Socialist Voice

Introduction. This article is based on a presentation made at the April 2009 “World at a Crossroads” conference in Sydney, Australia, by Emma Murphy, a co-editor of Green Left Weekly. In December, 2008, Murphy participated in the newspaper’s investigative reporting delegation to the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia.

Murphy previously lived and worked in the remote Indigenous community Irrunytju, and she has done cultural and linguistic work with the Yankunytjatjara, Pitjantjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra peoples of central Australia. Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Straight populations numbers 527,000; 31% of those live in the NT.

by Emma Murphy

This talk examines the current attack on Indigenous land rights and self-determination in the Northern Territory that began with the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) legislation of the Coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard – the “Intervention,” as it’s broadly known.

The legislation culminated 12 years of attacks on Indigenous people by the Coalition – but the election of the Labor Party government in November 2007 has not in any way ended these attacks.

Draconian legislation

Among the key attacks in the NTER legislation are:

• Giving the federal government the power to seize land which was granted to Indigenous people in 1976, and convert freehold title into five-year leases.
• Removal of Indigenous peoples’ right to control who enters their land, a right that had been protected through a widely supported permit system.
• Withholding 50% of the welfare payments due to Indigenous people in proscribed areas. The money is granted as store vouchers.
• Widespread bans on consumption of alcohol and pornography.

To provide a legal fig leaf, the legislation suspended the Racial Discrimination Act.

Land rights and self-determination

Central to most Indigenous struggles in Australia, from the European invasion until today, has been the question of self-determination, that is, land rights and Indigenous control of Indigenous affairs more broadly. Sovereign rights to the land are central to Indigenous culture, identity, and wellbeing. In capitalist, resource-rich Australia, ownership and control over land would also give Indigenous people unprecedented economic and political power through direct access to means of producing social wealth and through the ability to negotiate or exercise veto over mining ventures.

Although only about 25% of the Aboriginal population lives in remote communities, the Intervention has focused great national attention on them, so it’s important to understand what these communities are like, and where they came from.

One thing to note is that traditional law and culture are very rich and alive in these remote communities. These are among the last peoples in Australia to have been colonized. When I lived at Irrunytju, I would often be told I couldn’t take women out hunting on a certain day because there was “men’s business” traveling through that area. Similarly, when traveling past significant landmarks, people break into specified song as a sign of respect to the various totems and Dreamtime animals or spirits. Town Camps in Alice Springs are nestled amongst hills and rocks that are identified as having played central roles in the creation of that land, at the dawn of time.

An awareness of how alive these traditions still are, and how recently a distorted form of capitalism has been thrust upon this ancient people, only serves to increase our awareness of the depths of racism and offensiveness of the paternalistic Intervention.

The communities in central Australia and the NT were mainly established in the 1970s and 1980s. As Indigenous people became eligible for welfare payments – as late as 1975 for unemployed adults – and as limited rights to Native title were slowly won, Indigenous people began to enjoy more freedom of movement. Many began to demand the right to return to their traditional lands. Movement also occurred in the wake of the equal-pay decision in 1966 that saw many Aboriginal stockworkers (ranchhands) and their families leave the stations (ranches) they had been living and working on.

As part of a new era of “self-determination,” federal and state governments committed to providing infrastructure and essential services to these communities and homelands. In some cases, missions and reserves were handed back to be managed by the Indigenous people.

The homeland movement was an important part of the struggle for land rights. In many cases it gave Indigenous groups access to productive resources for the first time. Communities were able to experiment with being part of the capitalist economy through, for example, farming or arts and crafts enterprises, while still maintaining a connection to their land and a commitment to their culture.

However, diminishing government support and underfunding of Indigenous organizations meant that many of these communities faced social, economic, and political problems. Basic infrastructure such as drinking water and housing was at substandard levels, and the social fabric of many of these communities was fraying. Reports of 100% unemployment, substance abuse and violence became commonplace.

By the late 1990s, the first Howard government was expressing the view (through its unofficial mouthpiece, the Australian newspaper) that self-management had failed, that Aboriginal communities were unviable, and that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC – the organisation established under the Labor government in 1990) was failing its constituents.

