Full text follows from the CM's web site:
Pearson hits welfare "poison"
30apr99
PROMINENT Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has appealed to governments
to help
break the welfare dependency of indigenous people so they can
live more healthy,
dignified lives.
Speaking in Cairns this week, Mr Pearson said welfare was "a
poison" that had turned
many Aboriginal people into "drunken parasites" and was destroying
family and
community life.
He also challenged Aborigi nal leaders to cease disempowering
their own people
through continually depicting them as "victims".
But most of all, Mr Pearson wants Aboriginal people to accept
that, along with the
rights comes responsibility � to themselves, their wives, husbands,
children, elders
and the general community.
"The whole Aboriginal policy debate has been about rights � human
rights, legal
rights, land rights, individual rights against government and
so on," he said.
"There has been no discussion about our responsibility. There is a defensiveness."
Mr Pearson has written a 42-page discussion paper for Cape York
Aboriginal leaders,
titled Our Right to Take Responsibility.
"We have to get rid of the welfare system from Aboriginal community
governance in
Cape York Peninsula, and get rid of the welfare mentality that
has taken over our
people," the document says.
It states the two key problems affecting Aboriginal people are
racism and welfare
dependency.
"It is time we analysed our condition as a people without being
defeated and
paralysed by the racial issues. This is not to say we should
forget about racism, or
pretend that it doesn't exist," Mr Pearson wrote.
"By addressing the concrete social and economic circumstances
of our welfare
dependency, we can find the power necessary to prevail against
racism."
Mr Pearson advocates a changed system in which money coming into
communities �
there are 13 on the Cape which are home for about 12,000 indigenous
people � is
controlled by "a new interface" between the federal and state
governments and
ATSIC.
He said the new administration needed to be "holistic and de-welfared"
and he is
seeking support for Cape York to be the pilot model for the
changed system.
"Welfare is a resource that is laced with poison and the poison
present is the money-
for-nothing principle," Mr Pearson said.
"In the 1950s and 60s, our people worked hard in the hot sun
for red-necked
pastoralists, and people placed value on every penny earned.
It is only the welfare
system that has devalued money � because it is not earned."
Mr Pearson said the "welfare poison" was progressively breaking
down Aboriginal
society � a society that put tremendous pressure on community
members to "provide
resources to a parasitic drink-and-gamble coterie".
"Since the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people have believed their
right earned was
the right to drink," he said. "What about the responsibility
to your children? The
rights that are acknowledged are the rights of people to party,
drink, use money in
their own destruction. No talk of rights of children or old
people.
"And why has there been this collapse in responsibility? In my
view, it is related to
the nature of the economy under which Aboriginal people are
forced to exist � the
poisonous welfare economy.
"Aboriginal people should participate in the real economy � where
you don't get
money for nothing, you have to work. Aboriginal people lived
at the lowest, most
miserable end of the market economy for most of colonial history
and the time has
come to change all that. Welfare is a parasitic exploiter.
"The Government is paying these people to sit around the canteen
to drink and
destroy the prospects of their children � destroy society. The
madness of that system
has to stop."
ti-no-ta wrote:
Did anyone happen to post - or can anyone post - the articles by Rosemary Neill in the Australian from last Saturday and Monday on reconciliation and self-determination? As far as I can see, they aren't on the Australian's website. Like a dill, I accidentally tossed them before reading them and would be interested in doing so. Did anyone read them? I'd be interested to hear people's opinions. Does anyone know anything about Rosemary Neill? Thanks for any help Tim
