The Aboriginal “intervention” in Australia: four years onBy 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 the*Weekend 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.
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