There is a place where indigenous blacks are still being shunted off their land into reservations; where work is rewarded not with wages but with ration cards, to spend in white-owned supermarkets; where public services are lavished on the already wealthy but denied to the poorest unless they agree to hand over their birthright.<\/p>\n
Sixteen years after the end of Apartheid, incarceration rates among Australia\u2019s indigenous people bear comparison with the jailing of blacks in minority-ruled South Africa. Aborigines make up just 2.5% of the country\u2019s population, but they account for nearly a quarter of all prisoners. In the Northern Territory, the \u2018outback Australia\u2019 made famous in the Crocodile Dundee<\/em> films of comedian Paul Hogan, the proportion of those held under lock and key who are Aboriginal is a staggering 83%.<\/p>\n The historic subjugation of Australia\u2019s indigenous population began with the arrival of European settlers in 1788. Near where I live in Sydney\u2019s upper North Shore is the last site associated with the so-called \u2018first fleet\u2019 to have remained undeveloped. A brass plate in the bush memorialises a reconnaissance party led by Governor Arthur Phillip, which camped here in search of farmland to establish a colony.<\/p>\n By then, of course, Aboriginal people had been successfully feeding themselves, in a land of erratic weather patterns and thin, dry soils, for tens of thousands of years. It only adds to the sense of irony that now, thousands of indigenous Australians are having their income \u201cmanaged\u201d by descendants of those same settlers and the subsequent waves of incomers; doled out through ration cards, instead of paid in cash, with the stated aim of getting them to spend it on fresh food.<\/p>\n It\u2019s part of the \u2018Northern Territory National Emergency Response\u2019 \u2013 known to everyone else as \u2018the Intervention\u2019 \u2013 under which government \u2018business managers\u2019 have assumed draconian powers over Aboriginal communities, and acquired compulsory leases over Aboriginal township land. This is supposedly necessary to permit the building of public housing, but, despite a budget of AUD$670 million over two years, the total number of houses the government has so far built is\u2026 four. (A figure that does not include the fifty-odd dwellings constructed especially for the business managers themselves).<\/p>\n The Intervention was launched, under the previous government led by the avowedly right-of-centre Liberal-National Coalition, but continued unamended under the present Labor administration that took office in 2007. In the three-year Australian electoral cycle, that means an election is coming up, and ministers have responded to criticisms with a phoney \u2018consultation\u2019 exercise, purporting to show all is well, and emendations to bring the Intervention into line with Australia\u2019s Race Discrimination Act (RDA).<\/p>\n This, though, will involve a levelling-down of people\u2019s rights, not a levelling-up: any Northern Territory claimant of state benefits will henceforth be liable to see them snatched away and transformed into an allowance on a \u2018Basics Card\u2019 instead. And the new Intervention legislation, due to be debated in Canberra in a few weeks\u2019 time, omits one crucial factor: there is nothing to permit Aboriginal people to use the RDA to challenge any of its provisions, thus stripping the supposed \u2018change\u2019 of any meaningful content.<\/p>\n The Intervention was prompted by a report from the NT government on child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities, titled, Little Children Are Sacred<\/em>. It was not long before the ABC Four Corners<\/em> program, in a rare example of journalistic initiative on this story, exposed the inconvenient truth: CSA is no more prevalent among Indigenous Australians than among the Australian community at large. The government has funded only 20 child protection workers to cover the whole Territory, and only one is currently employed full time. Not one person has been prosecuted for child sex abuse since the Intervention was rolled out.<\/p>\n The arrival in Aboriginal areas of government officials has been backed by deployment of the military, and there are, indeed, abundant echoes of the propaganda that has accompanied various other \u201chumanitarian interventions\u201d of recent times. Yugoslavia was bombed to protect the Albanian Kosovars: never mind that, by the time of Nato\u2019s onslaught of 1999, the so-called \u201cOperation Allied Force\u201d (OAF), all but a handful of refugees had returned to their homes \u2013 before the bombing itself triggered a mass exodus.