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 Tuesday, Jun 12, 2001 Last Updated: 15/06/2001 12:39

Australia-Aborigines

Indigenous leaders clash over legal rights for Australian Aborigines

SYDNEY

In the Face of an Aborigine - Australia
© The Image Bank

Two of Australia's most prominent Aboriginal leaders have clashed publicly over whether demands for legal and political rights are the best solution to indigenous poverty and health problems.
For more than a year, Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson has been urging his people to abandon their decades-old campaign for land rights in favour of more practical solutions to improve living standards.
Pearson, also leader of Cape York Aborigines in Australia's northeast, has argued that welfare dependency is the major cause of the poverty, chronic ill-health and alcoholism which has ravaged Australia's 300,000-strong Aboriginal society for three decades.
He said last month that the focus on land rights would not deliver indigenous people a fair place in the Australian economy.
But Senator Aiden Ridgeway, the only Aborigine in the federal parliament, attacked Pearson's stand Tuesday, saying that no other indigenous leader had come out in favour of his "practical stance."
"Some of us are tiring of this new nauseating and incessant tune that Aborigines ought to get over 'victimhood' and that rights alone will no longer do," Ridgway wrote in an article for The Australian newspaper.
"Like all indigenous leaders, I share Pearson's frustration about the restoration of our communities and the need to move our people from the fringes by providing options that go far beyond charity and welfare.
"But to start any new moral proposition must be more than just fine words tapping into the dominant paradigm of mutual obligation, responsibility and reciprocity."
Ridgway, who is deputy leader of the Australian Democrats party which holds the balance of power in the Senate, said it was too simplistic to suggest the relationship between black and white Australia could be defined by economic goals alone.
"A new direction in indigenous affairs is certainly required, but it is questionable whether new social policy should become a substitute for the absence of any national rights-based approach."
Pearson's proposition that dole cheques are the cause and not the solution to Aboriginal deprivation was first advanced by him in speeches last year in which he described welfare dependence as a "poison" which had turned Aborigines into "drunken parasites."
"I contend that policies which were not malevolent but theoretically flawed have worsened the situation and probably even caused a social breakdown during the past three decades," he said.

AFP - 02:46:35

 
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