Media Monitoring of NT Intervention by Working Group for Aboriginal Rights: 2 July 2008
WGAR: Working Group for Aboriginal Rights (Australia)
2 JULY 2008: NORTHERN TERRITORY INTERVENTION
Contents:
Petition
Media Release
Opinion
News
PETITION:
Reinstate RDA - PETITION in relation to NT Intervention
http://lists.ntne.ws/pipermail/talk/2008-June/000239.html
June 08: "Attached is a petition for the Reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory. ... Let's together ensure we get thousands of signatures." Michele Harris
[To download the petition, click on the URL link at the bottom of the webpage]
MEDIA RELEASE:
NACCHO: Aboriginal men: part of the solution
26 June 08: "Initiatives like the Aboriginal Male Health Summit near Alice Springs next week show Aboriginal men want to be part of the solution and not just seen as the problem in communities says Dr Mick Adams, chair of NACCHO*, the peak body for Aboriginal medical services. “The summit, ‘Taking care of our children, taking the next steps’ is an initiative of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress medical service in Alice Springs and will examine issues in the Little Children are Sacred report” said Dr Adams, one of the summit facilitators."
OPINION:
On Line Opinion: School attendance and welfare
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7564&page=0
30 June 08: "Measures such as making parents’ welfare payments conditional on their children’s school attendance have a seductive simplicity. People have become tired of being told that the causes of disadvantage and dysfunction in Indigenous communities are complex and long-standing and require responses in the same vein. ... Quarantining welfare payments is an extraordinarily expensive and inevitably ineffective shortcut to increasing Indigenous children’s participation in education. Most importantly, it is diverting attention from what is known about what actually does work in getting kids to want to stay at school and giving them opportunities in life that their parents didn’t have." Ruth McCausland
Age: With respect, Aborigines can find solutions
30 June 08: "FORTY years ago, Aboriginal people were for the first time placed on an equal legal footing with the rest of the Australian population. The win was short-lived. Now, for indigenous people in remote areas, the hard-won rights — and responsibilities — that resulted from the 1967 referendum have been lost. The intervention, initiated by John Howard and continued by the Rudd Government, has introduced laws that are a contemporary form of the Aboriginal protectorate laws of the 1800s and early 1900s. In this sense, the Government is operating a system of effective apartheid in the Northern Territory." Jane Vadiveloo
New Matilda: The Intervention, One Year On
http://www.newmatilda.com/2008/06/26/intervention%2C-one-year
26 June 08: "Last Saturday marked the first anniversary of the Northern Territory Intervention, but it is far from something we should be celebrating. It has been a long year for those living with this paternalistic, top down policy; one that will no doubt make future generations ashamed. This legislation was a knee-jerk reaction that seemed designed purely to gain an election bounce for the Coalition (made even more ludicrous by the recent admission from former Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough that the whole plan was thought up in one 48-hour session), but it is the Rudd Government’s decision to “stay the course” that has been most disappointing. Frankly, we expected better." Greens Senator Rachel Siewert
GetUp!: The First Anniversary of The Report. By Rex Wild QC, Co-Author of The Little Children Are Sacred Report
http://www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=1341
26 June 08: "So, although we as the co-authors of the report were very happy that our report had landed on the Prime Minister’s desk and it had played some part obviously in his decision to do something about the plight of Aboriginal people, it seems to us that they, being successive Commonwealth Governments, have missed the central point of our recommendations. They read, and acted upon, the first sentence of the first recommendation and ignored the rest. That recommendation, set out above, was absolutely clear. No solution should be imposed from above." Rex Wild
AFFFET: Bring Aus Intervention Doctors - from Cuba!
