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November 7, 2006
The federal government is planning to gut the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program which was designed to move indigneous into mainstream employment. CDEP in remote areas. It failed to move Aboriginal people into mainstream employment because there was (and is) no mainstream employment to move into. Decades of government neglect and zero government investment in communities like Wadeye and Palm Island have seen to that.
Is there another approach government's actually investing in regional indigenous communities and participating in the creation of employment and wealth?
Sean Leahy
In his 2004 AMA Oration In honour of the late Professor Ross Webster Noel Pearson says that:
The health care services to our people are exclusively provided by the Queensland Government though its networks of clinics in indigenous communities and small hospitals in the towns. There are no indigenous medical services or GP services.There is a longstanding and unfulfilled need for doctors in Cape York Peninsula and myself and my colleagues in the leadership of our community.
He added that he is putting a proposal to the Commonwealth to provide funding through the cashing out of Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to communities that simply do not have access to GP services so as to employ doctors through a community-controlled health service organisation for the region.
Pearson argues that the exclusion of our people from this federal funding must end, and we must have the means to control the provisioning of the services which are desperately needed: those of doctors and indigenous health workers. Pearson says that community control means:
community responsibility, where our people do not just concern ourselves with the provisioning of the primary health care services, but we take responsibility for the upstream public health issues which underpin the poor health of our people: substance abuse, tobacco smoking, poor environmental health and poor nutrition. In Cape York Peninsula our whole agenda is based on the notion of responsibility: we have to take charge of our problems. If we can add the best health care services provided by doctors and health care workers with the kind of concerted and comprehensive public health strategies which we in Cape York Peninsula have developed (and are still developing) – then we will see real improvement in the health of our people.
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