Fanciful suggestion

As reported in The Guardian, Noel Pearson claims this:

Government ministers have spoken about the voice’s potential to bring together advice on complex, multi-disciplinary problems such as rheumatic heart disease, a little-known condition that the health minister, Mark Butler, described as “a disease of grinding poverty, poor environmental conditions, and not something the health portfolio can manage alone”.

Pearson called it “a problem only a voice can overcome”.

“It is a disease of the unlistened to. It is the disease of a people who have spoken, but have not been heard,” he said.

“No gets us nowhere when it comes to confronting rheumatic heart disease. Yes makes it possible.”

A Google search shows in fact a plethora of articles in medical journals and websites discussing the problem.   There are many recent articles, and to take one example from 2021:

A community-based program to reduce acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease in northern Australia

And by refining the Google search, you can see how much the problem was discussed, say, a decade ago.

Here's a screenshot of the first page when the topic is restricted to 2010 to 2012 search results:

 OK, so you might say "well, you are just proving that the problem was known, but the government wasn't listening to the aboriginal community about it."

The problem with that line is that Googling up the evidence of active government engagement to address the problem is also easy.  For example, here's a 32 page booklet from the Queensland government n 2018 with the title:

Here's some material from the Federal government National Indigenous Australians Agency (not sure the date, but it's after 2018):

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021–2031 (the Health Plan), released in December 2021, includes priority 5: Early Intervention; which emphasises place-based approaches that are locally determined such as preventing ARF from becoming RHD where needed, and promotes enhancing access to culturally safe and responsive, best practice early intervention (Objective 5.3). The Health Plan also supports community driven housing and infrastructure solutions (Objective 7.2) to consider targeted primordial intervention for housing-related medical conditions that are common to Indigenous Australian households, such as ARF and RHD, trachoma, and otitis media.

The Champions4Change Program has worked in partnership with RHD Australia since 2018 to meet a clear need for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-specific program that had self-determination and culture at its heart. The program is supported by nearly 60 Indigenous Australians with lived experience of ARF and RHD from 27 communities across Australia. The program was designed to privilege and promote the voices of its champions, to support them in their lives and work, and to put culture, Country and community at the centre of responses to RHD.

Gee, the bit in bold sounds quite a lot like "listening" to me. 

Some more material from the Feds:

The Australian Government is committed to ending RHD as a public health issue by 2030. To achieve this, the Australian Government is making significant investments to address ARF and RHD through:

• the Rheumatic Fever Strategy
• developing a vaccine against Strep A (funded through the Indigenous Health Research Fund).

The Rheumatic Fever Strategy includes:

• state-based register and control programs in the NT, WA, SA and QLD, to improve detection, monitoring and management of ARF and RHD
• developing clinical guidelines to prevent, diagnose and manage ARF and RHD
• developing resources and providing education and training for healthcare professionals, communities, and for individuals with these conditions and their carers
• piloting activities in high-risk communities to help prevent new cases of ARF
• national analysis and reporting on the data from state-based registers.

I could go on.

The point is, of course, that Pearson is engaging in pure rhetorical hyperbole when he says this is one example of a problem that "only a voice can overcome" because the indigenous are not being "listened to".

The truth, which it really doesn't suit him to acknowledge, is that the problem has been well recognized for well over a decade, governments have been actively working on programs to deal with it, and have been engaging directly with aboriginal organisations and advocates.

There is really no reason to believe that having another layer of indigenous representatives who say "you're not doing enough!" is going to achieve anything better.