Posted by John, August 5th, 2010 - under Uncategorised.

Tags: Aborigines, Big business, Election 2010

Aboriginal kids are starving while Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott argue over how much to cut company taxes.

The Northern Territory is holding an enquiry into child protection system. According to The Independent, child protection workers told the Enquiry that ‘children in remote indigenous communities are starving.’

The Independent went on to say:

resources allocated to indigenous communities were “grossly inadequate” and the spectacle of children who were failing to thrive was, to them, familiar. The Darwin-based team covers a vast area and looks after 14,000 people, but has to make do with four welfare workers and four Aboriginal community workers. That level of staffing, combined with a “fly-in, fly-out approach”, allows for “little more than superficial child protection responses”, the inquiry submission said.

In one of the richest countries in the world the submission argued that an international aid style mission (Oxfam, Red Cross) was needed to feed the aboriginal children.

None of this should surprise us. The Northern Territory intervention was never about protecting children. It was and is about stealing aboriginal land and controlling welfare recipients. It is the 21st century version of white paternalism and racism.

After 3 years of Labor in power nothing has changed. The racist intervention continues. The life expectancy gap between aborigines and white Australians remains at almost 20 years. Infant mortality is twice as high for aborigines. They are 8 times more likely to be in prison. Poverty, ill health and unemployment are rife.

Aboriginal society is the Gaza of Australia. We are its invaders and blockaders.

While Labor has no money for better health, education and housing for aborigines, and certainly no vision for a treaty, sovereignty, self determination or even real land rights recognising prior ownership, it has lots of money for big business.

It’s backdown on the Resource Super Profits Tax means it has forgone about $14 billion in revenue, revenue it could have used to address aboriginal disadvantage.

40 percent of big business pays no income tax and of those that do pay tax, most pay much less than the headline 30 percent rate. Rather than cutting their taxes Labor should be making them pay some tax. It could use just some of the $100 billion ruling class and upper middle class tax welfare grants to abolish aboriginal starvation immediately. It won’t.

Instead of helping the victims of genocide the Labor Government is handing billions to the mining companies, those very people who along with agribusiness benefit the most from the theft of aboriginal land and the destruction of their societies.

Labor does this because it rules for the bosses, not the poor, the dispossessed or the working class.

Children starve while billionaires stop a minor tax to protect their mega profits. The bankruptcy of capitalism and of its overarching priority – profit before people – is clear.

The need for a fight against the neoliberal policies of both parties has to me never been clearer.

Lara sums up the situation in the comments below:

Welfare workers – while they may be drawing attention to an issue which should be reported if it’s true – are probably just feathering their own nest. we certainly DO NOT need any sort of NGO like OXFAM or REDCROSS coming anywhere near our camps, communities or kids. I would assert if any child is starving either s/he is not in community – many women and children fled to the bush and to hide from the INTERVENTION (no more stealing of children) – or whole families are going hungry thanks to the ‘basics card’ and other punitive centrelink provisions making access very difficult (on top of the remoteness making the four day round trip from some communities very hard). At the four day gathering in July, at the New Way Summits and other first nation gatherings, and throughout this whole united campaign against the criminal misuse of the Little Children are Sacred Report we have demonstrated over and over again that Aborginal people and our friends can solve our own problems – can manage our own lives and communities. Bringing in more (fat cat or do-gooders alike) welfare types would add to the travesty. More of the solidarity such as the house building and freedom bus, and full funding for Aboriginal Control of Aboriginal Communities. More resources to the sustainable social and economic community development our communities are crying out for.

As aboriginal kids starve and the two major parties do and say nothing, the need for a socialist alternative to Labor has a new urgency.

Both The Independent and the BBC in the UK have run variations on this story. The mainstream media (MSM) in Australia have been silent to date. The lives of aboriginal kids are less important to them than reporting an election campaign of froth and bubble nonsense. This story of starving Aboriginal kids of course should be front and centre of any election campaign. If any MSM want to use my story please do so. Or at least begin to investigate the story and raise it during the election as a real issue.