Are you involved in an online community?

...Then please take 5 minutes to complete my survey. I'm doing a statistics course and as part of it I have to conduct a social research project. I've become very interested in online communities and so am investigating how they're formed, who is attracted to them, and why they become involved.

If you wish to participate, Click here to take survey.

It's conducted through Survey Monkey and is anonymous and confidential. All responses will be published in aggregate form. The final paper will be made available through this blog.

Hiatus

Galtha is on hiatus while this exhausted student is taking a break. Be back next year for my Master's.

Garma: Two streams meet

The opening speech from the Garma Festival has an interesting perspective on Aboriginal art.

The G20s missed opportunity

“Financial markets are not an end in themselves, but a means: they are supposed to perform certain vital functions which enable the real economy to be more productive: (a) mobilising savings, (b) allocating capital, and (c) managing risk.” The financial crisis was a direct result of treating the creation of financial products as an end in itself – as a valuable driver of economic growth independent of the products’ effects.
Read the full report here

Topics for negotiated knowledges

I started this blog mostly for my own purposes. It's been a great way to explore issues I need to confront in work and study and as a repository for research sources and ideas. As a student, it has been very helpful.

While the interest from other readers has not been high, there has been some interest, a fact that surprised me a great deal. As such, I'm running a quick poll to see what topics my (somewhat limited) readership is interested in so I can explore issues that are of interest not just to me but to other inquiring minds on the web.

Please vote if you feel inclined and comment if you want to make suggestions, comments or criticisms. My musings are just that, musings, and I would be ecstatic to get some constructive feedback from those passing by.

Closing the Gap: Is statistical equality enough?

Australian Review of Public Affairs: Is ‘Close the Gap’ a useful approach to improving the health and wellbeing of Indigenous Australians?

Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research: Beyond Closing the Gap: Valuing Diversity in Indigenous Australia

Close the Gap: What the NGOs are saying

The original Close the Gap campaign was started by a group of Non-govnerment Organisations (NGOs). What do they have to say about Close the Gap day? Of course the following listed NGOs are not comprehensive: see the full list on the Close the Gap website.

Amnesty International renews calls to Close the Gap

Oxfam says the campaign to Close the Gap has achieved real progress this year.

World Vision has an extraordinary amount of information in the always-excellent Stir.

The Australian Human Rights Commission (HREOC) announces that Rugby League became the first national sporting code to pledge its support for a national action plan to close the 17-year life expectancy gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and other Australians and argues that the historic formal statement of support from the federal government for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples should be backed immediately with a comprehensive national action plan to Close the Gap in health equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The Fred Hollows Foundation publishes a personal reflection on Closing the Gap.

Close the Gap: the Great CAEPR Caper

OK, technically that post title makes no sense but I have always wanted to use it. The Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at ANU is an island of evidence-based thinking in a sea of policy confusion.

Staff at CAEPR have produced a plethora of papers regarding overcoming indigenous disadvantage. They were also active in the period around Closing the Gap day in getting the message regarding Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage (OID) out into the media.

Following are some links to some more academic analyses on Closing the Gap:

Nick Biddle from CAEPR tells the SMH we need a more urban focus to Close the Gap

"Because 75 per cent of the indigenous population lives outside of remote Australia, and the outcomes of those outside remote Australia are still substantially worse than the outcomes of the non-indigenous population, in order to close the gaps there's no way you can ignore urban Australia."


Professor Jon Altman from CAEPR considers the Closing the Gap progress after the apology in this piece printed on the Crikey website.


Professor Jon Altman from CAEPR writes that the Closing the Gap rhetoric buys into the Howard legacy.

"Despite its rhetoric, the government does not have a plan to tackle Indigenous disadvantage Australia-wide, and its policy framework for Closing the Gap is captured by 2008-09 commitments to the NT National Emergency; these commitments are all subject to ‘independent’ review and face funding uncertainty."


Janet Hunt from CAEPR writes in the National Indigenous Times that governance arrangements hold the key to closing the gap.

"Culturally legitimate and practically effective governance lies at the heart of improved Indigenous outcomes. Indeed, 'Closing the gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia will remain a pipedream unless workable and legitimate governance arrangements are created and sustained in Aboriginal communities. We now have robust evidence of what such governance arrangements might look like, and how they can be developed."


Jon Altman, Nicholas Biddle and Boyd Hunter from CAEPR analyse the challenges of OID by
using available Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data from the five yearly censuses to examine change in Indigenous socio-economic outcomes in absolute and relative (to the non-Indigenous population) terms. They also use observations from data collected in past censuses to estimate when the existing statistical gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes might close and make some general observations about what these findings might mean for government policy at the national level.

