A respected Aboriginal leader warned yesterday that the Australian government's decision to ax their top elected body could spark a violent backlash from the nation's most disadvantaged minority.
For 14 years, Aborigines have elected their own community leaders to spend millions of dollars of government money and advise state and federal governments on indigenous issues.
But the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard said Thursday the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, has wasted most of the money and will be scrapped.
Alison Anderson, the only woman on ATSIC's current board of 17 commissioners, warned that the loss of a democratically-elected Aboriginal voice would herald a return to the violent days of radical Aboriginal activism of the 1960s and 1970s.
"Aboriginal people are living in creeks, living without [running] water, they've been cornered and without a voice, they'll come out in the only way that they know and that's violence," Anderson told reporters.
Aborigines, a minority of 400,000 in Australia's 20 million population, were given the right to vote in 1967.
Today, many still live in squalid camps in the Outback or garbage-strewn neighborhoods on the fringes of towns and cities.
Their life expectancy is 20 years less than other Australians and they suffer high levels of sicknesses like trachoma, an eye disease associated with the poorest developing nations.
Anderson's warning of violence came just weeks after dozens of police were injured in an extraordinary clash with hundreds of Aboriginal rioters in a crime-ridden Aboriginal ghetto in Sydney.
Anderson, one of ATSIC's most respected commissioners, said the organization was paying the ultimate price for campaigning on behalf of Aborigines.
"The government's ashamed of the good work ATSIC's done in showing the world how disadvantaged we are and highlighting the racist attitudes of a lot of non-indigenous people and governments," she said.
Another senior indigenous leader, Pat Dodson, said rising unemployment and imprisonment rates, declining health and soaring levels of substance abuse and violence were a failure of eight years of Howard's government and said ATSIC was its whipping boy in an election year.
Howard's government, which inherited ATSIC from a Labor Party government in 1996, has long been critical of how it spends its money on what Howard dismisses as symbolic issues like fighting for land rights and for squandering funds.
"I don't think the money's been wisely spent," Howard said. "I think the culture of favoritism and nepotism that has surrounded that body has become notorious."
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