Antinuclear

Tony Abbott’s policies and statements belie his claim to be “a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs”

Out there was white-hot anger that $500m+ had been cut from funding to Indigenous programs in Abbott’s first budget, without broad consultation. Those voices of protest didn’t get a hearing.

Abbott, perhaps invoking the now nostalgic colonial concept of terra nullius, declared Sydney was “nothing but bush” when the Brits arrived

Abbott’s homogeneous approach to Indigenous affairs will not erase the stain on Australia’s soul, Guardian, Paul Daley, 27 Nov 14 
Abbott’s pronouncements on Aboriginal Australia coincide with his waning political will to amend the constitution so it meaningfully recognises Indigenous Australians   On the way to government, Tony Abbott vowed he’d be a special prime minister for Indigenous Australians. He said:

It is my hope that I could be, not just a prime minister, but a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs. The first, I imagine, that we have ever had……….

But what has happened to Abbott’s journey, which has included his demonstrated commitment to working each year in a remote Indigenous community? His trip to Arnhem Land this year bore more hallmarks of an election-style PR exercise…….

For a start, in Indigenous Australia – whose disparate views are reflected broadly outside, if not within, the mainstream, media – Abbott is regarded as having selected an inordinately narrow source of advice, his notable seers being Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine………

a great many Indigenous people disagree with him [Pearson]and believe his close alignment with Abbott is a dramatic, personally risky, strategic error……..

Gary Foley, whose life-long ongoing struggle for equality is revered in Indigenous Australia, has described Pearson as a “latter-day black Gordon Gecko preaching ‘greed is good’”, while he views Mundine, to whom he is related, as “the white sheep of our family”.

Only the bigoted would demand Indigenous politics to be homogeneous, of course, when there are so many divergent black views and approaches. And that is the point here: Abbott takes his advice from such a narrow quarter that attention – public service, thinktank, media and national – is also, inevitably, tightly focused upon the same space.

Out there was white-hot anger that $500m+ had been cut from funding to Indigenous programs in Abbott’s first budget, without broad consultation. Those voices of protest didn’t get a hearing.

And now to Abbott’s recent string of absurd pronouncements on continental Australian, Indigenous and colonial history, beginning, in July, with this:

Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment. I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land.

Notwithstanding that Australia had been, um, settled for 60,000 years, it’s quite a feat of dissembling to substitute occupation with investment……….

And in just this past fortnight, while hosting British prime minister David Cameron, Abbott, perhaps invoking the now nostalgic colonial concept of terra nullius, declared Sydney was “nothing but bush” when the Brits arrived………http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/abbotts-homogenous-approach-to-indigenous-affairs-will-not-erase-the-stain-on-australias-soul

November 29, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized