On the danger of song lyrics and election shenanigans

The NSW government has refused to scrap a controversial songbook with a song apologising to Aborigines, despite complaints it's political propaganda. Hamish East, the father of a pupil at Kiama Public School, on the state's south coast, approached the school principal after learning his son Brian was being taught the Sorry Song by West Australian composer Kerry Fletcher. Mr East told News Ltd he was not opposed to reconciliation but the sorry issue was "emotive" and political, and should not be forced down the throat of a child. He is reported as saying that the song is a "political stunt" which "confused" his son.

The only lyrics I can find on the web are the following:

If we can say sorry to the people from this land,
Sing, sing loud,
Break through the silence,
sing across this land.

They Cry, they cry,
Their children were stolen,
They still wonder why.

Break through the silence
Sing sorry across this land
We cry, we cry, their children were stolen.

Mmm. I would have thought the history of that song was fairly undisputed, and was not overly politicised. Kids were taken from their parents, we still feel the ramifications of that today, and we should be sorry for that part of our history.

Kevin Rudd has disagreed with the NSW government. He's indicated that he sees the song as inappropriate for schools, saying: "I think we're starting to look at too much political correctness on those sorts of questions. We've got to watch out for political correctness going mad."

"Political correctness gone mad." That phrase always sets off alarm bells for me!

Mr Rudd says that children should be educated about the facts of Australia's history, including respecting indigenous culture, but left to make up their own minds about what's right and wrong.

With all due respect to Mr Rudd, I reckon that irrespective of whether Aussie kids are taught that indigenous kids were "stolen" or "taken", they're going to find that pretty...uh, emotive. When I was in primary school I was absolutely terrified that my parents would get divorced, because it felt like everyone else's parents would. I suspect that a lot of kids are going to find the idea that children were "taken" from their parents pretty distressing...even confusing.

I'm far from convinced that the Sorry Song is any more "emotive" or biased than the lyrics of our national anthem: . Perhaps we should cease teaching that to kids, in case it denies them the ability to make up their own minds about history.

When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd,
To trace wide oceans o'er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England's flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
"Brittannia rules the wave!"
In joyful strains then let us sing
"Advance Australia fair!"

Or how about the final verse:

Shou'd foreign foe e'er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We'll rouse to arms like sires of yore
To guard our native strand;
Brittannia then shall surely know,
Beyond wide ocean's roll,
Her sons in fair Australia's land
Still keep a British soul.
In joyful strains the let us sing
"Advance Australia fair!"

I'm not sure that singing about Aussies having a "British soul" and England ruling the waves is allowing kids much scope to "make up their own minds" about our history.

While on the surface this appears to be a relatively insignificant spat over the appropriateness of singing a song in a primary school, at a deeper level it reveals the extent to which Australian history continues to be whitewashed (and I use that term deliberately). The vulnerability and capacity of individuals and communities is rooted in their histories. History shapes our social structures, our sense of self, our emotional resilience.

I don't expect 8 year olds to fully understand this part of Australian history - it's hard for me, a young adult, to get my head around it! I don't believe that 8 year olds of Anglo descent should be plagued by guilt for what their grandparents or great-parents did. However the reality is that many 8 year olds of indigenous descent are painfully aware of this history. They might know that their father has only just met some of his siblings, or they might know that their grandmother never knew her mother because she was taken from her family and forced to work, very hard, for white people in a place very far away from her own community. Or they might know that their father doesn't know where he comes from, and that he saw very bad things in the mission he grew up on. Where do these kids fit into our education system? For how long will we continue to ignore their voices, their everyday experiences? For how long will their experiences be ignored because their stories are "too difficult" for other 8 year olds?

The Circuit: the social, cultural and political significance of great TV

I was chatting with friends the other night about the state of TV. We recalled some of the great Australian tv shows of our childhood and teenage years (Janus, Mercury, Brides of Christ, Wild Side, Seachange, MDA...) and bemoaned the way that reality tv seems to have taken over the world.

