Australian Politics
Monday, August 01, 2022
Indigenous voice ‘a precondition’ for Closing the Gap: Anthony Albanese
Wotta lotta ... It's fine talk but NOTHING will close the gap. Talk certainly won't. Many governments both State and Federal have tried everything conceivable to equalize black and white living standards but the gaps remain. A bigger police prsesence in Aboriginal communities to protect the women and children would help but that is about all
A voice to parliament is a “precondition” for making Aboriginal communities safer and closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Anthony Albanese says.
After revealing at the weekend his plans for a simple “yes or no” referendum on constitutional enshrinement, the Prime Minister told The Australian a voice would bring an even greater focus to the issues of violence, life expectancy, education and health affecting Indigenous people.
It is the strongest argument Mr Albanese has made to date on the practical need for a voice to improve the wellbeing and safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as critics of the proposal accuse it of being “symbolism.”
One of the nation’s foremost Aboriginal leaders, June Oscar, has backed the Prime Minister and sees the voice to parliament as an issue that women can champion for the sake of their children.
Speaking after the Garma Festival on Sunday, Mr Albanese said he understood concerns that practical outcomes for Aboriginal communities would come second to the voice, but said the referendum was “far from being an either-or proposition.”
“I believe that a voice to parliament and lifting up the status and respect of First Nations communities is a precondition for getting better practical outcomes and closing the gap in all areas,” Mr Albanese told The Australian on Sunday.
“I understand that people have been let down by promises, and that people want more than just symbolism for its own sake.
“There are legitimate concerns about practical reconciliation, and about the need to close the gap whether it be on life expectancy, educational outcomes, living standards, health outcomes – they all need addressing.
“But there will be a greater focus on them when there is a voice to the parliament that has to be listened to.”
A proposed model for the voice overseen by Indigenous academics Marcia Langton and Tom Calma has 24 members, 12 male and 12 female, including at least five people from remote communities.
Dr Oscar said the voice was a chance for Aboriginal women, the backbone of their communities, to “come to the fore”. She hoped non-Indigenous women would help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the yes campaign.
Dr Oscar is a Bunuba woman who led a long battle with bureaucracy to restrict alcohol in the Fitzroy Valley in the far north of Western Australia. She and other Aboriginal women took action in response to alcohol-fuelled violence and record numbers of Aboriginal suicides.
When the last bottle shop in the valley was shut down in 2009, Dr Oscar and other Aboriginal women helped researchers uncover one of the world’s highest rates of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder – permanent brain damage – among local children.
“Everything that we have been able to achieve has been a fight,” Dr Oscar said. “We can’t and we should not have to keep fighting because the fight is exhausting, and it discourages good people from getting involved. It is a struggle to get our issues listened to and acted on – you are dealing with layers and layers of bureaucracy.
“Will the voice provide relief from the fight? If it genuinely engages Aboriginal people in the design of it, I believe it will.”
Dr Oscar said she had more views in common than differences with senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has indicated she may campaign for a no vote in the referendum. The Coalition parliamentarian from Alice Springs has criticised the voice as symbolism and urged Labor to prioritise the reduction of family violence in Aboriginal communities.
“Our starting points might be different but we want the same things,” Dr Oscar said on Sunday.
Opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs Julian Leeser supports an enshrined voice and believes its chances of succeeding are higher if a model is settled before a referendum. He has urged Labor to provide more detail soon.
On Sunday, Mr Albanese said he wanted the design of the voice “to be owned by the whole of parliament … There will be more detail in the discussion that will take place to pass the proposal for a referendum to take place.”
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Gas price squeeze pushes industry to the brink
A NSW manufacturer said paying emergency rates for wholesale gas has crippled its operations as customers were unwilling to cover extra costs amid an ongoing energy crisis.
Magnesium producer Causmag International, which bought gas from collapsed retailer Weston Energy, is paying four times normal rates five weeks after Weston folded and is unable to secure a market offer from its supplier.
The manufacturer, based in the central NSW town of Young, said it had introduced a surcharge to its customers on magnesium oxide products to help cover the cost of paying $44 a gigajoule for its gas after it was forced to find emergency supplies through the retailer of last resort scheme.
However, less than 10 per cent of clients accepted the charge.
“They are able to source alternative products, including those made overseas in China, without such gas surcharges,” Causmag managing director Aditya Jhunjhunwala said.
“Our customers are unable to oblige us when we are faced with a 350 per cent increase in the price of natural gas. Our customer base built over decades of hard work is slowly getting wiped out.”
Fixing the gas market may involve the federal government playing a role in underwriting volumes through LNG imports, according to UBS, while industry subsidies for large manufacturers could also be on the table.
The Causmag chief said he was still hunting for better gas deals.
