Club Troppo

The NT Environment Centre is threatening to pull out of all Northern Territory Government committees unless it gets a funding increase.

Oh noes!

The centre’s Charles Roche says the Government has rejected a request for $185,000 in annual untied funding.

The centre currently receives $65,000 in untied funding.

So for the NT Government, the alternatives are:

1. Triple the funding of an organisation which essentially gainsays everything you do and indirectly contributes to the development of the Green Party in the NT, or
2. Let them destroy themselves in a hissy fit that will save you time, money and frustration; upset nobody at all, and deny them access to advance notice of internal goings-on.

Hmm. I wonder which will the NT Government will jump.

Source.

Last week the mainstream media devoted tens of thousands of words to “analysing” the effects of the Brough/Howard NT Indigenous Intervention.

Today the NT Department of Justice published its March quarter 2008 crime statistics (also see my previous post on NT crime figures over the last 6 years). What effect has the Intervention had?  A very slight reduction in violent crime but nothing to celebrate given the expenditure of well over a billion dollars by the Federal government.  Assaults are down by 14% Territory-wide from the previous quarter (which hadn’t shown any significant reduction) and by 3% from the March quarter last year.  Sexual assaults are down by 12% from the previous quarter and by 10% from the March quarter last year.

It’s hardly surprising given that, despite all the ballyhoo and reasonably massive expenditure of federal funds, the actual number of additional police deployed to remote communities under the Intervention has been quite modest (see this useful Crikey evaluation):

THE PROMISE: “Law and order will be a central focus of the measures I’ve announced. There will be an immediate increase in policing levels. They’re manifestly inadequate. The existing laws, even with their shortcomings, are not being adequately enforced. We’ll be asking each state police service to provide up to 10 officers, who will be sworn as police in the Northern Territory.” — John Howard, press conference, June 21, 2007.

THE DELIVERY: The leaked Situation Reports claim night patrols are operating in all 73 prescribed communities.

A total of 55 communities have still received no extra police resources. 51 additional police have been deployed across just 18 communities, comprising 33 interstate police and 18 from the Northern Territory.

Only 18 of 73 remote communities have received any additional policing resources at all, so you wouldn’t really expect huge reductions in crime rates.  Moreover, many of the interstate police have already returned home or are about to do so. None of this is meant as a criticism of the intensity of governments’ efforts, in one sense anyway.  The problem is a huge one and not susceptible of any “quick fix” solution, although that’s not the impression Brough and Howard tried to create.

(Continued)

I’ve long regarded writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper as a rather sad and futile exercise.  Far better to post on your own blog, where at least you’re only inflicting your opinions on genuinely consenting adults with similar obsessions. 

However, I couldn’t resist sending in the one that follows over the fold to that great journal of crocodilian record the NT News.  It deals with NT crime rates and related issues. Whether they’ll publish it is another matter, it’s rather longer than the norm for the genre, and any substantial editing would render the exercise even more pointless  than it inherently is anyway:

(Continued)

ABC news story this afternoon:

Northern Territory Police believe a woman found dead at Mindil Beach last night may have been assaulted in the hours before her death.

Police received a report at 11pm that a woman was lying on the beach unconscious and bleeding from the mouth.

Police have charged a 41-year-old woman and a 40-year-old man with manslaughter.

Detective acting senior sergeant Isobel Cummins says there was fighting in the area yesterday afternoon.

“We’re trying to ascertain if she was possibly injured earlier in the evening and has been left at the scene for some time or perhaps wasn’t deceased at the time that the assault immediately occurred.

“The post mortem results are still to be conducted but at this time it seems she may have suffered some head injuries.”

The 5pm radio news story went on to reassure listeners that the crime scene tapes would be cleared away in time for this evening’s Mindil Markets. …

During the last federal election I spent a lot of time writing up my thoughts and experiences on a blog. It got a few thousand visitors during the course of the six weeks and a few people told me that they voted on the strength of it.

One topic I wrote about is what I called the Tyranny of the Faraways — the dominance of the politics of Sydney and Melbourne in the affairs of other parts of the Commonwealth. I had a good old bash of lefties, as one does, but I’ve also come to see that the Tyranny of the Faraways is not restricted to those of a leftish persuasion.

Recently the most radical wing of the young fogies — the Australian Liberal Students Federation — put out this press release. Tim Andrews is a very smart fellow with a bright future, but I think he got it wrong, wrong, wrong on this point.

