The hypocrisy of Abbott and Shorten in the constitutional “recognition” for Aborigines
On July 1, just days before the Kirribilli gathering, the Abbott government cut off funding for the Aboriginal Medical Service at Mount Druitt in western Sydney, cutting adrift its 11,000 active patients and 96 doctors, nurses and other staff.
Since the 2014 federal budget, the Abbott government has stripped $600 million in funding from indigenous community organisations, including health, legal and language support services. It has also driven, via funding cuts, moves to shut down hundreds of remote settlements in Western Australia and elsewhere, forcing their residents off traditional lands.
Despite the hype, no concrete proposals emerged from Monday’s gathering
Australia: The political fraud of constitutional “recognition” for Aborigines, World Socialist Website By Mike Head 8 July 2015 A hand-picked group of 40 indigenous officials and academics joined Prime Minister Tony Abbott and opposition Labor Party leader Bill Shorten in Sydney on Monday for what was billed by the establishment media as an “historic summit” to discuss a proposed referendum to “recognise” indigenous people in the Australian Constitution.
The contrived event, staged at Kirribilli on Sydney Harbour, one of the city’s most affluent neighbourhoods, exposed the widening social and economic gulf between these privileged layers and the vast majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who live in poverty-stricken working class suburbs, rural towns and remote settlements…….
The very conception of “recognising” indigenous people in the constitution is a reactionary fraud. The Australian Constitution itself is a British colonial-era instrument that upholds capitalist property rights but contains no bill of rights or any other protection of basic social or democratic rights, not even the right to vote. It was adopted in 1901 to legitimise and enforce the establishment of Australian capitalism, at the expense of the emergent working class and its most vulnerable members, the dispossessed and decimated Aboriginal population……..
On July 1, just days before the Kirribilli gathering, the Abbott government cut off funding for the Aboriginal Medical Service at Mount Druitt in western Sydney, cutting adrift its 11,000 active patients and 96 doctors, nurses and other staff. The over-worked medical service had tried to meet the many health needs of Australia’s largest single Aboriginal community—the more than 32,000 indigenous people living throughout the working class suburbs of western Sydney.
This closure was just one of many social crimes being committed. Since the 2014 federal budget, the Abbott government has stripped $600 million in funding from indigenous community organisations, including health, legal and language support services. It has also driven, via funding cuts, moves to shut down hundreds of remote settlements in Western Australia and elsewhere, forcing their residents off traditional lands.
Under the government’s Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), all spending on Aboriginal programs has been reallocated to grants to organisations that contract to deliver “outcomes” that will cut people off welfare and coerce them into low-paid work, including at the hands of indigenous business operators, especially in the mining, pastoral and tourism industries……..
Those selected to attend included the CEOs of land councils that run extensive regional businesses, highly-paid government advisers and prominent university professors.
Among them were prime ministerial adviser and former Labor Party president Warren Mundine, Cape York program director Noel Pearson and Professor Marcia Langton. These three have been the most vociferous advocates for years of “quarantining” or cutting off so-called “passive welfare” to indigenous people, facilitating projects by mining conglomerates on “native title” land in return for the establishment of investment funds for Aboriginal business owners, and punitive interventions in Aboriginal communities in the name of combating alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and other endemic social problems…….
Despite the hype, no concrete proposals emerged from Monday’s gathering. …….https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/08/reco-j08.html
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