The CIS has no idea (shocking I know)

Sara Hudson, a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies wrote a piece on the ABC supporting the NT intervention and attacking public land title in remote Aboriginal.

It's pretty much what you expect from a CIS shill. "Public bad, private good", corrupt land councils, etc., etc. But one part of her piece stood out to me as someone on remote Aboriginal communities at the moment. Here it is:

"The absence of private property rights has seen remote Indigenous communities become sad slums with no resemblance to prosperous suburbs in the rest of Australia. If it is lucky a community will have one store, there are no cafes, motels, caravan parks, retail shops, hairdressers or the other services that abound in mainstream Australian country towns.

"By romanticising Aboriginal communities and failing to reward individual aspirations, government has consigned them to derelict public housing and the aimlessness and boredom of lives on welfare."

Hudson is dead right here, you know. The number of Aboriginal women living in poverty who come up to me and say: "Gee, I wish there was a hairdresser or a cafe here - that would just solve everything" is numberless, in the sense that no-one says that.

People sometimes want more choice in the commmunity stores (although it has to be said that some stores make a real effort and it's really appreciated). People sometimes want more health resources (although again, many of the clinics are hardworking and pro-active). But they never seem to want hairdressers.

In fact, the only people who seem to want this sort of private business operating in these communities are those who are used to them, like visiting politicians who can't believe they can't get a decent cappuccino. That sounds like hyperbole, but in the early days of the intervention, that's precisely what one pollie said.

Like most capitalist ideologues who probably never actually had to run a business, Hudson doesn't get that some business and economic models don't work everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the North Shore Sydney cafes and hairdressers as far as the eye can see aren't gong to make it in, say, Patjarr, population 30.

They don't even work well in many "mainstream Australian country towns" anymore, because the population and money ssimply isn't there to support it. Having been in Laverton for a week, which is benefiting from the mining boom, I can tell you that that "mainstream Australian country town" can't support hairdressers or cafes either, regardless of how much private land ownership there is.

It also doesn't have much the way of ATMs, the community - oops sorry - town being too small to justify sending much cash there. This means everyone pays for things by card.

But Hudson has been sold the whole "tragedy of the commons" garbage and gosh don't she believe it. It's fun that people who romanticise the destruction of common title always neglect to mention its result - Dickensian London, with child slavery, crime, disease, poverty, etc., etc.

Such would also be the result of any similar moves in Australia. The ALP's "Hub Towns" policy, which would starve smaller Aboriginal communities in the NT of funds and "encourage" people to move into the larger towns, is one such modern form of the British Enclosure Act. The rise in Aboriginal people in Alice Springs has led to a rise in homeless Aboriginal people and the social problems that stem from that. But no one seems to put two and two together and realise that these small "unviable" communities are much healthier than urban decay.

I guess we now know the definition of "viable" - able to produce a decent soy latte for a visiting diginitary. Sorry Laverton, no infrastructure for you!

It's been four years since the intervention was launched and some in the media, like the SMH, are touting its successes. The SMH said the other day in its editorial that even though the intervention was racist and there were some errors, it saved women and children.

The SMH neglected to mention how many, because most stats show rises in domestic violence reports after the intervention and rises in malnutrition - but hey, this is an editorial, not a spreadsheet Poindexter!

It reminded me of what John Pilger quotes often, that the struggle for justice is often a struggle against forgetting.

To believe the SMH editorial, we have to forget the lies about child pedophilia rings. We have to forget that an assistant to a federal politican pretended to be a Mutitjulu-based youth worker, and  that his long list of incidents that supposedly happened in one community, were actually spread out accross the whole of the NT. We have to forget that the first Basics Cards were just Coles and Woolies gift cards - despite, as Hudson will attest - there being no Coles or Woolies in remote Aboriginal communities.

We have to forget that Howard - why? intimidation? Brough's love of men in uniform? Howard's fear of the darkies? - sent the military in to implement the policy. We have to forget that this was a blatant election ploy from a man who always did blatant election ploys.

We have to forget the racism of a self-admitted racist policy.

We have to pretend, like the ALP likes to, that this is just  a minor technocratic shift to the welfare system, along with some inadequate rises in child protection funding.

Sure it's paternalistic, but you can't have carrots without sticks, right? Or, in this case, dainty underfed, sick looking carrots without chainsaws, but that's not important! What is important is that this policy that has no evidence of actually working is expensive and that means that we can claim it as funding for Closing the Gap.

And isn't it more important that we can say we're spending more than ever before on that, even if it isn't closing any single social indicator?

The comments section of Hudson's article was full of the usual internet arseholery but Marlene Hodder, a tireless Aboriginal rights activist from Alice Springs, also commented. Here's what she said:

"In my experience some Aboriginal communities had been pleading for police for decades and were ignored. Others didn't want or need them but now have them. It didn't need an imposition of racist laws to improve people's lives. Nor did it need takeover of land or seizure of assets etc. And working closely with people living under income management (mainly women) it is almost universally resented and detested.

"Having sat with Centrelink clients trying to gain exemption from this demeaning regime when they became entitled to apply, I have witnessed Centrelink's tactics in pushing to keep people on income management at all cost. The staff had obviously been trained to work on the basis that Aboriginal people are incapable of managing their money and it was important to try and keep them on the scheme at all cost, even to the extent of bribing them with a $250 bonus every six months. Interpreters were often not used.

"I worked with two women,one fluent in several languages and her mother who speaks little English. Both had no idea how they came to be still income managed when they so desperately wanted to be 'free'. They had apparently agreed to stay on it 'over the phone'. In all the years of working with prescribed area people I have only met two people who liked income management. The vast amount of money being spent ($4,000 per person) income managing people could be better spent on lifting them out of poverty or on up-to-date banking services in communities."

I couldn't have said it better.

The problems in remote Aboriginal Australia are difficult and ongoing. In some of the more remote places, colonisation happened as recently as just 50 years ago and, for some, as late as 1984. The damage that colonisation does takes generations to even begin to heal, even if everything were done right and with respect and with the communities rather than against them.

Anyone who tells you we just need to "get tough" on the symptoms of this damage is just choosing to avoid thinking about the problem. It's a non solution that pretends to be simple but usually just means an embarrassing back-down later and more damage done.

Meanwhile, the nice folks at the CIS will continue to peddle their market fundamentalism from their nice cafes and while ordering champagne at the hairdressers and wonder what the poor people are doing today.

And now, music. In honour of Hudson's First World solutions to Fourth World problems, I bring to you MC Frontalot's "First World Problems".

Now while our capitalism is in a minor kerfuffle,

you have to hustle. Before the fates come, reshuffle.

Rustle up another couple grievances and air 'em.

You can laugh about it later (maybe needed while despairing).

For the moment though, you ordered half caf, didn't get it;

there was no TV set when you jetted; internet resetted

itself just as I was in the middle

of tournament play, and so I suffered from transmittal

interruption. Completely ruined my day.

MC Frontalot's a jackass, that's all I'm trying to say.

People buy CDs in these days of disaster,

so poor me: I have to be a professional rapper.