By Situation Theatre 29/07/2015
Details have emerged of a secret $10 million scheme called 'Operation Blades of Racism' which pays for the weekly helicopter flights of racists to all Sydney Swans games of the 2015 season. The scheme factors in a $3 million kickback for Alan Jones to keep up the top-shelf bigotry.
The poor government can’t catch a break. First, they are subjected to unbalanced claims they are the worst kind of perpetrators of institutional racism. Facts that in under two years Prime Minister Tony Abbott has cut funding to Indigenous legal services by $13.4 million, given $2.2 million in legal aid for farmers and miners to fight native title claims, abolished the position of Co-ordinator General for Remote Indigenous Services along with the Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, Indigenous Water Advisory Committee, Indigenous Development Effectiveness Initiative Steering Committee and First Peoples Education Advisory Group, paid Indigenous workers in his Department $19,000 less than others doing the same jobs, cut $500 million from Indigenous programs over five years, including the Torres Strait Regional Authority, Vibe Australia, Indigenous language support, the Indigenous health budget and Aboriginal Early Childhood Support and Learning Incorporated, described Australia as ‘unsettled’ before the British arrived and ‘nothing but bush’, dismissed the ‘lifestyle choices’ of Aboriginal people while supporting remote community closures, stalled on constitutional recognition, silenced the Northern Australia Indigenous Experts Forum on Sustainable Economic Development, and demanded 99-year township leases in exchange for basic services, all ignore the other fact that Tony Abbott once visited an Aboriginal community.
Now revelations that the government also directly aids and abets individual racists with luxury travel ignores the Prime Minister's watertight riposte ‘How can I be racist, my friend Noel Pearson is Aboriginal’.
The PM's most recent statement ‘I’m not racist but Boo Adam Goodes, Boooooo’ can’t have helped.
While it’s common knowledge that the federal government scapegoats minorities to justify a suite of inhumane legislation and provide cover for its slash-and-burn economic policies, their brazen material support for particular racists has until now been less clear.
In other news, Yothu Yindi’s song ‘Treaty’ has surged back to the top of the charts.
***Thanks to Secretary of the Australian Services Union in NSW and the ACT Sally McManus for her blog Tracking Abbott's Wreckage.