Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. For the information of Senator Joyce, there is an English transcription of the message stick with the message stick which has been tabled. I am now reading from the message to this parliament from the people who provided that message stick at Garma. It continues:

The widespread fear caused by the deployment of Defence Force personnel in our communities will be a long term obstacle to achieving stable, healthy families and communities.

The Governments present intervention is not sustainable and the personnel presently working in our communities will inevitably leave. The impact of this intervention will have serious negative consequences, and one which concerns us most, because of the widespread defamation of all Aboriginal people that has resulted, is that Aboriginal people will lose confidence in any intervention, such as regular visits to medical services.

The Government’s decision to terminate the CDEP and replace it with social security arrangements will affect a majority of those people living on Aboriginal land. The detrimental impact of this new policy will be to force people into townships and communities where Aboriginal housing and services are drastically inadequate and create further dysfunction in those populations. Their policy of making social security entitlements conditional on school attendance and other factors will also contribute to a large transmigration with disastrous potential.

Moreover because the homelands have served as safe havens for families escaping alcohol, drug abuse, criminal behaviour and related dysfunction there will no longer be the option of the protection of their homelands. Thereby, the scale of the problem that concerns us all will accelerate rapidly particularly exposing women and children to greater risk.

We believe that the following steps are a pathway forward in dealing cooperatively with these matters.

And the first of those steps that come with the message stick is ‘Sit down and talk’; the second is ‘Stop the legislation’; and the third is ‘No more dispossession’.

Before dinner I had—