AustLit

'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)