The Aboriginal “intervention” in Australia: four years on
By Susan Allan
30 May 2011
As
the fourth anniversary of the Northern Territory (NT) intervention
approaches, calls are being made for a new round of regressive measures
against Aboriginal people, including a “second intervention”. Like the
Coalition government’s intervention in June 2007, which was preceded by a
lurid media campaign about child sexual abuse, similar coverage has
come to the fore centred on crime and violence in Alice Springs in
central Australia.
Nominally
the intervention, which involved the use of police and military, was
directed at helping children and alleviating social disaster in
Aboriginal communities. The expressions of humanitarian concern were,
however, a smokescreen for a socially retrograde agenda.
Blaming
Aboriginal people for their terrible conditions, then prime minister
John Howard used their plight to enact a long prepared plan to close
“economically unviable” communities, open up Aboriginal land for
exploitation and private profit, and develop a cheap labour force by
undermining welfare benefits. Aborigines, the most oppressed section of
the working class, were used as a test case for punitive measures
against welfare recipients nationally.
The
Northern Territory intervention involved a number of unprecedented
steps. The government, fully supported by the Labor opposition, rushed a
series of draconian measures through the federal parliament that
required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act and the Land
Rights Act 1976. These included: compulsory quarantining of 50 percent
of welfare payments to be spent on food and clothing, the banning of
alcohol and pornography, increased policing and the imposition of
business administrators in Aboriginal communities.
To
enforce the new regime, Major-General Dave Chalmers was appointed as
head of the taskforce of police and military units sent into the
prescribed Aboriginal communities. The operation was conceived in
military terms where resources were to be “deployed”, and towns
“stabilised” and “secured”—all part of a “three-phase operation” to
rescue the children.
When
the Labor Party took office in November 2007, the intervention was
expanded. By the end of 2008, welfare quarantining had been forced on
15,000 Aborigines in 73 communities. By June 2010, the Labor government
had extended it to all welfare recipients across the Territory. The new
legislation allowed for welfare quarantining to be imposed nationally,
including cutbacks to welfare payments if children did not attend
school.
Meanwhile, the federal and NT Labor governments were preparing a further assault on Aboriginal people with the unveiling of the Working Future policy in May 2009. Under the guise of overcoming “indigenous
disadvantage”, the plan involved the establishment of 20 economic hubs
or growth towns. Virtually all the growth towns were situated on
Aboriginal land. Traditional land owners were required to sign long term
leases allowing open access to business as a precondition for
government infrastructure aid.
At
the same time, government funding for hundreds of remote homeland
settlements was either frozen or axed. As a result, settlement residents
would be forced over time to move to the growth centres to obtain
health and education services. Aborigines, professionals and academics
warned that forcing people into growth towns would only cause further
dislocation and compound the social crisis.
In
the two years since the plan was announced, the growth centres have
been provided with very little funding and virtually no economic
development has taken place. For instance, in the most recent NT budget,
just $3 million has been allocated for bus services and upgrading
airstrips to link “growth towns” separated by thousands of kilometres.
In
February this year, the Labor government was forced to acknowledge in
its intervention report that virtually no progress had been made in
“closing the gap” between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians on a
range of social indicators. Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared that
it would be “extremely challenging” to attain parity by 2031.
After
noting improvement in only two of six benchmarks, Gillard turned on
Aborigines—the victims of two centuries of government repression, abuse
and neglect—demanding that they work harder and take more personal
responsibility to improve living conditions. “Indigenous people know
that when the child starts attending school, when the drinker stops
abusing alcohol, when the adult takes the job that is there, then change
begins,” she told parliament. “And indigenous people know these
decisions are not made by governments. They are made by people.”
Gillard’s comments set the stage for a new media campaign, particularly in the Murdoch-owned Australian and NT News, to pave the way for another round of punitive measures against Aborigines.