These arguments failed to acknowledge that declines in social indicators were the responsibility of the state and federal governments and not the ATSIC.

Indigenous communities and especially ATSIC itself faced an increasingly hostile media. In April 2004, the federal government dismantled ATSIC, saying that services for Indigenous people would be “mainstreamed” – delivered by the federal and state governments, rather than through Indigenous-controlled or Indigenous-specific agencies such as ATSIC. The Australian newspaper declared that “Australia’s 14-year experiment with Indigenous self-government is over.”

2007 report sets stage for Intervention

Three years after ATSIC was shut down, in June 2007, an inquiry into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse was released. Little Children Are Sacred was used by the Howard government to justify declaring a national “emergency” and introducing the NTER legislation just days later.

By no coincidence, a federal election was looming and pollsters were advising the Coalition to find divisive issues to stem the rise in polls of the Labor Party.

Was there an emergency? In the ten months that the report’s authors spent traveling through communities and hearing people tell their stories, they definitely collected some harrowing stories. But there was nothing new in what they found. Anyone who’d been reading the Australian knew about the dysfunction and social breakdown in many communities. The authors themselves pointed out, “There is nothing new or extraordinary in the allegations of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory. What is new, perhaps, is the publicity given to them and the raising of awareness of the wider community of the issue.”

They also reported that child abuse is a problem throughout all of Australian society.

The report drew attention to circumstances that lead to child neglect/abuse, including poverty and unemployment, overcrowding, substance abuse, family breakdown, etc. These, it said, are far more serious and requiring more immediate attention than the supposed “emergency” of child abuse.

None of this was news to the government, which had used reports of difficult conditions as part of earlier attacks on the concept of self-determination in general and ATSIC in particular. Communities themselves were obviously well aware of these issues as well. For years, Aboriginal women’s pleas for funded domestic violence shelters and night patrols had fallen on deaf government ears, leaving many communities to establish grassroots, largely volunteer programs.

The legislation

The authors of the Little Children report have condemned the Intervention because it does not implement a single one of their recommendations, which included: more resources and training for local Aboriginal people in areas of health, family support and community development; increased resources for child and adolescent mental health; support for establishing men’s and women’s groups/centers to assist in responses to cultural breakdown; and many more.

An overriding theme of the recommendations was the need for collaboration with and empowerment of the communities themselves. This is starkly at odds with the punitive approach of the Intervention.

The NTER legislation is only enforceable in “proscribed areas,” Thus, communities, town camps, and even individual houses in suburban Alice Springs now have big signs declaring them “proscribed areas,” in which possession of alcohol or pornography is a criminal act. Imagine the social stigma and racism created by such signs! Indigenous friends of my uncle can go to his house for a beer after work, but if he goes to their place, he’s breaking the law by taking alcohol into a “proscribed area.”

Other friends, who have never consumed alcohol, speak of the humiliation of having their car searched by police each time the re-enter their community on return from Alice Springs. Despite the fact that the police have known these people for years, and know them to be non-drinkers, the Intervention “empowers” police to search vehicles and houses in proscribed areas.

The themes of shame, humiliation and disempowerment were constants among the people we spoke to in the NT during our visit last year. Indigenous men have been branded “pedophiles” by the government hysteria surrounding the Intervention. This has had very real impacts on their confidence to show affection and care for their children. Families are breaking down.

This Intervention is a serious attack on the right and ability of these communities to solve their own problems and control their own affairs. For example, we visited Town Camps in Alice Springs that had for years urged the liquor licensing agency to declare them “dry zones,, as they recognized the negative effects of alcohol abuse and wanted to be able to call on police back up when there were problems. For years they’d been denied that right. When the Intervention started, suddenly they became dry zones, not through empowerment of communities but because of paternalistic government Intervention. There are now, of course, people who are relieved that their camp is alcohol-free, but the overwhelming sentiment we heard was one of insult and disgust that their decision-making powers had been taken away from them.

Similarly, there were domestic violence services being run entirely on Community Development Employment Programs (CDEP) because the government had refused to provide funding. However, as CDEP money was classified as “wages,” and wages couldn’t be withheld, all CDEP programs were shut down and its workers put on welfare.

