MEDIA

A radical shake-up of Queensland’s indigenous communities will begin next Tuesday, with new welfare and alcohol laws coming into force.

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has described a new plan to attract top teachers and graduates to Indigenous communities as a “call to patriotic duty”.

Top teachers and graduates would be lured to work in disadvantaged indigenous communities under a plan offering performance-linked incentives of up to $50,000 a year.

Malcolm Turnbull and Tony ­Abbott used indigenous constitutional recognition as a disposable weapon in their internecine war and had ambitions “only for themselves and not for the country”, Cape York lawyer Noel Pearson has alleged in an explosive new attack.

The Queensland government will trial indigenous welfare reform in four communities from next year, requiring families to meet basic responsibilities in order to receive payments.

PROMINENT Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson says there should be no “silly hesitation” about removing Aboriginal children from their parents if they are at risk. Mr Pearson said the case of the 10-year-old girl gang raped in the Cape York community of Arukun was “the tip of a tragic iceberg”. The rapes took place after the girl was returned to the…

PAUL Kelly and Dennis Shanahan reported on the front page of The Australian yesterday that Kevin Rudd will not be pursuing a constitutional referendum on reconciliation if he wins government. The constitutional referendum on reconciliation was the first pledge of the 2007 federal election campaign, made by Prime Minister John Howard at the Sydney Institute on the eve of the…

JOHN Howard’s election-eve pledge to solve the “unfinished business” of indigenous reconciliation is no less than a bid to make history – for himself and the nation. A road is proposed to be travelled to secure what has become a holy grail for Australians of goodwill. History soon forgets budget surpluses and property booms, tax cuts and sky-rocketing share markets….

I HAVE become convinced that the distance between good and bad policies is most often very fine — not poles apart. People from either side of the cultural and political divide usually believe the distance between their own correct policies and their opponents’ wrong policies is substantial.

Australia has never been clear about the place of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the nation. It was not clear on the founding of the colonies in Australia. There has been long and unresolved debate about the meaning of terms on which the British crown instructed the colonists to make sovereign claims to territories that had been, for up…

A deal was done behind closed doors with the Howard Government. The deal shafted the poor black fellas from the remote communities of central, northern and western Australia. The axe fell on more than twenty years of grassroots television development, in one fell swoop, in favour of big-city interests. There they were, two Fridays ago, these Uncle Toms, Aunt Jemimas,…

On Tuesday the 17th July 2007, The Eidos Institute Board and hosted a breakfast with Noel Pearson, an influential Aboriginal Australian lawyer, land rights activist and founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership