AustLit

' I will never forget the day ten years ago when the Howard government announced the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, or Intervention). A group of senior Aboriginal women from Central Australia were visiting me in Canberra, and they sat in my office with tears streaming down their faces. They were devastated because they dreaded the destruction the NTER would bring to their people. I feel a deep sense of anger and sadness at the ten precious years the Intervention has cost us and the billions of dollars that have been wasted on ineffective, punitive measures - money that could have been invested and time that could have been spent building on the strengths of Aboriginal people, and developing the Aboriginal services and workforce we need to close the gaps on health, education and life outcomes.'  (Publication abstract)

'A turbulent decade has gone by since the coming of the Northern Territory 'Emergency Response' (NTER), a policy revolution in the grand style, unveiled in Canberra on 21 June 2007 with high dramatic accents by the prime minister of the day, John Howard, and his keen-eyed aide-de-camp, Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough. It became known at once as the 'Intervention' - a project to transform the remote communities of the North. It was designed to be at once rescue mission and remedy for a raft of troubles: the cure for alcoholism, child neglect and passive welfare dependency, a scheme for restoring bush Indigenous men and women to their better selves. High ambitions; heroicseeming dreams. In retrospect, it is plain enough that the Intervention failed; it failed absolutely, and it failed on its own terms, although, like most failures in Aboriginal policy, it lingers on, diluted, rebadged and refashioned, its key measures still obdurately in place. The reasons for this failure are multiple, and only some of them are well characterised in the debates still ticking over amidst the bureaucratic and academic circles that make remote Indigenous Australia and its well-being the focus of their professional lives. It is clear that the NTER brought chaos, upset and vastly increased levels of administrative surveillance and control in its wake, but much about the project's long-term impact, during the course of its various incarnations under three successive Commonwealth governments, remains mysterious to its architects. The NTER has gradually taken on the aspect of a colonial endeavour, achieving the precise opposite of its stated aims, for the very reason that colonial endeavours often go astray: they aim to co-opt, and persuade, but the overseers of these efforts at social engineering cannot sense the way they seem to those they aim to change.'  (Publication abstract)

'In Arena Magazine No. 82, just on eleven years ago, I wrote about the denigration of Aboriginal homelands in very remote Australia, first by Amanda Vanstone as minister for Indigenous affairs and then by the likes of Gary Johns, then president of the now defunct Bennelong Society, and The Australian's news media in their conservative editorialising. I challenged these negative depictions of homeland living as being both emotive and ideological. Deep down, I doubted that such discourse, which ignored inconvenient facts about the relative success of homelands, would gain policy traction. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I see this discursive assault - a form of symbolic violence - as the harbinger of a project to eliminate the lifeways of the people who live on Aboriginal homelands. This process gathered pace with the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER, the Intervention), and I now interpret it as genocidal.'  (Publication abstract)

'From the beginning of the nuclear age, the United States, Britain and France sought distant locations to conduct their Cold War programs of nuclear-weapons testing. For fifty years between 1946 and 1996, the islands of the central Pacific and the deserts of Australia were used to conduct more than 315 atmospheric and underground tests, at ten sites. The Western nuclear powers showed little concern for the health and well-being of nearby Indigenous communities and the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites.'  (Publication abstract)