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A Convenient Intervention

Larissa Behrendt

As an opposition party, [the ALP] did not question any of the aspects of the plan that are patently flawed to anyone who knows anything about Indigenous affairs. Their quick agreement with Howard without consideration of the details highlights how little they know about the Aboriginal affairs portfolio and how little change we can expect if we find ourselves living under a Rudd government as opposed to a Howard one.

It was the “national emergency” that was sitting neglected for over thirty years. In the wake of decades reports, each with in-depth analysis of the issues and complex blueprints on how to address the immediate and the underlying issues, the federal government announced that it was finally going to prioritise the endemic violence in some Aboriginal communities and relied on the recently commissioned report by Pat Anderson and Rex Wilde, Little Children are Sacred.

For a federal government that has been much quicker to blame the Northern Territory government for their neglect of law and order issues or to blame Aboriginal culture, the change in priorities was a profound turn around. So profound, that initial reactions from many Aboriginal people were cautious support of their intention to finally do something but healthy cynicism about the timing and the proposed means of dealing with the issue.

When originally announced, the federal government intervention, unveiled by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough on 21 June 2007 included the following measures: widespread alcohol restrictions, quarantining welfare payments and linking them to school attendance, compulsory health checks to identify health problems and signs of abuse, forced acquisition of townships through compulsory leases with just compensation, increased policing, introduction of market based rents and normal tenancy arrangements, banning of pornography and auditing publicly funded computers, scrapping the permit system, appointing managers to all prescribed communities.

All of this was to be overseen by a Taskforce headed by the Western Australian magistrate Sue Gordon. Gordon was also the Chair of the handpicked Howard National Indigenous Council (NIC). The NIC had previously produced a paper critical of communal land holding and developed a set of principles around land tenure that included support for the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land.

As the details of the intervention plan emerged, one of the first things that became apparent was that the intervention strategy had no reference to Little Children are Sacred report it purported to rely on, following none of its recommendations. It specifically noted that it was a crucial part of the response to child sexual abuse was interventions was to work in conjunction with the community, especially on measures such as establishing dry areas and dealing with substance abuse. In these types of approaches, experience and research all pointed to the crucial need to involve communities intricately to ensure their success.

Heavy-handed, top-down interventions such as enforced prohibition have never proven effective, whether introduced in the black or the white community. It is telling that the federal government sought fit to consult with Noel Pearson in Cape York before announcing their “emergency” but did not consult with the leaders or communities in the Northern Territory who were going to be subjected to this punitive and draconian approach. Indigenous community leaders in the Northern Territory raised concerns about lack of consultation and respect, noting that whenever there has been a national emergency, the Prime Minister flies in to speak to those affected but at no time extended that courtesy in this instance. Apart from the protocols and niceties, the research clearly shows that the most effective way to develop policies and implement programs into Indigenous communities is to have those communities integrally involved in them. It’s not just a matter of good manners; it is a matter of effective practice and policy. The top-down, paternalistic imposition of half-baked policy ideas is a recipe for failure.

Other practical concerns were raised about the interventions said to target child sexual abuse. Why are welfare payments being tied to school attendance when there are not enough teachers and classrooms in the Northern Territory to cater for all of the Indigenous students? Why were mandatory examinations proposed when this not only breaches the rights to privacy and overrides the need for parental consent but there are not enough doctors on the ground to perform these examinations? What happens when a problem is found? Where are the counselling and health services to deal with problems as they are discovered? Why isn’t funding being spent on developing community medical services that have been crying out for more resources for decades? Why is the government focusing on proposals where there is not proof of outcomes while they fail to provide adequate resources to the programs and strategies that we already know do work?

Beyond the practicalities of purely interventionist approaches were some larger questions about the strategies employed in the intervention. Why are issues related to Indigenous control of their land being tied to the issue of child sexual abuse? The other fundamental criticism that was raised was concern about the changes to the permit system and the intention to compulsory acquire land. Even the Northern Territory Police Association stated that the repeal of the permit system would actually make it harder to monitor the movements of people in to Aboriginal communities and therefore making it harder to stop drugs, alcohol and paedophiles from going in to vulnerable Aboriginal communities. The change seems to be much more focused on opening up Aboriginal land to non-Aboriginal interests, a philosophical approach that accords with Howard government policy in relation to Aboriginal communal land holdings generally.