The Little Children report noted severe overcrowding in housing as a contributing factor to abuse and neglect, but not one new house has been built as a result of the Intervention.

Rudd: a new era?

The NTER legislation was passed with bipartisan support in 2007, so it is not surprising that little has changed under the newly elected Labor government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

In February 2008, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people travelled to Canberra from around Australia – particularly from proscribed areas in the NT – to protest the Intervention and demand it be repealed. But that protest was overshadowed by the historical apology to the Stolen Generations, delivered by Rudd on the opening day of Parliament of the new government, February 13, 2008. It was a beautifully crafted speech promising a new era in race relations in this country. It raised the hopes of quite a few people.

The Rudd government followed up with ratification this year of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Under Howard, Australia was one of four countries that refused to ratify the Declaration in 2007.

But these symbolic measures sound very hollow to the people who continue to live under the racist policies of the Intervention. While the rhetoric of the Rudd government is different from that of Howard – there are no explicit attacks on “self-determination” – the substance of Aboriginal policy has not changed.

If anything, Rudd has managed to take some of Howard’s attacks further than Howard himself had time to. For example, Labor is now pressuring NT communities to sign their land over to the government as 40- or 99-year leases in return for basic infrastructure funding such as public housing. Some communities have succumbed, but others are standing strong and refusing to sign their land over.

The government plans to extend this bullying tactic and land grab across Australia. In March of this year, it announced that no more public funds were to be released to Aboriginal communities unless they sign their land over to 40-year leases.

The federal government has also talked about extending welfare quarantining into other parts of Australia.

The Rudd government commissioned an inquiry into the Intervention. It heard many moving submissions from Indigenous people talking about how they felt they’d been taken back to the rations days and how the men had been branded pedophiles and child abusers. The inquiry’s report recommended that would have removed the most punitive sections of the Intervention, for example, it said welfare quarantining should be voluntary and only enforced in proven cases of child abuse.

The government has ignored the inquiry, saying that the Intervention has now “stabilized” and will continue until at least 2012.

It has also supported the NT government’s attacks on bilingual education. In communities where English may be a child’s second, third or fourth language, schools were using multilingual, ESL approaches in classrooms, employing Aboriginal education workers to ensure quality content in the students’ first languages. This has now been largely abolished: Aboriginal languages can only be taught in the final few hours of each day. Recent studies show a decline in school attendance as this policy is enforced.

There have also been ongoing questions raised by the government about the “economic viability” of remote communities and homelands. This ties in to an ideological trend that started under Howard: an argument that Indigenous communities need to “enter the real economy,” and Aboriginal people should enjoy the same “rights” of private home ownership as the rest of Australia.

The specter of “economic viability” hovers threateningly over Aboriginal communities. None have yet been formally closed down, but we need to draw all these different threads together and come to our own conclusions regarding:

• The increasing difficulty of living in remote communities when welfare withholding requires you to travel 400 kilometres to shop.
• The attack on the legitimacy of traditional culture and language through closing down the bilingual education system.
• The attack on the ability of Aboriginal communities to stop mining on their land, by transferring freehold title into leases back to the government.

Australian capital – especially mining interests – would benefit if life in remote communities got so hard that the Indigenous people had to move into town.

But Aboriginal people aren’t leaving their land and culture, and they’re not taking this latest attack lying down. For every attack on the land and rights of Aboriginal people, there’s been a fightback.

Aboriginal Rights coalitions have emerged across the country. There have been national gatherings to organize resistance, such as the one in Canberra in 2008 which coincided with the Apology last year and another in February of this year. We are seeing a cohering of a national leadership the likes of which we’ve not seen for a few decades.

Many communities are refusing to sign their land over to the government. The Proscribed Area People’s Alliance has formally taken the government to the United Nations, charging that the Intervention breaks numerous conventions. Amnesty International is pursuing similar avenues. There’s an awareness among many Indigenous people that the campaign to end the Intervention must broaden out to win support from the trade unions.

There’s a rich history of socialists and trade unionists collaborating with Indigenous people to fight for their rights. We must see the struggle against the Intervention as a continuation of that history, and always be mindful of the two principles of land rights and self-determination as we seek to build these broad alliances and wage the current phase of the struggle against colonialism and racism in this country.

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