By June 2007, these policy changes in Indigenous Australia were well underway, yet barely noticed in ‘mainstream Australia’, when a dramatic announcement by the Prime Minister hit the headlines.[12] Within days of the Little Children are Sacred Report (Anderson and Wild 2007) being publicly released in the NT, the Commonwealth Government moved with an intervention in the Territory, which it called a national emergency and likened to Hurricane Katrina (Howard 2007b). Others referred to it as ‘martial law’ (P. Dodson 2007; Smith 2007b). The intervention had a number of elements, with law and order ‘a central focus’, and the army called in to provide logistic and other support. These elements included an immediate increase in policing levels, widespread alcohol restrictions on Aboriginal land (much of which was already ‘dry’), medical examinations of Indigenous children, quarantining of 50 per cent of income support for food and other essentials, enforced school attendance, abolition of the permit system for common areas and road corridors on Aboriginal lands, and government-controlled leases over Aboriginal townships for five years, with administrators appointed to each township (Howard 2007b). Initially, 60 Indigenous communities were indicated but the number increased to 73.
Responses to this announcement ranged from welcoming the fact that the national Government had finally recognised the crisis facing Aboriginal communities and responded, to sharp criticism at the racial basis and centralist response (Altman and Hinkson 2007; Atkinson 2007; CLC 2007; Grattan 2007). Many who welcomed the fact that a response was being made were nevertheless sceptical about the motives, the effectiveness and sustainability of the approach, particularly the very top-down and militaristic style (Anderson 2007). This was ironic, since the very first recommendation of the report that the Government was using to justify its actions said: ‘It is critical that both governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities’ (Anderson and Wild 2007: 22).
Across the NT there was generally a high level of confusion and some fear about the implications of the announcement. While improved police and medical services had long been called for and were generally welcomed in the short-term, there was fierce Indigenous opposition to some of the measures, particularly in relation to land and the permit system, which most argued were unrelated to the issue of child protection. As Patrick Dodson observed, the ALRA:
was the first expression of the constitutional powers mandated by the 1967 referendum for the Australian Parliament to make laws for Aboriginal people … The Act liberated Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory from their subordinate and colonial status and became an inspiration for a raft of Aboriginal land legislation that has been passed in every Australian jurisdiction with the exception of Western Australia (P. Dodson 2007: 9).[13]
The attack on the ALRA was seen as a racist attack on self-determination and on Indigenous people’s right to a distinctive and different way of life. A coalition of NT Aboriginal organisations prepared a detailed response to the intervention, critiquing the Government’s actions and putting forward their own proposals to tackle the deep-seated problems based on a community-driven, evidence-based approach, in partnership with governments (Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory (CAONT) 2007). The proposed abolition of the CDEP added to the radical transformation being suggested. The Government justified it both in terms of the need to create ‘real jobs’ and in terms of the need to be able quarantine welfare payments (Brough and Hockey 2007). The ‘real jobs’ to be created by governments (estimated at 1600), while very welcome, would not replace 7500 CDEP positions to be abolished. Those people not transferred to jobs would find their income drop as ‘Work for the Dole’ participants.
From a governance point of view, the Australian Government’s June 2007 announcement was a dramatic development that strongly reflected a triumph for the conservative think tanks and their assimilationist approach. As Patrick Dodson recognised:
They have asserted that communal land ownership and governance structures that reflect Indigenous traditional decision-making, imprisons Indigenous people in welfare ghettos and locks them out of the benefits of modernity (P. Dodson 2007: 9).
Furthermore, in contrast to earlier collaborative ‘partnership’ approaches with both the NT Government and Indigenous leaders, it was a return to command-and-control-style hierarchical governance (Davis and Rhodes 2000; Rhodes 2005), as well as a complete reversal of any remnants of self-determination for Indigenous Australians. Indigenous governance was to be shunted aside while public service administrators with extraordinary powers took over again (Siewart 2007). While the intervention and subsequent announcements clearly deployed considerable additional resources for NT Indigenous communities, the cost-effectiveness and sustainable impact of the strategies employed are open to question.
The intervention also coincided with a period of local government reform in the NT, which had begun in 2003 (Smith 2004) and already undergone policy change in October 2006. A shift from a relatively bottom-up process of regional authority development based on culturally-defined and negotiated boundaries was shelved in favour of nine proposed shires, almost all of which were considerably larger than existing proposals, and incorporated non-Indigenous landholders and small urban areas (Smith 2007a, 2007b). The future of many community government councils was limited or unclear, as their roles were to be largely taken over by the new regional shires. The combined raft of Federal and NT Government changes added up to a context of extraordinary flux and uncertainty for many Indigenous organisations.
[12] In 2006, the outspokenness of an Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor, a media exposé of violence, and the Minister’s allegations of paedophilia in a central Australian community had been the trigger for a flurry of media and political activity on these issues, culminating in a Ministerial Summit on Family Violence held in Canberra in June. The almost total absence of Indigenous participants in that summit sent a message that the Government was not prepared to work in partnership with Indigenous people with expertise in these issues. In June 2007, the Government argued that a delay by the NT Government in response to a major report into child sexual abuse in the NT forced it to act. The Commonwealth suggested that it was only the persistence of the Aboriginal Affairs Minister in 2006 that had led the NT Government to undertake this enquiry in the first place.
[13] Technically this is not quite correct as the ALRA could be justified under the Commonwealth ‘Territories’ Power. However, the fact that Patrick Dodson sees and reports it this way is a powerful reminder of the symbolic importance of the 1967 constitutional change.