|
Frank
|
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has laid out her vision for an “advancement movement” in Indigenous affairs, in which welfare-dependent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do the jobs in their communities currently done by fly-in, fly-out workers, and “meet the standards other Australians are expected to meet”.
The opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman also calls for an end to an implied acceptance of cultural payback, arranged marriage, apportioning tragedies and mishaps to sorcery and other practices that are “anathema to modern culture”. As her home base of Alice Springs enters its second curfew this year to curb youth violence, and the nation struggles to find a new policy path after the failure of the voice to parliament referendum, Senator Nampijinpa Price has declared there is a “second way” to close the gap.
“We know where the gap is – it is 20 per cent of the 3 per cent,” the Northern Territory senator writes in an essay on history commissioned for The Australian’s 60th Anniversary Collector’s Edition magazine, published on Saturday.
“It’s remote Indigenous Australians, many of whom do not have English as a first language. We already know that we can either fix or exacerbate that by school attendance.
“There should be no fly-in, fly-out workers in communities with Indigenous Australians on welfare.”
Senator Price – a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from Alice Springs – has set out her arguments for an “advancement movement” and her hope for “real reconciliation and integration”, as she works on the Indigenous affairs policy she and Peter Dutton will take to the next election.
She describes the advancement movement as “a second way”.
“We can continue along the separatist road that sees Indigenous Australians as irrevocably damaged by settlement and wants to keep Aboriginal culture stuck in time like a museum piece,” Senator Nampijinpa Price writes.
“Traditional culture is romanticised by those who do not live it, while reinvention of culture has become an industry in the name of reconciliation for the purpose of political influence.
“This (separatist) way forward leaves negative parts of Indigenous culture alone to grow and fester. Things like violent cultural payback, arranged marriage and apportioning tragedies and mishaps to sorcery, all of which are anathema to modern culture.
“This is a view that lowers standards for Indigenous Australians … This has been the strategy of decades of government agencies and academic activists, and yet they fail to draw the obvious connection between this approach and the failure to make much ground on Closing the Gap.”
Senator Nampijinpa Price has never supported a truth-telling commission as proposed by the Greens in parliament last week. Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney on Tuesday said the government would look at the nature of the proposal.
Sources have told The Australian that Labor will block any judicial model that would in any way replicate the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa. Instead, it has been consulting communities that prefer truth-telling projects potentially overseen by a central body. The Albanese government has left this work to states.
“My personal view is that it needs to be more of a community-led initiative that brings people together,” Ms Burney told ABC on Tuesday.
Senator Nampijinpa Price expresses her concern about truth-telling because, as she tells The Australian in a video interview to be published with her essay, it has been “driven by this notion that somehow modern non-Indigenous Australians have to compensate for what occurred to Aboriginal people in our country’s history”.
|
Forum
Pages: 
