Vol. 71/No. 30      August 20, 2007

Hundreds joined rallies in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Alice Springs, as well as Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand.

“Leave the cops at home, leave the troops at home … and listen to the Aboriginal community,” Pat Turner, a spokesperson for the Combined Aboriginal Organisations in the Northern Territory, declared at the Sydney rally of 400.

The government claims the intervention is aimed at combating child abuse. But protesters say it is a clear attempt to erode rights to land and autonomy won in recent decades by Aboriginal people.

“There will be an immediate increase in policing efforts” by federal and interstate cops, Howard announced. The army’s Norforce unit, whose ranks are majority Aboriginal, is also being deployed.

The government is taking over Aboriginal township leases and the right to appoint administrators. It also plans to abolish the system where Aboriginal land councils must first grant permission before outsiders can enter Aboriginal land.

The government announced that welfare payments will now be linked to school attendance. The state is cutting welfare payments in favor of “payment-in-kind” schemes. The cops will also enforce newly adopted bans on alcohol and pornography on Aboriginal land.

A push to open Aboriginal communal land to “market forces” is at the heart of the intervention. Since the Aboriginal Land Rights Act was adopted in 1976 almost half the Northern Territory has been won back for Aboriginal ownership. In 2006 the federal government amended the act to open those lands to government-controlled 99-year leases for private homes and business.

The federal takeover has the bipartisan backing of the Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd. Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson, director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership in north Queensland, and Warren Mundine, a former Labor Party president , have also been prominent in supporting it.

The 455,000 Aboriginal people living in Australia comprise 2.3 percent of the population. Around 60,000 live in the Northern Territory—about 30 percent of the population there—with the big majority living on Aboriginal land outside the major towns.

Many of the communities slated for takeover began as church missions or government ration stations in the late 1800s. Others were founded in the 1980s; a product of battles by Aboriginal groups for land rights. The “town camps” around Alice Springs, Darwin, and other towns were first established as segregated areas by the white authorities. They also won a measure of self-government in the 1970s.

Aboriginal groups have fought for decades for adequate government funding for their communities. But housing, health-care services, and schooling remain abysmal and unemployment is high. This has created a social crisis which the government is now using to justify its takeover.

The measures announced to date do not include long-term plans for jobs or services. In fact these are being cut. Federal officials have proposed cutting services to small, and often remote, Aboriginal settlements they call “unviable.” The Community Development Employment Programme—which funded most of the jobs in these communities—is being scrapped.

Small “survey teams” of government officials, cops, and Norforce troops have visited some 30 communities since the intervention was announced. An article in the bi-monthly National Indigenous Times said they have received a “cautious welcome.”

The article quoted Barry Abbott, council president at Wallace Rockhole, 75 miles west of Alice Springs. He said the meeting with the survey team there “wasn’t too bad,” but the community was “not too happy with what the prime minister has done and the way he has done it.”

Abbott told the Australian that “we need a better school and better housing and we need support from the government for work out here.”

The Australian also reported June 25 on a “fiery” public meeting at Maningrida, east of Darwin, protesting the end of the Aboriginal-controlled permit system. “This will send us back to the 70s and 60s,” community worker Albert Stewart said, “with Balandas (whites) saying ‘do this, do that’, but we can talk for ourselves now. This will shut us down.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home