Needs must when the devil drives

Some of the written contributions to the debate about the Intervention

Russell Skelton (Skelton, R. (2010) King Brown Country: The Betrayal of Papunya. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest), a contributing editor to The Age Newspaper, says he set out to write a book about Papunya (one of the 73 communities swept up in the intervention) not from the perspective of an Anthropologist but that of a “foreign correspondent” (p.218). The resulting disappointing King Brown Country: The Betrayal of Papunya is certainly written in the “ain’t they strange and not even fascinating” mode does ask one question which all the apologists for the Intervention fail to ask. That question is:

How was it, then, that the Hawke, Keating and  Howard governments, with billion-dollar budgets devoted to indigenous programs, had been unable to lift a group of people the size of an MCG football crowd out of the morass of poverty, addiction, disease and social dysfunction? (p.155)

He could have added the Rudd and Gillard Government to those governments that have been found wanting. Perhaps Jon Altman (9) comes closest to answering Skelton’s question when he suggests that despite the current government’s assertion that they are implementing evidenced based policies, there is something insidiously ideological being foisted upon Aboriginal people. For over a decade governments have linked Indigenous violence to economic marginalization, inadequacies in aspects of Aboriginal culture and “passive welfare”.  Altman further insists that right wing think tanks, such as the Centre for Independent Studies, are closely linked to senior public servants driving the Intervention and that this in turn leads to the imposition of neopaternalistic welfare coupled with the assimilationist valorization of the free market and private property (pp. 266-267).

Mary Edmunds addresses in detail the way the Intervention erodes human rights. Retired Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alastair Nicholson in a less nuanced manner denounces the Intervention in both its original Broughian form and its current manifestation as unjust and racist. Both Edmunds and Nicholson point to the Howard Government’s actions of trying to enforce Town Camp 99 year leases in Alice Springs and other neoconservative agendas in the years prior to the Intervention. Both look at the timetable leading to, and the motives behind the Intervention.

The little children are sacred report was handed to the NT Government at the end of April 2007 and publicly released on 15^th June. On 21^st June Brough announced the Intervention with its suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, income management, compulsory school attendance and health checks, compulsory town leases and so on. Then on 7^th August the legislation was introduced into the parliament and given Royal Assent 10 days later. Nicholson notes “It is an Act of 500 pages in which the word children does not appear and Brough as the responsible Minister admitted he had not read it before it was passed (p.7).” It would seem that the little children are a convenient stalking horse. The act was passed without amendment demonstrating the compliance of the Labor Party.

Five hundred pages of legislation could not have been prepared between the 15^th June and the 7^th August 2007. And even if by some miracle it had been, what in heaven’s name would induce the Labor Party to instantaneously turn its back on its once proud history of defending Indigenous human rights and self-determination and support such obviously neo-conservative and racist legislation.  Clearly Altman is correct. There is a group of neoconservatives in the public service, on both sides of politics, in the media and right wing think tanks who are working hand in glove. Alistair Nicholson suggests “ as time passes it becomes clear that the intervention was an exercise in social engineering to destroy Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal attachment to their traditional lands and to force Aboriginal people into suburban agglomerations and adopt a white life style (p.9).”