Post by Salem on Nov 5, 2012 15:54:35 GMT 10
Though I've always seem the Liberal Party as the natural party of the Indigenous (ie Calwell's racism and the coalition in 1967 giving Indigenous people the right to vote and be counted in the census), I had no idea like Penny Wong, they chose Carr over the right person. Carr had his go, he had his time. He was, in Labor's finest time-honoured tradition, parachuted into a Senate seat when Mundine clearly is an ideas man and would have been a great feat for Labor to have an Indigenous Senator. Again, Labor fliped it up and chose a rich has-been hack. 
No wonder the Liberal Party is the home of the Indigenous.
Sick at heart: why a disillusioned Warren Mundine quit the Labor Party
WHEN Warren Mundine's Labor Party membership renewal forms arrived this August, the former national president ignored the email.
He had already made the momentous decision to leave the ALP after almost 20 years because it was "no longer the party I joined".
"I know there are people who are going to be shocked; I'm pretty shocked myself," Mr Mundine told The Weekend Australian.
"There was a time when I thought I'd go to the grave with my ALP membership in my pocket. I nearly did. But I'm over bullshit. I saw that we could end the disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia within a generation. And I believed (government) policies were never going to do it.
"It became more about the politics than actually achieving anything. And I began to start losing faith."
Mr Mundine's decision to reject the party that he had loved and supported since he was a boy coincided with a life-changing moment in his private life.
After years of ignoring pains in his chest that regularly knocked the wind out of the one-time boxer, Mundine had finally gathered his courage, made an appointment with a doctor and faced up to the heart disease that he knew was killing him.
"For two years, I'd ignored it," he said. "I'd just got on and pretended it wasn't there."
When he finally made it to a cardiologist, Mr Mundine was told he would have been dead by December. In June, he had surgery to place four stents into his arteries. But three weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, massive chest pain struck as he lay in the bath at home following a family barbecue. He was rushed to St Vincent's Hospital and 11 days ago had surgery to bypass five coronary arteries.
As he recuperates at home on Sydney's north shore, Mr Mundine, who lost his mother and sister to heart disease two decades ago, describes the despair he felt as he lay in his hospital bed following the surgery.
"You become very grey," he said. "You lay there and you think 'I've got a million and one reasons why I should not get out of this bed'. But you've only got one to get out of it. And you've got to take that one."
Immediately after the operation, Mr Mundine was still in the fog of anaesthesia, his fiancee Elizabeth Henderson by his bed as the former fitter and turner-turned-negotiator began to stir. "I'm not going to die," she heard him say. "I've got too much work to do."
The subconscious has a way of boiling down the unfinished business of a man's life, the driving anxieties that spill out in sleep talk when the mind's guards are down. "We've got to get jobs for every Aboriginal person. We've got to get them educated, get them standing on their own two feet," he told her.
The urgent crusade to combat indigenous disadvantage is the major driver behind Mr Mundine's extraordinary decision to renounce politics and give up the Labor Party membership he has held for decades.
Mr Mundine, who heads Pilbara mining baron Andrew Forrest's indigenous charity Generation One, has been a union member since the age of 17, and was always a strong supporter of what he called "Hawke-Keating Labor, where it was about economic development, and progress, and working with unions to get good outcomes for everyone".
He said a major source of frustration was the fact that the Liberal Party had managed to get two Aboriginal representatives elected at the federal level - one in the House, and one in the Senate - while the ALP, in a history spanning more than 100 years, had failed to put a single Aboriginal representative into the federal parliament, or indeed, into a winnable seat. "The way (the ALP) are going, they never will (elect an Aboriginal member)," he said.
"Who ever thought Aborigines would be elected into the Northern Territory parliament under a conservative banner? But that's what happened earlier this year: they got four Aborigines in the parliament, all of them conservative."
Mr Mundine put his hand up to become Labor's first federal indigenous parliamentarian when Mark Arbib quit the Senate in March. The ALP put Bob Carr into the seat. Asked if he could now see himself voting for the Liberal Party, Mr Mundine said: "Of course I can. Absolutely."
For now, Mr Mundine, who has slimmed down to 81kg and is fitter than ever, is issuing a call to Aborigines to take charge of their own destiny, most fundamentally their health. "If you go through the list of all of the leaders since say 1970, you will find most of them died young," he says.
"I sit around (corporate) boardrooms and I'm seeing these blokes and they're talking about 'I just ran the Boston marathon' ... To be a leader is not only about vision and doing things and action, it's also about the osmosis process of being fit."
