Bartlett's Blog

One of the benefits for me of not being in Parliament has been the chance to get more directly involved in community based organisations.  One of those I have got more involved in over the past year or so is the Queensland branch of Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (usually known as ANTaR). ANTaR started in the 1990s and has maintained a continuing role in promoting better community ...

Last night I attended the public forum I wrote about here, featuring Pacific Island peoples speaknig about the impacts of climate change on their homelands, health and cultures. It was very well attended and the speakers were engaging and enlightening. I've published a piece about it over at Crikey at this link. If for some reaon you want to see my efforts at live-Tweeting the forum, ...

The calls by Australian of the Year Mick Dodson, supported by many others, for a debate on whether to shift Australia Day away from 26th January, has produced some predictable howls of outrage and abuse. But it is not only Indigenous Australians who feel that 26th January is not the best day to celebrate our unity as a nation, as Ron Barassi’s views make clear. Many of the millions of ...

Last week I attended the launch in Melbourne of a report released by the organisation Stolen Generations Victoria.  The report is called Unfinished Business, which is the same name given to a report from a Senate Committee I initiated into the Stolen Wages issue.  This is a reminder that all these injustices are interlinked.  To me, all these reports and the evidence and experiences they draw on are a ...

The headlines after COAG focused on health and education and the overall size of the money handed out (with the usual uncertainty about how much was ‘new’ money and how much had already been promised or committed).  Jon Altman from ANU has written a good rundown on the various COAG agreements which relate to Indigenous Australians (or at least those in discrete remote communities, who seem to have ...

I’ve written about the Aboriginal Stolen Wages issue here many times.  There is a very good article by Marg Wenham in The Courier-Mail outlining this disgraceful situation – it’s worth a read.  More here too.  Sadly, the injustice continues.

November 19 marks four years since the notorious wrongful arrest and death in police custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island. Many Aboriginal men have been arrested, charged, exiled from their homes and jailed in the four years since.  Meanwhile, investigations into allegations regarding actions and investigations by police have yet to be completed and no disciplinary action of any sort against police has occurred. As this article from the ...

Palm Island man Lex Wotton has been handed a seven year jail sentence (less one year for time previously served) as a result of being found guilty by a jury of rioting with destruction. Although I’ve spoken with people who were present on the day which led t the charges, I wasn’t there, so I won’t give a view on who did what. If you want to see a ...

On Wednesday I attended a rally outside the Brisbane District Court, held to show support for Palm Island man, Lex Wotton, whose trial had been going for two weeks. The jury started deliberating on the Thursday. When I saw news that they were still going on the Friday afternoon, I decided to go to the court to bear witness with Lex and his family and supporters as they ...

There are lots of coverage and comment about the report by the independent group reviewing the Northern Territory intervention.  This is one of the more important amongst the many reviews set in train by the federal government. I hope the government is able to ignore the politics and focus on the substance of the report. As I said many times in the various pieces I have written about the ...

Everyone knows that billions of dollars are needed to address the third world conditions many Indigenous Australians live in, including horrendously overcrowded housing, poor road access and other infrastructure problems.  But I haven’t seen any mention so far of spending money to address these problems in the flurry of bidding that has started following the federal government’s announcement they are looking at spending $20 billion on infrastructure to ...

Last week I attended a funeral in Townsville for Yvonne Butler, who was one of the state’s most dedicated campaigners on the Stolen Wages issue.  I have written a number of times on this blog about the issue and the  poor record of the Queensland state government. Whilst the response from government has been far short of what still needs to be done, much of the credit for ...

The Federal Opposition's Indigenous Affairs shadow minister, Tony Abbott, is spending three weeks in a community on Cape York in far-north Queensland. He highlights one of the real difficulties for parliamentarians in meaningfully engaging with Indigenous (and to some extent also other) communities.  The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' — we fly ...

The Senate Committee report into my legislation on a compensation system for the Stolen Generations was tabled yesterday. The Committee didn't directly support a national system of compensation, but did put forward some other useful recommendations. You can read my additional comments at this link. The Daily Telegraph has invited me to 'debate' people and answers questions live through their website at 9am tomorrow (Wednesday). You can ask a ...

Brendan Nelson has reportedly pulled the Coalition out of the federal government's “bipartisan commission on Indigenous housing”, apparently because “Mr Rudd refused to include former Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough in the group.” I was supportive of the notion of some sort of apolitical ‘war cabinet’ on Indigenous issues when Kevin Rudd first floated it last year and I think it is a shame Mr Nelson has bailed out ...

Pre-Budget speculation gets fairly tiresome after a while – mostly just scene setting leaks and people writing and saying things to fill the space before they have something substantial to write and talk about. Budget night provides the relief of actually getting into the real thing after a lot of mostly empty shadow-boxing. This will be the eleventh Budget I've examined since being in the Senate (and another ...

I marched in Brisbane’s Labour Day parade today – only the second time I’ve done so. I was part of a group marching in support of justice for the group of Queenslanders who were the most exploited and ripped-off workers throughout most of the Twentieth Century – Aboriginal workers whose wages were taken by governments and never given back. This is known as the Stolen Wages issue. It is ...

The previous federal government used the spectre of child sexual abuse as justification to scrap the permit system contained in the Land Rights Act, which required people wishing to visit Aboriginal freehold land in the Northern Territory to first obtain permission. It was cheered on its efforts by its ideological fellow-travellers, who were happy to smear anyone who did not support the move as protecting paedophiles and other ...

I have been reading a book by Rosemary Neill called "White Out – how politics is killing black Australia". It was published back in 2002 but its core message is even more valid now than it was then – that the desire of people from across the spectrum to use Indigenous issues to reinforce their preferred political or ideological narrative is coming before ensuring public policy assists rather than ...

This afternoon I sat in on a meeting of about 50 Aboriginal people at Musgrave Park in Brisbane. They had come together to talk about the Queensland Government’s decision to take back some of the money the government had put forward six years ago by way of recompense for a small part of what was taken from Aboriginal people over decades through the process that has become known ...