Land for health swap 'an outrage'
By Peter Johnston
DARWIN — The Jawoyn Association announced last week that, following negotiations with the Northern Territory government, it would drop a claim for land 20 kilometres south of Katherine in exchange for a renal dialysis facility to be established in Katherine.
At present the nearest haemodialysis facilities are in Darwin. This forces anyone requiring haemodialysis to live in the Darwin region.
"Some may be critical of land being exchanged for health services, but the old people said, 'There are no sacred sites here; there are no ceremony places; it is not a hunting area. We worry about countrymen with kidney disease'", said Jawoyn Association spokesperson Robert Lee.
Northern Land Council chairperson Galarrwuy Yunupingu disagreed: "Trading away your land and native title rights for services that the government should be providing anyway is a very serious business".
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have worse health than non-indigenous Australians. Their life expectancy is 15-20 years lower in the NT, WA and SA. Babies are two to three times more likely to be of low birth weight, and two to four times more likely to die at birth.
According to the National Health and Medical Research Council, between 1968 and 1994 the gap between Aboriginal and total Australian mortality rates widened, especially for women. Indigenous women account for about 30% of maternal deaths, but constitute only about 3% of confinements. During the 1990s, women in Cape York are dying at a younger age than in 1979.
In large part, this is the result of insufficient health services. Research from Access Economics confirms that per capita expenditure for indigenous health services is lower than that for the non-indigenous population. This has remained the case for the last 20 years.
Democratic Socialist spokesperson Natalie Zirngast told Green Left Weekly that it is "an outrage that, in order to gain adequate health care facilities and funding, indigenous people are forced to give up part of their heritage".