Now I'm excited about an Aussie drama for the first time in a long time. I've been watching the advertisements on SBS and thinking that The Circuit looks like it could be a cracker. The Age has a write-up today which has whet my appetite further. It not only looks like some great TV, but its production raises questions about the role and status of indigenous people in broader Australian society and culture, and the extent to which the arts can be utilised for capacity-building and empowerment:

"With a cast, crew and writing and production team comprising about 95 per cent Aboriginal people, the stories of The Circuit are bound to resonate with many of them. The non-Aboriginal actors and producers say that working on this Aboriginal driven drama, a first for Australian television, has opened their eyes.

Co-producer Ross Hutchens, whose wife is Aboriginal, says: "Just seeing this baggage that indigenous people carry for their whole community . . . There's the amount of death that the indigenous cast and crew have dealt with . . . there's been an actor friend in Melbourne who passed away; it's just constant. I'll be dealing with some on-set issue and the director's helping me and at the same time they're texting a kid in Melbourne who's chroming. You've got all these people with different backgrounds, you're part-producer, you're part-social worker. At the end of it, I can go home, whereas for some of my indigenous directors and writers, this is their life."

Most (but not all) of my friends who are indigenous are also highly educated professionals (most attended university or TAFE). They're lawyers, ministers of religion, linguists, musicians, writers, film-makers, and people working in the community-development sector and the charitable sections of big corporates. At least one has said that he thinks that indigenous men who wear suits are perhaps the most marginalised of all indigenous people:

Although magistrate Peter Lockhart (Gary Sweet) and Aboriginal Legal Services lawyer Drew Ellis (Aaron Pedersen) essentially represent those two worlds, the complexity of their characters removes any chance of cliche.

Drew, a "flash city lawyer" from Perth who never knew his Aboriginal father, is more connected to the white way of life than that of the people he hopes to help. His earnest Western demeanour prompts the locals to call him a "coconut" - brown on the outside, white on the inside. And Peter is acutely aware of having to lord white man's law over black lore, forever pushing the limits of the legal system in a despairingly fruitless effort to accommodate both.

Ahhh...the question of the extent to which "white man's law" and "traditional law" can be reconciled. It could hardly be avoided, could it?!

In the wake of Howard's announcement about a tough new approach to problems in indigenous communities, it's also nice to be reminded of reasons to be positive and hopeful about the future:

If there is one theme that runs concurrently through The Circuit and the making of the drama, it is the combination of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers weaving a story for everyone.

And finally, a reminder that so-called "indigenous issues" or "indigenous dramas" aren't just for indigenous people:

"It's great to see scripts that are quite real, especially for Broome and Aboriginal people. It's nothing like Home and Away, it's something that we can relate to. And not just us, the whole of Australia."

A different perspective

There has been plenty of talk about "them" in the last week, and finally we are beginning to hear from those who are being talked about so much:

The Age yesterday received the following letter from a 13-year-old girl, written on behalf of her grandfather, a Warlpiri man from the NT.

I COME from one of the largest remote communities in the Northern Territory. Mal Brough and his team consulted the wrong people. He talked to only a handful and some are offenders themselves. How can we come to meeting when I can't tell time?

We wanted to say things but he left so fast. Some of the things he said are not what we agree on. Traditional owners cannot speak for us.

We never heard of all this rape and constant drinking here. That stuff happens mostly in the town areas. There is some but not the same as he says. Maybe same as Sydney or Adelaide.

If we have problem we always sort it out ourself. Spears stop even the worst of them. If bad stuff happens, they wait till night. Police don't patrol at night and our night patrol can't get money. Me and my family feel safer (with) night patrol than police. Police treat us like dogs sometimes.

Most drinking here is done by whitefellas who have drinking permit and we know they touch our kids but they all stick up against us when we talk.

How can we talk when they are our boss for work? They are all drinking mates as well. Nurse drink with mechanic, store manager, police and more. We don't like our kids to enter the white housing areas in our community. They don't even want to live with us. This makes us feel less than them.

