By Bernie Brian
DARWIN — Hundreds of Aboriginal people and their supporters gathered on April 15 at Raintree Park to protest against moves by the Northern Territory government to withdraw funding from the Danila Dilba Aboriginal Medical Service. People had come from as far as Alice Springs and Tennant Creek. The rally heard from numerous speakers, including the mother of a child who had died soon after being turned away twice from Royal Darwin Hospital. In an address filled with much anger and sorrow, she shouted "Why! Why!" and demanded that "Never again should mothers and fathers have to lose their children". Following is the speech given to the rally by Danila Dilba chairperson Suttie Ahmat.
This rally was organised to bring attention to what might happen to Danila Dilba if the Northern Territory government withdrew our funds.
What it has turned out to be is a rally to focus on the Northern Territory government's lack of ability to do anything serious about the health of all our people in the Northern Territory.
We are in a crisis situation where every week another tragedy happens. Our own health services are being threatened all the time, and yet the government is still prepared to cut us back and ignore us while their own department fails to provide this service to our people. This must stop now.
It is not just us who criticise them. Graham Richardson came up here a few weeks ago, and he said our communities were like war-torn Africa.
The president of the Australian Medical Association came up here and said that he was so shocked that he put Aboriginal health on the top of the AMA agenda.
The president of the parliamentary Subcommittee on Human Rights, Senator Stephen Loosely, came up here and said that the government was breaching international obligations in ignoring the plight of our people.
And yet, the Northern Territory health minister says that this government is leading the way in supporting Aboriginal control. This is not true.
We must take a strong stand together and call on the Commonwealth government to take Aboriginal health out of the hands of the Northern Territory government so we Aboriginal people ourselves can be given the support to do the work that must be done.
We can no longer sit and watch all this sorry business. We are all tired of going to funerals. We are tired of watching our people dying before their time from curable diseases. We are tired of watching our children struggle through their young lives with infectious diseases that are also curable. We are tired of all this sorry business.
We have a responsibility to our own people to talk in a strong loud voice to force this change.
If we don't take a stand on this all together and united, we are as much to blame as the Northern Territory government.
We are asking the federal minister, Dr Carmen Lawrence, to move quickly to finish the job that Graham Richardson started. Bypass the Northern Territory government and give this job to our own health services. Our voice must be heard all the way to Canberra.
We will no longer play the game of going cap in hand to the Territory bureaucrats begging for scraps. The days of the mission manager are gone forever, and we will not return to those days when the government controlled everything in our lives — the days when our people were massacred, when our people were forced off country, when our children were torn from the arms of their mothers.
Those days are gone now. We are the generation that survived and we will continue to fight for our rights.
We demand properly resourced health services run by Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people. This is what the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody talked about and what the National Aboriginal Health Strategy talked about. Can't these government people read? Can't they understand what has been said in their own reports? As for us, we have known that this has always been the only way for things to change.
So let's stick together and expose this government for what they are. A government who only survive because of their racist attitude to us, the people who really belong and will stay forever in the Northern Territory.
We must win this fight because we can't afford to lose it.