NSW Deputy Labor Leader Linda Burney has spoken out for the first time against the proposed closures of remote communities in Western Australia - and possibly South Australia.
WA Premier Colin Barnett said the state cannot afford to maintain unviable small communities.
The Canterbury MP says closing Indigenous communities is reminiscent of Australia’s past annihilation policies of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the 1961 Policy of Assimilation adopted by federal and state governments which intended Indigenous people to practice the same living manner as non-Indigenous Australians.
“The complete annihilation of self-determination – that is what we’re seeing now.”
“Forgive me for thinking that, this is 1955, not 2015,” Ms Burney said. “It is harking back to those days where Aboriginal people had no say, and no control over where they lived and how they lived.”
She likened the flagged closures to the policies of former Queensland premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.
In 1971, the World Council of Churches stated that his government’s proposed Aborigines Act, which banned Aboriginal customs, controlled relationships and recorded people’s movements, was “almost as iniquitous as South Africa’s apartheid”.
“The complete annihilation of self-determination – that is what we’re seeing now.”
It is wrong to argue that Aboriginal communities and homelands are not economically sustainable, Ms Burney said, because people’s health and wellbeing are better when Indigenous people live their traditional lifestyles.
Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion announced funding cuts to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations under the Federal Government's Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) last month.
The minister said less than half of the 2,345 Indigenous organisations that applied for funding under the strategy were successful.
Linda Burney thinks the move will backfire.
“The money that [Prime Minister] Tony Abbott thinks [the government is] going to save in the cutting back of Aboriginal services including things like drugs and alcohol, including child protection, including domestic violence services, will cost the tax payer millions into the future because of the social havoc that this is going to bring about in many communities.”
It is not sustainable to cut, for example, the only drug and alcohol service in the Darwin area, she said, and to "think that that’s not going to bring about more domestic violence, more child neglect and more misery".
The Federal Government cut 20 percent of funding from Amity Community Services, which provides a drug and alcohol prevention service in the Darwin region.
“It’s unexplainable, inexplicably bad,” she said.
