Sexual Abuse

After the initial claims of an “epidemic” of child sex abuse, the reality has been somewhat less dramatic. There have been 3 convictions, and on the high profile claims about Mutijulu,

“The Northern Territory’s police commissioner has revealed that no evidence has been found to substantiate allegations of sexual abuse in the communities of Mutijulu or Nhulunbuy.”

Another enlightening snippet that makes me wonder about the naivety of some people. We have the NT Police Commissioner wondering how 13 and 14 yr olds know about sex,

“But predominantly I’m talking around 12, 13, 14 years of age. Now they’ve learned that somehow. That seems to be a lot of the work of the child abuse task force and we probably see more of that than we see of adult-child sex abuse.”

And,

“We know of instances where sexualised behaviour has occurred in young kids, under the age of 10 years,” he said.”

Here’s a hint - overcrowded living conditions, where a family to a bedroom is fairly common. The worst case I know of is 40+ people living in one Wadeye (Pt Keats) house. Anyway, when it’s a family to a bedroom, children at a very young age are exposed to sexual activity- that of their parents.

Safe Houses

In theory a fine idea and one of the many that sprang forth from the NTER. There are now 12 remote communities with safe houses that are to serve as either a shelter for women or a “cooling off” space for men. This ABC News report makes clear the kind of uncertainty surrounding what appears to be a fairly straight-forward plan,

Malcolm Wall, the chief executive of the Yuendumu community, says he does not think men will choose to go to the safe house voluntarily.

“I think that’s probably where there’s going to be an issue because night patrol isn’t going to be able to grab these people and restrain them, maybe police will be able to use these facilities, I really don’t know,” he said.

Not that the idea is anything new. And if past lessons were learned, a good deal more thought may have gone into it, than just throwing down a bunch of shipping containers.

Once upon a time, in a remote community of Arnhem Land there was a domestic violence problem (and still is). Surely a ‘safe house’ would be just the trick, just like they have down south? Safe House was made. Safe House was very safe - no one ever went in it.

Some bright spark thought that they should talk to the locals and find out why, despite a real domestic violence problem, no one ever used the safe house. What they found, was that people viewed their social and family contacts, supports and networks as an indicator of competence in daily life. If you had a problem, it was these networks that you leant on, making use of the obligations that others owe you. The only reason that someone would go to the safe house would be if they lacked these networks of ties and obligations. In would be an admission of social and familial destitution.

More Housing

The planned bipartisan Indigenous Housing Policy Commission is bipartisan no more. Federal Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has declined to be the co-chair of the Commission after one (only one) of his nominees for the Commission - Mal Brough – was rejected. The reason given was that the Govt. didn’t want politicians appointed to the Commission.

I’ve an even better reason for finding Brough entirely unsuitable – his conflict of interest. It’s wasn’t enough for him to walk out of his Indigenous Ministerial role straight into one of private business man looking to earn in a quid in indigenous housing projects, he now wants to simultaneously serve on what will be the pre-eminent policy making body for indigenous housing!

Clue meter reading - zero.

Update

The Intervention hasn’t been front page news for some time (besides the odd hiccup), but things have been quietly ticking over behind the natural disasters and scandals of the headlines.

The Intervention is in 3 phases, and we are currently in all three. Phase 1, the child health checks, are still going on, for reasons which remain unclear to me. Phase 2, the health ‘blitzes’, particularly for ENT surgery, are happening, and the planning for Phase 3, the permanent enhancement of health services, is underway.

Permits
The abolition of permits to enter Aboriginal Land has itself been abolished.

Welfare Quarantining
Has hit it’s first, very much expected, hurdle, and is being revised. Having found that the store cards were being traded for cash, the Govt has announced that it will phase out the store cards and introduce debit cards.

Housing
Slow but steady progress in being made. As pat of the intervention, house ‘surveys’ are currently being conducted. The surveys are identifying urgent work that is needed to be done to ensure that houses are safe to live in.
The NT and Federal Govt’s have come to some basic understandings on funding and objectives for housing. There is a new program, the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) which has a $647 m budget for the next 3 years. He plan is to build 750 new homes, demolish and replace 250 and refurbish a further 2500. The stated aim is to reduce the average occupancy rate to 2 people per bedroom. Not 2 per house, 2 per bedroom. It’s currently a bit higher than that. This isn’t enough funding to achieve the stated aim, so one objective of the program is to achieve significant reductions in building costs. Other than through economies of scale it doesn’t say how it will achieve this. By my reckoning, the cost savings will need to be in the region of 50%, which is highly unlikely.

