New Year Resolutions please Mr Bowen

Hello Mr Bowen

I know that the media will keep your eyes focussed on this important area of government policy in the new year and I suppose I am expecting that there will be no major shift in your current policy direction - seeking to secure an off-shore processing option but in the mean time processing asylum-seekers on-shore as required by law.

I have never been happy with the way the Rudd/Gillard party has enacted this area of policy in government. I was never happy with the way Howard government enacted this area of policy. There have, however, been some glimmers of hope and good practice along the way and from time to time, so it is not all bad. Most particularly, I thank you for so readily moving towards community-based models for the care of asylum-seekers while their claims are being fully assessed. As Patrick McGorry said, our immigration detention centres are factories for psychiatric illness and we should aim to get people out of them as quickly as possible. I dread the thought that in a generation's time the Federal Government will be needing to say "Sorry" for the consequences of these actions of government in our day.

I wonder if I could offer you some new year's thoughts for consideration.

1. GLOBAL SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL PROBLEMS

It has occurred to me for a long time that both the media and the political analysts have been blind to the most significant push factor that is driving people onto unseaworthy boats bound for our shores. This is the issue of HOPE. Ever more draconian policies that are designed to extinguish hope will do nothing more than increase the power of this push factor. Think of the situation for asylum-seekers in Malaysia. I can't find the exact number of people living in limbo there - is it 100,000? is it more? - whatever it is it is a vast number of people. And that is just one of many countries in which refugees languish in camps. We know that people from some countries have been told plainly that they will never be offered places to go. Others wait for years and years. Thousands die while waiting. In such HOPELESS situations is it any wonder that people take extraordinary risks to improve their chances of survival and resettlement?

Clearly, the policy that is most likely to deter people taking such risks is one that INCREASES their HOPE of resettlement and thus their willingness to wait their turn. Understandably, Australia can't act on this alone, and in many ways the UN is either unwilling or ill-equipped to take a lead. The UN has given the world a legal framework by which we determine the status of people, but it is up to the nations to offer resettlement. Even your proposed "Regional Processing Centre" is of little value if it is not backed up by an increase in the number of resettlements being offered.

This is indeed a global problem and it therefore demands a global solution. How do we persuade more nations to offer resettlement to asylum-seekers? Getting more countries on board to offer perhaps a million more humanitarian placements each year would begin to INCREASE the HOPE quotient and thus stem the business plan of the people smugglers.

So long as you adopt policies that seek more and more draconian measures to stop the boats, you will rely on demonizing innocent people almost all of whom are deserving of our protection, not hatred.

2. LOCAL POLITICS

So far as our local political scene goes, I have to admit that the tussle between you and the Opposition, (which I prefer to call the NOalition) to come up with the harshest position has been completely unedifying and it diminishes the quality of your credentials as politicians.

I believe that this policy area has been the biggest single factor in the bleeding of political support from your party in support of the GREENS and yet you are making no policy adjustments that might woo them back towards you. In fact you are making policy adjustments that are driving them deeper into the arms of the GREENS. I don't get that as a political strategy.

Those of us (yes I count myself as one) who have moved towards the GREENS over the past two or three elections have done so because of a perception that the party of the left that cares about compassionate social policy is no longer the Australian Labor Party. Indeed, there are times when it is really hard to distinguish it at a policy level from the Tories in the NOalition.

Given the circumstances in which you all retained government after the next election I was expecting a clearer policy shift aimed at reclaiming this lost territory than has been evident in the 12 months or so that you have been in power. I can't fathom the logic of your policy advisers who have failed to consider this strategy - but there you are; perhaps that explains why I am not in politics.

CAN WE HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR?

So I leave you with these thoughts of mine. I am not a person of great consequence, nor do I have any power, political or otherwise, but I have a heart. I care about the detrimental effects government policy can have on the most vulnerable people in our country and wider world. As a citizen of this nation, and hopefully a good citizen of our world, I would like to see some leadership in this area of refugee and immigration policy that will make me even more proud to be an Aussie.

Stop the Boats!!!! A GLOBAL PROBLEM

"Stop the Boats" has caught the imagination of the media and the Australia public as if it as something we can actually achieve.

