By Jim O’Toole

Senator Jacinta Price, not afraid of saying it just as it is.

The Aboriginal Central Land Council in the Northern Territory is complaining the newly appointed Liberal Opposition spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs Jacinta Price was “telling lies” about the Voice, and “neither speaks for them nor listens to them”.

“We are tired of her playing politics with the grassroots organisations our old people have built to advocate for our rights and interests,” CLC deputy chairman Warren Williams said.

Lajamanu community leader Valerie Patterson said members had “never seen her on communities”.

“She needs to get down to the grassroots and find out the truth, not just speak with to the few people who will talk to her,” she said.

“We don’t want Senator Price to speak for us because she has been misrepresenting us, and telling lots of lies about us. And we’ve got our own voice.”

Ms Patterson now has admitted they already have a voice therefore any support for the United Nations-directed Voice referendum would be superfluous to their needs.

The CLC has attacked Senator Price because she has been critical of all land councils and their many Gravy Trains that have been established across the country which have allowed those at the top to enrich themselves at the expense of still-languishing community Aborigines who in many cases exist in worse than third world conditions.

Another body fitting this bill is the Cape York Land Council which divides the government spoils among the top and if there is anything left community people might get a pittance.

The land councils in all states are paid billions from the annual gratuity of $33 billion the Aboriginal industry receives from government.

These first layer elitist groups have created their own burgeoning bureaucracies which purportedly represent the regional Prescribed Body Corporates, a second layer of Aboriginal administration comprising elected local members of regional communities.

The land councils have on tap a bevy of highly paid lawyers, both black and white who represent PBC’s, family clans and other claimants in the Federal Court often battling each other or government in land claims.

The Central Land Council has a large advertisement on its website pushing more Covid jabs for Central Australians such as these kids. If these youngsters get the Covid jab as evidence shows it will either injure or even kill them. Why are the NT Labor Government and the CLC pushing the toxic jab?

What have the land councils done for their suffering people who are barely surviving in remote communities? These unrepresented families endure diets that are harmful to human health, buying expensive refined foods off the sparse shelves of community shops that in effect are poisoning them.

Bread, sugar, processed meats, noodles, Coke and cigarettes at $100 a packet are the staples of many remote communities. 

Then there is the deadly grog and illicit drug problem that seems to get worse and never better. Mothers giving birth to foetal alcohol syndrome babies and underweight and undernourished kids sipping on Coke and potato chips is the norm.

Where are the land councils and their government largesse?

On the CLC website is probably the most dangerous literature ever posted for Aborigines to read.  The NT Labor Government, similar to other states is pushing the deadliest of all medical hoaxes, the Covid jab for communities.

Conversations and distressing messages from Northern Territory Aboriginal people that Cairns News received during the Covid offensive clearly indicate the Labor government led by Michael Gunner was ensuring with community lock downs and sending bus loads of people to the secure Howard Springs quarantine facility, that community members could not escape enforced inoculations.

The 33,000 excess national deaths recorded by health authorities 2022-23 and recently tabled in the senate by Senator Alex Antic as Covid mRNA vaccine-related, included many Aborigines.

The vaxx epidemic is ongoing.

Tracker Tilmouth, a wily, affable representative of his people almost certainly would not have backed the UN Voice

This scribe has seen the CLC in action on the ground. Back in the days of Tracker Tilmouth in 1995 when I first met this wily, affable blackfella at a media conference in Katherine, he was director of the CLC.

Later, I ran into him several times at other functions and he was always steadfast in his representation of Aboriginal people.

He certainly was outspoken and seemed like a down to earth blackfella who genuinely wanted to help his mob. Tracker passed away in 2015 after battling cancer.

The ABC has somewhat immortalised him in this obituary:

“Prominent Northern Territory Indigenous activist Leigh Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth died in Darwin on Saturday night aged 62.

He had suffered from several cancers and heart problems.

In a long and storied career, Mr Tilmouth dedicated himself to Indigenous advancement and helped establish the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service, as well as the region’s Aboriginal health service.

He also served as director of the Central Land Council – the statutory body representing Aboriginal people over an area of 776,000 square kilometres in the southern half of the NT.

Mr Tilmouth claimed to have once rammed former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s limousine while protesting near Alice Springs.

He was a long-time member of the Labor Party, and in the late 1990s was the frontrunner to be pre-selected as the party’s senator for the NT before pulling out of the contest.

Following this, he controversially stated: “Labor likes pet niggers, and I’m counted as a pet nigger. I’m allowed to mow the lawns, but I’m not allowed on the verandah.”

He was critical of prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, saying it was a “big-noting” gesture and purely symbolic with no practical outcomes for Aboriginal people.

“I’ll go the big party at the end of the day when everything is done,” he told ABC Darwin 105.7 in 2010.

“Unless you’re fair dinkum about doing something with Aboriginal affairs – dealing with issues of land rights, the cultural and social problems – then count me out.”

He described Mr Rudd as “going around hugging people and carrying on like a pork chop”.

“Every time he sees me he hugs me,” he said of the then prime minister.

“I have to tell him now ‘release’ because he won’t let go.”

Known as a voluble and fearless opponent, he joked he was the only patient to have put on weight during chemotherapy.

Mr Tilmouth died in Darwin Hospital surrounded by family and friends.”

Would the suffering community dwellers be better off today with the likes of more Trackers? Yes.

Would he have backed the UN Voice? I seriously doubt it.