Re: [recoznet2] missed articles

[tim dunlop]

Thanks to Graham for this response.  Seems to me that this issue (as raised by Noel Pearson) should be occupying the list, more so than arguments about who said what to whom in a chance meeting and what they might have meant.  Which is not to say the discussion re Karyn's bio is not important.  Incidentally, as a non-Aboriginal person, I related to Lance's response and would like to thank him for it.  I just can't accept Irene's assertion that "you might be 6th generation here but you are in your place aboriginal somewhere else."  Maybe I misunderstood what she meant.  I lived overseas for a number years, including England, and the one thing I found out was that I wasn't "of" those places, no matter what my genes were made of.  I was "of" Australia, and that "ofness" is no doubt quite different to that of First People's but it is still real.  But maybe Irene thinks there shouldn't be any non-Aboriginal people on the list either, expressing a point of view.

 

Anyway, I hope we get some comments on the Pearson piece because it seems to me he has really taken a risk here.  But I guess we all do, everytime we open our mouths.

 

Tim

 

Rosemary Neill's articles seem to express a similar sentiment to a report in this morning's CM about a paper that Noel Pearson has written.- Our Right to Take Responsibility.

Full text follows from the CM's web site:  

  Pearson hits welfare "poison"

  30apr99
  PROMINENT Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has appealed to governments to help
  break the welfare dependency of indigenous people so they can live more healthy,
  dignified lives.

  Speaking in Cairns this week, Mr Pearson said welfare was "a poison" that had turned
  many Aboriginal people into "drunken parasites" and was destroying family and
  community life.

  He also challenged Aborigi nal leaders to cease disempowering their own people
  through continually depicting them as "victims".

  But most of all, Mr Pearson wants Aboriginal people to accept that, along with the
  rights comes responsibility – to themselves, their wives, husbands, children, elders
  and the general community.

  "The whole Aboriginal policy debate has been about rights – human rights, legal
  rights, land rights, individual rights against government and so on," he said.

  "There has been no discussion about our responsibility. There is a defensiveness."

  Mr Pearson has written a 42-page discussion paper for Cape York Aboriginal leaders,
  titled Our Right to Take Responsibility.

  "We have to get rid of the welfare system from Aboriginal community governance in
  Cape York Peninsula, and get rid of the welfare mentality that has taken over our
  people," the document says.

  It states the two key problems affecting Aboriginal people are racism and welfare
  dependency.

  "It is time we analysed our condition as a people without being defeated and
  paralysed by the racial issues. This is not to say we should forget about racism, or
  pretend that it doesn't exist," Mr Pearson wrote.

  "By addressing the concrete social and economic circumstances of our welfare
  dependency, we can find the power necessary to prevail against racism."

  Mr Pearson advocates a changed system in which money coming into communities –
  there are 13 on the Cape which are home for about 12,000 indigenous people – is
  controlled by "a new interface" between the federal and state governments and
  ATSIC.

  He said the new administration needed to be "holistic and de-welfared" and he is
  seeking support for Cape York to be the pilot model for the changed system.

  "Welfare is a resource that is laced with poison and the poison present is the money-
  for-nothing principle," Mr Pearson said.

  "In the 1950s and 60s, our people worked hard in the hot sun for red-necked
  pastoralists, and people placed value on every penny earned. It is only the welfare
  system that has devalued money – because it is not earned."

  Mr Pearson said the "welfare poison" was progressively breaking down Aboriginal
  society – a society that put tremendous pressure on community members to "provide
  resources to a parasitic drink-and-gamble coterie".

  "Since the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people have believed their right earned was
  the right to drink," he said. "What about the responsibility to your children? The
  rights that are acknowledged are the rights of people to party, drink, use money in
  their own destruction. No talk of rights of children or old people.

  "And why has there been this collapse in responsibility? In my view, it is related to
  the nature of the economy under which Aboriginal people are forced to exist – the
  poisonous welfare economy.

  "Aboriginal people should participate in the real economy – where you don't get
  money for nothing, you have to work. Aboriginal people lived at the lowest, most
  miserable end of the market economy for most of colonial history and the time has
  come to change all that. Welfare is a parasitic exploiter.

  "The Government is paying these people to sit around the canteen to drink and
  destroy the prospects of their children – destroy society. The madness of that system
  has to stop."