THIS photo of an Aboriginal drunk asleep in a grave in the middle of Cairns is shocking and sad.

But to anyone who has lived in the city for more than five minutes, it is hardly surprising.

When Maree from Westcourt took this photo, she was walking the dog at about 5pm last Saturday with a friend who lives near the McLeod St cemetery.

It was the last time they will walk the dog in this area because her friend is moving away to a quieter part of town after an Aboriginal man broke into her house recently.

Drunks asleep in public places. Homes broken into. Assaults and muggings day and night. Kids abused. Wives and girlfriends bashed and raped.

But who cares, right? Just another day in the Far North and another chapter in the failure of governments to help the black community help itself.

Nothing seems to be able to shock participants from all corners of this state’s Aboriginal movement into the kind of real action and change occurring in communities across the Northern Territory.

Bleeding hearts and bureaucrats will scream in protest at this assertion by pointing out that welfare reforms and grog restrictions are being rolled out across the Cape.

Despite the continued lack of progress, they just won’t accept that these measures merely tweak at the edges and tread softly around the problems, unlike the fundamental shift in values and expectations heralded by the intervention in the Territory.

Those sweeping changes enforced on Aboriginal people by the former Howard government have their flaws, but they have set new benchmarks of acceptability and accountability for both sides, black and white.

North Queensland blackfellas and the victims of their crimes should be up in arms about the failure by politicians to pay them the same respect and attention afforded to Territorians.

Why is the Federal Government so keen to continue the hard but important work of the NT intervention but so reluctant to tackle the same problems here?

The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons is asking the same question.

The group’s Chris Perry this week hit out at the Federal Government for ignoring the health problems of Aboriginal people outside the Territory.

Dr Perry said the Commonwealth spent about $1.5 million on ear, nose and throat infections annually in Queensland, an estimated 20 times less than the money pouring in to the Territory.

"We’re leaving kids deaf and with recurrent ear infections in northern Queensland and in north Western Australia and they’ve got just as pressing a set of problems as the Northern Territory Aboriginal people do," Dr Perry said.

"I wish that they would get around to doing it, we need the capital injection."

Whether it’s the basic health needs of young kids or the rape of a white nurse, or a drunk asleep on a grave, nothing will change until radical and systemic change is introduced.

A Territory-style intervention draws a line in the sand to let Aboriginal people know that old ways of behaving and living are no longer acceptable.

If it was a national emergency in the Territory, why not in the Far North? Aboriginal people in the Far North deserve better, and so do the rest of us.

But be prepared for more drunks asleep on headstones or buried beneath them so long as the status quo remains.

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