Health Services
Phase 2, providing the follow-up services identified as required in Phase 1, is facing workforce problems. Dentists are hard to come by. In one central Arnhem Land community where Phase 2 services are meant to begin in a few weeks, the doctor shortage is such that the doctors from the Clinic have been approached to help out. Kind of defeats the purpose.
Looking to Phase 3, the boosting of Primary Health Care services across the NT, the Federal Govt has just called for tenders to establish the Remote Health Corps Agency. This will be the organisation/group charged with the weighty responsibility of finding all the extra health staff required to expand services. The unwise idea of looking for short-term appointees (fancy a holiday in the desert?) still seems to be a core strategy. $100 million has been allocated for these services over the next 2 years and the NT Govt, DoHA and AMSANT are working on basic criteria to ensure a conssitent and workable approach to distributing these services across the NT.

The Intervention has certainly changed significantly since June last year. Some of the pointless aspects have been jettisoned though a combination of common sense and a change of government, while some significant funding commitments, that were originally excluded, are now coming front and centre.

Can You Believe This?

I was over on the Tiwi Islands a few weeks back and people told me that Mal Brough had been in town (Nguiu). I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, while I had no doubt that it was true, I had no idea what he was doing there.

 

However, today the ABC has confirmed the reports and revealed what the ex-Minister for Indigenous Affairs is up to these days.

I almost choked on this bit,

Mr Clancy [Tiwi Land Council] says Mal Brough is set to profit from the project [housing], but says Tiwi Islanders will also benefit.

 

Sure, an ex-pollie has gotta make a crust, but this is unethical. Some countries have business appointment laws that prevent ex-Govt ministers and officials moving from their publicly funded positions into private industry that is directly related to their areas of former responsibility.  How do we know that Mal wasn’t positioning himself (and Govt policy) for this as he saw defeat for the Coalition looming on the horizon?  He probably didn’t, but we don’t know.  What is clear is that he is about to profit from laws and policies that he, as the Minister, had a role in formulating and implementing only 3 months ago.  There has been plenty of opposition to the idea of David Hicks profiting from his recent past, but as a matter of ethics and public policy, this is a far more serious matter.

 

We need similar business appointment laws here, ones that cover former-Ministers as well as public servants.

Update.

Here’s very brief wrap-up of events over the Christmas - New Year period. 

As predicted, the ineffectual NIC was allowed to fade into history. 

COAG announced an extra $49.3 million for alcohol treatment and addiction services, which has been welcomed  by NACCHO , along with commitments to reduce the gap in live expectancy and educational outcomes. Some have noted that this will require significant funding to succeed.  

The Rudd Govt will apologise to the Stolen Generation but will not offer financial compensation. Indigenous Territory MLA, Marion Scrymgour, publicly backed this stance. 

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, announced that the welfare quarantining would continue to roll out across the Territory, but that the abolition of the permit system on ALRA lands would be reversed.  Though it isn’t clear how this will be achieved as the legislative mechanisms but in place by the previous Federal Govt grind on towards the automatic abolition of the permit system, due to occur on February 19.  Marion Scrymgour has backed an elective system of permits, which is sensible.  This is what makes the intervention so bizarre.  Under the ARLA, as it was, communities always had the ability to waive the need for permits. 

The mostly useless child health checks will recommence in a few weeks time in Top End communities.  How the necessary follow up will be delivered remains the subject of much speculation.

The Three C’s

Consultation, co-operation, commitment.

The new Federal Govt is showing early signs of understanding all three.

Kevin Rudd and Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, are in Darwin today meeting with the both the NT Govt and Indigenous leaders from across the NT.

This is Rudds commitment, which his Govt will need to be kept to,

We want to ensure that our overall objective of closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous life expectancy, Indigenous and non-Indigenous education attainments is done on a cooperative and consultative basis, so that we achieve progress together….

Sanity. Some might say that’s it only words, but the meetings occurring today are what had been missing from the Brough/Howard approach.

 

 

What Now?

The demise of the Coalition Government will have an impact on the nature of the NT intervention. For the better, in my, and many others, opinion.

