Inside Australia's third world

September 15, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/14/1126377372484.html


What sort of future do they face? Children atop a burnt out car as they play.
Photo: Glenn Campbell

Children begging for food, chronic health problems, overcrowded houses - this is not some basket-case nation but the reality of Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. As world leaders gather in New York to discuss poverty, Lindsay Murdoch looks at the distress in our own backyard.

Tracker Tilmouth points angrily at a tin shanty where 23 Aborigines are living in squalor. "Take a look. That's not only a disgrace. It symbolises what I believe amounts to a form of cultural and social genocide," he says. "This is as bad as anywhere on Earth, right here on Australian soil."

Tilmouth knows more than most about Aboriginal poverty, poor health, high crime, alcoholism and substance abuse. Snatched from relatives living in an Alice Springs creek bed when he could barely walk, Tilmouth has spent most of his life in remote indigenous communities.

New research shows that a population explosion and 30 years of under-funding in education, health and infrastructure has created a social time-bomb in these communities. "I have to speak out now because things are getting worse for people in these communities," says 53-year-old Tilmouth, a former head of the Central Land Council, the peak Aboriginal body in central Australia. "The system delivering services to these places has collapsed. But nobody wants to talk about it. Governments have one last chance to get it right or else they will be dealing with a catastrophe."

Bob Beadman probably knows more about the problems of Aboriginal Australians than any other non-indigenous person.

He also says it is time to speak out to shock Australia about the state of remote indigenous communities.

The former top public servant, who is chairman of the Northern Territory Grants Commission, says that 30 years of policies that bureaucrats considered generous have failed tragically because they ruled Aborigines out of having any effective role in their own lives.

We just want to be a normal part of Australia
with all the services and opportunities that
are available to the rest of you."
LEON MELPI, elder.

"We are now on the rocks," he says. "We need to fundamentally set a new course and abandon the old tiller settings. People need to be shocked. They need to be moved from their tacit acceptance that everything is okay. A huge task confronts the nation and particularly Aborigines themselves."

Beadman says that people need to abandon political correctness and tackle the taboos associated with indigenous communities such as child molestation, family violence and poor diet and personal hygiene. "Only when the dirty linen is put out for the wash will it be washed," he says.

But Beadman says that above everything, Aborigines need to be reengaged so that momentum for change comes from them. "They have been encouraged to think ... that government would prefer them to be paid to sit down rather than to work," he says.


Children outside a dilapidated house.
Photo:Glenn Campbell

"Billions of dollars have been thrown at this problem and we still have a deteriorating outcome."

University lecturer Steve Sunk has decided to expose what is happening in remote indigenous communities where he has worked for the past eight years in the hope that community elders will get the same help that is available to other Australians.

He has written to the Northern Territory's Chief Minister, Clare Martin, to tell of children in these communities who are starving and begging for food from teachers.

Appealing for urgent government action, including protection and daily meals, the Charles Darwin university lecturer says that children are being raped and "there is a lot of molesting and incest going on with the kids and it's too disgusting to mention the facts".

"They (children) are sleeping on concrete floors, they don't have the luxury of a mattress even to share with a camp dog," Sunk says in the previously unpublished letter. "Kids have sores all over which are not healing up because of lack of proper food."

Research by the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research reveals that fertility rates in 1300 remote indigenous communities are so high that the present total population of about 100,000 could double in 20 to 25 years.

John Taylor, a senior fellow at the centre, believes that unlike the rest of rural Australia, where economies are shrinking and populations declining, the "clock is ticking for remote indigenous communities".

Speaking in Wadeye - the largest remote community, 420 kilometres south-west of Darwin, where he is updating his earlier research - Taylor warns that unless there is an immediate major response from governments, the cost of attempting to fix the inevitable social dysfunction in the future will be enormous.

He says the communities have remained largely out of sight of mainstream Australia, which for years "managed to avert its glance".

But as the communities become increasingly accessible and open to the outside world "Australia cannot afford to avoid them any more."

The problems confronting Wadeye, a former Catholic mission with a population of about 2100, are similar to those of other remote communities.

An average of 17 people live in each sweltering, graffiti-covered house such as the one that Tilmouth pointed out. Almost half the population is under 15, most of the teenagers cannot speak English, infant mortality is four times the national average and life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians. Up to 80 per cent of the prisoners in Northern Territory jails are indigenous and many of them are from remote communities.

The administrators and elders in almost all the remote communities complain of a lack of basic services that are available to other Australians.

Many of the communities look like Third-World refugee camps. There are no banks, high schools, libraries, bitumen roads, child-care centres, restaurants, old people's homes or even privately owned service stations, milk bars or hardware stores - the sort of facilities you would see in a town of similar size elsewhere in Australia.