Below is a full transcript of Greg Sheridan's opinion piece in The Australian today. The views expressed in it epitomize the very reason why I no longer buy the Australian and indeed resist all offers from the News Ltd stable via the internet. For me the ABC and the SBS media will give me what I can trust for news and balanced opinion.

I am reasonably confident that those wanting to stop the boats have reasons other than an altruistic concern for the welfare of those who would take the risks associated with that crazy short trip from Indonesia to Ashmore Reef. The claim of altruism is used to give validity to their proposals which have nothing to do with the welfare of people fleeing persecution in their home country.

The greatest single "Push Factor" as people like to call it is not the fact that people can no longer go home because of civil strife. The places where people gather as refugees, bush camps or city slums, are places that offer no hope. In Malaysia and Indonesia, refugees who try to leave the camps are arrested as illegal immigrants, but in the camps there is so little processing of refugee claims, if any, that there is no hope of resettlement. The only thing they can count on is spending 10s of years in that place.

Hope is the big push factor - hope that if they get away they might have a chance at resettlement somewhere, anywhere, and for those in Indonesia and Malaysia, the closest somewhere is Australia. None of the Asian countries where we think there would be a closer cultural and religious fit than here have any programs of humanitarian settlement of refugees. Thailand has made room for many many Burmese and Cambodian refugees but always in the hope that those people would sooner or later be able to go back home across their common borders. That is what Temporary Protection Visas so enthusiastically advocated by the Liberal Party are offering - safety until you can go back home. Once again, there is no hope in such offers and they will not diminish the push factor.

Given that we have a global refugee problem it stands to reason that we need a global solution. The fact that the UN offers definitions and conventions that govern people's international rights only goes part of the way. The sad fact is that when the number of places for resettlement each year is put alongside the number of people displaced from their homes because of their race or religious or political beliefs current levels of humanitarian resettlements in third countries is a drop in the ocean.

What is needed is a global mobilization of countries willing to offer humanitarian resettlement to the millions who need protection. At the moment very few countries offer resettlement - just 10 countries, and per capita Australia us pulling its weight alongside the others. But the reality is that the number of places we offer is minsicule compared to other migration places offered, and other forms of entry for work etc, not to mention the number of working or touring visitors who have overstayed and are now lost in the fabric of our society. I think Australia could cope with a whole lot more refugee settlements and I think it would do our economy far more good than harm, but that is a minor issue.

But what if a whole lot more western countries could be persuaded to open their doors to refugees? What if between us we could all offer say a million new refugee resettlements a year, or even two? That would begin to offer hope to people who wind up in refugee camps, not just in Asia, but in various parts of Africa. This is what will reduce the push factor and put the people smugglers out of business.

Yes, it makes me mad that the people who organised the latest tragedy walked away with $1.5m perhaps for outlays of very little on a decrepit boat that was a single-use investment and a few peasant crew members who probably knew very little about the risks they were taking. But that does not diminish my concern for the refugees and the need for the rest of the world to offer them resettlement. If they truly are refugees they cannot go home. Our experience is that 9 out of 10 who come are indeed refugees, and they often come from countries in which our military has been actively involved in the civil unrest from which they are fleeing.

Jesus once met a lady who asked him to help her. She was a foreigner from Phoenicia. Jesus at first refused, but she responded that even dogs were entitled to the crumbs from under the banquet tables. The current social and political response to refugees in Australia seems to me to be like that - we have so much that even the crumbs from under our banquet tables would make refugee people happy and passing them on would do us no harm - BUT WE REFUSE HOSPITALITY.

Everything the Immigration Minister and his opposition counterparts talk about and do is designed to score political points and it will make no difference to the push factor - in fact it will only increase the pressure.

You wait and see!!!!!

BY:GREG SHERIDAN, FOREIGN EDITOR
From:The Australian
December 24, 2011 12:00AM

A TITANIC battle of wills took place yesterday between the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition and, as far as we can see, the opposition is not going to remove its veto on the Malaysia Solution to the illegal arrival of boatpeople.

The only way that would change, one presumes, is if the nature of the Malaysia Solution changed: that is, the Malaysian government signs the refugee convention or institutes similar guarantees into domestic law, or at least gives them a much greater degree of formality than they have now.

If that happens the opposition will be able to claim it has greatly improved the quality of the Malaysia Solution.

