Mission Resourcing Network

We can do it!  We can make a difference.  Professor Fiona Stanley told Fran Kelly on Radio National’s Breakfast that she plans to end the annual Hawke lecture she is giving tonight at the Adelaide Town Hall, with Obama’s words of hope, “We can! We can! Yes, we can!” Former Australian of the Year, Founding Director of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and Professor in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health in WA, Fiona Stanley  will give the address she has titled “The Greatest Injustice: Why we have failed to improve the health of Aboriginal people”.  Speaking on ABC Radio this morning she said, “We already know how to grow healthy and developmentally healthy young people. We have known this forever. We know what parents have to have, we know what communities are supposed to look like, what housing and hygiene people need.”  We don’t need more policy but more effective implementation of what we already know.  We need, she said “to get Aboriginal people to be part of the solution” by increasing the number of Aboriginal people employed in education, health, child protection and juvenile justice.  It is time Aboriginal people were given the assistance they need to run their own services and where communities don’t have the capacity, though many already do, help them get up to speed. There is diversity among capacity in communities: some Aboriginal  communities have 50% of their population under the age of 20.  Unfortunately, tonight’s lecture is fully booked (1200 people and a waiting list).  However, the transcript of Professor Stanley’s lecture will be available from the UniSA website (go here ) 

The MRN Team are strong supporters of the Close The Gap Campaign and Make Indigenous Poverty History.   

Olympic gold medallists Catherine Freeman and Ian Thorpe helped launch the Close the Gap Indigenous health campaign, which seeks to achieve health equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders within a generation. Photo by Michael Myers/OxfamAUS

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is almost twenty years less than it is for non-Indigenous Australians.

One of the major contributing factors towards reduced life expectancy is poverty.

 There are a number of campaigns focusing on Indigenous poverty in Australia.

 The Close the Gap campaign aims at decreasing the disparity in life expectancy.

To find out what you can do to support this cause go here

Last week end’s Presbytery and Synod meeting saw the 330 members from across SA keen to see some other issues affecting Aboriginal people addressed, in particular prison overcrowding and housing.  Below is an extract from the SA Synod’s Communications Team media release:

The Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC), the Indigenous arm of the Uniting Church, is concerned about severe over-crowding in the State’s prisons and the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prisons.

The meeting voted to establish a prison and justice issues advocacy group to investigate ways of addressing prison over-crowding, the high numbers of Aboriginal and remand prisoners, proposed prison closures and repeated lockdowns in the Port Augusta prison preventing prison chaplaincy and support.

Another issue raised by the UAICC is the lack of accommodation for Indigenous people visiting Adelaide from the APY lands.

The meeting heard that visiting Anangu people stay with relatives. This causes severe overcrowding which jeopardises tenancies and extreme financial hardship.

The church is considering solutions including whether it should push for a ‘Town Camp’ for Adelaide similar to those in Port Augusta and Ceduna.

If you would like to have further conversation about the issues raised in this post, please contact Peter Russell (prussell@sa.uca.org.au ), Covenanting Officer for the Presbytery and Synod of SA