indigenous politics
26 Jun 2008
The Intervention, One Year On
The anniversary of the NT Intervention is not a cause to celebrate, but a call to action, writes Greens Senator Rachel Siewert
Last Saturday marked the first anniversary of the Northern Territory Intervention, but it is far from something we should be celebrating. It has been a long year for those living with this paternalistic, top down policy; one that will no doubt make future generations ashamed.This legislation was a knee-jerk reaction that seemed designed purely to gain an election bounce for the Coalition (made even more ludicrous by the recent admission from former Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough that the whole plan was thought up in one 48-hour session), but it is the Rudd Government's decision to "stay the course" that has been most disappointing. Frankly, we expected better.
A quick scan of the recently released Northern Territory Emergency Response: One Year On report shows a fanciful set of claims boasting dramatic improvements, without the figures to back them up.
For example, during the last session of Senate Estimates, it was revealed that just one of the safe houses promised under the Intervention was operational as of Tuesday 3 June. The One Year On report states that as at Wednesday 18 June, 10 safe houses had been completed in eight communities. How credible is it that in just two weeks there were suddenly another nine fully operational safe houses?
Similarly, we are told to believe that Indigenous communities are now safer, with increased numbers of police. But a large proportion of these police (33 of 51) have been shipped in temporarily from interstate. How are Indigenous communities to build any kind of trust in a police force that is likely to be shipped back home at the end of their term? And what will happen when they leave?
For the whole of Australian history, the resources committed to addressing the problems in Aboriginal communities have been totally inadequate for the scale of the disadvantage they face. Now, after so many years of crying out for more resources, it is frustrating and soul destroying for those struggling on the ground that the resources finally forthcoming are being squandered on unnecessary, ill-conceived and ineffective measures while successful Aboriginal programs and organisations still go begging.
The money poured into the NT Intervention has the potential to turn around lives in remote communities, but more needs to be done to ensure it is spent on things that actually make a difference, such as the Safe Families program, a project of the Tangentyere Council in Alice Springs.
This program focuses on reducing family violence and preventing kids from needing to enter the child protection system. It is staffed only by members of the local indigenous community, employing 10 full time Indigenous residential care staff.
The Federal Government used to contribute to this vital program under the Family Violence Partnership Program, but it now faces losing staff and resources due to funding cutbacks. Ironically, this program would be a perfect candidate for Intervention funding. Without support from the Federal Government, the community will lose a successful, effective child protection program.
Image thanks to Fiona Katauskas.
The initial justification for the Intervention, of course, was concerns about the child sexual abuse illustrated in the Little Children are Sacred report. As part of the Intervention, the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) was given broad powers to investigate allegations of child sexual abuse and violence in Indigenous communities. During Senate Estimates in May, the ACC reported that it had found no evidence to date of organised paedophile rings in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, contrary to claims made by the then Minister.
They did indicate that a significant proportion of the intelligence they gathered in the Territory related to underage sexual activity. This is consistent with the evidence given to Senate Inquiry hearings in the Northern Territory, which suggested that few charges have been brought for child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory since the Intervention commenced last year. It is also in keeping with anecdotal reports we have received from Aboriginal communities.
Child sexual abuse is recognised as prevalent across the Australian community, and there is absolutely no doubt that there remains serious concern for the safety of children in Aboriginal communities. Yet only one coordinator and seven child protection officers have been put in place as a result of the Intervention. You would have thought more resources would have been put into this vital area.
Underage sexual activity is also a significant issue in many Indigenous communities, and one that creates a range of social problems that need to be addressed. It is a problem of a different nature to child abuse and requires an entirely different response.
A community education campaign is needed to ensure teenagers and young people understand and abide by age of consent laws, respect community standards, and appreciate the harm inappropriate underage sexual activity can cause.
Perhaps the greatest issue any Intervention in the Northern Territory must address if it wants to deliver better health and education outcomes and ensure children's safety is the lack of safe and appropriate housing in many communities. Overcrowded housing and sleeping rough are arguably the biggest contributors to poor health outcomes for Aboriginal people, particularly for high rates of infectious diseases.
If the Rudd Government is going to close the gap on life expectancy within a generation, there needs to be a huge amount of work undertaken to fix this issue - as well as ensuring existing houses have working power and plumbing, functioning bathrooms and kitchens.
Labor has already made a big funding commitment, putting aside $813 million to build new houses in the NT. While this is less than the estimated $2.3 billion needed to address the current level of unmet need for housing, let alone for projected population growth (42.4 per cent of the Aboriginal population in the NT is under the age of 17), it is a step in the right direction.
