Media silence: NT Govt caught stealing $2 billion

The scathing report from The Australian came at a time when all eyes were on the NT after a shocking case of child sexual abuse hit Tennant Creek.

While many people have their fingers pointed directly at Aboriginal communities, no one seems to be questioning the $2 billion of Indigenous funding that was taken out of Indigenous aid budgets by the NT Govt. Can you honestly say that problems would be so bad in these communities if the $2 billion was invested like it was supposed to be?

The report revealed that successive governments under-spent on allocated Indigenous and remote disadvantage GST funding. The total of under-spending has now reached around $2.2 billion dollars. In 2014, we saw outrage when Tony Abbot and Warren Mundine announced nationwide Indigenous budget cuts of over $500 million. Now it has been revealed that $2 billion was stripped secretly from some of the most disadvantaged Aboriginal communities and there is nothing but silence.

We can’t blame the public for not knowing about this as the only article about this story is behind a pay-wall on The Australian’s subscription based website. But other media throughout Australia have no excuse for ignoring this. What is really going on here? Is there going to be another military backed intervention in the NT? An intervention aided once again by Australia’s media that is only telling one side of the story?

Has anything really changed since the eye popping documentary by John Pilger – Utopia, exposed the deep apartheid running through Australia?
In the era of ‘Equality’ ‘#MeToo’ and ‘Same Sex Marriage’ – what about our First Nations?

Click here to read the rest of the article on the  Welcome to Country website

If you’re feeling helpless as to what you can do. Let’s start by sharing this story. At present, the Welcome to Country article is the only non-paywall article talking about the misuse of over $2 billion dollars. And lets start putting pressure and questioning why other news sites aren’t reporting on both sides of the story in the Northern Territory.

 “powerful” … “passionate” … “commanding” 

TOTAL FILM

NEW INTERNATIONALIST

“Pilger stands apart from the crowd as a documentarian. 

Utopia is essential viewing.” CINE-VUE

Utopia is a vast region in northern Australia and home to the oldest human presence on earth. ‘This film is a journey into that secret country,’ says John Pilger in Utopia. ‘It will describe not only the uniqueness of the first Australians, but their trail of tears and betrayal and resistance – from one utopia to another’. Pilger begins his journey in Sydney, where he grew up, and in Canberra, the nation’s capital, where the national parliament rises in an affluent suburb called Barton, recently awarded the title of Australia’s most advantaged community.

A global campaign illuminated apartheid in South Africa. No such opprobrium has been directed at Australia, where black Australians are imprisoned at up to eight times the rate of blacks in apartheid South Africa. Instead, Australia’s post card image is that of the ‘lucky country’; and indeed few societies are as wealthy, if you leave out the original inhabitants is that of a third world country. In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the average life expectancy of men is 37. This is the secret of apartheid Australia. 

Utopia is both a personal journey and universal story of power and resistance and how modern societies can be divided between those who conform and a dystopian world of those who do not. 

John Pilger has been filming indigenous Australia since the 1980s. The Secret Country (1985) is considered a landmark film, inspiring the setting up of the first indigenous memorial in the National Gallery of Australia. http://nga.gov.au/AboriginalMemorial/history.cfm 

Utopia draws on people and places Pilger filmed 28 years ago during his long association with the indigenous people of his homeland. The evidence he produces is often deeply moving and shocking.

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