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Apologies for the delayed reply. If you are still looking for an answer on this one – when the legislation is proclaimed Katherine will be able to invite anyone to come to her house without a permit, just like any other place in Australia.

So, when the legislation is proclaimed Katherine’s husband will not require a permit to live with her in her house in Kintore, at her invitation.

When the main permit system changes become law (on a date to be proclaimed but no later than 18 February 2008) there will be public access to common areas of community land and related access roads / airstrips / barge landings. It is important to emphasise that the changes are not yet law.

Community land is generally communities of over 100 people and includes Kintore.

The public will be able to enter or remain on premises on community land with the permission of the occupier. This will apply, for example, when people have been invited into residences by the occupiers, or when there is indication that shops or art centres are open for sales.

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A welfare tragic literally called on the government to ‘do something!’. That should do it.

In the paper another welfare tragic pointed out how baby products cost more in remote communities. (Well, yeah. If you choose to live in the middle of the Great Gibber Desert it does tend to affect the costs of supplying goods that are made in Sydney or China. Duh.)

Not one of them questioned the assumption that achieving parity of health outcomes was something that government could or should do. Oxfam certainly wasn’t proposing to close the gap using funds that were obtained voluntarily.

The way they were going on, you’d think this is all something new.

But if this is something that government can and should do, then what happened to all the billions upon billions of dollars that have been spent on precisely this purpose over the last 30 years? When can we expect the apology for having mis-spent all that money?

Of course, the pious weeping pope-holimost poo-bahs and pretenders of all those past thirty years are sipping their cappuccinos at Noosa. They’ve got their benefit out of their pious pretence. It only remains for the current crowd to get their snouts as deep into the trough as our credulity will let them.

The spirit of native title is indeed very just. The process on the other hand is awful. Such a process also highlights the unworkability and practical problems with a treaty, even if every tribe or language group is represented, it is still a fractious affair and does not respect individual preferences.

I have a lot of support for a kind of buy-back scheme. My only caveat is that private persons engage in the purchase and sale of land or other resources.