Our collective shame

...how do you send your kids to school every day when you share your house with 17 other people?

That’s only the average number of people who live in a single dwelling in Wadeye - when NIT visited last year we found one two-bedroom house (and we use the term ‘house’ loosely) with 31 people living in it.

Unemployment among the Indigenous people of Wadeye runs to 90 percent. It would be almost 100 percent if it weren’t for the work-for-the-dole CDEP programs, which deliver a ‘wage’ of just a few hundred dollars each week.

Life expectancy for a male in Wadeye is less than 50 years.

For decades, the federal and NT governments have being underspending on education, health, housing and economic development while overspending on welfare, policing and community corrections.

It’s a road map to the destruction of a community and the condemnation of its people to a life of abject poverty.

The National Indigenous Times publishes another excellent article on the shameful state of remote Aboriginal communities. This is our shame, for it is not the result of natural disasters but Government neglect.