At last - a more balanced look at effects of the Howard-Rudd NT Intervention

Finally the long-awaited Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Report has been released.

It tells us what most sensible people predicted when John Howard announced he implementing a fascist and racist approach to indigenous communities in the Top End.

The Executive Summary to the report states:

In many communities there is a deep belief that the measures introduced by the Australian Government under the NTER were a collective imposition based on race.

There is a strong sense of injustice that Aboriginal people and their culture have been seen as exclusively responsible for problems within their communities that have arisen from decades of cumulative neglect by governments in failing to provide the most basic standards of health, housing, education and ancillary services enjoyed by the wider Australian community.

Support for the positive potential of NTER measures has been dampened and delayed by the manner in which they were imposed.

The Intervention diminished its own effectiveness through its failure to engage constructively with the Aboriginal people it was intended to help.......

The benefits of income management are being increasingly experienced. Its compulsory, blanket imposition continues to be resisted, but the measure is capable of being reformed and improved......

If the various NTER measures are to operate as a genuine suite of measures there needs to be adjustments in the machinery of government enabling better coordination of services, greater responsiveness to the unique characteristics of each community and higher levels of community participation in the design and delivery of services.

People who do not wish to participate should be free to leave the scheme. It should be available on a voluntary basis and imposed only as a precise part of child protection measures or where specified by statute, subject to independent review. In both cases it should be supported by services to improve financial literacy.

Income management is in many respects representative of other NTER measures. If it is modified and improved, then the resistance to its original imposition might be negated.

When specifically addressing the selective quashing of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the report itself stated:

Not surprisingly, there was a convergence among
official commentaries and submissions to the Board
around the fundamental principle of international
human rights law that different classes of rights
cannot be traded off against each other. This
principle is captured in article 5 of the Vienna
Declaration on Human Rights (1993).

It is important to note that criticisms over the
exclusion of the RDA do not simply reflect an
‘academic’ debate. Throughout the Board’s
community visits and consultations with various
organisations and representatives, it was made
abundantly clear that people in Aboriginal
communities felt humiliated and shamed by the
imposition of measures that marked them out as
less worthy of the legislative protections afforded
other Australians.

These concerns were most palpable in the context
of comments and submissions relating to the
compulsory acquisition of land41 and the exclusion
of external merits review in the income management
scheme applied in the Northern Territory.42.....

In the Board’s view, there are no convincing
arguments for excluding human rights principles
and the RDA. Consistent with a key theme of the
review the Board believes the re-engagement
process has to be underpinned by acknowledgment
of the informed consent principle and human
rights provisions.

Predictably Howard's leftovers still on the Opposition front bench oppose any change to the Intervention.

One suspects their objections are based on a fear that human rights may be restored to indigenous communities covered by the Intervention.

If the Prime Minister and Cabinet have any moral courage whatsoever, they will scrap Howard's legislation completely and start again.

Full report can be found here.
The Canberra Times on the subject here.