Mind The Gap: Amnesty International blog entry

Read what Amnesty blogger Lucas Jordon has to say about Close the Gap day last week:

http://www.amnesty.org.au/aus/comments/20753/#When:04:01:40Z

Close the Gap Day: Background reading

If you're interested in learning about how we can all help close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage, the following background reading will help. The main question to keep in mind from a negotiated knowledges perspective is: are we trying to assess "statistical equality" only and is this the best way to measure comparative disadvantage?

Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations

Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle “Little Children are Sacred” report into child sexual abuse (warning: some readers will find the content of this report disturbing and upsetting)

Close the Gap: original website set up by a coalition of NGOs. Although most government frameworks on overcoming indigenous disadvantage use the name "Close the Gap" or "Closing the Gap" (often used synonymously), their policies may differ considerably from the ones outlined in this website.

Transcript of Rudd's speech when tabling the first annual report card on Closing the Gap progress

First annual Closing the Gap report card

Closing the Gap

Today is national 'Close the Gap' Day so it seems an appropriate time to start discussing different perspectives on service provision to Indigenous people, both within discrete communities and in urban areas. Over the next few days, I'll be providing links to relevant articles, media releases and campaigns, as well as summarising papers on the issue. There is a 17-year gap in life expectancy between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people within Australia and closing it requires innovation, consultation and informed policy.

If you have an opinion on CTG or have read something or informative on the issue, please feel free to contribute. It's only through the free-flow of ideas that the status quo changes in a constructive way.

Homo economicus rejected by Mag Economicus

"Too much economics, say Mr Akerlof and Mr Shiller, has been built on the premise that humans are rational calculators. That is not a new criticism, even from economists. Over the past couple of decades Homo economicus has evolved into a being more like H. sapiens, as economics has drawn on psychology, biology and even neuroscience. “Behavioural” economics has shaped public policy—for instance, in encouraging people to save or in shaping the choice of investments in their pension pots. Behavioural economists have earned Nobel prizes. Mr Akerlof and Mr Shiller, however, complain that this evolution has been confined mainly to microeconomics. It is time for macroeconomics to catch up."

The economist writes an article essentially stating that the very basis of its worldview is wrong...but it's buried in the science section so I suppose hell hasn't frozen over yet.

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis

"Ideas about changing the organization of society in the long run are clearly needed, quite apart from strategies for dealing with an immediate crisis. I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of "new capitalism" rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a "new world"—to use the other term mentioned at the Paris meeting—that would take a different form?

Another addition to the current economic debate at the New York Review of Books.

Are we really all Keynesians now?

The Economist is in the process of running a three-day online debate entitled "This house believes that we are all Keynesians now". The debate will run all this week at Economist Debates. At the moment, the general consensus is that no, we are not all Keynesians. What seems to be lacking so far is any acknowledgement that maybe we need to look beyond the neo-classical/Keynesian labels.

We are all socialists now

On the issue of economic orthodoxy, the New York Times has published an interesting article by Patricia Cohen on the lag in University Departments accepting other economic theories as valid.

The sound of a paradigm shifting

Today's issue of Inside Story has an interesting article on Rudd's anti-neoliberalism essay by Geoffrey Barker. I would have preferred a more in-depth analysis of the essay and Howard's response but nonethless it's an interesting read.

Blue Mud Bay: An Ontological Shift?

“We are the Yolngu people, the traditional owners of land and sea estates in the Gove Peninsula region of North East Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Our relationship with the sea and its resources is fundamental to our religious, social and economic life and wellbeing. We continue in the footsteps of our ancestors in caring for and being guardians of our sea country” (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2007, p4).

“In the Yolngu world view, water is the giver of sacred knowledge, all ceremonies and lands. Whether it’s fresh or salt, travelling on or under the land, or in the sea, water is the source of all that is holy,” (Rose 1996, p32).

Since the appeal against the Blue Mud Bay decision was unsuccessful in July 2008, there has been a stream of commentary regarding its impact on other native title claims and on commercial fisheries and amateur anglers.

In all the material written about the Blue Mud Bay decision, one aspect remains poorly-covered: the extent to which the recognition of rights over territorial waters in the Blue Mud Bay area impacts the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges from the region into conservation and land management practices.

There is an association between ownership of a resource and successful management of a resource. Recent research, published in Science and reported in the Economist, found a direct correlation between the privatisation of fisheries through what are known as catch shares or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) and the conservation of fish stocks.

