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Government Intervention in Aboriginal Affairs Leading to Discrimination and Racism

By Global News Digest

Indigenous Community News Network -- Australia
AP News

Posted August 5, 2008

In mid-2007 the Australian federal government announced a radical intervention in indigenous affairs to combat what an official report found was rampant child sex abuse in Aboriginal societies in the Outback Northern Territory. It was a paternalistic measure that allowed the Australian government to seize power over Aboriginal people and to impose restrictions on them, including limiting the sale of alcohol and the distribution of pornography, income management, among other measures.

Nearly one year later, most aboriginal people decry the government intervention, saying the measure is having more negative impact on them.

A group of Indigenous leaders in East Arnhem Land has demanded that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd end what they describe as the "intervention bureaucracy" in the Northern Territory. They made the call when the new prime minister visited Nhulunbuy and the Aboriginal community of Yirrkala with his Cabinet late in July 2008.

Wali Wungamurra, the Northern Land Council Chairman who led the group that made the demand on Mr. Rudd, says indigenous communities in the area do not welcome the intervention.

"They don't know what's happening and what's coming to them and what's going out of the community," Wungamurra said.

Another group in Alice Springs, the Intervention Rollback Action Group, has said that the government's intervention measure perpetuates a stereotype that Indigenous people as alcoholics who abuse their children. The group claims that the intervention has caused racial segregation and discrimination.

According to Barbara Shaw, one of the group's leaders in an Alice Springs town camp, non-Aboriginal people are asking for segregation in supermarket queues because of delays caused by welfare quarantining.

"When we go shopping [and] we're standing in lines with our stores cards, you get some non aboriginal persons ... asking these stores if they can have aboriginal only lines, ... that's wrong," Ms Shaw said.

Ms Shaw says government intervention is disempowering indigenous people. She says they who are "living the intervention and feeling the effects" should be the ones choosing what should be done. "Enough is enough," she said.

The two groups are asking that indigenous people be allowed greater say in their own affairs. They want the politicians to give them room to implement programs to deal with issues in their communities.

The East Arnhem Land Indigenous leaders' group is calling for a dedicated Indigenous future fund that would be used by the Northern Territory Government to address a backlog of Indigenous needs.

The group's letter to Prime Minister Rudd included demands to remove income management and re-instate the Racial Discrimination Act.