The Australian government yesterday announced a controversial plan to send administrators to run struggling Aboriginal communities, as a new report painted a bleak picture of indigenous lifestyles and health.
Health Minister Tony Abbott said allowing Aboriginals to run their own communities had clearly not worked in many cases and a new form of "paternalism" was needed.
"The fundamental problem here is not lack of spending, although it could always be higher, but the culture of directionlessness in which so many Aboriginal people live," Abbott said.
"Australians' sense of guilt about the past and naive idealization of communal life may now be the biggest single obstacle to the betterment of Aboriginal people," he added.
His speech provoked an outcry from opposition politicians, who accused the government of trying to turn the clock back to the days when Catholic missions ran many Aboriginal townships.
"What we know of 200 years of Australian history is that paternalism didn't work," said Chris Evans, indigenous affairs spokesman for the Labor Party.
"Paternalism is what saw the black children taken away from their parents," he added, referring to a policy that persisted until the 1970s of forcibly taking Aboriginal children from their homes and placing them with white families.
A government report into the so-called "stolen generation" released in 1997 found that the practice was racist and amounted to an attempt at genocide.
The report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare published yesterday showed that indigenous Australians continue to have a far worse life expectancy than the rest of the predominantly anglo population.
Seventy percent of indigenous people died before the age of 65, compared with only 20 percent of other Australians.
The death rate of indigenous children remained three times higher than other Australians, the report added.
Aborigines have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years. But they are now a minority with a population expected to reach 470,000 this year after being killed and driven from their lands, particularly in the 19th century.
Many live in squalid outback camps, where unemployment, alcohol dependency and domestic abuse is endemic and lawlessness is rife.
A report compiled earlier this year by the charity Oxfam found that the health of Aboriginal Australians lagged far behind that of indigenous people in other developed Commonwealth nations.
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said yesterday that Abbott was out of step with reality.
"It's just extraordinary that Tony Abbott thinks he is the father of the Aboriginal people of Australia," Brown told reporters.
"He should consult the Aboriginal people and make sure they are in the decision-making all the way down the line," he said.
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