While the traditional owners of Blue Mud Bay have had recognition of ownership over their land for a long time, the High Court’s decision granted exclusive rights regarding commercial and recreational fishing in the intertidal zone and tidal rivers to the low water mark. In the words of Wali Wunungmurra, the Chairman of the Northern Land Council, “this means that Yolngu people must now be included in any discussions and agreements about fishing, or any other business, on our lands to the low water mark. It also means that we can protect our sacred sites in the sea and take better care of our country.”

Blue Mud Bay is in the Dhimurru Indigenous Protected Area (IPA): 92,000 hectares near the Gulf of Carpentaria in North-East Arnhem Land and conservation programmes incorporating the local people have therefore been operating for some time. These are a part of the Dhimurru Yolnguwu Monuk Gapu Wana Sea Country Plan and include turtle recovery and satellite tracking, marine debris surveys, working as part of the Carpentaria Ghost Nets Programme, ethno-botanical survey of Melville Bay and coral monitoring. On its website, the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation lists investigating ways to incorporate western science-based management practice within traditional resource management as one of its fundamental objectives.

While the Dhimurru Sea Country Plan predates the original Blue Mud Bay decision in 2007 the Plan was a mechanism for Yolngu to articulate and define their management interests and customary rights in saltwater country despite having no formal legal jurisdiction at the time.

In his 2005 thesis on the relationship between the Yolngu people of Blue Mud Bay and water, Marcus Barber argues that the Dholupuyngu (literally ‘mud people’) people of Blue Mud Bay use their understanding of water flows as one basis for generating systems of coastal ownership. While non-Indigenous people use the word ‘Country’ as a synonym for land, for Indigenous people ‘Country’ is the English word most commonly used when referring to places they own and is a humanised realm with owners, stories, songs and Ancestry attached to it.

Since colonisation in Australia the legal system has used dominant western values of mare liberum to erase customary sea rights and the State has used this as a justification for the management of the ‘commons’ of oceans for commercial benefit and conservation. In contrast, for the Yolngu there has never been a separation between land and sea. Because Yolngu do not understand, think about or manage sea country differently to land and because traditional ecological knowledge is local, practical and embedded and is therefore most efficiently implemented within the cultural context in which it was developed, the Blue Mud Bay decision may allow a more effective incorporation of indigenous ecological knowledges into contemporary land and sea management practices in the area.

In fact, the return of ownership of traditional country has provided a significant opportunity in the area of biological and resource management for traditional owners although the issue of how to marry Indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science remains. There is still some way to go to achieve a vision of an economy that maintains and builds on Indigenous land, knowledges and management practices whilst creating genuine opportunities for employment, income and business development on Indigenous lands.

For the Dholupuyngu, sea ownership could have a significant positive impact on their capacity to conserve their ocean resources. While the ramifications of the Blue Mud Bay decision are still to be felt, the rhetoric coming from the Dholupuyngu shows a desire to work with non-Indigenous players, particularly in the area of fishing regulation. Wunungmurra talks of a “true” partnership regarding commercial and recreational fishing and quotes local traditional owner Djambawa Marawili as saying that, “there has to be real contact with the landowners so both Yolngu and whites are looking after the land, doing hand-in-hand, partner-to-partner, together".

But Barber goes even further than this; suggesting that an ontological shift in perceiving land and sea as inter-related, rather than separate, could have an impact on Western conservation efforts more broadly by facilitating the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges into these efforts. This shift, motivated by the Blue Mud Bay decision, could impact water preservation in other areas, such as that depicted in Altman and Branchut’s work on water in the hybrid economies in the Maningrida region.

Altman & Branchut note the paradox that largely irrelevant non-Indigenous ideas about water are informing policy in the region while local, relevant Aboriginal values are either being ignored or misunderstood. While water is increasingly a tradeable commodity from a Western perspective, its value for the local Aboriginal people is deeply culturally-embedded. These very different views about water and who owns it have resulted in what Altman & Branchut call ‘intercultural contestation’.

If the High Course can rule that Arnhem Land waters have been reserved for Aboriginal land owners, than it could be argued that terrestrial fresh water sources have been similarly reserved. What Altman & Branchut do not state outright but do imply, is that this decision could force the Northern Territory government to liaise with the local people and begin to incorporate local culturally-based knowledge into future water management plans. At the least, they recommend that a dialogue be opened with traditional owners and note that in the longer-term the activities of Aboriginal people on country could make a significant contribution to the maintenance of water quality and associated biodiversity.

According to Barber, this contribution could potentially be much broader. While he acknowledges that generalising is difficult because of the specificity of Indigenous knowledges to local environments, he believes that the greater understanding of the inter-connectedness of different aspects of the environment underpinning a Yolngu world-view can inform wider debates, such as those on climate change and provide a fresh perspective to non-Indigenous conservationists

“Understanding coastal country through water flows contributes to wider conservation concerns about the coastline; sewage and fertiliser runoff, river and groundwater quality, and the importance of estuaries as fish breeding areas...(and) draws attention to processes occurring on a broader scale, in terms of the relationship between weather, ocean and climate,” (Barber 2005, p210).

