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February 10, 2009
The starting point for any attempt to close the gap between indigenous and white Australia is that any intervention to address the poverty, sexual abuse and other problems that afflict Aboriginal people and their children in the Northern Territory cannot be remedied by laws and programs that are themselves racially discriminatory. Australia accepted this principle when it signed the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The problem, as George Williams points out in The Australian, is that the Howard government's intervention laws were passed in August 2007 to exclude the Racial Discrimination Act. The reason was clear. Parts of the intervention are racially discriminatory. For example, it quarantines 50 per cent of welfare income to be used for food and other essentials only for people living in Aboriginal communities. There is no exception even for people who can demonstrate they are responsible spenders of their income.
So these Australian citizens don't have rights.
The Rudd Government has acknowledged the racism in the legislation, as it It has said it will revise aspects of the intervention such as income quarantining and will restore the Racial Discrimination Act. But it has been slow to act, with no sign yet of the laws needed to bring these changes about.
The Rudd Government has failed to report little if anything on actual outcomes on closing the gap between white and black Australians. The Close the Gap campaign is based on the idea that it would take a generation to bring about serious changes in the outcomes, and that a decade of investment would be needed to simply achieve equality of opportunities before the outcomes really started to shift.
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Rudd's mob have been disappointing on many levels, none more so than with this.
An especially repulsive aspect of their approach is the way Macklin has carried on Captain Brough's practice of justifying decisions by 'what the indigenous people are telling me' and ignoring properly undertaken research findings. As if a few stage-managed conversations during a one day visit should over-ride weeks or months of careful data collection and analysis.
One is forced to the conclusion that the government believes the NT invasion was wildly popular and they're not about to undo it.