But they love us at royalty time when they sell us a cheap bomb car for thousands. Some cars don't last a month. I sell a painting for $50 and in town my painting sell for $1000.

I love my kids same as you. Kids are my future. I do everything I know to help my kids, but Howard calls me a raper and will take half our money as punishment. Is that fair? How would you like that to happen to you?

Our law is strong in communities and we have strong rules for marriage. I want my kids to learn but why should our kids get education? There are no jobs here anyway, all the big jobs are taken by whitefellas.

They won't give us a go because they want the money. We don't have a say in our own programs and the salary money goes to their mates they bring up. We don't even know some of these people who work here. Who picked them? Like we are not good enough. We have ideas too and we want to do things but no one can help us.

If we make mistake, is that OK? That's how we all learn, by mistake. In the city you get many choices, sometimes we don't get a single choice. If we report any problems here, no one listens. They call us troublemakers or radicals. They rubbish us to our own family. They say our own family is against us, they try to make us feel shame.

I can't speak good English but I want a say in things. We can stop most of these tricks and whitefellas from touching our kids and selling us porn and grog, but permit system gone now.

Maybe it's best to just keep quiet and say nothing. We never took up a gun before because fighting is wrong. But I think they want a war with us now. What did we do wrong? How can I lead when I'm scared too? I want you to come to our communities to see how things really are and hear our stories. I think you will cry when you hear them.

Source: A voice from the heartland, The Age

Quick fixes: alcohol and porn responsible for abuse of indigenous children

It seems ironic that my last post was directed at avoiding simplistic histories and the importance of understanding complexity, given that the Australian Federal Government has now determined that alcohol and porn are the causes of child sexual abuse in indigenous communities.

The Australian Federal Government has declared sexual abuse of Aboriginal children a 'national emergency' and is moving to take control of 60 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, ban alcohol and porn in them, increase police numbers, and make health checks for children compulsory.

Australia to ban alcohol for Aborigines - Rod McGuirk, The Associated Press

Australia bans alcohol on Aboriginal land - Bernard Lagan, Times Online

Howard announces major Indigenous overhaul for NT - National Indigenous Times

These measures are a response to the Northern Territory Government's Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, which released their report on June 15.

I'm not sure whether I'm more upset about:

• the discrimination quite clearly based on race - these measures will affect indigenous people, and no other group...isn't this called racism? Note that the inquiry found that children are being abused by both indigenous AND non-indigenous adults!


• the idea that removing grog and porn from indigenous communities will somehow fix damaged "traditions" (all of which are uncritically represented as positive). Never mind the fact that we're talking about communities that are suffering the aftermath of what could be called conflict and genocide;


• the scrapping of the entry-permit system under which indigenous people have controlled access to THEIR land;


• the sheer paternalism of these measures - this heavy-handed, top-down response to problems in indigenous communities is completely disempowering. The Howard government doesn't even PRETEND to have any commitment to "self-determination" anymore!

Federal elections are not far off. In the lead-up to the last federal election, Howard guaranteed himself conservative support by alleging that women aboard a "suspected illegal entry vessel" had been throwing their children overboard (Wikipedia entry, The ALP's "truthoverboard", Project Safecom's "The Unthrown Kids"). During the last federal election, the Howard government engendered and took advantage of public fear about asylum seekers and the need to protect our borders against them. This time, the government appears set to engender fear and garner support by appearing to clamp down on indigenous people who are, via the machinery of political speeches, media etc, inextricably linked with drunkenness and paedophilia.

This isn't to say, of course, that indigenous communities would necessarily fare much better under an ALP government. Larissa Behrendt has warned that we should not raise Howard's opposition up as some kind of saviour.

Edit: Howard appears to have acknowledged the inherant racism of the announcements of Thursday 21 June, and today, Friday 22 June, has announced that these welfare restrictions could be extended to all Australians.

Dealing with complexity, avoiding simplistic histories

Bruce Pascoe, writing in The Age, neatly highlights the bias in Australian history.