Predictably enough it’s blown up into a row between those who supported the apology and those who did not. On the contra side a lot of usual suspects have been trotted out — that nobody was really stolen, that it was meaningless symbolism (a variant of the view I have held for some time), that we can’t apologise for past generations, that it was the states at fault etc etc. Which was all quite beside the point that an apology costs nothing, makes many people feel better and lets the debate move forward from light and fury about whether or not to apologise.

In any case, this was the core of my own response to the Faraway Fogies:

Those of you who live in Sydney or Melbourne and suchlike, who have not actually been to those hells on earth out in the bush; with all due respect, you are talking out of your hats. Left and Right, liberal and conservative. Probably you speak out of well-meaning hats, out of very passionate hats, very clever hats, out of hats with lots of highschool & varsity debating experience; but you are talking out of hats nonetheless. Kindly desist.

Not a very tactful remark, I admit, but one born of my years of arguing with people of the sort who talk about aboriginal people a lot but have met very few.

It is a view and attitude I developed when I first came to Sydney in 2000. That was the year that “sorry” really took off. It angered me at the time that the symbol allowed the entire debate to be stalled for years and years. The symbol attracted 250,000 people to a walk across a bridge; the reality of child abuse and violence did not. That rankles.

But of course it’s not all symbolism — people genuinely suffered — yet the denial of the symbolic act has held up the reality. Now that it is a done deal we can try and move on with the third-world conditions of remote aboriginal settlements. We can attack infant mortality, life expectancy, malnutrition, treatable disease, STDs, violence, rape and social dysfunction of every kind. Hair-splitters, talking heads, symbolists and Faraway fiddlers of every persuasion are not welcome. There’s real work to do.

In part 1 of this post I attempted to outline some of the main principles that should underpin good policy in the indigenous affairs area, drawing especially on the work of the Productivity Commission and indigenous academics Toni Bauman and Marcia Langton.

In this second part, I intend focusing on the major individual elements of the Brough/Howard NT intervention (”the Intervention”).  It’s a relevant and even important exercise because Kevin Rudd promised during the election to continue the Intervention, albeit with a couple of specific exceptions and a general effectiveness review after 12 months.  Moreover, the new Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin has foreshadowed extending some of the Intervention measures to the States, given that the massive problems in indigenous communities, with alcohol-fuelled violence and child sexual abuse and more generally, are every bit as bad in WA, SA and Queensland as they are in the Northern Territory. The Territory was simply a convenient target because of the Howard government’s much broader powers to intervene in a Commonwealth territory with few constitutional constraints.

One of the most most striking things about the Intervention is the evident split between measures clearly and directly targetted at child sexual abuse (the pretext for the Intervention) and a broader “social engineering” agenda having little immediate connection with that professed objective but equally clearly aimed at achieving a fundamental reshaping of Aboriginal society in the direction of “mainstreaming”.  I will deal with each in turn.

(Continued)

A few years ago, some members of the ALP’s Left faction were battling to change the entrenched practice whereby its ministerial nominees were always allocated the federal aboriginal affairs and immigration portfolios.  One anonymous Left Caucus member referred to these portfolios as the “poisoned chalice” while another reckoned being awarded them was equivalent to being appointed the “toilet cleaner on the Titanic”.

Whether the Left lost that particular internal battle or whether wiser heads within the faction prevailed I don’t know, but in the new Rudd government portfolio allocation announced last week the convention was maintained.  Jenny Macklin and Senator Chris Evans, both members of the Left, scored aboriginal affairs and immigration respectively.

A brief look at the factional allocation of immigration and aboriginal affairs might even be relevant to a present day analysis.  In the early days of the Hawke government, there was no convention of allocating these portfolios to the Left.  The Right’s Clyde Holding had Aboriginal Affairs until 1988, and a passing parade of Right faction movers and shakers drew the short straw of Immigration: Chris Hurford, Susan Ryan, Mick Young, Clyde Holding and Robert Ray.

It wasn’t until 1988 that Hawke gave the Left’s Gerry Hand a classic hospital pass by allocating him both portfolios.  They’ve stayed with the Left ever since. (Strangely enough, Howard intially took a similar approach, allocating these portfolios to “wets” like John Herron, Amanda Vanstone and Phillip Ruddock.  Ruddock hastily jettisoned his “wet” pretensions, of course, and later Howard appointees Brough and Andrews were anything but “wet”, at least in ideological terms).