<\/p>\n Iraq was attacked to rid its people of an abusive dictator, and hundreds of thousands paid with their lives; millions more by being forced to flee their homes, most permanently. Afghanistan was invaded to protect Afghans from the Taliban, thus triggering a war that is certain to continue until the US-led invading troops are finally forced out, exacting a massive human cost in the process \u2013 and all on the thinnest of any evidence connecting Afghanistan to the \u20189\/11\u2019 attacks, the original pretext.<\/p>\n A phrase attributed to the American field commander, General Stanley McChrystal, during the recent Nato attack on the town of Marjah, is particularly resonant. Once the Taliban were cleared out, he said, there was a \u201cgovernment ready to roll out\u201d, with personnel and resources available to provide the services people craved. Inscribed in this is a variant on the so-called \u201cliberal peace\u201d theory. Liberal democracies seldom if ever go to war with each other, the argument runs, so what conflict-ridden countries need is to have the institutions that characterise liberal democracy implanted into them: at gunpoint, if necessary.<\/p>\n A highly intrusive administrative intervention, backed by troops, has swept away local forms of democracy and economic activity and is attempting to impose, from the top down, ways of being and doing that are, in some important ways, alien to the people concerned. It could be a description of both the National Emergency Response and the war in Afghanistan; a resemblance that is not purely coincidental. David Rieff sees, in the urge to intervene on \u201chumanitarian\u201d grounds, an extension of the self-styled \u201ccivilising mission\u201d of Imperialism, aimed at dragging lesser peoples into modernity:<\/p>\n \u201cContemporary advocates of state humanitarianism share something of the same faith that a combination of high moral intent, military force, the imposition of good government, and benign tutelage (for Kipling\u2019s \u2018lesser breeds beyond the law\u2019 read today\u2019s \u2018failed states\u2019) could be a force for the betterment of humanity\u201d.<\/p>\n So, in Afghanistan, home-grown traditions of consensual decision-making, embodied in jirgas<\/em> and shuras<\/em>, have been trumped by the imposition, from outside, of an all-powerful president as a \u2018partner\u2019 for western donors. The resulting government has proved corrupt and ineffectual, and Afghans who have experienced both are just as likely to prefer the Taliban being in charge. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Kabul bureau chief for National Public Radio, reported:<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the residents are leery. They complain that the last time the government was in charge in Marjah two years ago, corrupt police officers terrorised residents. A tractor driver named Faqir Mohammad said the Taliban brought peace to Marjah and generally didn\u2019t interfere in people\u2019s business. He added that residents were happy with them. By comparison, he said, police officers in Marjah stole people\u2019s motorcycles and cash, and were involved in kidnapping\u201d.<\/p>\n And the contractors who are doing the work of \u201crolling out\u201d General McChrystal\u2019s portable government have, according to a report this weekend in my old paper, the Independent<\/em>, \u201cbeen forced to retreat even further behind blast walls and heavily armed security perimeters. The security drives up costs, making interaction with regular Afghans harder and slowing reconstruction projects\u201d.<\/p>\n In the Northern Territory, meanwhile, the Intervention meant the abolition of the Community Employment Development Program, which provided jobs and prospects for local Aboriginal people. Patrick Dodson, an Aboriginal leader not from the NT but from the Yawuru people in Broome, Western Australia, complained, when accepting the Sydney Peace Prize in 2008, that initiatives from Canberra habitually bypassed \u2013 and therefore undermined \u2013 local Indigenous leaders, denying them the authority to implement necessary changes.<\/p>\n A strong and creative resistance movement against the Intervention is now well underway. Led by Aboriginal non-compliance \u2013 so-called \u201cwalk-offs\u201d \u2013 it has already produced a community house, built in just two weeks at Ampilatwatja with help from the dockers\u2019 union, the MUA. And a civil society movement, the Stop the Intervention Collective, is rapidly growing. Recently it organised a public meeting in Sydney addressed by John Pilger, the distinguished journalist and film-maker who last year succeeded Dodson as the Sydney Peace Prize laureate.