The government has had some success in getting commentators to blame the opposition for the recent policy impasse. But really, the whole illegal immigration-boatpeople fiasco is the government's problem, the government's fault and the government's responsibility.

Yesterday's events in a way make the government's position even more incoherent. Yesterday, the government was publicly prepared to open an offshore processing centre on Nauru. If the opposition maintains its veto on Malaysia, what then is the government's position? How can it be that Nauru was OK yesterday but no good today?

The absolute failure of the Gillard government to show any conviction, consistency or policy coherence on the boatpeople matter is at the heart of its failure to manage the issue effectively.

No one, least of all the people-smugglers, believes, or takes at face value, or invests with any sense of consequence, a single word the government says on this matter, so all the serially contradictory and wildly varying policies it has adopted and then discarded end up achieving nothing.

There are many layers of complexity and contradiction all through this business.

In Wayne Swan's letter to Tony Abbott on Thursday, he spoke of "our No 1, shared, overriding objective: to stop men, women and children from risking their lives on leaky boats."

The tragedy of those people who drowned is indeed an appalling human tragedy. They were all human beings and they all have an absolute claim on human rights. In my view there is no one in Australia, at any point of any spectrum of this debate, who does not want to stop such deaths.

Surely all of us involved in this debate can afford each other this much goodwill: that there is no one who wants, or who is directly responsible for, these tragic deaths.

And it is absolutely correct that avoiding these deaths must be an extremely high priority of policy.

But if it is the only policy priority, then the Greens' policy is the logical one to follow. Indeed, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only consideration of policy, you could quite reasonably be a lot more radical than the Greens.

The Greens want us to take tens of thousands of people from Malaysia and Indonesia. If we did that it would certainly, in the short term at least, prevent deaths at sea.

Why would anyone get on a boat when they knew they would come to Australia in short order in perfect safety? It would also massively increase the numbers coming to Indonesia and Malaysia.

More than that, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only priority, if the people involved really are refugees and have a right to claim refuge in Australia, then we should send our navy out to meet the boats and help them as early on their journey as possible.

I am not being sarcastic or ironic here. This was the position I took on the Vietnamese boatpeople of the late 1970s and early 80s. I believed they were genuine refugees. I strongly supported Medecins du Monde, which sent out boats searching for Vietnamese in the South China Sea. I helped try to set up a branch of MDM in Sydney, wrote columns about it, held a meeting for it in my home and on several occasions was invited to join its expeditions in the South China Sea.

If you believe these people really are refugees, and really are entitled to resettlement in Australia, this is the only logical response.

I have 100 per cent changed my view since then because I believe that overwhelmingly we are dealing today with determined illegal immigration, not refugees. The bureaucratic process to decide who is really a refugee is completely unreliable, especially when people throw away their documents before landing on Australian soil so their stories cannot be verified.

Middle-class Iranians, Pakistanis pretending to be Afghans, Afghans who have only ever lived in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils who don't want to join the tens of millions of Tamils in India: all of these people may reasonably want to live in Australia. Overwhelmingly, they are not refugees.

So a serious object of policy also has to be to prevent people from confronting Australia with an unmanageable problem of illegal arrivals by boat.

This is a perfectly sensible objective, which the vast majority of Australians want upheld. But it is almost impossible to achieve while ever the ultimate prize of permanent residency in Australia is available.

That is why those who claim it is hysterical for us to get worried about relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants are misguided or disingenuous. Once the route to Australia is established, the numbers will increase inexorably.

In the first half of December we had the highest rate of arrivals for many years. We have had more than 14,000 boat arrivals since late 2008, when Labor changed the successful Pacific Solution policies John Howard had implemented. The arrival rate is accelerating and all these people will bring relatives under family reunion. This is an immigration outcome, pure and simple, and one that the government has completely lost control of.

Offshore processing by itself will not stop the boats and, therefore, will not stop the drownings.

Once people are detained at an Australian facility, be it on Nauru or Manus Island, there will be strong calls from within Australia that they be processed quickly. If they have got rid of their documents, and are determined to live in Australia, the government will find it very hard to send them back and ultimately most will be accepted into Australia.

The boats thus will keep coming. This again would be a failure of process and a defeat for Australian sovereignty and the will of the people of Australia and of their government.