In aboriginal affairs, the changing of factional allocation resulted in Gerry Hand’s disastrous application of “self-determination” principles, when he decided to combine the old DAA and ADC to form ATSIC under a popularly elected indigenous body which became a byword for waste, incompetence, nepotism and downright corruption until it was eventually abolished by Howard with Labor support in 2005.  Otherwise, the administration of indigenous affairs continued largely unaltered, with ministers paying lip service to the rhetoric of self-determination and a welfarist “rights culture” approach of aggrieved entitlement, but without any corresponding significant increase in real funding, conferral of real substantive rights or any real attempt to tackle entrenched and increasing social problems in indigenous communities.

The picture in immigration, however, was rather different. 

(Continued)

Bryan “Ozpolitics” Palmer on the state of play with counting in doubtful seats as at 8:24 this morning:

The ABC Computer now has Robertson on the doubtful list (previously a Labor gain) after the pre-poll votes went in the Coalition’s favour 53.3 to 46.7. It also has Solomon on the doubtful list after pre-poll votes broke 53.6 to 46.4 in the Coalition’s favour.

Of the doubtful seats on the ABC computer, the Coalition is now ahead in Bowman, Dickson, La Trobe, Macarthur, McEwan, and Swan. Labor is ahead in Herbert, Robertson and Solomon.

Whereas the ABC computer has nine doubtful seats, the AEC only has seven. The AEC is not listing McEwan (Coalition retain) or Solomon (Labor gain) as doubtful. In McEwen, the pre-poll votes broke 55 to 45 in the Coalition’s favour.

The ABC Computer is back to predicting 86 seats for Labor, down from its Monday high of 88. It is possible that the Labor win might end up being as low as 83 seats.

Bryan notes that the AEC was not listing Solomon (essentially Darwin and Palmerston) as a doubtful seat.  Well it is now.  As a result of the counting today of 1500 postal votes from overseas-serving military personnel, ALP candidate Damian Hale’s 2PP lead over CLP incumbent Dave Tollner has shrunk to just 428 votes. 

Moreover, there could be as many as 5888 outstanding declaration votes still to count (all but 279 of them being prepoll rather than postal votes).  If we apply the pre-poll vote percentages Bryan mentions above as the actual ones in counting to date (53.3 to 46.7), then on my calculation Damian Hale ends up winning by 39 votes!!!!  However, if we do a finer-grained calculation and apply the higher percentage of 60% (which must certainly have been achieved by the postals counted today) to the remaining 279 postal votes, and the lower 53.3% actual figure to date to the remaining (maximum number) 5609 pre-poll votes, Tollner ends up winning by just 1 vote!!!!  Tollner first won the seat by 88 votes in 2001.

PS Mind you I might be misinterpreting the figures.  The AEC page for outstanding declaration votes in Solomon shows 7979 pre-poll “envelopes issued”, 5506 “envelopes received” and 2370 pre-poll ballot papers counted so far.  But why are there so many more “envelopes” issued than returned?  I always thought that pre-poll votes were ones cast before election day at designated pre-polling stations (usually AEC offices).  If that’s right, why is there a discrepancy between the number of envelopes issued and received?  If they’re lodged on the spot and not sent through the post, you’d expect the numbers issued and received to coincide.  Are there any polling/scrutineering experts out there who can enlighten me?

Update (Thursday 5:21pm) - Hale’s lead in Solomon is down to just 262 votes after today’s counting.  500-odd pre-polls and 300-odd postals still to count, with a maximum of 1000 more postals still to arrive.  If just about all those postals end up arriving, the postal votes alone could conceivably eliminate Hale’s lead completely if they split 60/40, so it’s still very much a lineball result, a handful of votes either way will decide it.

I don’t have much to add to Rex’s overall post-election rant, except to suggest that this is in many respects the result that might well have occurred in 2004 had John Howard’s dishonest interest rate scare not been so successful and had Mark Latham not been a victim of his own erratic, bizarre, overtly aggressive personality.  The interest rate scare was never going to work again in the face of 6 recent rate rises, and Kevin07 exhibited a machine-like ability to stay on-message and project a soothingly conservative and professional image (even if none of that endeared him to me personally).

