A government's duty of care

There is a very strong argument for a modern health service for distant communities based on fleets of planes and helicopters to ferry staff and equipment to where they are needed and to ferry patients and relatives to treatment centres. Medical staff should be available on shifts, not on permanent full-time call, and medical students should have experience of distance medicine. Sure it would cost but either we have a commitment to health or we don’t, and we are said to believe in equality. It’s a question of values and priorities.

In Indigenous peoples and poverty (2005), Stephen Cornell’s chapter on Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States notes these countries are among the world’s wealthiest nations but “the Indigenous peoples within their borders are in each case among their poorest citizens”, the irony being “the wealth of these countries has been built substantially on resources taken from these peoples, whose poverty is a recent creation”.

According to historian Geoffrey Blainey the Indigenous standard of living before English colonisation in 1788 was higher than for most of Europe’s population.

Australia’s political system is based on the economic “religion” of competition, so by definition there are winners and losers, with many Indigenous people among the most disadvantaged of the losers. What does that feel like in your own country? Depression is a psychological as well as economic result.