ATSIC flaws at a political level.

(From Canberra Times)

T HAT LABOR'S announcement that it would, in Government, abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, has seemed inevitable and sensible speaks volumes for the way in which ATSIC has conducted itself in recent times. ATSIC was created by Labor. Many of its structural flaws were ones consciously engineered by Labor, against warnings and advice that the then Minister, Gerry Hand, received at the time. But it's about a lot more than a seriously flawed organisation run, at its political level, by seriously flawed leaders. It was also about a principle that it should be Aborigines who themselves decided what should happen, who determined the policies, decided the priorities and made things happen. That was, once, what Labor stood for. Now that principle has only weak lip service, and, if Labor weakly intends, down the track, to restore a national representative Aboriginal advisory body, it is quite clear that it will be one much weaker, and with far less executive power and control than the body to be abolished. In this sense, Aborigines, and all Australians, are entitled to ask whether Labor's resolve to do anything about Aboriginal affairs has been weakened, and whether Labor's new approach steps back into the past rather than the future.

Yet that the criticism is muted - indeed supported by many Aborigines - is a reflection of ATSIC's own failures, not only over the past decade, but especially over the past two years as two of its most senior members have been the subject of serious allegations. ATSIC's own incapacity to deal with its poor leadership - indeed its restoration of it after the last election - and its complete paralysis as a voice for, champion of, and agent for Aboriginal interests over the past few years deprives it, though not Aboriginal people generally, of almost any right to sympathy. Rather than reforming itself, or refocusing its activity on things that matter, commissioners have become totally absorbed in their own fate, and the fate of two of the men whose general behaviour (even going beyond legal cases as yet unresolved) has deprived ATSIC of much of its moral authority and stature, whether among Aborigines, or in the wider community.

No doubt Labor's policy announcement on Tuesday was designed in part as a distraction from trouble of Mark Latham's own making over troop withdrawal from Iraq. But it was not without irony that the announcement should be made on a day in which the Hollows Foundation was lobbying government to ...