I share his outrage, but just as he advocates for a more sophisticated approach to history, so too would I advocate for a more sophisticated approach to "laying blame". Pascoe argues for a more nuanced history, one that recognises that indigenous Australians were not "all the same", and were not merely "hapless" and "wandering aimlessly over the continent and failing to resist European invasion". In other words, he advocates an approach that acknowledges that the indigenous population of Australia was characterised by diversity, and that indigenous Australians were not merely victims but had capacities and forms of resilience in the face of the European invasion. Pascoe highlights the problems of simplistic histories, and yet provides and overly-simplistic solution. He comes close to laying all the blame at the feet of school teachers, despite having begun his argument with a tale about the ignorance of two of Australia's "best journalists".

While writing a first-year geography essay at Monash University in 1998, I came across details of the complex eel harvesting, elaborate systems of water control and stone housing that existed in Victoria’s Western District in pre-colonial times. It’s rare for me to be moved to tears while reading an academic text in a university library, but on that day, I was.

I bombarded friends and family with my new knowledge for weeks, perhaps even months. Pascoe is right to suggest that our children would be fascinated that such technology existed in their country - I was thrilled by this new information. It challenged my assumptions and I felt my worldview shift. However I was also angry, and overwhelmed by a sense of having been lied to. I had gone to school with indigenous children and I thought that I knew something of indigenous history. Both my parents are teachers with a dedication to their work and a commitment to social justice. Despite this, I had somehow managed to reach university with the belief that prior to the arrival of Europeans, indigenous Australians were a nomadic people whose technological skills were essentially confined to carving spears and boomerangs.

I share Pascoe's outrage but do not regard the gaps in my knowledge of history as the product of "poor teaching". I was taught by dedicated professionals doing the best they could with the legacy of their own educations. While I felt that I had been lied to, I wasn’t sure who was responsible. Now I believe that this is a problem that all us, including the media, bear some responsibility for. Pascoe writes that he never felt blacker than when Jon Faine and Jill Singer reacted with incredulity to his description of the technological feats of pre-colonial Australia. When I first read of these feats, I never felt whiter.

Time to meet the Aborigines you weren't taught about

Bruce Pascoe
May 31, 2007

The hapless blackfella, once a handy myth,lives on through poor teaching.

I'M NOT very black. I'm sure that in years to come the Aboriginal community will be under pressure from bureaucracies to exclude people whose heritage is from a great-grandmother who did everything she could to become white, to merge with the master class.

Plenty of blackfellas think that a separation of two generations and failure to be present at formation of the Aboriginal Advancement League, the 1967 referendum or Charlie Perkins' bus trips invalidates us; we weren't around when it mattered most. Fair enough too. We had squibbed it along with a million other cross-cultural Aboriginal refugees.

But I never felt blacker than when I looked out of the ABC studio window this week and saw that perfect autumn sky. I had to look out the window because I couldn't look Jon Faine or Jill Singer in the face.

We were discussing my new book, Convincing Ground, on Radio 774's Conversation Hour and Singer had just chastised me for giving the wrong date for the waterside workers' dispute.

Faine and I had discussed the contact history of the Western District before and he thought I was still gilding the black lily, that my claim of Aboriginal people at war with white settlers was a romanticisation of contact history, that my reference to stone houses, grain harvests and fish aquaculture was somehow a fabrication or at best a distortion of history. Here are two of Australia's best journalists who cannot believe the story I have lifted from the same pages that ABC board member Keith Windschuttle must have read.

Theirs wasn't a case of ill will or mischief-making as displayed by others in the debate — they'd just never read this stuff before.

It's a failure of education. We persist in teaching the young that Aboriginal history is no older than 40,000 years, that the people were nomads and had no "real" houses or agriculture and did not fight to protect their land.

It's a failure of education that English visitors to the Port Phillip District in 1835 reported Aboriginal towns where houses were built with basalt blocks, timber and turf, some capable of accommodating 30 people, and yet we don't advise our 12 year-olds of this fact.