However, we remain concerned that adequate resources have not been committed to repairs and ongoing maintenance, despite the fact that this has been the key finding of all studies into the sustainability of Indigenous housing.
The heavy handed and paternalistic approach of the NT Intervention isn't working and very clearly was never going to work. Labor has always held a commitment to evidence-based policy in Indigenous Affairs and yet it is still pushing on with these ill-conceived Howard-era policies, for which there was never an evidence base.
The suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act remains a sticking point and an international embarrassment for Labor. We do not need the upcoming review to tell us that this aspect of the Intervention is and always will be morally wrong and ethically unjustifiable.
When the quarantining period comes to an end, those affected won't have been empowered to take control of their own finances, because that has not been a focus of the Intervention, and there still won't be jobs for them to go to. Much more of these resources need to be focused on delivering basic health services and protecting at risk children, on fixing existing houses and building safe new homes for the future.
The Australian Greens remain united and steadfast in our opposition to the approach taken by the NT Intervention. We were the only Party to stand up as one in the Australian Parliament to condemn the Intervention when it was announced, and we continue to maintain our opposition to the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, the compulsory seizures of lands, the indiscriminate quarantining of welfare, and the trampling of the human rights of Aboriginal people in the NT.
We've had one whole year of this racist policy; of ill-targeted spending with a total disregard for the basic human rights of Aboriginal people in the NT. We would much rather see these resources spent on truly delivering for Aboriginal communities.
It is high time that the ALP admit they made a mistake in backing the Intervention and commit to an evidence-based, community-development approach to Indigenous Affairs that respects human rights and empowers Aboriginal people.
One year of the NT Intervention is not an anniversary to celebrate - it is a call to action.
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Excellent article by Senator Rachel Siewert, an outstanding anti-racist and tireless advocate for human rights in the Federal Parliament.
My father was a refugee from Nazism. The racist Nazis wiped my family from the face of Europe.
My partner of 46 years has been a non-Indigenous Black Australian, all of whose grandparents were slaves of Australians in the South Pacific sugar cane plantations.
Would it be possible for me - or indeed ANY decent anti-racist Australians - to vote for the disgusting Lib-Labs if they voted to suspend the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act for Jewish Australians? For Indigenous Australians in general? For Kanaka-origin Australians? For Black Australians in general? For Indian Australians? For Chinese Australians? For Vietnamese Australians? For Turkish Australians? For Lebanese Australians? For italian Australians? For Greek Australians? For ANY subgroup of Australians?
After 1945 the formerly Nazi Germans adopted a post-Holocaust policy that can be summarized by the acronym CAAA (C4A): Cessation of the crimes, Acknowledgment of the crimes, Apology, Amends and Assertion "Never again to anyone".
Until this obscene, racist Lib-Lab legislation is removed (Cessation) and Religious Right Rudd (R3) offers Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Assertion "never again to ANYONE" it is IMPOSSIBLE for any decent, anti-racist Australian to vote Labor let alone for the equally "politically correct racist" Coalition.
The core messages from the Jewish Holocaust (6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and from the World War 2 Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Roma dead) are "zero tolerance for racism" and "never again to anyone" - sacred messages being grossly violated by the Zionists and Bush-ites in their violent, genocidal colonization of the Muslim world and by the Lib-Labs in their support for the genocidal Bush Wars (post-invasion excess deaths in the Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide 5-9 million) and this evil, racist legislation.
Having voted Labor all my life, in 2007 I realized that ONLY people I could vote for in "PC racist" Australia without spitting on my martyred forbears were the Greens.
And Green Senator Siewert is dead right about nation-wide child abuse.
Thus there is no doubt from the shocking anecdotal accounts in the NT Report “Little Children are Sacred” that from a qualitative perspective Aboriginal Child Sexual Abuse is occurring and must be urgently stopped. However the Report (p57) states that “it is not possible to accurately estimate the extent of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory” while documenting that 34% of females and 16% of males in Australia as a whole experience child sexual abuse (Dunne, M.P., Purdie, D.M., Cook, M.D., Boyle, F.M. & Najman, J.M.(2003), Is child sexual abuse declining? Evidence from a population-based survey of men and women in Australia, Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 27 (2), pp141-152).
No doubt there is significant Aboriginal child sexual abuse and other horrendous problems that need to be addressed by urgent provision of exactly the SAME services that are provided to White Australians– decent infrastructure, decent housing, security, police, justice, nurses, doctors, teachers and other welfare workers.
