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Good Oil readers are too grimly familiar with this script: a whole lot of blatherskite about ‘cultural safety’, a gutful of tilty-headed virtue-signalling from bureaucrats and judges – and yet more dead, raped, and brutalised indigenous children. Oops, ‘tamariki’. Got to keep up right-on appearances, now don’t we?
An Aboriginal boy who said he was raped by a man in his remote Northern Territory community was ordered to return to live in that town, despite his wishes, so he could connect with kin and explore his culture.
The family court judgment required the boy to be removed from a loving and secure life he shared with a white woman in Western Australia and restored to extended family in his NT home town, despite him telling a psychologist he did not feel safe there.
[Judge Richard Schonell] accepted the boy’s removal would be traumatic and have long-term consequences for the child but he ruled the woman could not provide for his cultural needs and the boy, born in 2016 while his mother was in prison, should be raised on country.
Something tells me any child would gladly trade “cultural needs” for a safe, loving home. Not to mention not being raped, brutalised and neglected by the very ‘culture’ the fatuous elites so fetishise.
“That trauma must be measured against what I am satisfied would be the long-term effect of his disconnection from his country, community, and kin.”
Those words should chill every parent in Australia. A young Aboriginal boy, allegedly raped in his remote Northern Territory community, told a psychologist he did not feel safe there. He was thriving with a loving white carer in Western Australia. The court ordered him back anyway, so he could “connect with kin and explore his culture”. Probably in the form of being anally raped by a drunken ‘elder’ (past, present or emerging is anyone’s guess).
The carer had become ‘mum’ to the entire community. The boy’s grandparents insisted she take him when she moved to WA. Then, when she didn’t return him for a funeral, the script flipped to ‘stealing our child’. There’s gratitude for you.
The carer, a government worker with deep ties to the community and even a ‘skin name’, begged the court to listen. The boy had been sexually and physically abused, neglected and exposed to family violence. He “clearly expressed the view that he wished to remain with [his carer]”. They had a close, loving relationship in a quiet, orderly home. But none of it mattered: back to the remote town he goes.
“Through being on country, X can learn about his culture through stories and songlines that can only be taught on country. He (can) take part in men’s business … become a traditional healer like his grandfather.”
What’s the ‘traditional healing’ for, say, syphilis, which afflicts hundreds of Aboriginal children?
But, no, for the city-based, elite culture-vultures, it’s culture über alles. So long as they don’t have to live it, and even when that culture has produced outcomes so dire that the 2007 Little Children Are Sacred report laid them bare for all to see. Since then, we’ve known Aboriginal children suffer shocking rates of abuse, violence, death and sexually transmitted diseases: far higher than any other group. These appalling disparities persist across all socio-economic quintiles. Poverty is not the excuse.
The same pattern repeats in New Zealand with Māori children, and in Canada with indigenous kids: grossly over-represented in abuse statistics, with perpetrators overwhelmingly from their own communities. Yet bureaucrats remain paralysed by the long hangover of the ‘Stolen Generations’ myth. Andrew Bolt’s standing challenge – name a single Aboriginal child removed from parents for any reason other than neglect or abuse – has gone unanswered for years.
The fear of being called racist has the same deadly effect here as it did in Britain with Pakistani grooming gangs, where authorities looked the other way for fear of ‘Islamophobia’. The same bureaucratic cowardice that reportedly let Southport killer Axel Rudakubana slip through the cracks. Child safety takes a back seat to identity politics.
In this case, the boy’s mother was in prison when he was born. His father is doing time for domestic violence and ‘trouble driving cars’. The family denied any abuse occurred and promised to keep the alleged perpetrator away. Police found insufficient evidence. The judge wasn’t satisfied the assaults happened or that the risk was ‘unacceptable’. So much for ‘believe victims’.
So back the boy goes, trauma be damned.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle demands indigenous children be placed with kin and community first. Safety? Secondary. The NT government now talks of tweaking the rules. Too late for this child.
This is not an isolated horror. It is the predictable result of two decades of sacralising ‘culture’ above basic humanity. We are told endlessly that removing children destroys their identity. Yet leaving them in environments of neglect, violence and predation is somehow ‘culturally appropriate’. Try making the same argument for a white child raised in a culture like Gloriavale.
At what point does the basic safety of children override activists’ obsession with culture? When does a society admit that some cultural practices – or the dysfunction they enable – do not deserve automatic priority?
Australia spends over $40 billion a year on indigenous-specific programs – four times the per capita rate for other Australians. The return on that investment? Town camps piled with rubbish next to tips, executives doubling their salaries while houses rot, and courts sending raped children back ‘on country’ because songlines and syphilitic children apparently trump safety.
The Little Children Are Sacred report was supposed to be a turning point. Instead, the bureaucracy and the Aboriginal industry doubled down on the same failed ideology. Children continue to pay the price while the usual suspects lecture us about ‘self-determination’ and ‘cultural connection’.
Enough. The safety of a child is not negotiable. It is not subordinate to identity politics, historical myths or bureaucratic terror of being called racist. If a culture cannot keep its children safe from its own members, then that culture – or at least the romanticised version peddled by activists – deserves no special protection at all.