It's a failure of education that we read of the aquaculture systems covering more than 100 square kilometres at Lake Condah and elsewhere and assume that a society capable of the engineering to tunnel into rock and build sophisticated structures must have been advised by an Englishman.

It's a failure of education to read that the search party for Ludwig Leichhardt observed Aboriginal people in central Australia harvesting, irrigating and sowing grain, and allow that information to disappear from our history. Grain was stored in stone silos, wooden dishes and sewn kangaroo skins, some collections weighing over a tonne. Doesn't this prick your interest? Don't you think your children would find it fascinating that this was going on in their country?

It's a failure of education to read that parties of 200 to 300 Aboriginal warriors attack white settlements and not to conceive that a war might be under way.

A cynic would say we hide behind a myth of the hapless Aborigine wandering aimlessly over the continent and failing to resist European invasion so that we might validate our occupation of the continent. But I think that, while the myth may have grown from that source, we persist in believing it because our education has failed us.

Normally intelligent people have been told they need not search the public record because it bears no evidence other than proof of the haplessness and brutishness of indigenous Australians. We advise our best minds to ignore Australian history because nothing happened. We resort to reconciliation as an expression of our compassion and understanding for a benighted race.

Young Australians, I beg you to thank your parents for their earnest response to indigenous disadvantage, but then go back to the early documents — you're in for a surprise.

None of us are going anywhere until we believe our history. Argue about it by all means, speculate on what it represents, but when you read of the warfare, the houses, the agriculture, don't fail to mention this to your own children. It's their country, and they deserve to know.

Bruce Pascoe's latest book, Convincing Ground, is published by Aboriginal Studies Press.

Make Indigenous Poverty History

'I know you think you should make a trip to Calcutta, but I strongly advise you to save your airfare and spend it on the poor in your own country. Its easy to love people far away. Its not always easy to love those who live right next to us.' Mother Theresa

The Make Indigenous Poverty History campaign aims to ensure that the global campaign supporting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) does not overlook the poverty suffered by Indigenous Peoples around the world including Australia.

The MDGs do not specifically target Indigenous Peoples but Indigenous Peoples are often the ones most affected by extreme poverty and usually rank at the bottom of most social and economic indicators.

Australian key social and economic indicators show that Australian Indigenous Peoples are living in poverty: our children are twice as likely to die in infancy, and we suffer from more preventable diseases, higher unemployment, lower house ownership, lower engagement with education and we are six times as likely to be murdered.

Poverty is a very real and debilitating experience for many of our people.

The MDGs must be aligned with poverty reduction strategies that address the particular needs of Indigenous peoples. Without the meaningful participation of Indigenous Peoples our marginalisation and exclusion will continue.

Here in Australia we must compare the living standards and levels of health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples with those of the rest of Australia – not to the poorest of the world’s poor.

Youth and sustainable livelihoods

I've been thinking about how in Australia's remote indigenous communities, the Solomons and Bougainville (and probably many other places throughout the world), the focus has been on the older generation, on 'leaders'. Yet these places are plagued by violence, where the primary protagonists are young men - young men who have been dispossessed of their cultural, social and economic inheritence. Young men who for various reasons have been dispossessed of the land which traditionally governed every aspect of the social, political, spiritual and political order. They've not only been shut out of their inheritance, but they're told that to be worthwhile, they need an education in the formal education system, and a job in the formal economy. Given that they can't have either of those things, why are we surprised when they get caught up in the excitement and temporary sense of empowerment that physical violence provides?

I know of one community development agency in Australia that's running a "leadership program" that doesn't target those kids that are usually defined as "leaders" - it's not the academic and social over-achievers that are invited to participate. Instead they're inviting the kids who are, in some respects, the very opposite of that.

I think our well-intended attempts at community development, whether it's here or overseas, often miss the mark because we unwittingly reproduce existing power structures. In Australia, when I go through the list of people speaking at "leadership forums" or lists of the people identified as "young leaders", they are still overwhelmingly dominated by people from white, private school, upper middle-class, tertiary educated backgrounds. Similarly, many agencies engaged in community development work abroad work with those who already have economic, political, and social clout. Yet in doing this, we reinforce the status quo, we reinforce the existing distribution of social, economic and political privilege, furthering the marginalisation of those who are most vulnerable.

