This Musical Dispatch From the Front is edited from one first published 30 June 2012
Several Dispatches ago I told you about the plane load of bureaucrats that landed on Yuendumu airstrip. The bureaucrats attended an unattended meeting.
There’s a meetin’ here tonight…. http://youtu.be/-fECUAJ5H5M
Last week I happened to be at Yuendumu airstrip when a charter plane landed which disgorged three passengers. I offered them a lift ‘into town’ that they gratefully accepted as ‘they’d made no arrangements’.
They had come to Yuendumu to inspect the Men’s Safe House.
At the beginning of the Intervention a contractor installed a converted shipping container as a ‘Men’s cooling-off place’. At the time I came to the conclusion that the ‘cooling-off place’ had been designed by the same architect that had designed Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. The several strands of barbed-wire at the top of the chain-wire mesh fence, the padlocked chain on the gate and the spotlights surrounding the Spartan building are reminiscent of TV images I had seen during the time that David Hicks was receiving similar consular assistance from the Australian Government as Julian Assange is currently receiving.
I also found it hard to envisage Warlpiri men embracing the facility as a ‘cooling-off’ place.
The intervention had tens of these so called ‘cooling-off’ places installed throughout the NT. The contractor made a killing.
The perceived and implied need for these “cooling-off’ places is yet another way remote Aboriginal communities have been stigmatized.
No discussion or consultation with locals preceded the decision to install these facilities.
One word: GRATUITOUS
I drove the two men and the lady that had emerged from the plane to the padlocked ‘cooling-off’ place. I found out it had been renamed the ‘Men’s Safe House’.
The lady exclaimed: “It looks like it has never been used!” Well spotted! It never has.
One word: SUPERFLUOUS http://youtu.be/IKsTyGxrjGU
An hour later the charter plane took off on its way to another community made safer by the erection of an Intervention Safe House.
To pay a local organisation or individual to inspect the unused Safe House, take a few photos and knock a few walls to check for muluru (termites) would require a paradigm shift the Intervention is incapable of.
A much more likely scenario is that a plane load of experts, consultants, mentors and trainers lands at Yuendumu airstrip to run a course leading to a Safe House Inspector’s Certificate.
One word: VISIONARY
Early yesterday morning the Australian Parliament passed the Stolen Futures Legislation. One word: VISIONARY
In Brazil meanwhile they have introduced a scheme that allows prisoners to reduce their sentences by reading books.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-26/brazil-prisoners-to-read-books/4093762
“A person can leave prison more enlightened and with an enlarged vision of the world,” said Sao Paulo lawyer Andre Kehdi, who heads a book donation project for prisons. “Without doubt, they will leave a better person,”
Now that is what I call visionary!
So which is the Banana Republic ?
Mr. tallyman tally me-banana
Obrigado por ler esta expedição
Francisco
As long as I can see the light…..
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