Antinuclear

many Aboriginal people in the NT remain unconvinced of the elegance, and legitimacy of Mundine’s manifesto.

Maurie Ryan, Chair of the NT’s Central Land Council questions the LNP’s anointment of Mundine as head of the Indigenous Advisory Council.

The members of the [Central] Land Council find it unacceptable that policy affecting them may be dictated by somebody who doesn’t understand the issues affecting them. Unfortunately Mr Mundine seems to be unaware of the significant changes made in recent years and he needs to update his knowledge of the current situation in the Northern Territory 

Warren Mundine’s indigenous manifesto – ‘elegance and simplicity’ or more bullshit?  Crikey BOB GOSFORD | SEP 04, 2013  “……If Tony Abbott wins the election on this Saturday, Warren Mundine will most likely become the most powerful Aboriginal person in the country. He will lead the Abbott’s Indigenous Advisory Council, an as yet vague entity that will be unelected and, in the minds of many, an unrepresentative body providing Abbott with high-level policy advice in his “Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs” morph.

The little we do know of  the Indigenous Advisory Council is that it will be led by Mundine, from the New South Wales right, who will apparently be joined by fellow conservatives Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson. Abbott has said that the Council will include a “reasonable spread of urban and bush and regional, male and female” representatives. Little is known about what the Council will do, who it will report to (other than Abbott on a regular basis) and what relationships will be cast between it and the Federal indigenous affairs bureaucracy……..

Abbott set the tone with his views of the true worth of Aboriginal land as an economic, as well as spiritual and cultural asset.

I think it is pretty clear that we need to try to ensure that indigenous land is an economic asset and not simply a spiritual and cultural asset. That is what I will be working towards bringing about.

Later that evening Mundine spelt out his manifesto for the future of indigenous affairs under an Abbott government in a speech, entitled “Shooting an Elephant: Four Giant Steps” to a closed corporate session at Garma. In his speech Mundine identified the elephant as having four legs – Governance, Land Ownership, Social Stability and Openness.

Over the next few days I’ll look at two other legs of Mundine’s elephant – Land Ownership and Openness – because they are areas that I’m most familiar with and also because these are the areas where I think Mundine makes his weakest case. Today I’ll look at Mundine’s vision for the future of governance in Aboriginal communities……..

Mundine presented no facts to support his broad assertions nor does he detail the nature and role of the Indigenous governance bodies he derides.

In particular he doesn’t identify what he means by a “statutory Indigenous governance bod[y]……. Mundine reaches far into the realms of fantasy and folly. Is he really suggesting that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small ‘governance bodies’ be established to undertake this broad sweep of functions?

Mundine provides no evidence that the creation of these hundreds of new legal entities would be in any way more efficient – or effective – than existing arrangements……..

How will Mundine and the LNP achieve this apparently elegant solution? That will be the subject of my next piece.

In the meantime, many Aboriginal people in the NT remain unconvinced of the elegance, and legitimacy of Mundine’s manifesto.

Maurie Ryan, Chair of the NT’s Central Land Council questions the LNP’s anointment of Mundine as head of the Indigenous Advisory Council.

The members of the [Central] Land Council find it unacceptable that policy affecting them may be dictated by somebody who doesn’t understand the issues affecting them. Unfortunately Mr Mundine seems to be unaware of the significant changes made in recent years and he needs to update his knowledge of the current situation in the Northern Territory … Mr. Mundine’s four fundamental principles of governance, land ownership, social stability and openness provide nothing new. These are issues we have all been working on for a long time, not in city board rooms but out on the ground in the bush.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2013/09/04/warren-mundines-indigenous-manifesto-elegance-and-simplicity-or-more-bullshit/