The first person in Australia to die from H1N1 virus (or "swine flu") was an Aboriginal man from a remote community.
This is no coincidence. It's a result of ongoing government policies that encourage racist attitudes and threaten the lives of the most disadvantaged in society.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd claimed a key priority at the July 2 Council of Australian Governments meeting in Darwin would be reducing Aboriginal disadvantage in health, education and employment. A report released at the COAG meeting, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009, said on all social indicators Aboriginal wellbeing hav remained static or gone backwards since 2000.
The report found there were more than twice as many substantiated notifications of child abuse than there were in 2000, said a July 2 ABC Online article. There had been no improvement in 80% of social and economic indicators. While employment had risen from 43% of Aboriginal people to 48%, the gap between Aboriginal employment and that in the wider community remained at 24%.
Since 2000, imprisonment rates for Aboriginal men had risen by 26%, and 46% for women.
Little substantial
Rudd labelled the report's findings "devastating", said the July 2 ABC Online article.
However, apart from vague promises to "redouble and treble [government] efforts to make an impact", little of substance came out of the COAG meeting. Rudd pledged $46 million to improve data collection, after admitting governments "don't have a clear idea of what's happening on the ground" in Aboriginal communities, Sky News reported on July 3.
In response to reports of poor nutrition in Aboriginal communities, COAG has commissioned an Indigenous food security strategy, ABC Online said on July 3. The strategy includes a national licensing scheme "to ensure remote stores sell nutritious goods".
But the proposed scheme has already been slammed by those on the ground trying to provide nutritious food at affordable prices to Aboriginal people in remote areas.
Karen Mellot from WA Buying Power, which services 16 remote communities, said the money involved in such a scheme could be better spent. "The community are having to pay three times as much for a loaf of bread because they have got to pay the freight costs", she said on ABC Radio National's AM on July 3.
"We would like to see the government assist them with the freight costing. That would be possibly the best thing that could happen."
As part of the racist NT intervention introduced by the former Howard Coalition government and continued under Rudd, Aboriginal welfare recipients must forego half their welfare payments in return for "Basics Cards" — vouchers that can be only spent in certain stores, on certain things.
In practice, this has meant that some community stores that have consciously and successfully provided healthy, affordable food have lost customers, as Aboriginal people have been forced to travel to nominated chain supermarkets to use their Basics Card.
It's hard to see how introducing a national licensing scheme would address such a problem. In fact, such a scheme is an example of a "top-down" policy that the report released at COAG said had failed to address disadvantage.
Not helping
Government policy isn't helping "close the gap" between Indigenous Australians and the rest of the population. On June 29, AAP reported on an Aboriginal family with six sick children and one seriously unwell woman in the remote community of Ukaka in the NT. The family travelled 140km to get medical attention. They were displaying symptoms of swine flu.
They ran out of fuel 40km from the clinic, and it took the nurse two hours to bring the ambulance to them and assess them.
This was despite their shivering, suffering extremely high temperatures and the Centre for Disease Control having declared there was a swine flu "pandemic" in the NT. In the end, the nurse didn't even assess them for the disease.
They had to travel this far because they lacked the money to use the public phone in their community and had no phone of their own.
The well-documented and unacceptable levels of poor health among Aboriginal people increase their chances of catching, and dying from, diseases such as swine flu.
A Flinders University report In Our Own Backyard released in March revealed that although under-resourcing was a factor in the poor health outcomes for Aboriginal people, racist attitudes made a huge contribution. The report said 93% of those interviewed had sometimes experienced racism and that two-thirds often experienced racism.
The report also detailed people's personal experiences.
Debra, who was 44 and worked in a Community Development and Employment Project (CDEP), said: "Sometimes, yeah, I got insulted a couple of times. One said to me when I went to <193>I had spots coming out on my arms and back and the doctor turned around and said, 'Debra it's just like a black dog with white spots, you can't change it.' And I thought: you arrogant bastard."
The study said: "Feeling angry/annoyed/frustrated was the most common response to racist treatment. Physiological reactions were experienced at least sometimes by over two-thirds of people. In response to racist treatment, over a quarter of people reported feeling ashamed/humiliated/anxious/fearful or powerless/hopeless/depressed often or very often."
Rachel, a 34-year-old from Enfield, said: "I think anxiety wise when I had that incident here. I was just….my heart was racing, I was thinking oh my god if this gets […] worse I'm going to faint or something you know what I mean?"
This is probably something that the family from Ukaka could relate to, as they sat on the ground in the middle on nowhere waiting to see if they had a potentially deadly illness.
There were also direct correlations to mental health, as 62% of Aboriginal people who regularly experienced racist treatment suffered poor mental health.
Resources alone cannot fix this — it requires a real change in attitudes of non-Indigenous Australia, something that Rudd's policies work against.
When the previous Coalition government of PM John Howard came to power in 1996, every aspect of Aboriginal self-determination was under attack.
The government cut funding to successful Aboriginal programs to tackle violence and drug abuse. CDEP projects that employed Aboriginal people and provided services for their communities were shut down. Aboriginal land rights became more difficult to assert.
The punitive policies that make up the NT intervention were justified in the name of protecting children from an apparent "emergency" level of child abuse in Aboriginal communities.
These policies are part of the structural racism in Australia that condemns Indigenous people to be second-class citizens. This racism kills.
Two years after the intervention was introduced, COAG has heard that reports of child abuse are in fact rising. And still Rudd continues the policy. He has not only allowed these Howard-era policies to continue, he has expanded them.
Work programs scrapped
On July 1, all CDEP programs in non-remote areas were scrapped. In the NT, 6500 Aboriginal people were shifted from projects that maintained Aboriginal culture and language, onto Work for the Dole, which has less protection of rights and the expectation that, despite the massive employment gap, people will still look for "real" work at the same time. Aboriginal people in Work for the Dole programs will have half their "wages" — which are less than what they receive on CDEP — "quarantined".
On July 1, the community of Davenport had its federal funding cut by $400,000 a year. This will mean its administrative centre will close and community development jobs will be at risk.
Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009 found that, overall, the programs and policies addressing Indigenous disadvantage that have positive results have focused on community involvement approaches.'
However, Rudd's policies all say the same thing to Aboriginal people: You can't be trusted to run your own affairs. If Rudd continues with these policies that demean and punish Aboriginal people, the gap won't close — it will continue to widen.