Aboriginal Australia

Successive governments have done the barest minimum they can get away with politically, the help Australia’s first people. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up 3% of the population. Presumably that it is too insignificant for parties like the Liberals who ignore a gender that makes up 50% of the population…

Not for us. 3% is a lot of people, and until now they haven’t really had a political voice – though there have been some failed attempts. We intend to be the first elected party that has a progressive policy for indigenous Australians.

While inviting submissions from all indigenous Australians would be our first goal, we expect a Royal Commission into their general well-being is well overdue, and we would create a taskforce with the primary goal of discovering where more money could best be spent to reduce two core issues:

Domestic Violence

The level of alcohol abuse amongst Aborigines is substantially less that the general public believes, possibly distorted by the high visibility of troubled people in some cities, rather than alcoholism occurring between closed doors. In reality, the difference of alcohol abuse rates between black and non-black Australians is tiny. See here. We do note that the studies are small and a more substantial study needs to be undertaken.

What is different is the level of support available to Aborigines who suffer from domestic violence due to alcoholism. The resources are so lacking that it is more likely to have your child removed from your care (because of the dangerous environment), than to get protection from the abuser. This attitude from the authorities appears to be systemic and ignored by politicians.

Crime

“As of 2018, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28% of the total full-time adult prisoner population while accounting for 2% of the general population” (Wikipedia)

Propensity towards crime is not a factor of race. The over-representation of indigenous Australians in prison is a direct effect of social status, as we have also seen in the USA with African Americans.

Rehabilitation of prisoners is an area that needs to be fixed immediately – the current model is not working well. New forms of punishment and rehabilitation need to be tested, focusing on non-violent and non-abuse crimes. Specifically robbery and illicit drugs. There are more Aboriginal people in prison for robbery than non-Aboriginal people.

Robbery tends to be less lucrative than having a job, and most robbers are eventually caught. This is clearly not a career choice. Providing an alternative is surely preferable for offenders, and cheaper for the government. For example, paying the full-time wages for someone is cheaper than keeping them in prison ($110K per year).

For the same price you can give employers a free worker, and that worker can have a full-time social worker.

Health

In Katherine, which has one of the highest rates of kidney disease in the world, we have the bizarre situation where we keep people alive with dialysis, but kill them with a lack of housing.

The Warlpiri Transient Camp has “up to 20 people live in small dwellings bursting at the seams” and “only a handful of these dwellings are air conditioned; some don’t even have electricity.”

A study found that “…they are very sick. Almost 10% had died before the end of the first year of the program. Participants had an average of 2.8 significant health problems, many fold higher than the Australian average.”

“Three out of five didn’t have reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious food. Almost one-third had chronic kidney disease, and 10% were on dialysis. Of the 11 people needing dialysis three times a week, eight met the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of homelessness; three were living in a tent.”

“Needless to say, nowhere else in Australia is it imaginable that someone sick enough to require dialysis has to live in a tent in temperatures regularly above 40℃.”
https://theconversation.com/how-a-rethink-of-emergency-care-is-closing-the-gap-one-person-at-a-time-127020