The brave new world of the National Emergency Response is now hitting the northern coast of the Territory, with the largest Arnhem Land community of Maningrida getting medical checks and art carpetbaggers in the first week of formal intervention.
The medical corps arrived a week or so ago, in brand new Toyotas driven by Norforce troops, along with a couple of brand new Hyno trucks carrying mobile clinics. Not that Maningrida doesn’t already have a health service, but for the volunteer nurses and doctors it was a useful place to drop the “clinics in a container” and hook up to the power.
The volunteer doctors and nurses, on $650 and $550 a day respectively, then got to work, and set up the fold out chairs and waited. And waited.
After two days with nary a child to be checked, it was suggested that they might like to recruit some Aboriginal people to go out to the community and let people know what was happening. Over the next two days the medical corps managed to check 80 kids … and then the supply dried up again.
Turned out that because it is illegal for civilians to be driven around by Norforce, the kids (who happily walk to school), weren’t walking to have their health checked out by the strangers in town.
A sausage sizzle was the next solution. At least one observer noted that the medical corps were going to have to eat most of the sausages on hand.
Meanwhile, Maningrida Art and Culture scored its first carpetbagger—even before the abolition of the permit system. A stranger in the art shop followed an artist out after a painting she wanted to buy had been refused. Stranger then offers to buy the painting on the spot … and indeed any other paintings for cash. “Or if you’d prefer,” the artist reported back to the art shop, “I’ll pay in Kava.”
The carpetbagger was run out of town by the cops, who still have powers under the Aboriginal Land Act. At any time between now and 18 February 2008 the permit system will be completely abolished for towns such as Maningrida. Brough can pull the abolition on any time he chooses.
Thank you Crikey for bringing the disgraceful situation in the Northern Territory to the attention of the rest of Australia. The erosion of civil liberties for the aboriginal community is absolutely mind numbing and very frightening.