of why. Apart from that, the family inlaws of white cattle station owners and other opportunists who regularly ran night-time grog runs to supply drinkers in remote communities was another long-standing farce which obviously had the co-operation of the police and the judiciary as well as the politicians, blind-eyed or otherwise.
Despite those depredations, the drug scourge which finally devasted remote indigenous communities came in the form of what is now known as "chroming" - inhaling of solvents - but which started with petrol sniffing. The fact that addictions and intoxication are extended with the use of kava and other things is typical of a dissatisfied and repressed community society with too much time, no aspirations and no leadership. Sending in "more police" to ostensibly "interview" victims over and over again constitutes harassment. Their stories are already mostly well-known and documented. In fact, that is the exact issue which WomenForWik and its supporters have been objecting to. And there are never enough health workers to deal with all of the problems facing any community these days anyway - black or white.
You have skirted around the issues which are most significant in that it is the governments themselves and their bureaucracies which are primarily at fault and are known to be so (your employers). That obviously includes the judiciary and the public prosecutors as well as the police from time to time. It is all white mans' law and it is still all being imposed in a colonialist invader/occupier method. As Marion Scrymgour said, the problem is the utter lack of understanding of "settler society" in living in this not-unoccupied land. It has been thus and it still is and it is ultimately failing with its own self-destructive lifestyles.
So-called white society is as riddled with sex-abuse, violence and drug abuse and all manner of crimes yet you have chosen to side with them in using remote indigenous communities as something and someone to point the finger at as a means of denial and refusal to confront negative issues intrinsic to all Australian society. Perhaps it is you who is really hiding from your inability to change things despite your eminent professor status? No-one here is advocating any kind of "failed sentimental policies" as a solution to problems in remote communities or elsewhere. In fact, that is the issue at the heart of the state and federal governments' failure to solve these problems decades ago and it is now apparent that is why they are continuing. There was never any shortage of "documentation" of the problems in recent decades, uhh.
In addition to that, it is known that the previous Liberal government had an agenda of a covert land-grab for mining interests in the NT and that an "intervention" was to be their means of distorting public opinion in their favour. Smearing remote communities was also a convenient election ploy - "the black kids' Tampa" affair. Too bad that it all backfired on them. This is not an issue about names and "the once proud Wik people" could still be proud of those who can see what is really happenening and who have come together to fight it and to make positive change. You, Marcia Langton, have merely chosen to side with the "failed sentimental policies" of white mans' law and white mans' ways of forcefully rectifying the mess they create which inevitably continue to "utterly dehumanise them".
Yours sincerely,
Douglas Chalmers
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