Instead I want to focus on the Northern territory seat of Solomon where I live.  It remains in the “undecided” column after last night’s count and will almost certainly remain that way for the next fortnight until postal, pre-poll and absentee votes are counted.  The swing to Labor looks to be substantially less than the national average of around 5.7%.  According to the AEC website, the Solomon swing to the ALP currently sits at 3.8% after counting all but the prison and hospital mobile booths (which are likely to increase the Labor swing very slightly - most patients and prisoners are Aboriginal and most of them vote Labor). The ALP has 50.99% of the 2PP vote and CLP 49.01%.   Labor’s Damian Hale is currently on 20,941 votes after preference distribution, with CLP sitting member Dave Tollner on 20,129.  That’s a lead of just 812 votes.

However, a story in this morning’s NT News asserts that : “By the end of the night, the ALP calculated a victory by 1246 votes“.   I’m not too sure how they reach that figure; possibly by adding in the scrutineers’ counts for the hospital and prison booths. 

(Continued)

On Friday I decided to stand for the House of Representatives in the seat of Solomon.

It’s not an easy choice. I am a student: during the election period I have three assignments due and four exams to sit. I am in Western Australia, Solomon covers Darwin and its surrounds. I am standing for the Liberty & Democracy Party, which is a small voice in Australian politics.

I quite like the incumbent, David Tollner. I worked for him for a year. But David is John Howard’s man in Darwin. I think that Darwin, the NT and the country would be better served by the LDP’s policies, not the Coalition’s.

Ken thinks I’m crazy to do this. So do my family. They might be right, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do. It’s too easy to sit on the sidelines and say how it ought to be done, rather than to get up and try and do it. There is no better time to push for a free, just and prosperous nation than now.

Soon I will have a website at chester4solomon.com, but in the meantime if you want to help out, please email me: jacques@chester.id.au

Update: The chester4solomon site is now active.

Update 2: It looks like I will be campaigning in Solomon after all.

Former Territory Labor Opposition Leader and Keating government Minister Bob Collins has died in Darwin at the age of 61. Whether from the bowel cancer he had suffered over the last couple of years or from some other cause is yet to be revealed.

I knew Bob Collins very well in the 1980s and early 90s, and had a high regard for his abilities as a political leader, although even for a politician he had a remarkable propensity to treat the truth as an infinitely flexible commodity. He was a towering figure in the decimated Territory ALP of those days, holding the party together sometimes almost single-handedly in the wake of successive crushing electoral defeats in the early 80s, and exercising a morale-boosting Keating-like parliamentary dominance over his numerically overwhelmingly powerful CLP opponents.

Later, after entering Federal Parliament as a Senator for the NT, having being rolled as local Opposition Leader by a somewhat unsavoury alliance between the Left and Centre Left with the connivance of a couple of members of his own Right faction, Collins became the first NT representative to achieve federal Cabinet rank as Minister for Transport and Communications in the Keating government. His record once achieving that high office, however, is rather more equivocal. The general opinion is that his stewardship of Australia’s conversion to the digital age was somewhere between mediocre and disastrous, as this article of uncertain provenance explains. In fairness, it may well be that Collins’ decisions were dictated by pressure from Keating, Richo and others to bend over backwards to avoid antagonising the Packer and Murdoch interests even at the risk of incoherent policy.

In retirement, Collins was commissioned by the NT CLP government in 1999 to inquire into and report on indigenous education. His report, titled Learning Lessons: An independent review of Indigenous education in the Northern Territory , continues in large part to guide the development of education in remote Territory communities.

Bob Collins’ advice and guidance were also undoubtedly significant factors in the unexpected victory of Clare Martin’s Labor team at the 2001 Territory election.

It’s impossible, however, to write an obituary of Bob Collins without acknowledging the elephant in the room: the sickening child sexual abuse charges he faced at his death. I have no knowledge of their truth or otherwise, although I can certainly make some fairly educated guesses. Do those events erase or negate a record of impressive achievements in public life? I guess it depends on the observer. I certainly know that I feel much sorrier for Bob’s family, especially his son Robbie, and for the Aboriginal men he allegedly abused as children back in Maningrida in the 1970s, than for Bob’s own tragically tarnished reputation. At least they will all now be spared the trauma of what would inevitably have been a series of very unsavoury criminal trials.