Should we in fact be offering 'leadership' programs to those that are regarded as 'leaders' in the traditional sense, or should we be seeking to build the 'leadership' skills of those who are most marginalised?

What does self-determination mean?

I caught this interesting interview by Kerry O'Brien of Noel Pearson the other night - Pearson explained the complexities of self-determination and expressed his frustration with well-intended but foolish calls for a return to paternalism in a way that I thought was not only accessible, but immensely gracious:

Action needed to stop ongoing Aboriginal crisis: Pearson

Reporter: Kerry O'Brien

KERRY O'BRIEN: Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, mentioned by the Health Minister, won't be part of Monday's summit, but he's already seen his share of them, as he has of Aboriginal communities that represent success stories and others that don't. I spoke with Noel Pearson in Brisbane earlier today. Noel Pearson, are you supportive of Monday's summit? What would you want to see come from it?

NOEL PEARSON, DIRECTOR, CAPE YORK INSTITUTE FOR POLICY AND LEADERSHIP: I think the danger, Kerry, is this will be Groundhog Day once again, where we come together every four or five years to discuss the ongoing Aboriginal crisis and we actually don't do anything in the wake of it. I certainly think that there is a crisis in many of our communities, that government must take action on the problems and assist communities with the opportunities but I've got to say, just in the last 10 years, I've participated in at least two of these crisis sessions and I don't see that we've made a lot of progress in the wake of them.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Did Health Minister Tony Abbott, his comments, take you by surprise when he talked of returning to a paternalistic approach to intervene in dysfunctional Aboriginal communities?

NOEL PEARSON: I think the notion of paternalism is correct if you're talking about a parent or father having jealous regard for the safety and protection and future of their own child. That is paternalism, that is correct - when parents and community members such as myself have real anxiety and take steps for the protection of our future generations. But when it comes to government and when it comes to people of another race presuming to carry out a paternal role in relation to the welfare of people of another race, then I think, you know, we're returning to an old institution that became extremely problematic for Aboriginal people.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But if you take the word paternal out of the equation, what's wrong with the government taking the same approach to a seriously dysfunctional Aboriginal community where people's lives are a misery, as government might to a dysfunctional city council, like Melbourne city council, which was done at one point, that is, putting in an outside administrator to try to restore some kind of basic stable infrastructure?

NOEL PEARSON: Firstly we have to recognise there is a range of communities. Many communities are on the mend. Many communities have good leadership, good administration and good directions set and they're on the path to recovery and uplift for their people. There are some communities that are in a miserable condition where the safety and protection of women, children, old people, sober people is urgent and yes, I for one am a supporter of the need for government to step in and ensure basic safety and protection through law and order measures but you can't just have unilateral government action through law and order. You actually have got to work in partnership with the sober people, with the good people, to build ownership of those social order measures.

KERRY O'BRIEN: How do you rationalise to yourself, how do you come to understand, a community that has become so dysfunctional, where a few who are the leaders of the community can dominate, to their own ends, including things like sexual abuse of children, including, it seems, deliberately leading young kids into petrol sniffing so they can prey on them. How do you feel as an Aboriginal leader and activist over decades when you see that kind of image being projected?

NOEL PEARSON: It's absolutely terrible. It's a consequence of us letting obvious social problems continue without any courage for intervention. Grog has been getting out of hand in our community for decades. Marijuana has been getting out of hand for the last 15 years in Cape York. These problems have not stabilised. They keep snowballing and because of our refusal to intervene and take measures such as restrict alcohol, such as having a zero tolerance approach to drug dealing and drug abuse within our community, our inability over the last 20 or so years to really understand that, gee, these problems aren't just a kind of chronic problem that stabilises, these problems mushroom and, you know, a kid that's been subject to an abuse two generations ago turns into an adult who is a terrible abuser of future generations and we're now living with the legacy of our failure to confront these problems when they first arose.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You allowed yourself to be harnessed to the Federal Government. You acted, as a time, as an adviser to the Prime Minister. Was that a genuine partnership? Do you see often what you would regard as genuine partnerships between Aboriginal communities and governments and how widespread is that? Whereas you say the Aboriginal community is the major partner.