http://lists.ntne.ws/pipermail/talk/2008-June/000238.html
26 June 08: "It seems that the NT government and the AMA are at a loss to get more and enough Doctors to the outback, to indigenous communities. ... At the abc forum we were told by East Timor President Jose Ramos Horta that Cuba is training 700 East Timorese as doctors, and Cuba has provided around 300 for East Timor. ... So we call for Australia to invite Cuban doctors into the NT to assist the reform process to provide good long term medical support for remote NT." Rob Wesley-Smith, spokesperson for AFFFET, Australians For a Free and Fair East Timor
NIT: Editorial Opinion: We’re so close yet so far
http://www.nit.com.au/opinion/story.aspx?id=15309
26 June 08: "You can’t help what you are. And one year on, the Northern Territory intervention remains the best act of racism by the worst leader this nation has ever seen. What sort of a man would seek to play politics with the lives of the nation’s most desperate, impoverished children? The same man who politicised, demonised and then jailed the world’s most impoverished children – those fleeing oppression and seeking asylum in Australia." Chris Graham
NIT: Reality check a year on
http://www.nit.com.au/opinion/story.aspx?id=15308
26 June 08: "The anniversary of the NT emergency intervention is a sobering reality check, writes Prof LARISSA BEHRENDT*. One year into the Northern Territory intervention and the attempt to put a positive spin on it must be making the government work overtime."
NIT: NIT Forums: A lost year
http://www.nit.com.au/opinion/story.aspx?id=15310
26 June 08: "The Northern Territory intervention’s primary accomplishment has been to demonise Aboriginal people and diminish Australia, writes JEFF McMULLEN*. Like many Australians I long to see Aboriginal children treated equally, enjoying the full promise of all life can be. So I choose my words carefully when I say that the Northern Territory intervention has been a lost year for Aboriginal children."
NIT: Ringy's Ramblings: A not so happy NT anniversary
http://www.nit.com.au/opinion/story.aspx?id=15307
26 June 08: "A year on from the Federal Government’s declaration of virtual martial law across a large chunk of the Northern Territory, GRAHAM RING pauses to survey the damage."
WSWS: Northern Territory intervention: “Unintended consequences” or deliberate destruction? Part 2
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/nti2-j26.shtml
26 June 08: "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."
Socialist Alternative: Northern Territory intervention one year on
http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1712&Itemid=125
June 08: "A year ago remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory were invaded and martial law imposed. The Racial Discrimination Act had to be overridden because these racist laws apply only to Aboriginal people. From day one of the intervention, Aboriginal people struggled to get their voices heard above the barrage of propaganda about child sexual abuse." Diane Fieldes
Arena Journal: Not Yet: Aboriginal People and the Deferral of the Rule of Law
http://www.arena.org.au/ARCHIVES/Journal%20Archive/Journal29-30/manderson29-30.pdf
No. 29/30, 2008: "From the ‘War on Terror’ to Malaya and Pakistan the language of ‘emergency’ has been used to suspend legal principles. Closer to home, legislation enacted in August 2007 has profoundly changed the treatment of large numbers of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory in Australia argues Desmond Manderson"
ABC Unleashed: A neo-liberal intervention
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2282765.htm
24 June 08: "I was always suspicious of the Howard government's motives to announce the intervention. They have been in power for eleven years, the fourth term was to end a half year later and the polls were decidedly against the government. It seemed too much of a coincidence that Brough and Howard suddenly turned philanthropic and wanted to 'help' the children about whom they did not seem to care for more than the previous decade." Katarina Ferro
GLW: Review: Paul Toohey: Mixed messaged and malign motivations
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/756/39069
21 June 08: "“Last Drinks: the impact of the Northern Territory intervention”, by Australian journalist Paul Toohey, attempts to provide a critique of the federal government’s intervention in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, 12 months after it was begun. ... Toohey, perhaps, does have a sensitive and insightful understanding of racism, colonialism and the various social problems they will often lead to. Unfortunately this understanding does not come through in the essay, leaving comments such as “These people had become accustomed to doing nothing for themselves” utterly without any historical context (generations of dispossession and institutionalisation, perhaps?) and downright racist. It’s also a lie, clearly." Emma Murphy
NEWS:
Dynamic Business: NT intervention bad for small business
http://www.dynamicbusiness.com/news/latest/nt-intervention-bad-for-small-business-10-11am-1.html
1 July 08: "Small businesses in the Katherine region have blamed the Northern Territory intervention for a downturn in trade, following the installation of welfare quarantine arrangements."
