Submission to the review of the "Northern Territory Emergency Response"
15 August 2008
Introduction
STICS is a Sydney-based organising collective consisting of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who are concerned about Aboriginal rights. While we have had extensive contact and collaboration with people from "prescribed communities" in the NT, we are not ourselves facing having our welfare quarantined, and we are able to access the protections of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975). However we feel strongly that the intervention's policies, and the living conditions of Aboriginal people living in remote communities, impact on the lives of all Australians.
1. What is a "viable" community?
The Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Jenny Macklin, has responded favourably to the final report by the NT Emergency Response Taskforce that recommends providing government funded community services like primary schools and health clinics only to those remote Aboriginal communities in the NT that have been deemed "viable". This would mean to denial of basic services to those deemed "unviable", effectively shutting them down. This is utterly at odds with the wishes of the traditional owners and members of these communities, and would be a further step towards completely abandoning the idea of Aboriginal self-determination.
All Australians will be affected if another generation is forced off their traditional land, leading to the devastation of language, culture and teachings of the traditions which bind Aboriginal communities to land. We believe that caring for country and maintaining Aboriginal traditions is an invaluable contribution to the diversity and humanity of Australian society. To label these practices "unviable" and continue the long-running policy of denying these communities the basic standards of health care services, housing, infrastructure and employment that we would expect as residents of Sydney, is to repeat the crimes of the Australia's earlier policies of assimilation.
On the contrary, it is the funding levels of government services in these communities that is unviable. "The vast majority (of prescribed areas) are substantially deficient across the entire range of selected services", as John Taylor, Deputy Director at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) says, "even the largest of the remote communities do not have the full range of services and infrastructure".
The government currently spends less than half the amount on education per child in Wadeye, one of the major Aboriginal communities, than on equivalent areas in the "mainstream" NT. Ninety-four percent of Aboriginal communities in the NT have no preschool and 56 percent have no secondary school.
Ninety nine per cent of all Aboriginal communities in the NT have no substance abuse service and 99 per cent have no dental service. Only 54 per cent have state funded primary care services and 47 per cent have an Aboriginal primary health care service more than 50km away. The Australian Medical Association has estimated that $700 million is needed to bring up to minimum standard the basic infrastructure needed to maintain health, such as water and sewage.
This chronic lack of services is responsible for many of the problems facing the communities. Rather than begin to take genuine steps to remedy the situation by injecting community controlled funds, Jenny Macklin seems pen to the idea that the vast majority of the communities be closed down, and speed up the movement of people into the larger centres that has already occurred since the intervention was first implemented. We know only too well that policies which force Aboriginal communities from their lands create new generations whose lives are wracked by trauma, loss and eventually social disintegration and violence.
Support for Aboriginal self-determination is widespread amongst the Australian population. We are therefore deeply disappointed that the newly elected Labor government is failing to break decisively with the Howard government's paternalism, or to lead the wider community to build support for self-determination, or to provide adequate funding levels to allow remote communities flourish.
2. You can't "close the gap" while allowing racial discrimination:
Despite the moving apology to the Stolen Generation, the centrepiece of Kevin Rudd's Indigenous policy appears to be a re-branded version of Howard's "practical reconciliation". Rudd's "close the gap" campaign perpetuates the fallacy that Aboriginal living standards can be raised without addressing:
- The effects of colonial dispossession
- The need for Aboriginal control over Aboriginal affairs
- Human rights
- The need to reverse the tendency to blame policies of self-determination for ongoing poverty
In order to bring in welfare quarantining for all Aboriginal people living in the "prescribed communities" the then Howard government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA).
HREOC Aboriginal Commissioner Tom Calma has noted "As the first anti-discrimination law in Australia, the RDA declared unambiguously to the Australian people that racism and discrimination were no longer acceptable in our society".
The suspension of the RDA (for the third time in its history, each time to bring in measures to the detriment of Aboriginal people) sends a strong message to the whole of Australia that it is legitimate to discriminate against Aborigines, or even that it is 'in their best interests'. Reports suggesting that racist attacks in the NT have increased since the intervention was announced come as no surprise.
More important will be the long-term impact of the humiliation being created as the intervention policies remove community run programs, and take residents back to the 'ration days' where they are seen as 'not able to handle money'.
This humiliation, and the government sanctioned, racial abuse that Aboriginal people are exposed to under the intervention, will lead to a further decline in health standards in these communities. We know this because these are the precise factors that previously created "the gap" between Aboriginal life expectancy and the rest of the Australian population.
There is a large body of literature which proves that racism, and particularly the dispossession of indigenous people around the world, creates physical and mental health problems for generations of indigenous people.
The capacity of Aboriginal people to control the affairs of their community is the only road to improvements in quality of life. For example, a study from the University of British Columbia by Michael Chandler shows that rates of youth suicide amongst Aboriginal people in Canada are dramatically lower where there is secure title to traditional lands, structures of self-government, community-directed education, health and fire services and resources for the practice of traditional culture.
The same picture can be seen in all areas of health and related substance abuse – the humiliation of policies of dispossession destroy people's health. The intervention repeats the policies of removing traditional communities from their homelands, and de-funded community-controlled programs (for example, abolishing the Community Development Employment Program CDEP). This is leading to further disempowerment which will push new generations deeper into cycles of poverty abuse, and disease.
The Northern Territory Intervention is a huge step backwards for Aboriginal people across the country. STICS calls on the review team to recommend that it be scrapped immediately and replaced with policies which support the right of Aboriginal people to live on the land of their choice, with fully funded services.