In Darwin, the build-up to the wet is starting to bite, as tensions grow and tempers fray. Conditions probably aren’t much different in the office of Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, as the key pillars of the Northern Territory Emergency Response begin to crumble before her eyes.
Macklin has recently released the NTER Review Board report after an unexpected delay. The postponement, unimportant in itself, is characteristic of the whole unhappy intervention adventure.
The review team of Peter Yu, Marcia Ella Duncan, and Bill Gray has gently blown the intervention out of the water, with unequivocal recommendations for the Racial Discrimination Act to be restored, blanket welfare quarantining to be scrapped, and the permit system to be reinstated.
Technically, the review team has called for the intervention to continue, expressing support for uncontentious measures like improved housing and policing. But, in context, this becomes a prescription for dumping the demeaning and punitive aspects of the plan, in favour of refocussing on the long-neglected area of service provision.
The false dichotomy of the intervention — that you must be either “for it” or “against it” as a package — is thrown onto high relief. The measures announced by John Howard and Mal Brough on 21 June last year were spun as inextricably interconnected, but this was never the case.
The recent publication in The Australian of extracts from an earlier draft of the report is a diverting side-show which adds an overlay of intrigue to the affair, and generates further problems for the embattled minister Macklin.
Crikey spoke to Peter Yu late last week and he was adamant that the final report, as released, accurately represents the considered position of the Review Board. Yu had earlier issued a terse three-sentence media statement, observing that “the Report that has been published is the Report of the independent review board.”
Last Thursday Vicki Gillick — coordinator of the NPY Women’s Council and a member of the Review Group’s own expert advisory panel — undermined the report’s recommendations on the ABC’s Lateline program. She spoke of a “slow form of genocide” and suggested that the maintenance of unilateral welfare quarantining was crucial to the success of the intervention.
On the same program, Yu was dismissive of Gillick’s position, observing that “she probably underestimates the nature of the sophisticated understanding of the communities themselves to be able to express their point of view.”
Meanwhile, Macklin is preparing the ground for a departure from the recommendations of the Review Board. She has pointedly observed that, in considering future policy direction, the government would not rely solely on the Yu Report, but would consider “a number of pieces of evidence”.
The Review Board document demonstrates essentially that the Howard Government got things hopelessly wrong, and that its successor has continued to stumble blindly down the same ill-fated path.
The Government’s formal response to the report of the Review Board is keenly awaited. For Minister Macklin, it is a chance to put things right.
Graham Ring should resist his inclination to make snide comments that betray his personal political agenda. From well before the Rudd’s election Ring displayed bitterly negative & cynical attitudes towards Rudd’s approach to government.
Far from “generating further problems for the embattled minister Macklin”, the debate following the Yu report’s release provides clear evidence that Macklin is calmly calling the shots & handling very difficult issues with consummate ease.
The amateurish & ill-concealed attempt by Yu’s Review Board to ambush the NT Emergency Response project (& with it, the Rudd Government) in a welter of antagonistic & emotional rhetoric, & poorly researched assertion, has played into Macklin’s hands.
Macklin is continuing to display her skills as an accomplished politician, able to keep a rein on the agenda & keep the focus on the real issues – issues which are much more centred on the concrete aspects of rights to safety, security, wellbeing, education, jobs, health, housing and decent living standards for children than on a shallow approach to equal rights, & legal technicalities.
The inadequate response by many remote community men to the challenges presented by modernity in general – contemporary economic realities, child welfare requirements & equal rights for women in particular – are clear.
These inadequacies demonstrably underly both the need for intervention & much of the pain associated with the NTER implementation. There is little inclination amongst the bulk of these men to adjust their behaviour accordingly.
Ring would do better to concern himslef with lifting his appreciation of these factors and attempting to understand the analysis that such appreciation brings to the political surface. At present Ring, like Yu, seems to prefer staying stuck in a sentimental time warp, his vision obscured by adherence to dogmas which have been proven to be dead ends in terms of Aboriginal survival, liberation & development.
Excellent comment by Catullus. Bravo!
Watching First Australians last night on SBS, I was appalled by the story of Victoria’s Aborigines trying to adapt to life with the new colony. What was just as horrifying was the story’s parallels with today’s intervention in the Northern Territory. William Barak’s attempts to achieve peaceful self-determination were thwarted by the then Victorian Government. When Howard and Brough announced the emergency last year, they dismissed self-determination as a failure. Yet in my experience of living in remote communities, the things that fail are government policies, formulated from afar without consultation. The things that work are the community initiatives, developed with scant resources in partnerships with whitefellas who understand community priorities, culture and language. Visit these sites: http://www.mttheo.org and http://www.warlu.com to see examples. When William Barak walked from Coranderrk to Melbourne to talk to bureaucrats, he was ultimately ignored. Similarly, when a delegation of Central Australian elders made a journey to Canberra last year to make urgent representations to Mal Brough about the intervention, he ignored them and they returned home, defeated and ashamed that they had let their people down. It’s hard not to compare the early Victorian history with what’s happening today in the Northern Territory. It seems we haven’t learnt much.
“What politician would accept the Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs given the history of good people that have seen it destroy their political careers, from the first to the last?”
What a silly comment Arty.
Les Johnson, Fred Chaney, Peter Baume, John Wilson, Clyde Holding, Gerry Hand, John Herron, Philip Ruddock, Amanda Vanstone – none of these had their political careers destroyed by being Indigenous Affairs Minister. In fact most of them went on to greater things.
The poisoned chalice of Australian politicians !
What politician would accept the Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs given the history of good people that have seen it destroy their political careers, from the first to the last?