Tony Abbott, the wall that keeps on standing, and the rote lines that keep on being delivered ...

(Above: concrete wall with no message. As always in loon pond, we bring the finest examples of metaphor known in the full to overflowing intertubes).

Here's Tony Abbott in the Daily Terror back on October 8th:

Last year, to give what I suspect is an emblematic example, a local person complained to the head teacher that a concrete block wall in the school playground at Ukaka, an out-station west of Alice Springs, wobbled when leaned on so was unsafe and could hurt the children. This week I was told that the problem would finally be fixed because contractors were coming to do the job that one man with a heavy hammer could have cleared up in about an hour. By the time this simple job has been completed, the teacher and regional office bureaucrats will have wasted much time in calls and paperwork, thousands of dollars will needlessly have been spent, and local Aboriginal people’s sense of powerlessness will have been reinforced. (here).

Here's Tony Abbott in today's The Australian, a month later, give or take a day or so.

Re. the concrete wall. The job's still not done:

About 18 months ago, at the outstation of Ukaka, 200km from Alice Springs, someone noticed that an old handball wall of unstable concrete blocks could fall while the schoolchildren were playing on it. One person with a heavy hammer could have removed this potential danger in a few hours but no one in authority seems to have thought that the local men could perform this simple act of community service.

After much badgering, it's now said the wall will soon go but at the immediate cost of thousands of dollars once education department contractors have come from Alice Springs and at the further cost of reinforcing the learned helplessness of local Aboriginal people who, yet again, are passive bystanders in their own country.

The Ukaka wall saga, replicated time after time in thousands of places, is symptomatic of a comprehensive failure of governance in remote Australia. (here)

Soon go! The wall will soon go! But the job's not done, despite all the efforts of Tony Abbott. Why he could have flown up there with a sledge hammer himself, but he didn't. Something about the learned helplessness of politicians.

Oh for god's sake, fair suck of the sauce bottle, and give a loon a break. Will someone just knock down the bloody wall, or alternatively hand Abbott a new copywriter and a better bloody script.

As if a dodgy concrete handball wall is symbolic of anything much, except a desperate opposition, which failed in government to tackle aboriginal issues, and now is flailing away at anything to hand.

Whatever it is, it isn't the Berlin wall. In my day, we'd just put up a sign - danger asbestos dump - and then let the kids play on it for years. And where was the harm in that?

On a day when Paul Sheehan spends his time bemoaning petty bureaucracies, and tyrannical councils, and interfering governments, ain't it grand to see Abbott blathering on about the vital role government can play in the lives of Australians. Black Australians. But it seems there's been a snag:

New governance arrangements need to be established because the intervention has irrevocably destroyed the credibility of the old ones. To be sustainable, any new arrangement would have to be more respectful than the intervention was of the views of local Aboriginal people without compromising its effectiveness through inconclusive consultation in the search for consensus.

Uh huh, same old same old. Now it seems what's needed is a messiah (though for the sake of seemliness, let's call them an administrator):

To work, the administrator would need general authority over all the local functions of government such as policing, health and education, as well as municipal services. To be acceptable, any such arrangements would need to be chosen by local people as an alternative to the existing system. They would have to be sponsored by a person of great moral standing, much as Pearson has overseen the process in Cape York.

Gee, that sounds a little bit like a dictator. Control of everything, but only by popular choice.

By golly, what we need, if Paul Sheehan is any guide, is for Woollahra Council to move to Alice Springs. That'd sort everything out.

Well there's nothing so funny as to see conservative commentariat columnists bemoan the role of authority in the lives of white Australians, and then watch as conservative commentariat columnists cum politicians decide that what's needed in the lives of black Australians is government regulation, control and authority:

The challenge is to move beyond the permissive paralysis where anything goes but nothing much ever happens and to create a new institutional framework that offers the unifying authority that traditional and then mission arrangements once provided but no longer can.

Ah the glorious days of the missions, before the blacks got uppity and unseemly, and traditional authority, which was of course in its day dismissed as unseemly superstition, with integration effectively leading to eradication of traditional ways.

Well enough of that. There's just a little time for a little quiet revisionism, and even - softly now - a hint that the intervention might have had a few issues:

Certainly, the Howard government struggled throughout its term to run them in ways that were responsive to Aboriginal culture but which also delivered outcomes that were acceptable in modern Australia. Any acknowledgement of the former government's good work was tempered by pejorative assumptions about its motives fuelled by the refusal to issue a formal apology for past injustices.

Although the intervention embodied a decade's reflection on how policy could be more effective, it was also an ad-hoc response to an emerging crisis. Inevitably, it was a blunt instrument. Necessarily, it was another example of outsiders helping to run Aboriginal people's lives.

Embodied a decade's reflection!! You mean ignore things for a decade, and then spring into action after a week's thinking just as an election looms? Is that what ad-hoc means? An emerging crisis? That only took a couple of hundred years to emerge, and then sprang full blown into emergent state in the last months of the Howard government?

No wonder I gave up studying history. Weasel words by politicians over the generations.

A blunt instrument? You mean sending in the army was a problem? But isn't not having a general in charge of current military operations the problem?

Substituting a bureaucrat for a general as the intervention's operational commander, and subsequently abolishing the position; and having government business managers report to authorities in Alice Springs or in Darwin rather than to Canberra, were signs of the new government's disposition to return to business as usual.

Ah, it's those pesky bureaucrats again, always beavering away, always up to no good, when a military solution was likely the right one after all.

For god's sake, somebody knock down that bloody wall, and from hereon in why doesn't the opposition just appoint Noel Pearson as spokesman on indigenous affairs. He'd make a lot more sense, and be far more interesting reading, than the half understood recycling of his thoughts by the likes of Abbott.

(Below: a concrete wall with a message).