The Blue Mud Bay decision to give traditional owners the right to restrict access to the intertidal zone on the waters in their Country is an opportunity to fully-incorporate Indigenous knowledges into conservation practices. The ontological shift this decision represents, away from a Western view of the land and sea as being separate to an Indigenous worldview that sees land and sea as inter-related, also has implications for the incorporation of local knowledges into water management in other areas, such as Maningrida, and in wider debates, such as climate change.

Adapted from an essay submitted in October 2008 as part of my post-graduate diploma in Indigenous Knowledges

I am indebted to the following sources, among others, for this piece and would recommend further reading around these references:

Altman, J. C. 2008, ‘Understanding the Blue Mud Bay decision’, Crikey, viewed 20 September 2008, http://www.crikey.com.au/.

Altman, J. C. & Branchut, V. 2008, Fresh Water in the Maningrida Region’s Hybrid Economy: Intercultural Contestation over Values and Property Rights, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Working Paper 46, The Australian National University, Canberra.

A Rising Tide, The Economist, viewed 19 September 2008, http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12253181.

Armstrong, R., Morrison, J. & Yu, P. 2006, Indigenous Land and Sea Management and Sustainable Business Development in Northern Australia, North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance, viewed 20 September 2008, http://www.nailsma.org.au/.

Barber, M, 2005, ‘Where the Clouds Stand: Australian Aboriginal Relationships to Water, Place, and the Marine Environment in Blue Mud Bay, Northern Territory’, Unpublished (PhD) Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.

‘Blue Mud Bay decision may impact Aust-wide indigenous rights', ABC News Online, viewed 21 September 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/30/2319084.htm.

‘Blue Mud Bay 'sets precedent' for Torres fishery’, ABC News Online, viewed 21 September 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/31/2319649.htm.

Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation 2008, Goals and Objectives, viewed 27 September 2008, http://www.dhimurru.com.au/goals.html.

Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2007, ‘Dhimurru Yolnguwu Monuk Gapu Wana Sea Country Plan’, in Waves, Vol. 13 No. 2, Marine and Coastal Community Network, p4, viewed 26 September 2008, http://oldmccn.iwayvietnam.com/article.php/id/1729/.

‘Land rights decision impacts NT fishing industry’, 7:30 Report online, viewed 21 September 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1883439.htm.

Morrison, J. 2007, ‘Caring for Country’ in Altman, J & Hinkson, M., Coercive reconciliation: Stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia, North Carlton, Victoria, pp249 – 261.
‘Northern Territory of Australia v Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust [2008] HCA 29 (30 July 2008)’, viewed 21 September 2008, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/2008/29.html.

Peat, FD 1996, 'Indigenous Knowledge' in Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe, Fourth Estate, London, pp 239 - 274.

Robinson, N 2008, ‘Aborigines' fishing rights in Blue Mud Bay upheld’, The Australian, viewed 25 September 2008, www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24101153-2702,00.html.

Rose, DB 1996, Nourishing Terrains, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra.
Smyth, D 2007, ‘Sea Country Planning’ in Waves, Vol. 13 No. 2, Marine and Coastal Community Network, p3, viewed 26 September 2008, http://oldmccn.iwayvietnam.com/article.php/id/1729/.

Williams, G 2007, ‘Fishing Licences as an Opportunity – What Can We Learn About Ourselves?, in Waves, Vol. 13 No. 2, Marine and Coastal Community Network, 20, viewed 26 September 2008, http://oldmccn.iwayvietnam.com/article.php/id/1729/..

Wunungmurra, W 2008, ‘Journey goes full circle from Bark Petition to Blue Mud Bay’, ABC News Online, viewed 21 September 2008, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/14/2334855.htm.

Tackling the financial and economic crisis

The OECD has created a new website with commentary, analysis and statistics "on the crisis we are facing".

Lies, damn lies and my weekly pay check

On the subject of measuring progress beyond the limits of GDP and NDP, the Financial Times has an article on statistical measures of progress. It's a good read and can be found on their website.

Progress, what progress?

The global economic crisis has focused minds on restoring growth. But does growth necessarily mean progress? What about factors which growth depends on, such as the environment or happiness? Measuring true progress demands new indicators and a major global project to develop them is now underway.

This is an extract from an opinion piece from Joseph Stiglitz in the oecd Observer. Click here to read the full editorial. Stiglitz is Chair of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.