Melanie Sjoberg, Adelaide

“The representative notion of governance is not one held among many Aboriginal communities”, John Tregenza, an Aboriginal public health worker, told a Socialist Alliance meeting on June 30.

Aboriginal councils, services and communities have been under attack from the federal and state government, allegedly due to lack of good governance. Tregenza stated that he understood governance to encompass the ability of a society or community to make, implement and enforce decisions about their community. He argued that it should also include the ability to review and change the way things are organised in order to make progress in the community.

Tregenza outlined the recent history of Aboriginal community-based self-management that developed during the 1960s and 1970s because people were determined to establish appropriate services that were not being provided by the white government. He explained that this was the origin of many Aboriginal health and legal services that were today being attacked.

Tregenza condemned the current government's “assimilationist” approach, which he explained is dividing the community, cutting funding and pushing services into the white bureaucracy. A legal services officer at the meeting confirmed this view when he announced that the Aboriginal Legal Service in Adelaide had received a federal government press announcement that day declaring that their service was now under the umbrella of the attorney-general’s department.

The meeting agreed to continue support for Aboriginal control of Aboriginal affairs and to take to the streets in defence of that right.

From Green Left Weekly, July 7, 2004.
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