UBS lifted its 2022 forecast for east coast contract gas prices on Monday by 14 per cent to $10.20 a gigajoule and expects a further jump by a third to $13.50 a gigajoule by 2025 with new sources of gas supply remaining scarce or very expensive via imported LNG.
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New-age thinking is verging on politically correct bullying, writes Peta Credlin. Football teams should play sport rather than play politics, and a war memorial should honour the dead rather than make political statements
With an NRL team insisting on players wearing LGBTQ pride jerseys last Thursday and Melbourne’s plan for the Shrine of Remembrance to be lit up today in rainbow colours – now abandoned – are you getting the impression that getting on with the job is now playing second fiddle to political virtue signalling?
Add in the Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp, who has now made official a push to junk January 26 as the day we celebrate Australia, and it’s hard to not be disappointed in our so-called leaders who would rather strike a pose than meet their responsibilities.
That’s before we even get to Labor’s new president of the Senate announcing that, because she’s an atheist, the parliamentary day should no longer start with the Lord’s Prayer; although naturally, the acknowledgement of country should stay, even though not all of us are indigenous.
Surely it’s the job of a football team to play sport rather than to play politics; and of a war memorial to honour the dead rather than to make political statements; and of a local government to stick to its job of rates, roads and rubbish — and in Melbourne’s case, clean up a grubby city that’s clogged with useless bike paths and empty offices, rather than show off its political correctness?
But the fact that banks love to advertise that they don’t fund coal mines; and that power companies keep advertising how green they’re going to become; and that even the military stress the importance of climate change, and diversity and inclusion, shows how rampant this new-age thinking, verging on politically correct bullying, has become.
Last week even gay veterans told radio stations that they were embarrassed about the politicisation of the Shrine.
And ultra-woke rugby league bosses had to belatedly acknowledge that Manly’s seven Islander players were within their rights to refuse to wear a Pride jersey at odds with their religious or cultural beliefs — which they might have understood if they had bothered to consult them in the first place.
After Melbourne radio host Neil Mitchell said “no disrespect to the gay community but the rainbow flag can be divisive”, Shrine chief executive Dean Lee questioned “whether the gay pride flag and colours continue to be divisive” because the ADF had accepted gay people since the early ’90s.
But, surely, that’s the point?
With no barriers based on sexuality, why consider splashing a memorial to our war dead with a political statement of equality when that equality has long been enshrined in law?
Sadly, the march of identity politics means that it’s no longer enough to be perfectly accepting of minority rights.
Increasingly, militant minorities are now demanding that their right to be recognised trumps others’ rights to have a different view.
As a nation, we have never been more diverse, yet we’re now constantly lectured about the need to embrace diversity.
We’ve never been more equal but we’re incessantly told we need to divide ourselves over race or sexuality in order to achieve “true” equality.
And we’ve never been more tolerant, yet we demand intolerance in order to prove it.
Instead of being proud of the easygoing, decent and welcoming society we self-evidently are, we’re told to despise ourselves on account of so-called phobias that are not borne out by the everyday lived experience of most Australians.
Last week, millions of Australians who voted to support marriage equality looked at a footy club forcing footballers to wear gay pride jerseys, and lighting up war memorials with rainbow colours as a bridge too far, and the entry of identity politics into places where it wasn’t warranted, or welcome.
Along with a federal government wanting to divide us by race with its proposed indigenous Voice to the parliament, despite a record number of individual indigenous voices in it, there’s a yawning gulf between woke Australia and the rest of us.
Sooner or later, a backlash is coming from good and decent people who have had enough of being told what to say, do and think.
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Another statue down? ‘Caucasian male’ statues face cull in Tasmanian premier row
Hobart is poised to tear down the statue of a former premier, while flagging a broader purge, after a report found the city had too many monuments to “Caucasian males”.
The city council has been considering the removal of the large Franklin Square sculpture of William Crowther, a naturalist, surgeon and premier who, in 1869, was accused of severing and stealing the skull from an Aboriginal corpse.
A new council report, to be voted on this week, recommends spending $20,000 to remove the statute to storage, pending finding it another home, and $50,000 on “interpretive elements onsite”.
The report complains there are too many white men memorialised across the city and recommends a new policy be adopted to guide further statue “additions and removals”.
Aboriginal groups welcomed the moves, but some historians expressed concern the council was “opening the floodgates” to revision or erasure of colonial history.
Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania chairman Michael Mansell said removing the Crowther statue was long overdue, but that countenancing later placing it elsewhere was illogical.
“If the reason you’re taking a statue down is because what the person did was so offensive, you couldn’t put it up in any other context because people will remember what that guy stood for,” Mr Mansell said.
He was unaware of any other Hobart statues the Aboriginal community would want removed, but believed further decisions should be based on “balance” and “scale”.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
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