Inconvenient Truth in Aboriginal Affairs

 

Photo credit: SkyNews

Because she's worried about intelligent Australians seeing through the intent of the so-called Voice to Parliament, Ms Langton claims there is no evidence that previous advisory bodies have failed.

I worked with such a body for 15 years; the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and its successor the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services department (the latter lasted 12 months while ATSIC was abandoned).

On this one, rare occasion, I agree with Ms Langton. I don't believe ATSIC/ATSIS failed, however, I don't run the country and the people who funded ATSIC were convinced it was a failure. So much so, they shut it down.

ATSIC did a lot of good in a very challenging, politically unpopular, and highly visible portfolio. It built houses, airfields, sheds and other installations to enable business, provided a community employment program, and was engaged in a very wide range of programs all intended to improve the lives of indigenous Australians. Some improvement occurred.

True, there was a lot of waste. Houses it built were destroyed weeks after being finished; money was used for purposes that were not approved. A rich harvest of community managers managed to feed at the money trough. However, it could hardly have been called a failure.

If it did fail, it was because of the clients who didn't make the best use of the programs available. ATSIC funded businesses that eventually stalled because clients couldn't get themselves to work. Literacy and numeracy problems didn't help when it come to management, organisational and accounting issues.

ATSIC was the only opportunity indigenous people had through their Regional Council/Regional Planning process to provide bottom-up advice to governments on what was needed at grassroots level. To that extent, it certainly wasn't a failure.

Maybe the problem was that the organisation expected generations of challenges to be changed within a few years. An impossible task for any government.

Sadly, Ms Langton is pushing the Voice and doesn't want to associate past failure with the very high probability that any Voice will fail. It will.

The Voice will divide Australia, disrupt our community stability, degrade our government performance and will only benefit a handful of mostly wealthy, white Aborigines who will make a fortune and achieve nothing of any value to the many remote and regional Aboriginal Australians who need help.

I won't vote for a change to our Constitution and I explain why here:

#Robinoz

PS: ATSIC's budget for most years was about one billion dollars. We fund the Left-wing, biased, ABC for more than that and look what we get.