Those defaming Indigenous Australians for child sexual abuse in the absence of concrete figures are simply lying in a racially-specific way– it is akin to the deadly anti-Jewish anti-semitic canards of past millennia (e.g. “drinking the blood of Christian children”) and indeed to the current anti-Arab anti-Semitic and Islamophobic carnards (“terrorists”, “extremists”, “fanatics”, “militants” ) that are routinely trotted out every day in the racist Australian and Western media. Those indulging in this race-specific propaganda have no idea as to whether the incidence of Aboriginal child sexual abuses is greater or less than the appalling figure for Australia as a whole (see "Racism in Australia. La Trobe, “Bundoora Arabesque” & Aboriginal Ethnocide": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15960/42/ ).
- Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
So, Senator Siewert, has the Intervention been heavy-handed (any evidence? any children taken away? anybody roughed up? anybody evicted?), or is it that not enough resources and professional staff have been stationed in remote communities, at least fewer resources and staff than promised, or than is needed ? Are you condemning, or asking for, more paternalism ? Are you defending, or damning, self-determination ?
Of all the current parties in the various parliaments, I would most unambiguously support the Greens, but I think that you are way off the mark in the case of the Intervention. Having been involved in self-determination efforts on and off over the past forty years, and watched almost all of them (except tertiary student support programs: twenty two thousand Indigenous university graduates!) go belly-up due to the casual involvement (to use a euphemism) of Aboriginal people, I have to conclude that the policy has failed, and that the welfare benefits brought in thirty five years or more ago - to which all Indigenous people were as entitled as anybody else - have had the effect of assimilating Aboriginal people, at great distances, to the most powerless sections of Australian society. They no longer predominantly hunt and gather, but rely on welfare payments (and royalties) as is their right, but which is also their ‘golden cage’.
Thanks to policies which have kept many Aboriginal people minimally satisfied and uneducated, bereft of work-skills or work ethic, and remote from social and economic interaction with other Australians, Aboriginal people have simultaneously assimilated themselves culturally and segregated themselves socially, and in the process completely disempowered themselves economically - to the point now where barely a single ‘community’ is even remotely self-supporting, where people’s literacy, child-rearing skills, health and sense of community are far worse now than forty years ago. Yes, there is a crisis in Aboriginal affairs, a dreadful and horrific crisis, and I am appalled that supposedly thoughful white people can so callously write off the situation, as if it was nothing more than an opportunity to bag the prevailing government.
What’s your alternative, Senator Siewert ?
Cheers,
Joe
Dear Joe,
Your comments make it seem like you haven’t read this excellent article by Rachel Siewert. Could I draw your attention to her last couple of paragraphs, if reading the whole article is too much to ask? I will copy and paste them:
We’ve had one whole year of this racist policy; of ill-targeted spending with a total disregard for the basic human rights of Aboriginal people in the NT. We would much rather see these resources spent on truly delivering for Aboriginal communities.
It is high time that the ALP admit they made a mistake in backing the Intervention and commit to an evidence-based, community-development approach to Indigenous Affairs that respects human rights and empowers Aboriginal people.
Does that answer your question?
Helen Lewers
Joe,
The Greens are not calling for a halt to the increased funding/attention on NT Indigenous communities - instead it is more about drawing attention to where the money is being spent.
The top-down approach of the Howard/Brough-Rudd/Macklin Intervention fails to involve the experience of successful community-driven programs (such as those being run out of Tangentyere council), instead opting to bring in external staff, ideas and programs.
There is an overwhelming ‘we know better’ approach going on in Indigenous communities, with no effort to involve the very people we are supposedly there to save.
If anything, this is not an opportunity to ‘bag the prevailing government’ - it is a call for them to do the right thing, in comparison to their predecessors.
The Howard Government needed to seek exemption from the Racial Discrimination Act for this legislation. Why? Because it is racist. It’s time for the Rudd Government to recognise that, and do something about it.
Sorry, MonkeyJedi, which successful Tangetyerre programs exactly ?
I’m sure that Aborigina lpeople know what should be done, the question is why aren’t they doing it ? Here’s a puzzle:
* there are roughly a tghousand ‘communities’ all over Australia. six hundred of them would have a fairly reliable and adequate water supply. Many are very remote, and getting fruit and vegetables out to them is very expensive. How many have vegetable gardens and chooks and orchards ? i.e. even as a carry-over from the Mission days ? Six hundred ? One hundred ? Fifty ? Ten ? Why do intelligent people play games like this ? What Eric Berne would call the Wooden Leg game (we don’t have resources, governments won’t fund us), and the Yes, But …. (but we are too busy, loaded down with other duties; but who would do A or B; but what if x or y … ) game.
