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Buying petrol? Then don’t fuel around

By Graham Ring - posted Friday, 14 October 2005


This article is a Blatant Plug. I’m using it to draw your attention to a Brilliant Product produced by Brave People.

Opal is a lead-free fuel which does not contain the aromatics that have such a deadly attraction for sniffers. It’s Better Petrol.

Mind you, there are no Big Profits to be made in the production and distribution of Opal. It’s hopelessly uneconomic to produce the fuel in small quantities. Storage is difficult: you can’t keep jam and Vegemite in the same jar.

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Transport is expensive: there are lots of miles to cover in the bush - and not so many people there to buy the stuff when it arrives.

In terms of return on investment, the manufacturer would do better flogging heaters in Hawaii.

While the ALP is busy self-immolating, the de-facto leader of the Opposition, Bob Brown, is maintaining pressure on the Howard Government to loosen the purse strings and get Opal into Alice.

To its credit, the government is stumbling in the right direction. The Federal Treasurer recently found $6 million in his other pants to fund the subsidised distribution of Opal to Yulara and points south.

A good start - but no cigar.

This piecemeal policy of subsidising Opal in some areas of the central desert but not others lacks credibility and cohesion, like most of the government’s Indigenous affairs policies.

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Health Minister Tony Abbot recently addressed a group of medical students on the subject of working in remote communities. He was able to enlighten them thus: “We can try to preserve a particular type of Indigenous culture, but almost inevitably people living in that particular world are going to have different outcomes in things that we think are important than people who are living in a different kind of world.”

Fifty-odd years earlier, George Orwell said something much more easily understood: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Tangentyre Council Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service (CAYLUS) is right in the thick of things. They’re a lot closer to the action than the word-play warriors sheltering in the parliamentary trenches of Canberra.

The CAYLUS submission (pdf file 71KB) to the recent coronial inquiry into petrol sniffing deaths at Multijulu does not mince words: “Young people in Central Australia sniff petrol because it is the best thing on offer. They sniff because their friends do, because their family is drinking or dead, because petrol is readily available, and because they are hungry. They sniff to get away from pain.”

It’s passé and PC to mention it, but this sort of thing hasn’t been happening out in the bush for all that long. Certainly not before we white fellas blundered into town with alcohol, gunpowder, venereal disease and all the other goodies which have served black Australia so well over the last couple of hundred years.

Call me a chardonnay-swilling socialist if it makes you feel good - I actually prefer a shiraz - but this won’t make the facts of the previous paragraph any less true.

An earlier coronial inquest in 2002 took evidence from Kawaki Thompson, who had lost his son to the scourge of sniffing.

Mr Thompson asked: “Who is responsible? The petrol doesn’t belong to us. It is not part of Anangu law. It was introduced to the lands by white people. The problem with petrol comes from the outside - like the Maralinga bomb tests. The solution should come from outside too.” Game, set and match.

CAYLUS has called on the Federal Government to subsidise the comprehensive roll out of Opal fuel in the Central Australian Cross-border Region. The submission identifies an area bounded roughly by Coober Pedy, Mt Isa, Tennant Creek and Laverton as containing the largest cluster of petrol sniffers in the country.

Until sniffable fuel is removed from this whole region, the government is only wallpapering a termite-infested house. The treasurer needs simply to put his hand in our (collective) pocket and spend the few extra dollars necessary to complete the task and save some lives.

My stylish 1991 four-cylinder rust-bucket goes through more oil than petrol these days. But when it’s time to top up the tank, I zoom into the servo which is all decked out in the green and gold.

A patriotic purchase? Not really. I’m told that the mob involved are Pommies. That’s right. Ashes owners. (Whether it was bad planning, batting problems or bloody Pieterson is beside the point. The urn has turned.)

But I digress. The landscape of Indigenous Australia is littered with Broken Promises and Blathering Prattle. There is a screaming need for Bipartisan Policy to realise this Bold Plan. So which oil company came up with this Brilliant Product?

Journalistic integrity (snicker!) prevents me from unbagging this cat. But I think it’s safe to say that the importance of eradicating petrol-sniffing from the Central Desert region is truly Beyond Petroleum.

So Buy Purposefully!

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First published by the National Indigenous Times on October 5, 2005.



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About the Author

Graham Ring is an award-winning writer and a fortnightly National Indigenous Times columnist. He is based in Alice Springs.

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