By Andrey Spark
ALICE SPRINGS — The Northern Territory Country Liberal Party government is trying to privatise Yirara College, a public secondary college here for Aboriginal people. It proposes to hand the college over to the Lutheran Finke River Mission (FRM) in January 1993.
Yirara is the only place that young Aboriginal people of the bush communities in central Australia can reasonably get secondary education.
The move follows the privatisation of Traeger Park Primary School in Alice Springs earlier this year. Traeger Park had a largely Aboriginal attendance and strong links to the Aboriginal community, but was handed over to the Catholic Church.
Shane Stone, NT minister for education, and the FRM have said that Aboriginal people asked for Yirara to be taken over by the mission. However, the clear wish of Aboriginal communities and families is for the college either to remain public or to be under Aboriginal control.
Any "agreements" were made under pressure and with vital information withheld. Aboriginal communities were presented with a stark choice: either the government will close the college altogether, or it will remain open, but under FRM control.
The FRM is to be given publicly owned capital assets worth $8 million, and funded to run the college until the end of 1993. The FRM has stated that unless it is given more money at that point, it will close the college.
Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the federal Labor government is cooperating with the CLP. In September 1992, the then federal minister for education, John Dawkins, wrote to Shane Stone, promising that "The Commonwealth Government would support the transfer of such schools to existing non-government systems."
In fact, Dawkins said that the federal government would support giving Yirara to the Lutherans only if this was part of a policy to hand over Aboriginal education in total to "established non-government systems." Of course, the only established non-government education system is that run by the church.
Many see this move as part of a deliberate policy to undermine Aboriginal self-determination and return to the assimilationist policies of the past, when Aboriginal children were taught by the missions to despise their own people and culture. The FRM was a leading group in opposing land rights in the mid-1970s.
Putting Aboriginal education in the hands of private church interests contradicts both the Aboriginal education policy of the Commonwealth government, and the recommendations of the Royal Commission Into stody, which have been endorsed by both territory and Commonwealth governments. The privatisation of Yirara is one more example of how governments pay lip service to the ideas of Aboriginal self-determination, while in reality working to undermine it.