The white-anting of ATSIC has been brought about by the usual suspects

The piece was memorable for one paragraph that came from a "short on specifics" Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Amanda Vanstone who promised: "We'll find a way to engage with Indigenous people in a much more meaningful fashion than ATSIC ever did...."

That's surely up there with no child will live in poverty. Pigs, Amanda.

Kelly's piece was worse.

His readers were told in his opening paragraph that Australia's 14-year-old "experience in Aboriginal self-determination has ended in failure, with both John Howard and Mark Latham agreed that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission must be abolished. This will happen only because ATSIC has lost the support of its constituency."

The ATSIC Board has "signed its own death warrant", it fought the "necessary reforms" by Ruddock, Howard is "turning back towards mainstreaming".

You get the drift.

Fact is ATSIC has never been allowed to put self-determination into practice.

It was never allowed to do so under the Hawke and Keating governments. It was never allowed to do so under Howard.

This is self-evident to anyone who looks beyond the spin and takes a close look at the history of the organisation.

ATSIC has not lost the support of its constituency. The mainstream media says it has. How can you claim it self-determines when all of its program budget is quarantined by government and the lion's share of what's left is soaked up by non-discretionary spending. Howard is turning back to nothing.

He mainstreamed ATSIC as much as he could without legislative change when he set up ATSIS last year. That was the final nail in the coffin of limited self-determination.

It saw the death of the collegiate ATSIC in which the elected and administrative arms of ATSIC worked together in much the same way as bureaucrats and ministers in the mainstream.