Indigenous Literacy Project. On Wednesday September 2 2009 all Australians are invited to participate in the third Indigenous Literacy Day. ILD aims to help raise urgently needed funds to address the literacy crisis in remote Indigenous communities. The Indigenous Literacy Project (ILP) is a partnership between the Australian Book Industry and The Fred Hollows Foundation. 
PALS project submissions
This document is a report on disaggregated performance data in PISA for Australian Indigenous students in all three PISA studies of 2000, 2003 and 2006. It is based on students who self-reported as Indigenous.
Demographic data was collected in all three cycles to allow disaggregation of Indigenous students, and all three had a special focus to ensure that there was a sufficiently large sample of Indigenous students to allow valid analysis.
This is the first of two reports on Australian Indigenous students. A following report will examine the impact of background factors, including socioeconomic status and psychological factors such as attitudes and beliefs on the performance of Indigenous students.
The Australian Education Union (AEU) announced at its 2009 Annual Federal Conference a plan to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students in response to what it deemed an inadequate and misguided approach by the Federal Government in its first term.
AEU Federal President, Angelo Gavrielatos said the Prime Minister’s goal to halve the gap in achievements for Indigenous children within a decade was worthwhile, but would fail without the development of a comprehensive policy and a solid funding commitment.
The AEU’s plan to improve outcomes for Indigenous students and their communities includes:
The development of different educational structures and models for the provision of public education to Indigenous students that take into account their needs and those of particular communities and include the following characteristics:
To the SSTUWA I would like to say thank you for the opportunity to embark on a journey of discovery and sharing with other Indigenous peoples from around the world. This report has just been a short journey of my experiences in Melbourne.The historic formal statement of support from the federal government for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples occurring this Friday should be backed immediately with a comprehensive national action plan to Close the Gap in health equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma said today.
I was fortunate to be able to represent the WA branch of the ATSEIC – SSTUWA for the WIPCE conference in Melbourne from 7-11th Dec 2008.Early this year I was approached by many young women, mothers, grandmothers, and those who work with them. At first I was nervous about what they may say: I knew I had stepped beyond what was expected of me in my Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Trapped in the Aboriginal reality show’. I had prepared myself for hate mail and abuse, and that came, but for each abusive comment there were at least an equal number of women who contacted me and said, ‘You spoke for me’.
One woman pushed me to confront the core of the problem: ‘You and I know that the problem is big bunga politics.’ If you haven’t been in the Aboriginal world in the last thirty years, you may never have heard this phrase, but for those of us who have spent our lives fighting racism, agitating for change, for evidence-based policy, it describes something we know too well – the real politic of power in our world – power that is all too often used against women and children, power that takes many forms, and has too frequently been used for personal aggrandisement. The big bunga way – a scatological term used to refer to the ‘big man’ syndrome – works to the advantage of a few and has become normalised, and even glorified, in some circles. Meanwhile, assault, rape and an astonishing variety of other mental and physical forms of abuse have become the norm in far too many communities and families.The symptoms of this are becoming increasingly well known – manifest in both vertical and lateral violence. At its core, there is a pattern of entrenched violence directed both against those in positions of official power, and poisonously and insidiously against those close by who have little power or capacity to respond. Violence as a proxy for power traumatises Indigenous families and communities in Australia, and in other countries that share a history of colonisation and displacement.
Troy Buswell and the State Government have appointed a former Howard Government industrial relations advocate to review Western Australian workplace laws and will soon announce changes that could affect up to 300,000 Western Australian workers.
Public schools are a foundation stone of our society. They are places of learning, of inspiration and opportunity where every Australian child can get the education they deserve. It's the key to a strong economy, a skilled workforce and a socially cohesive society.
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Public education should be free and open to all to ensure non-selective and non-discriminatory access to education. Every child has a right to be educated, to develop as a human being. This capability should not be denied to anyone, either by design or neglect.
