All decent and fair-minded Australians - let alone those who have a conscience and want to see justice done to the Aborigines of the country - ought to be gravely concerned by the actions of the Federal Government in relation to to its response to the recent report on the conditions of and in various settlements in the Northern Territory.
Professor Fran Braun - a professor of public health at Flinders University - lays out, in the clearest terms in an op-ed piece in The Age, her concerns about what the Federal Government has unleashed by its legislation and what the likely outcome will be. The piece certainly makes for depressing reading when one reflects on how the Aboriginal population has been dealt with down the years and what is now going to happen. The word apartheid looks like now appearing in the Oz lexicon.
"This will be a week of shame for all non-indigenous Australians if the legislation planned by the Howard Government is passed by Parliament. This legislation, among other things, will make the welfare system an apartheid one with different rules for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and make payments depend on government-dictated behaviour. It will also take control away from Aboriginal people over who goes on their land."
And:
"For the past two years I have been serving on the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, which was established by the World Health Organisation and has gathered evidence from around the world about the underlying causes of disease and illness.
A consistent message from the evidence is that when you rob people of control over their lives, it is uniformly bad for their health, whether they be British civil servants or Indian women living in slums.
The commission's interim statement, to be published soon, will stress the importance to health of people having control over their lives and meaningful participation in decision-making processes."
Professor Fran Braun - a professor of public health at Flinders University - lays out, in the clearest terms in an op-ed piece in The Age, her concerns about what the Federal Government has unleashed by its legislation and what the likely outcome will be. The piece certainly makes for depressing reading when one reflects on how the Aboriginal population has been dealt with down the years and what is now going to happen. The word apartheid looks like now appearing in the Oz lexicon.
"This will be a week of shame for all non-indigenous Australians if the legislation planned by the Howard Government is passed by Parliament. This legislation, among other things, will make the welfare system an apartheid one with different rules for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and make payments depend on government-dictated behaviour. It will also take control away from Aboriginal people over who goes on their land."
And:
"For the past two years I have been serving on the Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, which was established by the World Health Organisation and has gathered evidence from around the world about the underlying causes of disease and illness.
A consistent message from the evidence is that when you rob people of control over their lives, it is uniformly bad for their health, whether they be British civil servants or Indian women living in slums.
The commission's interim statement, to be published soon, will stress the importance to health of people having control over their lives and meaningful participation in decision-making processes."
Comments