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Indigenous health a casualty of federal budget

By Harry Throssell - posted Monday, 21 May 2007


There were proposals to send children to exclusive schools in the cities but there is a great need for improved basic education in home communities. Community Development Employment Program (work for the dole) is to disappear but real jobs available are “a drop in the ocean”. The government has missed an opportunity to create new infrastructures to break into the cycle of poverty in health, housing, and education, he said.

After a few days to think about it journalistic luminaries Barry Cassidy, ABC; Misha Schubert, The Age; George Megalogenis, The Australian; and Piers Akerman, Daily Telegraph, met for an hour on ABC’s Sunday morning Insiders, with Paul Kelly of The Australian also calling in. They talked about Howard, Costello, Rudd, Zimbabwe, Murdoch, Blair, Keating, refugees and Indigenous people on AWAs in north Queensland. But no mention of Indigenous health.

Oxfam Australia Executive Director Andrew Hewett said the Budget “delivered less than one-tenth of what’s needed to make the slightest impact on the health and well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders”.

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According to The Australian, at Wudapuli, 380km southwest of Darwin, an Aboriginal family who signed up for an eight-bedroomed $420,000 house will receive special government funding. Four families in the scheme will become eligible to buy the properties after two years if their rental record is strong and the children are sent regularly to school. Reporter Patricia Karvelas referred to giving children in remote communities scholarships “to attend the nation’s wealthiest schools”, youth leadership scholarships to attend high-performing schools and university, and the plan to convert CDEP jobs into “real jobs”, in environmental and heritage protection, childcare, night patrols, community care.

“The budget signalled Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough’s focus on remote communities, with urban Aboriginal people being forced to use mainstream services.” But National Indigenous Council member Wesley Aird said much of the $3.5 billion committed to Aborigines in the budget will be wasted because “Indigenous people still want to go to Indigenous organisations”.

Brough said the lack of any real economy in remote communities could be overcome because “this is great cattle country”, there are opportunities in crocodile farming, and market gardens could supply produce to communities. “You can make your own jobs and your own destiny”, he said. The Courier-Mail reported scholarships will be offered to encourage Indigenous people to study dental health.

But it seems no-one has the courage, even when Australian money-bags are overflowing, to create the grand plan for comprehensive economic, social and culturally appropriate structures likely to overcome poor health in a rich country.

Around the world the worst health profiles are in places where “poverty” does not refer to too little cash in the wallet, but describes the total social infrastructure in which people exist day to day. Where drinking water carries disease, waste disposal spreads disease, the diet is inadequate for healthy growth and resistance to infection, housing overcrowded (and often without necessary mosquito nets), there are no means of earning income, little or no education is available, health services non-existent or inaccessible.

These daily conditions all too easily produce violent competition for resources, hopelessness, bewilderment, despair and early death. Such scenes have been described in very moving terms by United Nations special envoy Stephen Lewis in his book Race Against Time - searching for hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

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Overcoming destructive infrastructures requires long-term investment of funds, effort, radical ingenuity, imagination, determination and co-operation. At present in Australia there seems little government interest in this kind of commitment, only little projects here and there, some of them controversial, and judging by experts’ reactions under-funded. Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, could do much better, given the will.

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About the Author

Harry Throssell originally trained in social work in UK, taught at the University of Queensland for a decade in the 1960s and 70s, and since then has worked as a journalist. His blog Journospeak, can be found here.

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