NOEL PEARSON: I say that there ought to be partnership. We've always said there's got to be partnership between Aboriginal people, government and the private sector and government is most powerful in the resolution of social problems if they understand their limits. Government is most powerful when they understand that the best role they can play is as a junior partner supporting and enabling and assisting but the minute they think that they can step over the top of Indigenous people and say, "We prescribe a certain pathway for you and you just stay passive and we will lead because you're useless," I think, you know, there's got to be...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Are you saying that is what predominates today?

NOEL PEARSON: That is our entire interaction with governments at both levels, State and federal, that Aboriginal salvation is somehow seen as something government must ultimately take charge of. Well, I think most Australians would understand that ultimately the security and safety of Aboriginal children in the future has got to be ultimately the responsibility of parents. Now, we're a long way from that in many families. We've got parents who have really abandoned their children because they're stuck in alcohol abuse, drug abuse, violent situations and so on but we have to restore that situation. At the ends of the day our aim has to be to restore the circumstance where Aboriginal parents, Aboriginal people take responsibility and my fear about the current directions is that there's this continued assumption that somehow government has got to completely take charge and the Aboriginal people are some kind of passenger in the process.

KERRY O'BRIEN: People talk about Aboriginal self-determination failing but different people can mean different things by self-determination and I think there's been confusion about what it really means. Mick Dodson says it hasn't failed because it hasn't been tried. What's your position?

NOEL PEARSON: If you mean by self-determination that it is about taking responsibility, I'm in complete agreement. If self-determination is about taking responsibility, then that's what I'm about, because at the end of the day, you know, our salvation lies with us. We need to be supported by good-willed Australians, we need to be supported by government but our salvation and the salvation of our children lies essentially with us. Unless we have an Indigenous leadership that steps up to the plate and grabs the responsibility back off government. Because my experience over the last decade in thinking about these problems and working with these problems is that the bureaucracies - the bureaucracies which have sucked the life out of us, sucked the responsibility out of us will not yield back that responsibility freely. We have got to take back responsibility and insist with the government that the future of our communities lies with us at the end of the day.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You would be widely regarded as one of the most articulate and successful Aboriginal leaders this country has produced. How much power do you feel you and the other leaders of your community have? Real power?

NOEL PEARSON: I think the problem of Indigenous leaders is that we - in terms of time, we spend 95% of our time thinking about these problems. 95% of our knowledge is dedicated to the resolution of these problems but we have 5% of the power and conversely, politicians - this problem is only 5% of their attention, 3% of their knowledge and yet they possess 95% of the power and that's the paradox within which we labour. That's the paradox within which we labour but the problem is we live in a place where, as I say, we possess a fraction of the power to be able to do something about it.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Noel Pearson, thanks for talking with us.

NOEL PEARSON: Thank you, Kerry.

Rights of indigenous women and children must come first

In the last few weeks, as the issue of violence, particularly sexual, hit the headlines in the Australian media, there have been frequent claims that indigenous 'custom' or 'culture' somehow encourages or at the very least facilitates such atrocities. Until today, newspapers have at best devoted one or two lines to quoting those who disagree with this view. Finally, today's Age devotes some decent space to the issue, which Larissa Behrendt fills wonderfully (here).

THERE is much evidence to support the assertion that stereotypes of Aboriginal women as bad mothers and promiscuous women exacerbate their treatment in court. The reliance by perpetrators of sexual violence on what has been termed a "customary law" defence has raised arguments from the bar table, accepted by the bench, that rape in Aboriginal culture is not treated as seriously as it is in Western culture.

