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The Aboriginal Issue - an issue for all

By Brian Boyd, VTHC Secretary
1st September 2011

John Howard’s ‘Intervention” into Northern Territory indigenous communities began formally on the 21^st June 2007. His Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough carried out the cabinet’s decision, trying to present a ‘human face’ to this unprecedented federal government action.

Howard’s move was purely reactionary. There was no deep analysis of the historic colonial policies and the subsequent decade by decade consequences that led to the present ‘crisis’.

The government didn’t offer up any scrutiny of the past century of Aboriginal Affairs management in the Northern Territory.

Descriptions of current problems about Aboriginal children needing protection, occurrences of petrol sniffing, drug use and infiltration of pornography affecting some outback and remote communities were offered up instead. These modern day problems are not in dispute.

But Howard offered up no progressive strategy about how to build on the last five decades of indigenous struggle for land rights and self-determination, no recognition of the hardships endured with elongated legal cases to extract some limited native title gains, especially after the 1992 High Court Mabo decision.

Also there was no explanation of the evolved system of reserves, compounds and isolated townships that were trapped between the imposed contradictory policies of segregation and assimilation. And there is the subterranean brutish attitudes towards our black Australians, of certain sections within the wider Australian community, that have always been there. Howard ‘dog whistled’ this racist negativity by often whipping up the straw man, unintellectual concept of the ‘black arm band’ version of Australian history. This tactic alone, by its very nature, is dismissive of the Aboriginal cause of achieving sustainable justice.

For example bringing into the public discussion the harsh conditions faced by Aboriginal labour on Northern Territory cattle-stations for decades, was deemed as not useful in ‘helping’ the situation today.

Past lessons to help show a way forward were simply frowned upon. Howard did not want any mention of the often unacknowledged massacres of the past. He didn’t want in the post-colonial era any perspectives to emerge that looked at the issue in broader terms of ‘the coloniser or the colonised? Why? Because such an approach logically leads to wider political conversations in terms of Aboriginal rights per se.

Recent reports have highlighted that many billions of dollars have been spent ‘addressing’ the Aboriginal issue, but there is universal acceptance the conditions in remote communities in particular, are worsening not improving.

Why is the inequality between this marginalised world and the mainstream increasing? Why is movement forward elusive? Why are the obvious priorities around health, literacy, family violence, sexual abuse, unemployment and lack of acceptable housing not being acted on? Good intentions are not enough. A wider political framework that recognises that Aboriginal communities through their leaders and via self-determination not burdened by over legalised restrictions, is urgently required.

Our nation’s Aboriginal citizens need to speak for themselves, not have others speak for them.