Ultimately, solving this problem must include a determination that if you arrive illegally by boat, whatever your circumstances, you will not get permanent residency in Australia. This is why the opposition's approach of offshore processing combined with temporary protection visas, with no family reunion rights, is likelier to work than the government's approach.

The fact that the Abbott opposition, like Howard before it, looks as if it really would enforce these policies means it would have a better chance of staring down the people-smugglers and their clients.

Credibility, which on this issue Julia Gillard has entirely lacked across her whole prime ministership, is crucial.

The Rule of Law and a Civil Society

Two quite separate events in the media this week have caused me to think about these principles.

The death of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi may well have been nothing more that the death of the Commander-in-Chief in the front line of a civil war.  He certainly had caused the death of countless civilians both during his 42 year reign of terror in Libya and during this most recent civil war.  But there are international rules of engagement in war, especially in relation to those taken prisoner, that mean that once taken prison a person should expect to be taken into custody and dealt with through a military justice or international justice system.

Given that the people's army in this civil war were not in any way really trained for combat it is not beyond the realm of possibilities for the situation to simply have gotten out of control because people really didn't know the rules nor were they under a proper system of command.

Nevertheless, I feel disquieted by both the end result - his ignominious death and the ensuing lack of respect for his remains - and the almost gloating tone of Western leaders suggesting that the world was better off with him dead.  This is a not-too-faint echo of the circumstances surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden in an insurgent military operation by US troops without the official sanction of the Pakistani government.

The man was a bad man, but the West loses all its moral authority if it allows others to sidestep the rule of law in dealing with bad people, just because they are bad and this way is much easier.

The second event, and one much closer to home concerns the removal by police of unarmed non-violent demonstrators from a number of our city centres, firstly in Melbourne this week, today in Sydney, and I expect again in a few days from now in Perth, in what can only be described as a heavy-handed response to the situation.

I have no doubt that some of the occupiers are what might be called "professional protesters" given that their faces pop up again and again regardless of the cause - wild rivers, anti-forestry, coal-seal gas, you name it.  I also have no doubt that while permission may have been sought and granted for a "two-hour" protest with a clear intention of making the protest go way beyond that time frame, protest in an orderly (but not necessarily quiet), non-violent manner in a public place is not something that a civil society should allow the police to shut down just because a city by-law had been breached.

I don't believe the protesters were preventing citizens from going about their business.  I don't believe they could be regarded as having trespassed on private property.  They were simply using this centuries-old means of getting a point across and they weren't finished yet.

But armed police, some in riot gear, some on horses decided it was time for them to finish and so man-handled hundreds of people to get them out of there, some of whom may now face charges.

I actually don't really agree with the point these protesters are trying to make, but I feel very uncomfortable when the authorities of my society take to themselves the right to silence such criticism and protest in this way.

What do you think?

Have a heart

Asylum seekers at Lombrum Naval Base, Manus Island. Shipping containers surrounded by cladding and fitted with air-conditioners are their accommodation. Photo: Angela Wylie via Sydney Morning Herald

I find it hard to reconcile the determination of the Gillard Labor Government to be as harsh on boat-arrival asylum-seekers as the Howard Coalition Government ever was. They have spoken words of differentiation between their policies and the previous regime, but their actions are entirely consistent with the barbaric practices that Phillip Ruddock as Immigration Minister normalized.

Chris Bowen has now put in place off-shore processing options for anyone arriving by boat in two separate countries that are not signatories to the UN Convention on Refugees and if Nauru eventually comes on stream, which I think is most likely, that will be a third country. He thinks that by putting people in hopeless situations they will stop taking the boat-pathway to gain entry to our country. So long as he does nothing to speed up the exit-pathways from the miserable camps, especially for the Afghanis in Malaysia, they will continue to choose this option. As an aside I remain convinced that the use of the term "people smugglers" is intended to imply that there are border-security issues at stake and that refugees are being mercilessly exploited, but it is simply a ploy to side-step a racist concern that says we don't want people "like that" coming here.

Last week, the Head of the Immigration Department invited Senators to seriously consider that option of community-based on-shore processing of claimants, not for humanitarian reasons, even though these are many, but for economic reasons. The cost to his Department of managing the situation last year was $750m compared with $150m three years ago, and a large part of the cost is related to trying to do departmental work in remote areas. It would be much cheaper and in no way compromise our security concerns to have people in community-based detention in the cities where departmental services are easily accessed.