So, what is the ‘right thing’ to do now that self-determination has been such a disaster ? What can intelligent, but dreadfully self-disempowered, people do to get out of their predicament ? Or will Cargo keep coming ?
It’s time we looked closely at the assumptions behind the policies of the past thirty five years. Here are some:
* ‘Real’ Aboriginal people are mostly out hunting and gathering, most of the time;
* Running a community is easy, anyone can do it, no matter what level of education;
* The smaller the community, the easier it is to run;
* Aboriginal people, being caring and sharing, and strongly communal, are naturally suited for community governance;
* all elders are wise, and full of proactive knowledge about what to do next;
* Merging traditional and modern cultural practises is dead easy.
I’m sure that you can find many more.
Cheers,
Joe
rmg1859,
The Safe Families program that is referred to in the article, for one. Tangentyere have also been running successful voluntary income quarantining programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and many more. All of these are run by the local community Aunties and Uncles, which engenders trust amongst community members.
Compare that with an interstate, white, police officer telling you how you should be running your family budget. Hardly appropriate.
I’m not sure of your point. Are you saying that Aboriginal people cannot be trusted to run their own affairs? If so, I think that is an incredibly offensive view to take.
Of course people can run their own affairs, or at least they should do so. As I say ad nauseam, people are intelligent, and intelligent enough to carry out all the basic human responsibilities for their children and their old people without preying on them, or expecting someone else to provide for them. Aren’t they ?
Thank you, but it’s a pity that a program like Safe Families is so necessary, as are night patrols and safe houses and women’s refuges: the pity is that they leave the streets to the perpetrators, and confine the innocent and disrupt their lives, certainly their sleep. A couple of police officers, Black or white, would free up the innocent, let them have a decent night’s sleep, and clamp down on the perpetrators and that would be fine by me.
Cheers,
Joe
While we are on the subject, here is a success story that will chill the hearts of all Apartheid-supporters:
* 1.62 % of all women commencing university undergraduate courses across Australia in 2006 were Indigenous;
* at the last Census, 1.66 % of all Australian women over 20 years were Indigenous.
So, while some of us seek ways to confine Indigenous people to remote areas, Indigenous women across Australia are getting on with business; 98 % parity is something to be proud of, given the class, cultural and spatial factors involved.
Well, some of us are proud of that achievement - others may believe that Indigenous people shouldn’t be going to university at all: too ‘white’. Not really, ‘modern’ would be a better word. Yes, folks, Indigenous women are part of the modern world.
Another fact: close to 80 % of all Indigenous people now live in urban areas. Combined with the fact than nobody is hunting and gethering as their primary economic mode (or has been for decades), this would suggest that Apartheid is very much on the ropes.
But of course, are there still some readers who think that Indigenous people should be kept out of the towns and cities ? Just like in the old days ? Not going to happen, folks.
So, two bits of good news to start your day with.
Joe
And another thing: home ownership -
* from the 2001 Census to the 2006 Census, the percentage of Indigenous households across Australia who either owned or were purchasing their own homes increased by 9.5% to 52 %. In Adelaide, the total proportion was close to 54 %, and from one Census to the next, nearly 80 % more households were purchasing their homes, but in the Kimberley, less than 14 % of households were owned or being purchased by occupants, probably mostly in Broome.
Home ownership is a very bourgeois, Western concept, I’m sure that we would all agree. So what does it say if more than half of the Indigenous population are living in their own homes, or in homes that they are paying off, and overwhelmingly so in the towns and cities ? That they are here to stay.
Or don’t you think that Indigenous people should be allowed to live in towns and cities ? That’s equal rights, folks, the right to live wherever you damn-well like. That’s what Ferguson and Patton were fighting for in the thirties and forties, not for apartheid or re-segregation. Leave that to the Left.
Joe
oops …..
It doesn’t do to be too cocky. I apologise for using the wrong figures above: home ownership and purchase rates increased across Australia between Censuses from 32% to 34% (35% in Adelaide), with the rate in the Kimberley rising from 9.7% to 10.8%. Sorry.
Joe
yes, joe we know you can google, but as the great dictator and mass murderer, Stalin said: "one death is a tragedy, million deaths are statistics".
Walk in the shoes of the blackman first, and then you will see
What do you think some of us have been doing, Expat ? Have you ?
Joe
if you did, you have NOT done much of a good job, joe….as a matter of fact, you have failed them.
You wife is Aborigines? Or just another of your con jobs?
Oh, and by the way, to my extra shame, I was named after that bloke you mentioned, and I don’t think he would have given a toss about one death or a million or ten million. Someone described him as a predator mimicking harmless insects and that sounds about it.