While thousands of well-paid public servants from federal and NT departments work on indigenous matters in air-conditioned offices in Darwin and Alice Springs, administrators in remote communities complain that their pleas for help mostly go unanswered.

Ngukurr, a community at the edge of Arnhem Land, asked for eight months for help on chronic petrol sniffing among teenagers. One social worker with expertise in the problem arrived for one day.

Wadeye, which has a new, invigorated governing body based on centuries- old traditions, has declared that enough is enough. It is planning to sue the NT Government for years of neglect of its children's education.

According to a report written by Taylor, the community receives less than half the education funding for each child compared with the average for the rest of the Territory.

But remote communities lower the average and Taylor says that a direct comparison between Wadeye and Darwin is likely to be many times worse.

The revelations about the state of life in remote communities come amid signs that a bold experiment by the Howard Government to trial a "whole of government" approach to delivering services to 10 indigenous communities, including Wadeye, is faltering.

In early August, federal Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson was taken aback when she was told during a visit to Wadeye that community elders were close to quitting the second stage of the Council of Australian Governments trial.

Patterson, whose department leads the trial in Wadeye, was not aware that the community was missing help from government departments because it was wrongly believed it was getting all the help it needed from COAG.

A report written in August by Wadeye's Thamarrurr council told COAG that the trial was "placing unsustainable pressure on council members and staff and on council resources". The report suggested that the trial had caused the community to chase its tail. "We have come across our own tracks many times," the report said. "Our people ask ‘how can this be?' "

Of $1.3 million allocated to another COAG trial in the Far-East Kimberley region of Western Australia, only $327,000 was spent on Aboriginal people and programs over two-and-a-half years.

The rest of the money was spent on salaries, travel and other related administrative expenses of the Department of Transport and Regional Services, which administers the program.

Tilmouth described COAG as a Band-Aid solution and a waste of time. "There are so many meetings that they have to hold more meetings to discuss the problem of so many meetings," he said.

As the Howard Government pushes Shared Responsibility Agreements it has negotiated directly with communities such as Wadeye, Aboriginal leaders and administrators in central and northern Australia are questioning how much of federal funds that are sent to the NT Government to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage actually reaches communities.

Norman Fry, the chief executive officer of the Northern Land Council, the peak indigenous organisation in northern Australia, says that spending on indigenous health, housing and other programs by the NT Government remains a "deep, dark secret" that his organisation wants investigated.

He says the truth about Aboriginal funding "must be exposed so that the true causes of dysfunction in remote communities may be addressed".

Northern Land Council chairman John Daly told the National Indigenous Times last month that "every indicator and every report points to serious concerns with the Northern Territory Government's expenditure of monies targeted for Aboriginal disadvantage".

Indigenous leaders point to reports that just over $1.5 billion of the $4 billion of the GST revenue expected to be collected in NSW and Victoria in 2005-06 will go to the NT Government to meet the needs of Territory Aborigines.

They say that $1.5 billion is more than the entire national budget of the now-dismantled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. They point out that while ATSIC's taxpayer funds were spent primarily on work-for-the-dole and infrastructure maintenance programs, the NT Government is responsible for education, health and infrastructure.

Indigenous leaders in the Territory regard education as the most important priority and want to see an exact account of where the money is being spent.

Taylor says that on any school day, only a quarter of children of school age in remote communities actually sit down behind a desk. But the NT Government continues to receive 100 per cent federal funding for these children's education.

The delivery of health services is also one of the main areas of concern. The NT receives about $115 million from the Federal Government for Aboriginal health.

Territory indigenous leaders strongly believe that, following the demise of ATSIC, the Howard Government should establish powerful regional authorities that would receive and distribute Commonwealth funds for disadvantaged Aborigines.

Both the Darwin-based Northern Land Council and the Alice Springsbased Central Land Council have told Canberra that they believe it would be more efficient for federal funding not to be sent first to mainstream government departments and agencies.


Beadman, a former head of the NT Office of Aboriginal Development who has written a report on the future of Aboriginal youth for the Menzies Research Centre, says the establishment of strong regional authorities would be a "better co-ordinating mechanism for state and territory-level funding and federal funding".

Leon Melpi, a respected elder of Wadeye, is fed up with bureaucrats coming to the community with pieces of paper to discuss one solution or another. "They should stay away and do their business and not come back until they have a final solution," he says.

"All I will say is that we want to deal directly with the people who actually make the decisions that affect us. We want to cut out the middle man."

In the meantime, Melpi is planning to build an ecologically friendly motel on his land above a magnificent, white sand beach that few non-indigenous people have ever stepped foot on.

"We just want to be a normal part of Australia with all the services and opportunities that are available to the rest of you," he says.