“A national framework for child protection is necessary, we can do better and must do better for the protection of our little children.” - Kevin Rudd.
Having worked with the child protection system I am much less excited about this comment than I should be were I to take the above comment at face value. A national framework has been advocated for years as a very basic policy intervention, and always seems to end up being hijacked for other violently paternalistic ends (if it’s not how such Interventions start off in the first place).
“Little children” really are the ultimate signifier into which to empty out all sorts of misdirected rubbish.
Is this for real? I’m sure I’ve got a drunkenly written film script sitting around somewhere that involves Mal Brough being presented, via Keith Windschuttle, with a medal from a society of the same name.
I couldn’t have scripted for this, though, so it must be true. See you all outside COAG next month.
This man is the architect of the Intervention.
It just writes itself sometimes.
1. Rendition
2. In the Valley of Elah
and coming soon …
3. Battle in Seattle (perhaps some enterprising Australian director will propose “Woomera” in a few years time - if so I bags a cameo as cardigan wearing social worker with gin addiction).
It’s endlessly fascinating and frustrating to follow the e-debates going on about the apology. I’ve been idly watching the ones going on under news items on the ABC website and that of the Daily Telegraph (if I didn’t have a thesis to write, I just know I’d start up a website like this one).
I am so struck by the way in which ‘debates’ like these open up a space for white settler descended Australians to, seemingly unconsciously, pour out so much of their own hurt and bitterness: ‘My Mum was white and taken away too, where’s her apology?’, in other words, ‘I’ve been so hurt in my life and no one came to help. Where’s my apology?’, ‘Aboriginal kids were taken away because they were NEGLECTED. They are still being NEGLECTED.’, in other words, ‘I have been NEGLECTED. I feel NEGLECTED’. Or, ‘I didn’t do anything, why should I have to apologise?’, i.e. ‘OGOD PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME CONFRONT WHAT THIS MEANS I LIKED THAT JOHN HOWARD FELLOW MUCH BETTER’.
So many seem so unable to give any ground because they are so obsessed with holding onto their own victimage: my ‘personal property’ is painful, poisoned - but goddamn it it’s mineminemine.
Particularly since the NT intervention lurched onto the public scene last year, I feel the urge to keep up the critique of government and non-government ‘helping’ regimes. I’ve quoted it before, and I’ll quote it now: “the judgement ‘good’ was not invented by those to whom goodness was shown!” (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality).
So. On this. Whilst flicking through the notes I had made whilst I was overseas, I was reminded to share this little gem with the critiquitariat: Arzu Rugs. It was advertised in an aeroplane magazine, I forget which one. At first glance it seemed to be the usual marketing package of decorative non-western crafts attached to a charity venture: ‘conscious’ consumption with an ‘ethnic’ feel. Arzu brokers the sale of rugs crafted by Afghan women, “creating opportunities for women to obtain a consistent income”. But their trade has an even sharper twist than similar ‘fair trade’ products: it’s not just money, its empowerment, too, apparently:
“Core to the Arzu approach is our social contract with weaver families where we agree to pay the weavers market rate for their weaving, plus an additional 50% bonus on top-quality carpets.
In return for this higher wage, families must agree to send all of their children under age 15 to school full-time and to have at least one woman from each household attend literacy classes. Where children cannot attend a government school, Arzu partners with education providers and pays for classes to be set up in villages. Since most girls are well behind the education standards for their age group, Arzu funds “Fast Track” classes so they can catch up and join their peers at a government school wherever possible.”
This is a remarkably explicit ‘contract’ imposed on ‘third world women’ by ‘first world women’ in the name of salvation from the consequences of imperialist wars brought to the former by the kinsmen of the latter. I mean, those girls and women should sure be grateful. I wonder what they did before Western intervention in their lives?
Something I have often been surprised about in the scandals manufactured by Howard & co is the extent to which senior public servants, even political-appointment ministerial staff, have expressed their meticulous, reasoned caution; even disagreement, with renegade actions. And no one has taken any notice of them. This suggests a failure of the parliamentary system on two counts: (1) the public service as an instrument of review and (2) the capacity to manipulate the system so that lies and fearmongering can be recalibrated to look like healthy debate and hardwon consensus. Take this, for example (a pdf): the digest on the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bills 2007, rammed through as new legislation last night. A cursory glance shows the extent to which civilliberal ideas of social justice, human rights and citizenship are invoked by instrumental participants to suggest that Howard should at least slow down a bit on the land-grab-moral-panic bullshit. Not unlike advice that was provided on the Iraq War and Children (Not Thrown) Overboard. They go to war on all and any peoples who threaten their illegitimate privilege in the name of a system they don’t even adhere to. This strange, sad dissimulation is concreted in the current The Australian newspaper television advertising campaign. It is the most stunning piece of propaganda (perhaps designed to inspire kiddies to take up this ‘option’?) that I’ve ever seen, posing second-generation migrants (when the old and the young are true blue Aussies, that’s Australian), miners and engineers as Nation builders (I suppose it’s a step up from sheep), and ending with:
When the cries of our young (cue Indigenous child with sun on her face) bring us together as one,
That’s Australian.
The Australian. The heart of the Nation. (cue image of Uluru).
*vomits*
* See John Ah Kit, quoted here.
PS: The ALP supported the Bill. Seems to me this belies a poll-view that, had they opposed it, it might threaten their voter support. Now, this is what makes me wonder if I ought to vote at all. I have always voted Green, it seems the closest I can get to projecting justice onto the Nation. I want to see Howard and the Coalition go. But if, wherever I turn, Aboriginal people are the limit, excess and cost of that movement, how can I pencil myself into, onto, such a system without leaving the booth smelling of blood? I’m serious here: the apparent neutrality of this system is what enables it to kill people.
Gayatri Spivak with the first entry: “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (how did she know, all the way back in 1987?).
(Update 28/06: NTMD - Now With Tags !@!4!!)