Joe
I really don’t understand where you are coming from, Expat, apart from your implicit expectation of paternalism on my part. You sound like someone with not the slightest understanding of the Aboriginal scene, or of Australian history.
Joe
But, Expat, yes, you did get one thing partly right: many Aboriginal graduates, no matter how qualified they might be, have trouble either finding work in their field or in keeping their jobs: I know of quite a few graduates who are either unemployed, kept at the same level year after year while unqualified Aboriginal people get promoted around them, or are pushed aside into dead-end jobs, OR are pushed out altogether.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most Aboriginal graduates have experiences of this sort of racism, come to think of it.
This seems to happen especially to Aboriginal graduates who just want to work in their professions, as is their right, and not get shunted into an Aboriginal unit or enclave, or transferred to an Aborigines-only position, and it has to be admitted that unions are amongst the most powerful forces driving this segregationist, and ultimately racist, agenda.
Joe
Further to the contribution above about the feasibility of vegetable gardens and orchards in Aboriginal settlements, and how much such a vital enterprise might cost to set up and operate:
* [assuming adequate water, and number of upright able-bodied young people, perhaps a tractor with rotary as well, and a ute or van to transport produce]:
* a community of two hundred people might need a garden of two hectares, of which one hectare may be in use at any one time, on a six-month cycle.
* the cost of seed would be minor, a few hundred dollars a year at most, say five hundred.
* Cost of hoses and/or drippers would also be under a thousand dollars.
* Cost of a suitable walk-behind rotary hoe (check out Google, Husqvarna has some beauties) is under fifteen hundred dollars, and for smaller blocks, as little as six hundred dollars.
* Cost of an annual load of manure, trucked up from the south, would be less than two thousand dollars.
* Cost of shade-cloth over half of the worked area, plus supporting posts, might reach two thousand dollars.
* Cost of a dozen fruit trees plus transport might be five hundred dollars.
* If the community wanted eggs as well, the annual cost of fitting out a chook yard (netting, shellgrit, grain, supplements, chooks, one rooster) might be around two thousand dollars, much of which would be re-couped by the sale of eggs and chicken meat.
Grants are available for many of these inputs, but all up, a community could get a garden, orchard and chook yard up and running for less than ten thousand dollars. Produce could be sold at city prices, as it used to be in the nineteenth century at the community we are most familiar with down here in SA, so much of the labour coasts could be paid for by the enterprise.
Any takers ? Not grandiose enough ? Too much actual physical work ?
Joe
I apologise if I’ve got it wrong, but as far as I can tell - please correct me - out in the remote areas,
* nobody provides for themselves or their families by hunting and gathering
* and very few settlements have any economic enterprises of any sort.
So what are some (not all) able-bodied people doing apart from sitting around, watching porn, bashing their women, rooting each other’s children, and standing over their elders and grannies for their pensions ?
For me, this sounds like a horrific way to live, totally pointless. It has all the ingredients of the meaningless life that Viktor Frankl described for the unemployed of his day, and for the alcoholics and addicts that he had to treat. In his view, a meaningless life was a fatal step towards self-destruction. Is this what we want to be remembered by, as having set people up for meaningless lives in segregated and remote shit-holes ? And then have the gall to call it self-determination when it is absolutely nothing of the sort ?
This is despicable.
But what is even more despicable is that so many of us who call ourselves Leftist, would sit back and watch this happen without any qualms: at least it’s not assimilation, we can tell ourselves. As long as we keep people totally powerless, totally without skills, they will not come into the towns and cities to use their skills to find work, to set up home, and (horrors!) maybe even let their kids associate with our kids.
No: people have to have the option of getting skills, especially the women, and to use those skills to find productive work and to thereby take their place alongside other Australians, ot provide their own children with models and aspirations for their future. If the traditional life has gone, if enterprises at remote settlements are extinct, and a segregated existence is a living death, why shouldn’t people from remote settlements have the right to move to towns ? Why should racists be allowed to push scare camapigns to try to keep them out in the sticks ?
One day we will be held to account for how we stand on the rights of Aboriginal people to move freely, to get skills and work where they like, no longer under the thumb of corrupt organisations or kept out of towns - and opportunity - by racist policies which some of us have supported, all in the name of opposing ‘assimilation’, and, implicitly, equal rights.
No, Senator Siewert, there is nothing to celebrate about the Intervention, because there is so much work to do to UNDO the damage of the policies of the past thirty five years. Those thousands of degraded lives lost can never be brought back, but we know what and how they occurred, and history will damn us if we let another generation go the same way.
Joe Lane