ABC: Reform trial begins in far north Indigenous communities
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/01/2290389.htm
1 July 08: "Today marks the official start of a program aimed at combating welfare dependency in four Indigenous communities in far north Queensland. The new Family Responsibilities Commission will have the power to quarantine welfare payments if parents do not send their children to school or look after their homes."
ABC AM: NT struggling with doctor shortage
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2289350.htm
30 June 08: "The Federal Government is running into problems finding doctors to fill positions in its intervention program in remote Aboriginal communities. And other bush and regional communities are all missing out on basic health care because they can't find enough doctors."
Australian: NT plan takes in children on Cape
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23943248-2702,00.html?from=public_rss
30 June 08: "THE federal intervention into the Northern Territory indigenous communities has spread in part to Queensland, with an Australian Crime Commission taskforce taking over the investigation of alleged child abuse and neglect."
ABC: Drop the 'intervention' from intervention: AMA
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/29/2288935.htm
29 June 08: "The president of the Australian Medical Association's Northern Territory branch says there has been a shift in terminology surrounding the NT Emergency Response."
ABC: Intervention 'ignoring plight of Indigenous men'
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/28/2288531.htm
28 June 08: "A peak national Indigenous health group is calling on the Commonwealth and Territory governments to sit down and discuss the issues affecting Aboriginal men in remote communities. Dr Mick Adams from the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation says Aboriginal men are being blamed for child abuse in remote communities - the reason given for the Commonwealth intervention. He says as a result, all Aboriginal men have been tarred with the same brush of being linked to sexual violence."
NIT: Aboriginal men aren't brutal and uncaring, summit will hear
http://www.nit.com.au/breakingNews/story.aspx?id=15288
27 June 08: "Hundreds of Aboriginal men will gather in the sandy desert of Central Australia to dispel notions they are "brutal and uncaring". Since the federal intervention to combat child sex abuse was launched a year ago, health manager John Liddle - from the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress - says Indigenous men have been painted in a negative light. Worse still, it's an indiscriminate stereotype."
Solidarity Online: One year on, rallies demand an end to NT intervention
http://www.solidarity.net.au/web/one-year-on-rallies-demand-an-end-to-nt-intervention/
27 June 08: " On June 21, people from ten cities around Australia took to the streets to protest the ongoing NT Intervention. One year since John Howard and Mal Brough announced the Intervention in the NT the vast majority of it continues to be rolled out, full steam ahead, by Kevin Rudd."
NIT: Alice Springs camps sign to 40yr lease scheme
http://www.nit.com.au/breakingNews/story.aspx?id=15283
26 June 08: "The troubled town camps of Alice Springs will hand over control of housing and essential services to the Rudd government for the next 40 years. In a $50 million deal with Canberra, Tangentyere Council has voted unanimously in favour of the landmark agreement."
[See this comment: http://icnn.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1254&Itemid=9#akocomment11 ]
ABC: Reviews suffocating intervention: Altman
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/25/2285701.htm
25 June 08: "An expert on Aboriginal economic policy says there are too many reviews of the Northern Territory federal intervention."
NIT: GP and nurse shortage threatens gains in Aboriginal health: AMSANT
http://www.nit.com.au/breakingNews/story.aspx?id=15274
25 June 08: "GP and nurse shortages threaten to undermine improvements in Aboriginal health, the Northern Territory's peak Indigenous health body has warned. A report handed down by the intervention task force last weekend, on the first anniversary of the reforms to combat child abuse, advised the Rudd government to adequately resource the primary health care system."
Australian: Embed officers for kids: head of intervention
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23904949-5013172,00.html
23 June 08: "THE Northern Territory government is under pressure to bolster its child protection system following a call from the federal Government's outgoing task force chief [Sue Gordon] that child protection officers must be embedded in Aboriginal communities."
ABC: Macklin to consider NT alcohol management plan
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/06/22/2281897.htm
22 June 08: "The taskforce running the federal intervention into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory has recommended alcohol bans be scrapped in favour of management plans."
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WGAR: Working Group for Aboriginal Rights (Australia)
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