Downer a downer on human rights?
Amnesty international is concerned by the Australian government's reluctance to agree to a human rights clause in a trade agreement with the European Union. Almost 100 counties have already agreed to the clause while Australia is trying to get out of it. Why is our government undermining Australia's credibility on the world stage?
Last July the Foreign Minister issued a major statement pledging that government human rights policy would be based on democratic principles and the basic human rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was reaffirmed by Mr Downer on International Human Rights Day in December. How is it that this economic agreement has become an exception?
Clearly human rights are universal. They do not stop at national borders nor are they expendable in the interest of an alleged trade benefit. Australia, by ratifying the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights treaties since, has a clear obligation to promote and protect human rights around the world. What is the problem?
National Director
Amnesty International Australia
Racist past (and present)
Whether one's concept of the past can be encapsulated within Geoffrey Blainey's black arm band or John Howard's white blind-fold view of Australia's colonial history the Wik and Mabo High Court decisions present a challenge for decent non-racist Australians.
It has been a common practice in Australia, when confronted with the appalling mortality and morbidity profile of indigenous Australians, for middle Australia to suggest that the events which cause Aborigines to experience the classic symptoms of dispossession occurred 200 years ago and that they were carried out by unnamed forebears or unknown pioneers. The implication arising from such reasoning is that white Australians living in the 1990s are not responsible and therefore have no obligation to rectify the situation.
As the stolen generations inquiry publicised, over 5,000 Aboriginal children were taken from their parents in NSW alone this century. Aboriginal children were still being unnecessarily removed from families throughout Australia well into the 1980s. In 1963 over one million hectares of Aboriginal land was alienated by white interests and the current bi-partisan parliamentary support for the Century Zinc Mine shows that this process is continuing in 1997.
The prime minister now claims the important step is to treat all Australians equally. He is ignoring the fact that to treat unequals equally is as unfair as treating equals unequally. It can not have escaped his attention that no white Australians have native title. The Wik and Mabo decisions provide white Australians with the opportunity to come to an equitable reconciliation with indigenous Australians. If non-indigenous Australians do not seize this opportunity then each of us must accept our responsibility for the extinguishment of Aboriginal ownership of land. We can no longer claim the conditions which cause disproportionate ill health and early death were caused by long forgotten forebears — they will be caused by us.
Senior Lecturer, QUT
Green strategy
Ben Courtice (GLW #259) makes the important points that "The government has not stopped for blockades, nor listened to persistent lobbying" and "destruction of the environment continues unabated".
Obviously, there is something wrong with the strategy, if not with the tactics of the green movement. In fact there doesn't appear to be a strategy.
One thing constraining the development of such a strategy is the conflict between the need to greatly reduce the per capita consumption of energy and luxury goods for the sake of the environment and the need to resist the attacks of the capitalist class on the wages and conditions of workers.
Until that conflict is resolved, and that resolution appears to require the abolition of the profit motive as the driving force of production, environmentalists would do well to remember what any ancient working class activist could tell them, that the money flow is the life-blood of capitalism.
Cut that off and you have their immediate attention. We should also be actively opposing taking part in the global market whilst at the same time advocating the development of local self-sufficiency.
Alawa NT
Senate shame
I did not see the vote in the Senate — 53 votes against sending congratulations to Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos Horta, and for a review of the banning of the East Timor photo exhibition from parliament, to ten votes for that resolution — reported in the press.
Bravo to Bob Brown, whose motion it was. Perhaps you could publish the 53 names of those who opposed the motion, as well as the ten who supported it. It may shame the 53, if they are capable of feeling such a thing.
It tells us a lot, I believe, about how parliament really works and why we have to work outside as well as inside federal parliament.
Paddington NSW
Secretary Australia-East Timor Association (NSW)
[Only the following senators voted for the motion: Allison, Bourne, Brown, Harradine, Kernot, Lees, Margetts, Murray, Stott Despoja, Woodley.]
Hospital privatisation
Recent health department figures show that Port Macquarie Base Hospital has the longest waiting times for elective surgery in the state. It is the only privatised for profit base hospital in the state. Before privatisation it had a waiting list of 800 people. Now after all the "hoo-ha" the waiting list was over 1600 in November and climbing fast.
Budget cuts? Maybe. Who can tell? The hospital, which was going to be the "first of many" according to the previous Coalition government, operates under "commercial sensitivity" so we don't know what's causing the disgraceful state of affairs we find ourselves in at present.
Seems to me that having the highest waiting list times, and largest percentage of people on that list per head of population, is a pretty good reason to keep private hands out of the public health purse.
Port Macquarie NSW
[Abridged.]