HOWARD DISCOVERS A WAY

After nearly 11 years in office, a few months out from his hardest election ever, Howard discovers the privations being suffered by Original Australians. See the article from the A.B.C. here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/06/21/1958258.htm

Mr Howard has announced (COMPULSORY) medical examinations for all NT Indigenous children under 16 and widespread bans on alcohol sales on Aboriginal land for six months. (TO GET PAST THE ELECTION)
The Commonwealth will ban x-rated pornography (ONLY LEGAL IN CANBERRA) in the affected areas and boost the policing presence.
The Government will also link welfare to school attendance. (FOR ALL AUSTRALIANS) It will quarantine half of the welfare payments to parents for food and other essentials.

Under the guise of concern for the desperate plight of the aboriginals, Howard is implementing sweeping ad hoc changes to welfare laws. Once in place, Australia will look even MORE like USA with an army of homeless people forced to live by crime. This is NOT the compassionate Australia I want. The full transcript of Howards proposal is here:

http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070621-Howard-declares-national-emergency-the-full-transcript.html

Richard Farmer wrote to Crikey:

With one short press conference he removed discussion of things like the misuse of official residences for Liberal Party fund-raising from the radio and television news. Dirt units and dirty tricks involving Liberal pollsters and anti-Labor advertising campaigns were relegated from the newspaper headlines. Now the news is about a Prime Minister who is actually dealing with a serious problem.

At his initial press conference, in the Parliament shortly afterwards and on various television and radio programs since, Mr Howard was the very model of a serious and concerned Prime Minister. He looked and sounded like a man who really believes that it is duty to solve the problems of Aboriginal disadvantage that two centuries of white rulers before him have found insoluble. Yet it is the very lack of detail in the plans he announced that creates the impression that his current electoral situation was a major factor in his decision to act so decisively.

A final solution may not be what Mr Howard thinks he needs. His advantage from this issue will come from looking Prime Ministerial for the next six months. Some other leader than he will be in charge when the judgment is made years from now on whether the initiatives of 2007 really worked or whether they amounted to nothing more than another lot of white man’s words.

The starting point..................................................

The starting point might be to recognise that the
problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It
begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition
that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took
the traditional lands and smashed the traditional
way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol.
We committed the murders. We took the children
from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and
exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And
our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the
most basic human response and enter into their hearts
and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this
were done to me?