No Nukes News - Hiroshima Day

Northern Territory intervention

"Unintended consequences" or deliberate destruction?

Part 2

By a WSWS reporting team
26 June 2008

World Socialist Web Site journalists Susan Allan and Richard Phillips and freelance photographer John Hulme recently visited central Australia to report on the social and political impact of the federal government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response or police/military intervention into Aboriginal communities. This is the second in a series of articles, interviews and video clips. Part one was posted on June 21.

Over the last two months a number of newspaper commentators have begun describing the exodus of Aboriginal people out of remote communities and into town camps and urban centres as an "unintended consequence" of the federal government’s intervention into the Northern Territory. Their descriptions are entirely cynical—the break up of remote communities is not an accident but a key aim of the government measures.

Former indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough spelt this out when he told the Australian on August 9 last year: "Some communities are going to be very challenged to remain as they are and we are going to have to have honest conversations with people.... If you want to live there that’s OK but don’t expect the government to somehow build a clinic and put a school in for kids or whatever it may be ..."

Here it was in black and white. The future of remote settlements would be measured according to market requirements. Those communities that failed the test would be left to wither and die, precipitating population relocations even more socially destructive than those that followed the mass sackings of Aboriginal stockmen in the late 1960s.

Brough’s comments echoed those of Gary Johns, a minister in the Keating Labor government of 1992-96, who told the Bennelong Society in October 2006: "Moving will not be easy, nor will it be possible or sensible for all. But mobility will be a big part of the structural adjustment story in remote Aboriginal society.... The challenge for government is to stop funding programs that militate against the migratory solution."

This is the Rudd Labor government's real agenda. It was confirmed by everything we witnessed during our visit to central Australia. And, as if on cue, on the first anniversary of the intervention, the Northern Territory Emergency Response Taskforce has recommended that the government consider the sustainability of smaller communities and provide only those deemed economically viable with basic services such as schools and health clinics.

Many of the long-term Alice Springs residents to whom we spoke told us that the number of homeless Aborigines seeking shelter in the town camps and elsewhere had increased since the intervention. Police activity around the town centre was intensifying and there were larger number of numbers of Aboriginal people sleeping rough under trees and in the dry bed of the Todd River.

While we were there, the local press reported on the desperate overcrowding in Bagot, a Darwin town camp, whose population has more than doubled, growing from 500 to 1,200 residents. According to community officials, one dwelling in the camp had become home to nine families. Only one in five homes has either a stove or a refrigerator, creating unbearable living conditions for the vast majority.

The reason for this population drift became very clear. Increasing numbers of residents in remote Aboriginal communities were moving towards the urban centres trying to escape the measures introduced by the intervention, or to use their Centrelink-issued "income management" store-cards. It appears this displacement of remote Aboriginal communities has resulted in a movement not only to urban areas in the Northern Territory, but to towns in South Australia and Queensland as well.

Welfare organisations in the South Australian town of Coober Pedy, more than 600 kilometres south of Alice Springs, for example, report many NT Aborigines moving into the town. This is placing severe burdens on the Umoona Community Council, which provides local assistance to alcoholics in Coober Pedy, but has recently been inundated with new arrivals and is now unable to cope.

Family and Community Services Minister Marion Scrymgour will have a scandal on her hands according to the CLP.   8 million spent on 'business managers' as part of NT intervention CANBERRA July 14, 2008: AN independent review of the NT emergency intervention into Aboriginal communities has revealed the Federal Government has spent $8 million dollars directly bankrolling the income of 51 government business managers.

NT govt underspending on children and Aborigines
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 4:11:22 PM

By Tara Ravens

DARWIN, July 15, 2008: The Northern Territory government may have deliberately tried to cover-up drastic underspending on Indigenous people and needy children, the Country Liberals claim.

Opposition Leader Terry Mills has warned Family and Community Services Minister Marion Scrymgour will have a "scandal" on her hands if an independent audit the government refused to release last year backs claims it redirected commonwealth funds away from problem areas.

"The minister now has to clear the air on this issue, she must release the audit or face the accusation of a cover-up," Mr Mills said.