In
the lead up to the 2007 intervention, then Indigenous Affairs minister
Mal Brough made unsubstantiated claims, later proven to be false, that
paedophile rings were running rampant in Aboriginal communities. The
theme now is that crime and anti-social behaviour is out-of-control in
Alice Springs, the main town in Central Australia, where a significant
Aboriginal population lives in squalid camps on the outskirts.
Shortly after Gillard’s speech, Nicholas Rothwell wrote a lengthy article for theWeekend Australian entitled
“Destroyed in Alice”. A specialist in breathless colour pieces,
Rothwell painted a picture of a town engulfed by alcohol- and
drug-fuelled violence due to “bad, reactive politics, a lack of new
ideas, a need for drastic measures and a refusal even to debate the
reforms that might have a chance.”
Rothwell
did not spell out what “drastic measures” should be implemented but as a
supporter of the first intervention it is safe to assume that he backs
more of the same. His partner, Alison Anderson, a former NT minister,
added more fuel to the fire with claims, picked up by the media, of “an
indigenous child sex trade” and “child prostitution”—a revamped version
of Brough’s allegations.
Absent
from Rothwell’s article was any serious examination of the social
disaster confronting Aborigines in Alice Springs, or the failure of
successive governments to provide the resources necessary to address it.
The
official unemployment rate among Aborigines across Australian is over
20 percent, or almost four times higher than for the rest of the
population. Around 29 percent of young indigenous people are neither
working nor attending school. The Australian Institute of Health and
Welfare reported an “alarming” housing crisis facing indigenous families
with 20,000 extra dwellings urgently needed.
A
growing number of indigenous people are moving from remote communities,
where funding had been cut, into Alice Springs where they live either
in the already overcrowded town camps or on the streets. Homelessness is
growing in major towns across the Northern Territory. In the
territory’s capital Darwin, at least 800 people are sleeping rough each
night.
Over
500 people are homeless in Katherine, a town with a population of just
5,600. Recent figures from the NT’s Sunrise Health Services, revealed
that almost 8 percent of residents in Katherine East had negative or nil
income and 57.9 percent received between $1.00 and $249.00 per week.
The
response to this worsening disaster is not to provide much needed
housing, jobs and services, but to blame Aborigines for the inevitable
social ills and demand tougher punitive measures.
The
media attention has spurred on a right-wing lobby group “Action for
Alice” to finance racially-divisive TV advertisements, that demand the
NT government implement tougher law-and-order measures. The NT
government responded with a three-week police operation last month that
led to the arrest of 102 people and another 1,243 people being taken
into protective custody in the town of barely 30,000.
In
this context, federal opposition leader Tony Abbott made a much
publicised visit to Alice Springs late last month to announce his plan
for a “second intervention”. He called for an extra 100 police in Alice
Springs, for the parents of “delinquents” to be fined and for school
attendance enforced through a truancy authority tied to schools and the
police. Abbott called for “a military man” to be put in charge and
insisted that no additional funding would be required.
Abbott
directly linked the “second intervention” in the Northern Territory to a
national plan for welfare “reform”. Like the first intervention, the
aim is to use Aboriginal people to trial regressive measures to be
imposed on the working class as a whole. Abbott especially foreshadowed
nation-wide welfare quarantining, a compulsory scheme of
work-for-the-dole and the suspension of welfare payments for unemployed
who refuse unskilled jobs or to take jobs in other areas.
The
Gillard government is yet to call for a second intervention. Warren
Mundine, Aboriginal leader and former Labor Party president, did,
however, publicly endorse Abbott’s welfare proposals, only adding that
they did not “go far enough”. If Labor has not come up with its own NT
plan it is because it is already pressing ahead with “welfare reform”
across the board, including the extension of welfare quarantining of up
to a possible 70 percent of payments and more trials in working class
suburbs throughout Australia.
As
far as Labor is concerned, the first intervention has already served
its purpose as a spearhead for draconian measures against welfare
recipients. Any turn to a second intervention against Aborigines would
inevitably mean a dramatic new escalation of the assault on the living
conditions of the most impoverished layers of the working class
throughout the country.