Sadly, the senators will not investigate this question, I fear. This new committee is simply a platform for the opposition to score points and to politicize the issue rather than inject considered policy proposals. I wish it were otherwise.

What do you think?

Presenting an Alternative View or Trolling?

Over the past month I have enjoyed participating in some internet forums about the National School Chaplaincy Program.

I had several motivators in doing this.

Firstly, I wanted to see what the detractors were saying - to keep up with the issues they thought would bolster their case.

Secondly, I wanted to put some of the evidence in support of the program before people, to offer an alternative view and at times to correct misrepresentations.

I also wanted to hone my skills in clarifying what the issues were and then responding in a coherent way.

I have been involved in several public forums as well as participating in a discussion page on Facebook.

My involvement on Atheists Federation of Australia forum on School Chaplaincy felt a bit like jumping into a fish tank filled with piranhas. People did not want to listen to an alternative view point and took great delight in referring to the things of faith in the crudest of terms. Some contributors were clearly intent on total disrespect for anyone with religious world views. And after a while, I found that what they wanted to say was filled with generalisations as well as utterly repetitive. They tickled each others ears with the same things over and over again.

I then got involved with with a GetUp discussion page on the NSCP. I found some of the same contributors making the same kinds of comments, the same kind of sweeping generalisations, the same kind of reluctance to engage with evidence that contradicted their point of view and the same repetitive droning on. But at least they were polite about it.

I have more recently been following a page in Facebook called "The High Court Challenge to the Constitutional Legality of the NSCP". Every day they would post links to various newspaper stories that were generally antagonistic to school chaplaincy and there would follow a litany of oooo's and aaaahhh's as people would join the chorus of outrage at the state of affairs.

Now I have to admit that the evangelical stance of some other school chaplaincy providers in Australia is a great liability in this climate and one or two stories recently have been a bit like giving away an "own goal". But I have consistently tried to offer evidence that chaplaincy can be done well, and that the program is wanted by schools.

On Friday, however, the administrator of the page decided that my close connection with YouthCARE meant that I was no longer entitled to contribute to the debate. My connection to the page was closed down, I became invisible (all my previous contributions disappeared) and even though I can follow the page I can no longer directly contribute to it.

I guess that says it all, really, in regard to the willingness of opponents to listen to alternative points of view.

Have you had any similar experiences?

Government Funding for Religious Organisations

On 19 April, Scott Stephens published a blog on the ABC Ethics & Religion Web-site in which he advocates that Churches should say no to government funding. It is a well-reasoned argument in many ways, but I think it makes a significant omission, resulting in what could be a travesty of justice.

Religious organisations, particularly but not only Christian religious organisations, have a very long history of engagement in the Community Sector, delivering a wide range of social, welfare and community development services that benefit the whole community, not just the members of the particular religious community.

At all three levels of government in Australia there is a general principle that denies funding to religious and political organisations for activities that are either intended exclusively for their members and/or are intended to promulgate their particular religious or political views. It is an interesting paradox, in my view that a sporting club is not ineligible for government funding in the grounds that the services are only available to the members of the sporting club.

I think I generally support that principle.

However, there is a debate in the public and political sphere right now about whether or not Government Funding should be given at all to religious bodies. The focus is particularly on the National School Chaplaincy Program but the outcome of this debate has much wider ramifications than just the NSCP.

Secularists on the one hand want the public domain to be religion-free and any use of public funds to achieve outcomes of religious organisations is illegitimate, and the Religious "exceptionalists" (as Scott Stephens describes them) believe they are entitled.

I believe that both extremes in this debate are wrong: the "secularists" because they assume that once religion is removed from public-political life, and consigned to interiority (where they assume it belongs, if anywhere), the secular space that is left will be neutral, benign and inherently just; and the Christian "exceptionalists" because they think that God's providential care of the world can be mediated through political coercion, and because they do not believe that being on the payroll of the State is hazardous to the soul of Christianity itself.

I agree that both are wrong. The removal of the religious from public political life not only fails to create a neutral and benign space, it creates a space that does not reflect the nature of society. And the government funding can indeed be much more than providential because of the political obligations that are so often attached to such funding.

But to conclude, as Scott does, that religious bodies should deny themselves access to government funding, while perhaps noble and perhaps also a strategy that keeps the church in total control of its destiny, cuts across another important principle of contemporary democratic societies - the principle of equity and access.