The proposal to compulsory acquire townships that were included in the range not only raise questions about how this strategy could possibly assist in dealing with issues of child sexual abuse, they also give some insight into why the timing of the intervention raised so many questions amongst those who follow Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory. Only a week before, Brough had presented an agreement to an Aboriginal council in the Northern Territory offering to address basic housing repairs in exchange for the lease back of their land. The council rejected his offer saying that they did not want to sacrifice their control over land, especially not for something like basic infrastructure which should not be bartered with by the government like that. Brough was publicly humiliated by the council’s stance and suddenly there was an emergency in the Northern Territory and the compulsory acquisition of land that Aboriginal communities had not wanted to relinquish control over was part of the package.

The other crucial issue raised in the Anderson Wilde report and over looked completely by the federal government response was the failure for any of the measures to deal with underlying issues, specifically the under-funding of basic Indigenous health services and housing needs. In the lead up to the last election, Access Economics estimated that basic Indigenous health needs were under-funded by $450 million. Aboriginal housing needs in the Northern Territory have estimated to be under-funded by approximately $2 billion. Yet nothing in the intervention package seeks to address these underlying issues of disadvantage. This is a profound flaw in the intervention package because it means that the whole approach is predicated on dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes of dysfunctional Aboriginal communities. Research and reports into the high instance of violence and abuse in some Aboriginal communities consistently point to the fact that cyclical poverty, including poor health and poor environmental health, contribute to the breakdown of the social fabric in communities and when that happens communities become dysfunctional.

The other issue raised by the Anderson Wilde report but overlooked by the raft of changes proposed in the intervention was the fact that the report found that a large number of perpetrators of abuse of Aboriginal children were non-Aboriginal. Nothing in the intervention attempted to deal with these non-Aboriginal perpetrators and instead seemed to work on the assumption that the problem was primarily one within Aboriginal communities.

In the face of the myriad of growing concerns and questions, the rhetoric was powerful: “it’s all about the children”. And with this mantra, anyone, no matter what colour or what their on-the-ground experience, who dared to ask questions about either the motivation or the mechanisms employed by the intervention was deemed to be part of the problem. This insulting and disempowering tactic was designed to silence those who are going to be most affected by these interventions. Aboriginal people had every right to ask questions of a government who had over a decade to deal with issues of disadvantage within Aboriginal communities. They had every right to be sceptical of a government who had given them failed policies like “practical reconciliation” and “shared responsibility agreements” and now said “trust us, we have the answers”.

While community leaders and representatives, particularly the Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations worked tirelessly on developing an alternative policy response and lobbying parliamentarians to amend the harshest aspects of the legislation, it passed without amendment and with only one day allocated to a senate hearing to enable public submissions. With little time to analyse the 500 plus pages of legislation, Indigenous people from the Northern Territory – and their supporters around the country – raised more concerns when it became apparent that the legislation specifically seeks to take away the protection of the Racial Discrimination Act and to subvert the rule of law by trying to prescribe that the actions in the Northern Territory were “special measures” for the purposes of the Act.

Only the Greens and Democrats, with some ALP parliamentarians from the Northern Territory gave adequate scrutiny to the Bill. But overall, the ALP had quickly given its in principle assent to the intervention when it was first announced and so was limited in how much it could now raise objections. As an opposition party, they did not question any of the aspects of the plan that are patently flawed to anyone who knows anything about Indigenous affairs. Their quick agreement with Howard without consideration of the details highlights how little they know about the Aboriginal affairs portfolio and how little change we can expect if we find ourselves living under a Rudd government as opposed to a Howard one.

Some observers rightly commented that the legislation contained plenty of things that should have provoked the ALP, especially the proposed changes to the permit system, the changes to the Northern Territory Land Rights Act and the attempt to subvert and override the Racial Discrimination Act. But Kevin Rudd and his opposition colleagues didn’t blink, not being drawn into making an Indigenous issue a wedge issue. While some will admire his political astuteness to outsmart Howard’s usual pre-election tricks, the Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory are going to be paying a high price for this politicking.