The news that the Council of Australian Governments will fine-tune alcohol regulations for indigenous communities as its response to the latest devastating statistics on Aboriginal welfare is underwhelming.
It is surely time for a major rethink about our relationship with the First Australians of the kind offered by Ted Egan, in his book Due inheritance: Reviving the cultural and economic wellbeing of First Australians. The book contains a series of quite revolutionary proposals for change, which should be seriously debated.
Among many innovative suggestions, he proposes the creation of a register of those who identify as indigenous, which will create an electorate for election of a 50-person First Australian Academy. The new body would assume responsibility for cultural matters and administration of an important new ''Settlement'' Futures fund.
His ideas seek to cut across the stifling dead hand of whitefella bureaucracy and paternalism. Egan's proposals are born of desperation at watching things go backwards over the past 30 years.
His proposals are all debatable, but because they come from someone who throughout his lifetime has interacted closely with Aboriginal people and deeply respects their culture and their potential to rise from their current desperate plight, we should all be listening.
He says we need some circuit-breakers that will empower people to move beyond the learned helplessness that has resulted from well-meaning efforts by governments in recent decades. I can only agree.
Bob Douglas, Aranda
Hep C and drugs
When Peter Phillips (Letters, July 1) and the ACT Government reckon that ''drugs can be kept out of the ACT prison and users rehabilitated'' I doubt whether I inhabit the same planet.
The difficulty lies in irreconcilable views about how the world behaves, a difference more profound than separates the climate change denialists from the scientific consensus.
In three recent forums, speakers who know have declared that the provision of sterile syringes in prisons is essential if Australia is to get on top of its epidemic of hepatitis C.
As Dr Peter Sharp, of Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service, put it, ''Prisons are little concentrations of hep C all around the country from where it is going to spread out.'' His forum asked: ''Why are the rates of hepatitis C higher in Aboriginal communities?'' It is largely because we are sending more drug-dependent indigenous people to prison.
At the same forum Associate Professor Carla Treloar, of the National Centre in HIV Social Research, said, ''In my view the thing that makes hepatitis C different, so challenging and difficult ... is the underlying criminalisation of injecting drug use. Illegality frames everything that we see as possible and impossible in our responses and allows things to happen that we would never tolerate in any other sector.''
We must, she added, ''reframe hepatitis C away from its embeddedness in criminality and give it its proper status in health''.
All this is a bridge too far for the ACT Government which pays lip service to removing indigenous disadvantage and respect for human rights yet ignores the pleas of Winnunga Nimmityjah and its own Human Rights Commission.
Bill Bush, Turner
Pipe dreams
Last Friday I choked on my porridge on reading three letters from the United States in The Canberra Times.
They argued against prohibition of illegal drugs, even its repeal. Of all countries in the world, the US is the last to be preaching to other nations about drug policies.
The world knows it has much greater liberalisation of illicit drug use than Australia and the resultant drug mess it has internally, and at its border with Mexico. Because of its lax laws and lack of primary prevention, it is largely accountable for the drug gangs which have sprung up in Mexico even challenging the Government there.
It is hypocritical for the US to have spent over $100billion in Afghanistan on war, and trying to develop democracy, without moving to destroy the poppy crops and adequately recompense the farmers until other crops can be grown economically.
Rarely can we watch our televisions without seeing an American action/drama that doesn't have drug trafficking and use as a theme.
So, with due respect to the correspondents concerned, please don't export your drug advice to this great land.
To use an old Aussie saying: Put it in your pipe and smoke it.
Colliss Parrett, Barton
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