Indigenous pain

I’m pretty shocked by what I’m hear­ing on Lateline right now. The reports this morn­ing about sexual abuse in remote com­munit­ies up north were pretty bad. Com­bine that with this attack on a woman – pour­ing petrol on her and set­ting her alight – and the dread­ful petrol sniff­ing we already knew about… but I didn’t know there was such a thing as non-sniffable petrol. To see that the report to the gov­ern­ment was based on how much *money* they would save by using that com­pared to how much money it costs to look after an addict! What a hor­rible way to cal­cu­late it! What an awful example of how we live in an eco­nomy now, when it should be a soci­ety, it should be ‘roll out this non-sniffable petrol because it’s the right thing to do for fellow human beings’.

It’s shock­ing, but then to have Mal Brough say, with regards to the rapes and the alco­hol prob­lems, that people up there are saying ‘treat us like the white­fella’… That’s really very inter­est­ing. Mind you, I have no idea what else should be done either. 

One of the really hard things was the suc­cess­ful artist saying, “hey, I brought my son up well from when he was a baby and he still ended up a petrol addict, trying to kill himself”. 

Law-and-order, law-and-order. It’s like a mantra. I just don’t believe this is the solu­tion, but right now I’m sniffly and have a stuffy head and am not think­ing clearly enough to come up with an alternative.

Mean­while, tonight’s other adven­tures included the launch of my old super­visor, Jeff Lewis’s book, Lan­guage Wars: Media and Global Ter­ror­ism. It looks fant­astic, so go buy it.