"Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services - some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention"
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“Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services” is doing two jobs at once: it’s evidence and a rebuke. Malcolm Fraser, a former prime minister not easily cast as a romantic reformer, is staking out a conservative-sounding argument for a progressive conclusion: self-determination isn’t a slogan, it’s already an operating system. The number “120” and the detail “for 30 years” aren’t garnish; they’re a quiet attack on the lazy assumption that Indigenous-led governance is untested or naïve. If this many services have kept the lights on for decades, the problem isn’t capacity. The problem is the country’s willingness to back what works.
Then he pivots to the exhausting breadth of what these services are asked to carry. “They struggle with difficult medical problems” could have stopped at diabetes, kidney disease, preventable infections. Instead Fraser stacks a second ledger: counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention. The subtext is brutal: Aboriginal health isn’t just health, because Australia made it everything. When trauma is structural, the clinic becomes a frontline institution for history, law, housing, policing, and grief.
Fraser’s intent reads as a demand for realism. If governments keep treating Indigenous disadvantage as a technical glitch fixable with short-term programs, they will keep outsourcing responsibility onto underfunded community services. His list is a moral audit: look at what Aboriginal organisations already do, then ask why the nation still behaves as if closing the gap is a charitable project rather than a debt.
Then he pivots to the exhausting breadth of what these services are asked to carry. “They struggle with difficult medical problems” could have stopped at diabetes, kidney disease, preventable infections. Instead Fraser stacks a second ledger: counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention. The subtext is brutal: Aboriginal health isn’t just health, because Australia made it everything. When trauma is structural, the clinic becomes a frontline institution for history, law, housing, policing, and grief.
Fraser’s intent reads as a demand for realism. If governments keep treating Indigenous disadvantage as a technical glitch fixable with short-term programs, they will keep outsourcing responsibility onto underfunded community services. His list is a moral audit: look at what Aboriginal organisations already do, then ask why the nation still behaves as if closing the gap is a charitable project rather than a debt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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