Three years of shame for the NT Intervention

by Jean Parker

Three years of federal intervention into Aboriginal communities in the NT has created a mounting pile of reports damning it as racist and destructive. But to the despair of those living with the policies, Labor’s new legislation entrenches and extends the intervention.

Despite having spent over a billion dollars on the intervention, the government can’t point to any evidence of progress in the 73 Aboriginal communities ‘prescribed’ under the intervention. The children of the 1960s whose lives were controlled by mission managers and the rations system say that intervention-appointed Government Business Managers and compulsory income management have taken their communities backwards – to the days before equal wages, before land rights, before self-determination.

Jenny Macklin and Kevin Rudd say their Aboriginal Affairs policy is ‘evidence-based’, but have spent recent months papering over evidence that links the intervention to increased rates of alcohol related violence, childhood malnutrition and overcrowded housing.

On the eve of Macklin’s planned expansion of income management (or welfare quarantining) across the NT – a move that allows the government to claim the policy is no longer racially discriminatory – the Medical Journal of Australia published the first quantitative evaluation of income management, conducted by the Menzies School of Health Research. Income management sees half of all welfare payments paid into a “BasicsCard” that can only be spent in particular shops on particular items. The Menzies School research contradicts Macklin’s claims that income management leads to more healthy food in the stomachs of Aboriginal children, and shows that tobacco and soft-drink sales had remained the same or increased since the imposition of the BasicsCard system.

Compulsory five-year leases have seen the NT government in control of all 73 townships for over two years. This takeover of Aboriginal land and housing has also required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). Yet the $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure (SIHIP) has delivered only seven houses in over two years.

7,500 people working in the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) before the intervention were thrown onto the dole in order that their incomes be quarantined onto BasicsCards. After Rudd’s election CDEP was reinstated. But now what’s called CDEP compels thousands to work running services in their communities, sometimes working more than 24 hours a week for $200 Newstart payment. Half of this money is quarantined onto the BasicsCard – effectively a food card. Aboriginal people are working for rations again.

The federal government’s refusal to provide $8.5 million annual funding will see a further 500 paid jobs, which were created with the abolition of CDEP, lost in June.

At its heart the intervention blames Aboriginal communities for their poverty. Rather building houses and creating jobs in all communities where they are needed, the government enacts punitive control measures accompanied by rhetoric about fostering Aboriginal ‘responsibility’. Three years of intervention has brought great shame to Aboriginal people. But the real shame is the Labor government’s continuation of racism through such failed policies.

Jean Parker is a member of the Stop the Intervention Collective Sydney, which will be holding a demonstration against the intervention at midday at Town Hall Square on Sunday June 20.