Sally Loane The Sydney Morning Herald 5/11/01

Forget the treaty, it's time to face up to tough solutions. The real issue for Aboriginal communities is alcohol and drug abuse, say two lone men who dare to speak the truth, writes Sally Loane.

Two people have made more sense than almost anyone in this whole election campaign, and they're not politicians. They're lawyers - one black, one white - and they've trodden where no politician, Labor or Liberal, has ever dared or bothered. Or ever will, judging by their history and their combined lack of ticker.

Noel Pearson, the leader of the Cape York Land Council and a product of Brisbane's St Peter's Lutheran College, has been talking tough about his people for months. In the recent inaugural Charles Perkins Oration, Pearson again laid his beliefs on the table, calling for a prohibition on drugs and alcohol in Aboriginal communities as the first, vital step in tackling the unprecedented levels of violence and abuse.

Pearson, who has forsaken lucrative careers in both law and in Aboriginal politics to live and work with his people in remote northern Queensland, walks the talk like few of his peers. Grog and drugs are destroying communities. Treaties and apologies may make white liberals and black activists feel terrific, but the only way to stop three-year-old girls being raped and children hanging themselves from trees is to get rid of the substances, the violence and the crime.

Hal Wootten, the former judge who was Royal Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, aired the same ideas a week later. When I heard that Mr Wootten was addressing a forum on the impact of the royal commission into black deaths, I thought, here we go again, another well-meaning speech to make white liberals and black activists feel good.

But Hal Wootten was as tough and direct as Noel Pearson. Rather than agonising over the lack of an official apology, black leaders, he said, must tackle drug and alcohol abuse and place zero tolerance on violence.

Aboriginal parents should make their children go to school, eat decent food, stay out of trouble and prepare for good jobs. They had to stop looking to government funding as the answer to everything. After all, he said, the first Aboriginal legal service started with no funding at all.

The morning after Noel Pearson's Charles Perkins Oration, we decided to get some reaction to it from Aboriginal leaders. My producers on 702 tried all the usual suspects, from the Dodsons to Senator Aden Ridgeway but, as is depressingly usual, no-one was home, no-one would put his head up.

Geoff Clark's ATSIC flack dredged up some ancient grudge against my program, which went something like this - the last time you wanted to speak to Mr Clark and we offered someone else, you said you didn't want them, so why should Mr Clark speak to you now? It was as stupid as that.

In three years of radio I've barely got close to persuading male Aboriginal leaders to discuss issues like the ones Pearson and Wootten have raised.

When the family violence issue blew up in the wake of Queensland academic Bonnie Robertson's report, which detailed horrific levels of child abuse in communities, the only people who emailed me and who were willing to go on air to talk about these painful facts were Aboriginal women.

I can only conclude the men are happier playing politics than serious about addressing the survival and health of Aboriginal women and children.

Only a fool would describe the views of Noel Pearson and Hal Wootten as provocative and divisive. Anyone who's witnessed the devastation of the grog and violence in an Aboriginal community and walked away bewildered at the tolerance - indeed, acceptance - of it by white liberals, knows that these men, as well as women like Bonnie Robertson, are cutting through the cant and hypocrisy with hard, cold truth.

If Kim Beazley becomes prime minister, the first thing he must do is remove Aboriginal affairs from its traditional home, the Left. If it stays there the same old hand-wringing will continue, the Aboriginal industry will continue to line its pockets and black children will continue to die.

If John Howard keeps his job, he must give the portfolio to someone who will listen to Noel Pearson and who's tough enough to knock together the soft heads of the state Aboriginal affairs ministers, something that the current federal minister, Philip Ruddock, has failed to do.

Don't even think about more summits or treaty talk fests. We know what's wrong, we know what caused it. In the words of the brilliant Aboriginal lad who was schooled by the authoritarian Lutherans, it's about time we faced up to the solution.
Copyright: Sydney Morning Herald