Month: November 2003

To counter the sagging spirits of my last post I point you to a voice of reason in the Aborigine debate. Gerhardt Pearson is executive director of the Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation and has a piece in this mornings Australian

Straight to the core of the problem.

Two issues are vital to every family and every household: managing money and education for the children. Restoring social order and confronting grog and drugs are a prerequisite to our plans in those two areas.

It was a mistake not to draw alcohol out of the long list of “underlying issues” and elevate it to the highest priority after the royal commission. And it’s unfortunate that criminologist Don Weatherburn’s points were not prominent in the debate at an early stage: the high rate of offending is the cause of the high rate of indigenous incarceration, not bias and discrimination. And diverting indigenous people away from the prison system is not an efficient way of reducing incarceration if it only adds a few rungs at the bottom of the ladder that leads to prison.

He leads the debate away from left wing ‘victim mentality’ and heads upstream to defining the real problem in the first step towards finding a solution……..the high rate of offending is the cause of the high rate of indigenous incarceration, not bias and discrimination. How radical….How true.

He then goes on to confirm the opinion of millions of reasonable Australians. Education is the basis for the break-out.

The next challenge is to provide seven years of quality and uninterrupted primary education. Then we will send our children to high-quality, high-expectation boarding schools. Our vision is for our children to be bicultural and bilingual or multilingual. We want them to embark on what we call orbits, where they see Cape York communities as their home base, and they orbit to Cairns or Sydney or New York in pursuit of their education, employment and careers.

Good God! He also suggests work ethics are important as well as reading.

But it is amazing what my illiterate mother and Bible-reading father could achieve. They made sure we children went to school and learned to work, and they constantly told us about the importance of reading.

Truly, his is the voice of reason and yet we still have the misguided screaming for land rights. The land rights of the last four generations of my bloodline (and the following one, I might add) have been based on hard work, saving and scrimping to educate kids and to buy land.

Hard work, education and a saving program.

The rock on which land rights and nations are built.

A feel-good story to lift your sagging spirits. Reported in todays Australian

As a 10-year-old station hand, George Musgrave led government men across his Cape York ancestral lands, pointing out the waterholes and good grazing spots that would serve generations of white graziers on Lakefield Station.

Twenty years after Lakefield Station was declared a national park, the banks of the lagoon are a deeply pockmarked quagmire from wild pigs and cattle. The ground is barren from overgrazing.

The Qld Parks and Wildlife Environment Protection Agency web site claim that Lakefield’s traditional owners, the Lama Lama, Kuku Warra, Kuku Yamithi and Kuku Thaypan, are closely involved in managing the park and have been for some time.

The legacy of Georges folly is not that the graziers ruined the land but that it has been ruined by inaction and poor management procedures since the land was resumed 20 years ago.

The Parks and Wildlife have been managing the park with help from Kuku Thaypan and others over the last 20 years so what have they been doing? If George is trully stressed he could have done something to save his sacred land over those years but what has he done?.

In a word – nothing.

For those of you who don’t travel outside your southern triangle comfort zone I must point out that the feel-good reports you read in the press about national parks and indigenous input are often a long way from the truth.

I went through Lakefield two years ago on the way to Cape York and for three sleeps I wondered where the park rangers were – didn’t see one. Saw a lot of signs of pigs, both bovine and city based non thinking 4 wheel drivers, lots of obnoxious weeds, a couple of crocs but very little else. Camping fees paid into a post boxes to stop tourists bothering the undermanned Ranger Station. The Parks and Wildlife people have a fairly good labour-free money collection system but you’d have to drive around a lot to find any signs of that money going back into facilities.

Victor Steffenson, the architect of the traditional knowledge website, says Low Lakes is a perfect example of the synergies that exist between traditional land management and modern conservation agendas.

Synergies! Give me a break. Traditional land management consisted mostly of burning. Not a bad thing in itself but meaningless by itself and the fires in the ACT, NSW and Victoria are proof that burning/backburning is not on the agenda while Greenies hold any sway in land management.

When it was a grazing property the managers were obliged to keep on top of the obnxoious weeds and cull the pigs as often as they could but now the land has been reclaimed none of these land management procedures are employed.

Parks and Wildlife seem more into good business practices than good land management and every state government knows that every station resumed is another Greenie vote and if you think the Kuku Thaya chaps are going to clean up the place under the leadership of George Musgrave then think again. Work isn’t in the 5 year plan.

More sit-down money is.