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April 19, 2011
I missed the Q+ A programme on the intervention into the NT indigenous communities when I was in Tasmania but I have just read the transcript. There was little debate about the breaking up of Aboriginal control and Aboriginal culture, moving people off their lands and forcing assimilation into "mainstream" Australia.
What we did have in Q+A was Bess Price, a central Australian Aboriginal leader, saying:
I am for the intervention because I've seen progress. I've seen women who now have voices. They can speak for themselves and they are standing up for their rights. Children are being fed and young people more or less know how to manage their lives. That's what's happened since the intervention.
I find that a puzzling statement because, as Graeme Innes the Human Rights Commissioner observes, notwithstanding the huge amount of work that needs to be done amongst remote Aboriginal communities, it also:
seems to me counter intuitive to empower people to improve their communities by taking away their rights. That just seems to me totally counter intuitive to do that and that's what was done when the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended and rights to complain were taken away from Aboriginal people.
Price's response is that at the time it needed to take place the Intervention was an emergency because her people were suffering and it was so bad out there. She also said that she didn't think the commonwealth government is racist.
However, Price failed to mention the community opposition to SIHIP's design to further break up community control of township land, push people out of remote areas, and entrench the NT intervention; or thge community opposition to Income Management; or the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. Nor did Price refer to the deep resentment of the Intervention amongst aboriginal people.
If aboriginal women are standing up for their rights as Price claims, then it is as a form of resistance to the equivalent of working for rations and to the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) in which a select number of aboriginal communities are required to sign away leases over their land for between 40-90 years for new housing.
The core problem that I have with the Intervention (under Howard, Rudd and now Gillard) is that it is not based on a partnership with aboriginal people as is claimed. It is being imposed on aboriginal communities whether they want it or not. Income management increasingly looks more like the old welfare rationing system that disempowers individuals and communities in order to control and socially engineer aboriginal people in the Northern Territory throughout the 20th century before the advent of the 'self-determination' era in the early 1970s.
I see the NT Intervention as the culmination of the re-emergence of ‘assimilation’ as a dominant philosophy guiding government policy in Aboriginal affairs. We have, in effect, a re- introduction of "rationing" policies in the form of Income Management through the Centrelink bureaucracy. The effect of this paternalism over whole communities is the aboriginal people's loss of autonomy and voice.
So liberalism has been dumped in the name of protecting woman and children. The rhetoric is based around the stereotypes of abusive men, pitted against women, needing strong controls for their own protection in order to protect the children. The women are battling the men to retain the Intervention. We have the construction of Aboriginal women as hapless victims needing government controls to protect them from abusive men so they can be safe.
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The ad campaign highlighting aboriginal smokers is a good move. Long overdue.