<\/p>\n Pilger drew attention to the Northern Territory government plan, set out in a report titled Working Futures<\/em>, to cut off public services to hundreds of homeland Aboriginal communities deemed not to be \u201ceconomically viable\u201d, in favour of moving their inhabitants to \u201chubs\u201d where they will have the opportunity to live \u201cmainstream lives\u201d. This is a blueprint for social breakdown: places earmarked as \u201chubs\u201d have some of the worst social indicators in Australia. The agenda, Pilger averred, was a familiar one: \u201cmoving blackfellas off their lands\u201d to make way for lucrative mineral exploitation.<\/p>\n This is just the most overt statement of assumptions that still run through government policies, imposed from Territory and federal authorities alike, as the wording through a stick of rock: that Aboriginal people need to be assimilated into the way of life, and forms of political organization, brought by westerners. Professor Larissa Behrendt, the eminent Aboriginal legal scholar who spoke at the same meeting, noted that the NT had surreptitiously changed the basis of allocating school funding, from the number of enrolled students to the number in attendance: a way of speeding up cycles of decline in schools relied on by Aboriginal communities and one of a myriad of similar ploys.<\/p>\n The Four Corners<\/em> team aside, most mainstream media responses to the Intervention \u2013 as to Australia\u2019s role in the Afghan war \u2013 have been almost comically supine. When the United Nations sent a rapporteur to look into complaints that the RDA had been suspended, and Indigenous leaders sidelined, his criticisms were reported along with indignant denials from Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin and her Howard-era predecessor, Mal Brough. One or two nationally known Aboriginal leaders were quoted, but there was no investigation, based on sources on the ground, to enable readers and audiences to assess his criticisms for themselves.<\/p>\n The ABC, the public broadcaster, generally shows the deep imprint of years of political interference and intimidation: a well-timed \u201cexclusive\u201d on the nightly Lateline<\/em> program had served up sensational claims of a child sexual abuse \u201cring\u201d in Aboriginal communities \u2013 just when the Intervention was first proposed. Its source, an unnamed \u201cyouth worker\u201d, was subsequently discredited, Pilger noted, by both the NT government and the police. When a documentary strand on the ABC2 channel proposed to run a simple film showcasing a range of responses to the Intervention, by Aboriginal people in their own words, it caused an almighty row and the program team was forced to broadcast a misleading statement to \u201cbalance\u201d it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth revisiting the verdict of Professor James Anaya, the special rapporteur on Indigenous rights sent in by the UN. \u201cThese measures overtly discriminate against Aboriginal peoples\u201d, he declared. \u201cThey infringe their right of self-determination and stigmatise already stigmatised communities\u201d. Significantly, he identified them as a breach of legally binding undertakings Australia has given to the international community: \u201cThe emergency response is incompatible with Australia\u2019s obligations under the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination\u201d.<\/p>\n This makes the Intervention into everybody\u2019s business. Australia needs to be shown that it cannot engage with the outside world on any other subject, until this is satisfactorily resolved, and the present policies replaced with a consultative and supportive approach to Aboriginal communities, based on social justice. Inform yourself further at www.stoptheintervention.org<\/a> and write to your local Australian High Commission. In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle, quoted at the meeting: to be silent in the face of oppression is not to remain neutral, but to side with the oppressor.<\/p>\n ______________________________<\/p>\n Associate Professor Jake Lynch is Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a place where indigenous blacks are still being shunted off their land into reservations; where work is rewarded not with wages but with ration cards, to spend in white-owned supermarkets; where public services are lavished on the already wealthy but denied to the poorest unless they agree to hand over their birthright.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}