The 30cm scar that divides Mundine's chest is his own very personal reminder that it is not politics, but personal responsibility, that will keep his people alive.
www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/sick-at-heart-why-a-disillusioned-warren-mundine-quit-the-labor-party/story-fn59niix-1226509539543
No wonder the Liberal Party is the home of the Indigenous. Sick at heart: why a disillusioned Warren Mundine quit the Labor Party
WHEN Warren Mundine's Labor Party membership renewal forms arrived this August, the former national president ignored the email.
He had already made the momentous decision to leave the ALP after almost 20 years because it was "no longer the party I joined".
"I know there are people who are going to be shocked; I'm pretty shocked myself," Mr Mundine told The Weekend Australian.
"There was a time when I thought I'd go to the grave with my ALP membership in my pocket. I nearly did. But I'm over bullshit. I saw that we could end the disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia within a generation. And I believed (government) policies were never going to do it.
"It became more about the politics than actually achieving anything. And I began to start losing faith."
Mr Mundine's decision to reject the party that he had loved and supported since he was a boy coincided with a life-changing moment in his private life.
After years of ignoring pains in his chest that regularly knocked the wind out of the one-time boxer, Mundine had finally gathered his courage, made an appointment with a doctor and faced up to the heart disease that he knew was killing him.
"For two years, I'd ignored it," he said. "I'd just got on and pretended it wasn't there."
When he finally made it to a cardiologist, Mr Mundine was told he would have been dead by December. In June, he had surgery to place four stents into his arteries. But three weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, massive chest pain struck as he lay in the bath at home following a family barbecue. He was rushed to St Vincent's Hospital and 11 days ago had surgery to bypass five coronary arteries.
As he recuperates at home on Sydney's north shore, Mr Mundine, who lost his mother and sister to heart disease two decades ago, describes the despair he felt as he lay in his hospital bed following the surgery.
"You become very grey," he said. "You lay there and you think 'I've got a million and one reasons why I should not get out of this bed'. But you've only got one to get out of it. And you've got to take that one."
Immediately after the operation, Mr Mundine was still in the fog of anaesthesia, his fiancee Elizabeth Henderson by his bed as the former fitter and turner-turned-negotiator began to stir. "I'm not going to die," she heard him say. "I've got too much work to do."
The subconscious has a way of boiling down the unfinished business of a man's life, the driving anxieties that spill out in sleep talk when the mind's guards are down. "We've got to get jobs for every Aboriginal person. We've got to get them educated, get them standing on their own two feet," he told her.
The urgent crusade to combat indigenous disadvantage is the major driver behind Mr Mundine's extraordinary decision to renounce politics and give up the Labor Party membership he has held for decades.
Mr Mundine, who heads Pilbara mining baron Andrew Forrest's indigenous charity Generation One, has been a union member since the age of 17, and was always a strong supporter of what he called "Hawke-Keating Labor, where it was about economic development, and progress, and working with unions to get good outcomes for everyone".
He said a major source of frustration was the fact that the Liberal Party had managed to get two Aboriginal representatives elected at the federal level - one in the House, and one in the Senate - while the ALP, in a history spanning more than 100 years, had failed to put a single Aboriginal representative into the federal parliament, or indeed, into a winnable seat. "The way (the ALP) are going, they never will (elect an Aboriginal member)," he said.
"Who ever thought Aborigines would be elected into the Northern Territory parliament under a conservative banner? But that's what happened earlier this year: they got four Aborigines in the parliament, all of them conservative."
Mr Mundine put his hand up to become Labor's first federal indigenous parliamentarian when Mark Arbib quit the Senate in March. The ALP put Bob Carr into the seat. Asked if he could now see himself voting for the Liberal Party, Mr Mundine said: "Of course I can. Absolutely."
For now, Mr Mundine, who has slimmed down to 81kg and is fitter than ever, is issuing a call to Aborigines to take charge of their own destiny, most fundamentally their health. "If you go through the list of all of the leaders since say 1970, you will find most of them died young," he says.
"I sit around (corporate) boardrooms and I'm seeing these blokes and they're talking about 'I just ran the Boston marathon' ... To be a leader is not only about vision and doing things and action, it's also about the osmosis process of being fit."
The 30cm scar that divides Mundine's chest is his own very personal reminder that it is not politics, but personal responsibility, that will keep his people alive.
www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/sick-at-heart-why-a-disillusioned-warren-mundine-quit-the-labor-party/story-fn59niix-1226509539543