For me, Bob Collins’ character is succinctly illustrated by a dealing I had with him in the 1980s, when I acted as his legal adviser. Bob battled severe weight problems throughout his adult life. I’ve also occasionally engaged in a Battle of the Bulge myself, though to a much less extreme extent. Around 1988 I lost a lot of weight and got extremely fit. “How did you do it?” asked Bob. “I just can’t seem to lose any weight at all, what with travelling all the time and eating hotel and airline food, and Jenny Craig is a waste of time”. I told him that I’d found a range of pre-packaged frozen diet meals called Findus Lean Cuisine to be very effective. Bob said he’d try them. To encourage him, I bought 10 packs and dropped them off at his office. I saw his wife Rosemary a few days later and enquired how he’d gone with the Lean Cuisines. “Oh fine,” she replied. “He loved them. He ate all ten in a single sitting.”

The Chinatown area of Cavenagh Street, Darwin just before World War II

(This is the second in an intended series exploring Australian federalism (the first part is here). In this part I test the proposals of those who think we would be best advised to abolish the existing States and rely on a stronger central government with small regional governments or local councils. I do so by examining the real life experiences with such a system in one of the few parts of Australia that doesn’t enjoy the protection of the checks and balances provided by the federal system, namely the Northern Territory).

When Darwin’s residents began returning home in 1945 at the end of World War II, they looked forward to repairing and rebuilding their shattered homes and businesses and getting on with disrupted lives. They had been evacuated from the town a little over 3 years earlier, as Japanese forces threatened to bomb and invade after the fall of Singapore. In fact, Darwin was bombed 64 times in 1942 and 1943, although the initial bombing on 19 February 1942 was by far the worst, more intense than the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the same Japanese carrier fleet a few weeks earlier. Hence by 1945 much of the town was destroyed.

However, little did Darwin’s people know it, but they were about to face an enemy far more pitiless than the Japanese: the Canberra bureaucracy. Some public service bright spark had decided that Darwin was inappropriately located on a narrow peninsula jutting out into a huge harbour, and that its destruction and temporary depopulation provided an ideal opportunity to shift it 20 kilometres or so south around the present day suburb of Berrimah. Rather than bothering to consult with the locals (sound familiar?), the federal government simply enacted legislation (the Darwin Land Acquisition Act 1945) compulsorily acquiring all land and buildings in the settled areas of the town (the CBD, Stuart Park, Parap and Fannie Bay)!!

Returning residents found they had no title at all to their homes and businesses, and so they couldn’t safely repair or rebuild them. Some were granted short term revocable licences permitting them to occupy their own (former) properties, but many were forced simply to squat illegally in their ruined homes or in one of the many abandoned Nissen huts left behind by the troops who had occupied Darwin over the previous 3 years.

The Bank of NSW (now Westpac) finally lost patience with the inertia of the federal bureaucracy, and simply re-occupied and repaired its bombed-out premises at the corner of Smith and Bennett Streets without official permission, daring the authorities to do something about it. They didn’t, so more and more people began following suit.

(Continued)

That graph is from the 2001 census. One of the problems in Australian politics is that everything is viewed from the national level. From Imagining Australia:

If our Indigenous people comprised one tenth rather than one fiftieth of the population there would be widespread outrage about Indigenous disadvantage.

Yet indigenous people in the NT should be well catered for democratically as they are a significant minority making up over a quarter of the population. Unsurprisingly NT politics is very conscience of indigenous issues.

So why are the feds digging in the NT? Looks like a local issue to me.

I’ve posted over the fold a draft of a speech I’m delivering at a seminar being held tomorrow on indigenous policy in the wake of the recent Howard-Brough intervention in the Northern Territory.

In part it’s a more reflective version of the angry post I wrote here at Troppo on the day the policy was announced exactly a month ago, although it also contains some additional issues and observations.

I would be interested in any constructive feedback readers might have to offer.

(Continued)

A friend of mine - Stephen Rimmer has proposed an Aboriginal Rights and Responsibilities Commission. If you’re wondering what that might be, you get a clue from the fact that Stephen is an old hand at the Productivity Commission (having spent a great deal of his time in regulation review). The proposal is for a body to report to COAG whose charter is to try to render the success or otherwise of Aboriginal programs more transparent by measuring their effects and reporting on them publicly. I also heard the PC Chairman Gary Banks make some sensible sounding comments on Aboriginal disadvantage and the piecemeal programs that had been found to be effective (like linking access to organised sport to school attendance).

In any event, on sending this piece to me I asked Stephen if he would be happy for me to post it here and he agreed. It is over the fold and the organisation chart to which the piece refers can be downloaded here. (Continued)