I am unable to identify a source that would be specific about this, but a very significant part of the Community Sector is in the hands of religious organisations - Anglicare, the Salvation Army, even generic organisations like Mission Australia and World Vision which began out of a religious vision. These organisations make both a significant and valued contribution to the whole community. If Governments decided that they should no longer fund them because of their religious basis or heritage, it would amount to a scandalous example of discrimination on the basis of religion.

The dichotomy is wrong - the secular and religious. Indeed, if it were a valid dichotomy, the removal one from the public space would give the other an inappropriate advantage. the two live together, and indeed must live together giving each other the respect they deserve as each making valued and significant contributions to the welfare of the whole community.

What do you think?

The Yindjibarndi People versus Fortescue Metals Group

Hypocrisy is only worth doing when you do it well. Here is one of the best examples I have seen for a long time.

The Saturday West Australian newspaper had a great little opinion piece this weekend by Andrew Forrest, Managing Director of Fortescue Metals Group, telling us all of his grand vision to free indigenous people from their dependence on government welfare. It was a gratuitous piece of self-agrandisement, and every claim he made is at odds with the accounts I have seen on video and heard from someone who was there. So I wrote a short note to every member of the Western Australian Parliament today. Here is your copy:

In our current climate it seems sacrilegious to speak critically of anyone involved in promoting the resources base of our economy, and especially one of our local heroes. Indeed in yesterday’s West Australian Andrew Forrest makes the claim that “Fortescue Metals Group is passionate about working together with people and communities to improve their lives and livelihoods. In aboriginal communities this means real engagement and not simply replacing government welfare with mining welfare. Writing a cheque is easy.” (p.66)

I was recently made aware of a meeting between the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp. and Fortescue Metals Group on 16th March in which the behaviour of Andrew Forrest and FMG seems to be very much at odds with this statement.

Please take some time to watch this video – it takes about half an hour – and you will see what I mean. It was posted by the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp. only a few days ago and it portrays quite clearly the tactics used by Andrew Forrest to secure unfettered access to the lands of the Yindjibarndi people.

Ostensibly the meeting was called between the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation and FMG to mediate difficulties the parties were having in coming to a resolution in their discussions. Each party had their legal representatives and the meeting was supposed to be chaired by an independent legal mediator, Mr Graham Castledine.

However, his role as mediator was compromised by the determination of the lawyer representing FMG to take over the meeting and he withdrew from the meeting, leaving it in the hands of one party in the debate.

FMG had some very carefully prepared resolutions and had bussed in enough outsiders who claimed to belong to the Yindjibarndi people to win the day whenever the resolutions were put to the meeting. When the real Yindjibarndi people realised they were being stitched up they took no further part in the meeting. None of the bussed-in people spoke to any of the resolutions, yet by those resolutions they were given the power, previously vested in the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp., to make decisions about the Yindjibarndi native title claims. All this challenges Andrew Forrest’s assertion in the article mentioned above, that through this meeting the strong and independent Yindjibarndi people voted overwhelmingly in support of FMG’s proposals, thus regaining control of their destinies through the power of democracy.

I wonder if you can answer me a few questions about this.

Firstly, do you think this meeting and the resolutions passed at it would be regarded as legitimate by the relevant authorities in consideration of the Native Title rights of the Yindjibarndi people? I hate the thought that it might be, and every reasonable bone in my body says it shouldn’t be, but somehow I feel that the FMG lawyer has decided this is the way to get what they want.

Secondly, if you think that FMG has achieved its objectives in this way, what is your view of the probity of FMG’s behaviour in this situation?

Finally, does this incident change you views about the integrity of Andrew Forrest and FMG, particularly in regard to his often stated passion for the welfare of indigenous people?

If you feel as badly about this as I do, I would ask you to do whatever is in your power to draw attention to these matters, and protect the interests of the Yindjibarndi and other aboriginal people when they come into conflict with big mining companies that think that if they promise them a few million dollars a year they will sign away all the sacred rights they have to their country.

As I write, two MPs have already replied, The Member for Ocean Reef doesn't know much about it and thinks I should take it up directly with FMG, and the Member for Cockburn said that there has been a lot of discussion about this within his party already and he awaits developments.