[Indigsol] e-mail write up/Aboriginal Rallies held in Solidarity with Rallies in Australia

[mattm-b at resist.ca]

hi,

this is the e-mail write up i've made.  i took a section of the media
release.  please let me know what you think.

i would like to send it out sometime this evening, so people have time to
read it tomorrow morning.  it would also be best, i think, if we could
send it from the IPSM e-mail, but this requires that we sign up to a bunch
of lists and that we co-ordinate things before this evening which doesn't
seem likely that it will happen to me.

matt


Aboriginal Rallies held in Solidarity with Rallies in Australia
Decry Australian Government’s Racist New Policies

Friday, July 13th
Rally at the Australian High Commission
Noon
World Exchange Plaza, 50 O’Conner Street
At the corner of Slater and Metcalfe

There will be protests across “Australia” and Aotearoa (New Zealand) and
Internationally in response to the Australian governments colonial attack
on the Aboriginal people of “Australia”.

The paternalistic, culturally insensitive, racist and short-sighted
measures announced by the Howard government include widespread bans on
alcohol and pornography, forcing all indigenous children under the age of
16 in the territory to submit to  medical examinations, putting a
quarantine on 50 per cent of welfare payments to parents of children in
affected areas, linking welfare payments to school attendance for all
people living on Aboriginal land and enforcing unilaterally imposed land
reforms on Aboriginal lands.

The Government there, and its Prime Minister, John Howard, is covering its
actions under the rubric of preventing child sexual abuse.  A recent
report titled, “Children are Sacred” describes a serious problem regarding
child abuse in Aboriginal communities.  However, "Of the 97
recommendations in the Little Children are Sacred report, none of which
mention acquisition of land, the Howard Government is implementing only
three," said  Hilary Tyler from Alice Action.

She went on to say, “"People in Central Australia know problems facing
Northern Territory communities will not be solved by military occupation,
but by long-term funding and support for infrastructure and strong
community health and education programs.”

“National reports into mainstream domestic violence, alcohol and substance
abuse also call for urgent action, again the issues are at crisis level,
and the numbers of victims and abusers are far higher than in the Little
Children are Sacred report. None of the recommendations in all of those
hundreds of national health reports recommend compulsory sexual health
tests for every Australian child under sixteen,” writes Jennifer
Martiniello in The Guardian.

She also poses the question, “So who are the real victims here, the
silenced victims of John Howard’s scheme? Aboriginal children, of course,
who will be subject to physically and psychologically invasive medical
examinations, irrespective of their home and family circumstances, and who
will deal with the mental and emotional fall-out from that? Aboriginal
men, too, who become the silenced scapegoats, painted by default by John
Howard as all being drunken, child-raping monsters.”

“Pat Turner, head of National Indigenous Television and former
administrator of ATSIC, questioned why the Government had decided to act:

‘We have known about the issues in our communities for several generations
and governments have done nothing,’
"We have to stand up to this Government and we have to say "if you want to
do anything to us, you negotiate.
"We have, on Aboriginal land, inalienable freehold title and we will keep
it.’”

Quotes from:

http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve07/1327tampa.html

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,22042836-1702,00.html