Undeniably there is a national crisis in Indigenous welfare. It’s taken years and numerous reports and calls for action from Aboriginal leaders for governments to act. Now there is the political will to invest in the sorts of basic services other Australians take for granted; primary health care, education, housing and health.
In the last few months a new phrase has entered the Australian vernacular. Three words that when used together have come to symbolise our nation’s greatest challenge. A new lexicon, they have been used extensively by media commentators, celebrities, campaigners, politicians and perhaps most important of all, the Australian public.
On Sunday, Oxfam International announced their intention to pull out of Gereida, the largest camp in Darfur and the home of 130 000 displaced people.
Climate change is arguably the gravest threat ever faced by humanity. Some say more of a threat to global peace and security than terrorism and diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
‘The rich are only tolerable so long as their gains can be held to bear some relation to roughly what they have contributed to society’, so Robert J. Samuleson of The Washington Post recently paraphrased English economist John Maynard Keynes.
In the last week intense media attention has focused on the challenge Australia faces to close the gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders and other Australians. It’s hard to be believe but impossible to deny that Indigenous Australia live nearly 20-years less than the rest of us.
On a typically steamy day in Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, the Australian manager of one of the country’s gold mines said, ‘We don’t have a social responsibility program because we didn’t think we’d be operating more than two years.’ Ten years after mining began and with plans to expand production, the Australian-owned mine still has no intention of ending the practice of dumping more than 140,000 tonnes of toxic waste such as lead and mercury into the local river system each and every year. In fact, the company has no plans whatsoever to minimise the social and environmental impacts of its operations. Meanwhile, downstream, out of sight and out of mind, vulnerable people who rely on the river for drinking, fishing and washing as well as land cultivation find themselves at the pointy end of the senseless and selfish actions of a multibillion dollar Australian mining operation. The company however cannot plead ignorance. Neither is it oblivious to the harm it’s caused ‘ local people have complained bitterly on several occasions about the irreversible environmental and social damage caused by the mine.
Forty-years ago 90 per cent of Australia voted to give Aboriginal Australians equal rights ‘ equal rights as citizens of Australia to help redress the ‘White Australia’ policy as well as to right wrongs experienced by Indigenous Australians. It was heralded as a watershed moment in Australian history ‘ 200 years after the first Britains settled and claimed the land for themselves, Indigenous Australians were to be recognised as equals.