Aborigines are not native animals and building houses for them is only another attempt to assimilate indigenous Australians into white society, Aboriginal activist and leader Rosalie Kunoth-Monks says.
Passions flared on Saturday at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture in Gulkula, eastern Arnhem Land, as indigenous leaders and academics spoke out against the Northern Territory intervention.
More than 2000 local indigenous people have been joined by interstate and overseas visitors for the five-day festival, which concludes on Tuesday.
Ms Kunoth-Monks, president of the Barkly Shire Council, made her comment at festival forum focusing on the impact of the intervention.
Measures introduced under the policy, established by the former Howard government in 2007, include quarantining government payments to individuals, an influx of social services and a crackdown on illegal behaviour such as sexual abuse of children.
Ms Kunoth-Monks cautioned white members of the audience about how they might view Aborigines and the steps taken by the commonwealth and NT governments to help them.
"Be careful in your support of us - that you don't think for us. Indeed, that you don't become paternalistic," Ms Kunoth Monks said.
"Sure, there are some beautiful people with a heart of gold in the government forum. But please, please get off this agenda of making me a carbon copy of yourselves."
She took aim specifically at the $670 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program, which was launched 15 months ago to deliver 750 new homes in remote indigenous areas over five years.
To date, not one home has been built.
Ms Kunoth-Monks has asked for $5 million of the funds for her Tennant Creek-based shire, which covers an area 1.5 times that of Victoria and is home to about 7500 Aborigines.
She said politicians need to create better policies to advance the well-being and culture of indigenous Australians.
"It is time now to have a look and to be intelligent about it and also to acknowledge we are not part of the flora and fauna of Australia - we are human beings," she said.
"And it is time the territory government and the federal government took this seriously and used their brains on how to include and be inclusive of the Australian Aboriginal person."
Australian National University professor Jon Altman also spoke at the forum and lambasted the territory government's homelands policy to turn 20 towns into regional hubs.
Funding to more than 500 outstations, or homelands, would be frozen, forcing residents into larger towns in order to have access to vital social services.
Professor Altman has been studying visual arts in indigenous communities for the past 30 years and said the move would crush the Aboriginal art industry.
"The lack of support for outstations may see centralisation and this will have a disastrous impact on the visual arts for the very simple reason that most of it is produced at outstations," he told the forum.
"The Australian state, be it the commonwealth or the Northern Territory, cannot intervene into communities and run the arts.
"It does not have the capacity and it will not get community support.
"If successful, the state-project of improvement via state intervention will destroy Aboriginal creativity and the arts."
Front page
RSS Feed