In December last year, the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal increased the sentence of an Aboriginal elder who had raped a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl. During the trial the defence had argued that the man had not been aware of the fact that it was against the laws of the NT to rape a woman, and instead the judge had decided that the man had honestly believed that he was entitled, under customary law, to take her as a wife and to sodomise her. He had given a one-month prison sentence in the first instance and this was increased to three years and 11 months, with 18 months minimum to serve, by the appeal.

This is not the first time that a trial judge has shown leniency to criminal behaviour against Aboriginal women by giving more weight to the "customary law defence" of older men than to the rights of the young girl who has been violated. It should be stressed that in other cases, Aboriginal women have strongly contested the misogynistic views put forward by defence lawyers — and happily accepted by magistrates and judges — and instead, these women assert that under our traditional cultural values, Aboriginal women are treated with respect, crimes of sexual assault are treated with great severity and that it is only since the sexism of the colonising culture was imposed on us that Aboriginal women were treated as inferior.

Colonial notions that Aboriginal women are "easy sexual sport" have also contributed to the perception that incidents of sexual assault are the fault of Aboriginal women. The result of these messages to Aboriginal women by their contact with the criminal justice system would only reinforce any sense of worthlessness and lack of respect that sexual assault and abuse have scarred them with.

The statistics that link sexual abuse with drug abuse also relate to low socio-economic living standards. It is for these reasons that much careful analysis should be given to the recommendations of the royal commission on Aboriginal deaths in custody. The report noted that the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody was because indigenous people would be convicted and given custodial sentences for crimes that non-indigenous people would not be charged with — namely, public order offences such as drunken behaviour or offensive language. In these circumstances, it was recommended that alternatives to imprisonment be explored.

Nowhere in the royal commission report was there a recommendation that offences of a serious nature should not be given serious punishment and it is with much concern that we see a general trend to try to avoid or lessen custodial sentences for any crime where the offender is indigenous.

In matters of sexual assault, it sends the wrong message to not impose harsh sentences for offenders, especially those who prey on children. These serious offenders were not the prison population that was to be targeted in reducing the overrepresentation of indigenous people.

I am a Eualeyai and Kamillaroi woman. My nation is matrilineal and our creation spirit is female. As a child, I attended political meetings with my father and watched as the men postulated and shouted and then, in the end, the women would have the final say. I look at women whom I have grown up admiring, such as Marcia Langton, Pat Anderson, Roberta Sykes, Mum Shirl and Norma Ingram, and I did not see victims or submissiveness. I saw women who understood that they are the backbone of our communities and I grew up respecting them and I feel that this was a strong cultural value imbued in me.

I was shocked as I began my professional career working in indigenous affairs to see the level of sexism that pervades Aboriginal politics and it only increased my admiration of the strong Aboriginal women who lead our indigenous communities who continue to insist that mistreatment of women is not acceptable under any circumstances.

At the same political meetings, I heard a lot about our rights. I grew up understanding that we have a right to our sovereignty, our self-determination, access to health, access to education and freedom from racial discrimination.

We often claim that we have a whole range of rights that are not recognised and protected by the Australian legal system. For this reason, it makes no sense that we claim all of these rights that are long recognised as inherent in every human being, only to ignore them when that human being is a young girl exposed to great physical, mental and emotional danger. There is no reason our cultural values cannot conform to respect basic international human rights laws, and they should and must.

And if it is a matter of balancing the cultural rights of an old man to take a child bride against a child's right to be free from physical, sexual, mental and emotional abuse, I think the latter has to win, every time. If we are to ensure the continuation of our nations and our cultures, we need to make sure that the rights of our children are protected first and foremost. Our elders should know better.

Giving light sentences to perpetrators of sexual and physical violence against children not only gives comfort to the criminals that their behaviour will be protected by the white legal system, it sends a terrible message to our young people of how little that system — and their own people — value them. Hiding behind "traditional culture" to justify the actions is an insult to the victim. The NT court was right to increase the punishment to better suit the the crime.

Larissa Behrendt is professor of law and director of research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney. This is an edited extract of her Alice Tay Memorial Lecture, delivered last week at the Australian National University, Canberra.