Working Papers
The working papers collection comprises historical papers as well as current ideas and works in progress on some of the major issues and topics of our times.
It was three o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the wealth creation capital of Australia and there he was stealing around the rubbish bins, searching for a half used cigarette, a bit of food - a modern day Fagin.
Former Macquarie Bank Chief Bill Moss' call for more incentives to invest in Indigenous Australia is a welcome one.
In his opening address to the 2007 Garma (“both ways learning”) forum, Gallarrwuy Yunupingu told us that he was “worried sick” about the effects of the current Northern Territory intervention legislation before the Senate.
We’re at that dangerous point in the political cycle when journalists think they determine the outcome of elections. However one ex-journalist does seems to be turning the tide.
Robert Kenny's remarkable book is the story of Wotjobalak man, Nathanael Pepper, who reaches the heights of religious acceptance and hope in the late nineteenth century and yet is doomed never to move beyond a certain level. When he dies at the age of 36, after an extraordinary life as an interpretor of two worlds, he has achieved only the status of ‘native helper’.
A Rudd Federal Labor government working with State Labor governments could re-vitalise our national institutions.
We are, most probably, a nation of people who are divided in our own minds about the future of Indigenous Australia.
John Howard is dividing and ruling the leadership of Indigenous Australia.
Putting Indigenous Child Abuse in the Northern Territory into Perspective
(released 30 June 2007)
» more
There were 319 substantiated instances of Indigenous child abuse in the Northern Territory in 2004/5. This compared to Qld 1,186, NSW 1,642 and Victoria 770. Perhaps the Commonwealth and other states should be sending an army of bureaucrats to study why the Northern Territory has a comparatively good record for looking after Indigenous children. But let us not doubt the motives of John Howard and Mal Brough in seizing control of NT Indigenous communities! Download the key statistics below.
Politics is about the art of the possible. It’s about spinning on the tip of a pin, having no principles and constant reinvention to suit the circumstances of the day. But there is one thing that you cannot hide in politics and that is pure emptiness of policy. The sight of the latest welfare tourists from Canberra in Aboriginal communities conveys just how empty the Howard-Brough incursion into the Northern Territory is.