Based on Labor’s public comments and commitments we can expect the following;

• CDEP will continue and increase in scope much to the relief of many community organisations
• the permit system will not be revoked for remote communities

What other alterations may occur are unknown, but here are my best guesses,

• the compulsory acquisition of communities for 5 years will be abandoned
• government business managers will be phased out
• the quarantining of welfare payments will no longer apply to everyone but will be implemented on a case-by-case basis with a right to appeal.
• SBS will not be banned in the NT.

Generally in Indigenous affairs, we can expect;

• a new elected national Indigenous body (bye-bye to the Govt appointed and ineffectual NIC)
• a more consultative and considered approachbut also an outcome orientated approach
• a shake-up at the Office of Indigenous Policy Co-ordination (which can’t) and the Indigenous Co-ordination Centres (which don’t).

Footnote:

And what an appropriate place for the former Minister, Mal Brough. His time as Minister was meteoric – short and spectacular. While his loss in his own electorate of Longman almost certainly had nothing to do with the NTER, as Chris Graham (Editor of NIT) noted at Crikey (thanks Club Troppo ), there was a voter assessment of the intervention in the seat of Lingiari which covers all the affected communities. It seems that remote communities weren’t as enthusiastic for the intervention as Mr Brough was. There weren’t big changes, but most of the swings in remote polling booths were towards rather than away from Labor. One interesting result was from Oenpelli in Western Arnhem land, where the CLP managed an amazing 14 votes out of the 699 cast. The Greens beat them with 21.

Health

The Federal intervention in the NT continues, albeit without much significant coverage, Four Corners being a notable exception. 

My own involvement is in the field of health and the current state of play can be summarised in a single word - confused. 

The much heralded child health checks (CHC) continue, though seem to be shutting down for a Christmas break. The scheduled checks will continue into next year and should be finished by June at the latest, given that this is the date that the intervention is meant to enter Phase 3. As I’ve said before, the CHCs have been a very expensive and time consuming circus, the prime outcome being lots of pieces of paper.  The CHC teams have been sending out referrals to NT Health Dept staff, like myself, telling us that child A, whom I already know, has condition X and requires services. Gee thanks. 

Phase 2 of the intervention is meant to be about actually trying to provide some of the services that are lacking.  Now that will be useful, but the intervention circus wasn’t required to figure out what was lacking.  There will be a focus on ENT and dental services in this next phase, sometime in the first half of 2008.  But, in a testament to brilliant planning that is the NTER, it isn’t quite clear exactly how and when this will occur.  To help figure some this out, the Federal Govt has put together the succinctly named, Northern Territory Emergency Response Health Expert Panel, which has meet several times to try to clarify some of the practical details, such as which health professionals are required, how they will be found, employed, deployed and supported. That this is still being talked about is some measure of the making-it-up-as-we-go-along approach.   

Fortunately there are some good people and organisations on the Panel, it’s just a matter of whether their sage advice will be acted on.  If Brough and Howard had been serious about this intervention, the Panel would have been formed before, not after, it began.  And the Panel would have advised against the ill-thought out CHCs. 

Fences are Evil.

So says Mal Brough.

He was in Darwin yesterday and had this comment to make about a fence at the Aboriginal community of Bagot, located right in the heart of Darwin,

It is an appalling circumstance when a government of any persuasion puts a fence up between one part of its community and another and lets what goes on behind the fence hide behind it.

According to Brough, problems are being allowed to “fester” behind this awful fence. It must be a veritable Berlin Wall in Darwin the way Brough is talking.

In case you don’t have the pleasure of living in Darwin, here is the offending structure,

A 2 m high section of corrugated metal cladding, interspersed with roughly equal parts of this,

1.5 m high pool fencing, which, lest my eyes deceive me, seems rather transparent.

The new fence replaced a dilapidated falling down cyclone fence a few year ago. One the reasons it was replaced was for safety, as the previous fence allowed people to cross the road at any point, which they did, often at night. Bagot sits right on Bagot Rd, a 6 lane stretch that is one of the busiest in Darwin. I’ve had personal experience of almost running someone over as they made the dash across.

Mad Mal promises to tear the new fence down. Apparently Aboriginal people are not allowed to have a fence and a bit of nice shubbery.

But just a kilometer away on the same stretch of busy road is the relatively new housing development of Parap Grove and the fence they erected in response to the traffic noise.

 

2.5m of pure concrete unbroken for about 250m. What are they trying to hide?