The long betrayal of remote indigenous Australia: the record of successive governments

Thursday 13 May 2010

AUDIO transcript available here

Jointly presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and the The David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education & Research

Celebrated author, Nicolas Rothwell and Independent Member of the NT Legislative Assembly, Alison Anderson will take up this topic in a public session chaired by Professor Peter Buckskin, Head of the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research at UniSA.

• Alison Anderson will review the experience of recent policy initiatives on the ground, as felt by language-speaking members of desert indigenous societies, and noting that almost all comment on the Intervention and its effects has been by outsiders without capacity to know the true responses of the target social group. She will also explain what she regards as the fiasco of the present SIHIP program in the NT, and the bars to success in indigenous education. She considers that these issues relate strongly to the condition of the APY lands, which she knows well.
  
  
• Nicolas Rothwell will provide a separate account of the assumptions underlying policy-making and the effects of the paradigm in place today on the ground. The aim is to provide a reality check and to suggest that we are still in an era of profound colonial administration, and that power relations as much as passive welfare constitute the bar to progress.

Speakers

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Heaven and Earth, Another Country, The Red Highway, and most recently, Journeys to the Interior. He is the northern correspondent for The Australian.

Alison Anderson was born in Haasts Bluff and grew up in a number of Northern Territory communities, including Hermannsburg and Papunya. A strong community person, fluent in several Aboriginal languages, Alison has spent her life trying to improve the conditions of people living in Central Australia.

Alison has served on the Aboriginal Development Commission and as an ATSIC Commissioner. Alison has also been a senior member of a number of influential boards, including the Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre, Flinders University Centre for Remote Health, and the NT Government Indigenous Economic Strategy Task Force.

In 2004 Alison was selected by the Howard Government to represent Central Australia on the Round Table discussions on Aboriginal matters.

In 2005 Alison Anderson was elected as the Labor Member for Macdonnell and in 2008 she was re-elected unopposed. In August 2008 Alison was selected to Cabinet as Minister for Environment and Heritage, Minister for Parks and Wildlife, and Minister for Central Australia.

In August 2009 Alison resigned as a Minister in Government and is now an Independent Member of the Northern Territory Parliament.

While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of: strengthening our democracy - valuing our cultural diversity - and building our future.