Taken from page 21 of the "Little Children are Sacred" report
Mr Fred Chaney, in retiring from the
National Native Title Tribunal, was asked why successive
governments have failed so comprehensively to turn the
story of Aboriginal deprivation around. He was being
interviewed on the ABC’s 7.30 Report on 19 April 2007
and replied:
And one of the things I think we should have learned by
now is that you can’t solve these things by centralised
bureaucratic direction. You can only educate children in
a school at the place where they live. You can only give
people jobs or get people into employment person by
person. And I think my own view now is that the lesson
we’ve learned is that you need locally based action, local
resourcing, local control to really make changes.
But I think governments persist in thinking you can
direct from Canberra, you can direct from Perth or
Sydney or Melbourne, that you can have programs
that run out into communities that aren’t owned by
those communities, that aren’t locally controlled and
managed, and I think surely that is a thing we should
know doesn’t work.
So I am very much in favour of a model which I suppose
builds local control in communities as the best of those
Native Title agreements do, as has been done in the
Argyle Diamond Mine Agreement, as is being done in
Kununurra. Not central bureaucracies trying to run
things in Aboriginal communities. That doesn’t work.
They’re locked into systems which require central
accounting, which require centralised rules and
regulations. They’re not locally tailored. The great thing
about working with a mining company in an
Aboriginal community is that the mining company has
the flexibility to manage towards outcomes locally with
that community.
The great thing about the education projects in which
I’m involved is that we can manage locally for the
outcomes that we want to achieve locally. Once you try
and do it by remote control, through visiting ministers
and visiting bureaucrats fly in, fly out – forget it.
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