Month: December 2004

Michael Long, the Victorian footballer continues restarts..umm….well at least he walked the last few kilometres into Canberra on his mission to save his Indigenous brothers from themselves..from the government. I note he was smart enough to walk out of Victoria but as I said before there are better things he could do for his people.

Mark Latham makes a brilliantly meaningless statement saying

“Long had done a great service, I think, to put Indigenous issues back on the agenda.”

Typicall Dead Parrot statement. Maybe Mark missed the fact that a mob of drunks at Palm Island preempted Michaels task during the course of his walk/drive to Canberra. They have definitely put Indigenous affairs back on the agenda.

Michael puts other matters on the agenda when he quotes the poem Me, We. No that’s not the title – it’s the whole bloody poem. I’m glad I don’t have an Arts degree or sometime in my life I may well have had to discuss Me,We.

Out west near Goondiwindi some local farmers got ticked off with local youths stealing from them and over re-acted by slipping a rope around one of the thieves neck and dragging him around for a while. The boy, understandably shaken, will hopefully redirect his life to avoid such treatment. The trouble is, the lad has dark skin which has everybody screaming RACISM.

If I caught someone trying to steal my property then race wouldn’t be an issue. It would occur to me though, to train the miscreant to associate pain with theft.

At Palm Island, police are still the bad guys, according to the MSM. The drunken mob that tried to kill them by setting fire to the police station, Court House etc are using the ‘Poor Fellow Me’ defence which strange as it may be, never works for us white fellows.

In 2000, in Darwin, I had a conversation with an ex National Serviceman who since Army days had worked as a builder. For some of his life he was contracted to erect houses for Aborigines in missions in the Territory. I showed interest hoping for an answer to the many problems, but it was not to be.

Once someone had died in the house no one would live in it. The NT Government then tried to relocate the house to another mission. They still woudn’t live in it. They then tried to break the houses up using walls from one with floors etc from another. They still woudn’t live in it knowing that a tribesman had died in a building associated with ‘that wall’

I’m not sure if this still is the case and no way do I knock them for their beliefs, other than to say education will fix it, but it does indicate how far we have to go.

Maybe that should be ‘how far Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson has to go as she discusses ways of addressing the Indigenous housing crisis.

People in the communities have said they want to repair and maintain their own houses and that is admirable.

I just hope it works.