Sorry

Today was an important day for Australia. In Parliament House Canberra, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition expressed their apologies to the stolen generations of indigenous people.

The media, eg the ABC website, have covered today's events in great detail.

Of all the comment and analysis about the event one remains in the forefront of my mind: Noel Pearson's in yesterday's Australian. The title, "When words aren't enough" says a lot, but if you care at all about the next steps which must be taken to follow up on today's statements, I recommend that you read , and ponder, it.

Comments on indigenous matters

The Weekend Australian has two good pieces on indigenous matters. The first "A symbol of intent" by Mike Steketee discusses the views of Ian Tuxworth, a former CLP (conservative) Chief Minister of the NT and resident of Tennant Creek,and Richard Court, former Liberal WA Premier, about the proposal to say sorry to Aboriginal people".

An apology is not the most important issue facing the Rudd Government. But nor should the power of symbolism be dismissed. The policies of child removal adopted throughout Australia treated indigenous people not just as bad parents but as racial inferiors. Acknowledging how mistaken this was matters. Going further through what [former WA Premier Richard]Court called a national change of heart and incorporating the oldest civilisation on earth into the Australian consciousness would be something of which we could all be proud.

Tuxworth wrote last year: "It is easy for us to see Aborigines as members of dysfunctional communities, remote skin groups or disruptive mobs hanging around in public places, with little to do but be a nuisance which offends the sensibilities of the wider community.

"In fact, they are also individuals whose beliefs, confidence and self-esteem are at such a low ebb it is going to take at least a generation to rekindle in the Aboriginal community the inner spirit that drives other Australians."

An apology can help light that flame.

The second "Standing on secret ground" by Paul Toohey asks "Is the national emergency response still an emergency?" Although Major-General Chalmers, the head of the Federal government's emergency response taskforce, says it is because the government has said it is, Toohey's response is more nuanced in places and forthright in others:

The intervention is in three stages: the current stabilisation period, which will nominally last a year and seeks to establish order through increased police presence, changes to alcohol and pornography laws, the quarantining of welfare, the gathering of population data, and explaining the intervention to residents of 73 communities and 45 town camps; part two is the longer normalisation stage, in which communities will - they hope - be provided with the services they need for good health, education and infrastructure; the final stage is the exit strategy.

The emergency response legislation will be dismantled after five years. If all goes well, not just Aborigines will know their responsibilities by that time, but the Territory and federal governments, which have long neglected Aboriginal communities, will know theirs as well.

Fears that the legislation, which allows the federal Government to control communities for the five-year period, was a disguised land grab have not been justified.

If some of the shriller opponents of the intervention were now to look more closely at what is happening, they would find the intervention is less invasive than they imagine. The Northern Territory Government, initially shocked by the emergency, then humiliated, has seen the benefits: it knows that over the five-year period will come an enormous injection of commonwealth funding to the bush. The quarantining of welfare money, or income management, is being rolled out in stages, with a sweep of central Australian communities the first to experience the regime. As of a few weeks ago, it was being introduced in one of the Territory's biggest northern communities, Wadeye. So far, Katherine, Tennant Creek and the whole of Arnhem Land are yet to be affected by the intervention at all, except for health checks. People can choose to have their welfare quarantined to their local store, which electronically manages the money for food or essentials (but not cigarettes), or, if a person wishes to spend in, say, Alice Springs, they can get a Centrelink card that works at Woolies or Kmart, but not at the bottle shop.

"There are problems with it and these are very complex things to introduce," says Chalmers. "When a problem crops up it aggravates people but people who often don't have voice (women): they know this is making a difference and money is available to be spent on children. Stores where we've introduced income management have had an increased turnover of 20-30 per cent. To me, that money that was potentially being spent on gambling or grog is now being spent on food and essentials."

If income management is implicitly discriminatory, Mavis Malbunka, 63, an emerging spokeswoman for Aboriginal women from Hermannsburg, in the centre, is prepared to overlook the fact. She has now lived with income management for close to six months. "We see the benefits," she says. "There's no money running out. Income management is a great help for Aboriginal people; in Hermannsburg I hear no complaint about income management." She says it is too early to say whether gambling has been stamped out, because there is still cash money available in the un-quarantined welfare payment.

"But I do know people are buying more food," Malbunka says. "We see income management as more safe." She witnessed the initial visit by the army and medical teams. She says an infrastructure crew is in the area talking about renovations and building improvements but, as a grandmother, she says what she really wants from the intervention is practical assistance with disciplining kids.

"Old people and family feel there's a threat coming from the children. If we hurt them, they go to police and we are charged. We are not looking to hit kids, but we want support to work with the kids. They're going over us." Her point is valid: how can you help kids, and protect them from harm, if they won't listen? Therein may be Dave Chalmers' toughest intervention challenge.

.....

Chalmers won't comment on Macklin's decision to reinstate the permit system for townships. So I will. It is a disaster. She has said keeping the permit system will keep out the pedophiles and the grog and the ganja. But aren't the pedophiles supposedly already in the communities? Wasn't that the basis of the emergency response? As for drug and ganja runners, they are not outsiders: they are Aboriginal locals, looking to make some extra money or taking in their own supply.

In its intention to reinstate the permit system, Labor is not acting in the interests of Aborigines but reaffirming Labor's strong political base in the bush. Journalists will be allowed in without permits, but so what? It isn't about journalists, it is about allowing normality to return - or begin - in the bush.

Labor's position will undermine every successful step the intervention has taken and will see, in five years' time, communities return to their rotten isolation. It should be very clear: permits will, and should, still be required for the vast Aboriginal land holdings that surround the towns. If people want cultural privacy, all that land is theirs to use. But Aborigines and whites who don't like the intervention should be able to see, by now, that it was the permit system that created the intervention. A secret world is not necessarily a sacred one.

I've quoted lengthy extracts from them, but both articles are worth reading in full.

Varieties of Australian justice

#1 Queensland District Court (Cairns)

• The Australian editorials 10 December 2007 and 11 December 2007

• Sentencing submissions(edited).

• Judge Bradley's views on sentencing (January 2007).

• Comment by anthropologist Peter Sutton on Unleashed (ABC online) 11 December 2007

#2 Downing Centre Local Court (Sydney)

The life and travails of former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld aged 69 as reported by

• The Daily Telegraph

• The Age

• The Australian

• The ABC

#3 Federal Magistrates Court (Adelaide: expected soon)

The Advertiser/ Adelaide Now and The Age report that federal Attorney-General McLelland, at the request of the Australian Federal Police, will seek a control order on David Hicks , who will be released from Yatala prison later this month.

From The Age:

"David is in a mentally fragile state and unlikely to have the strength to challenge an application for a control order," [Hicks's solicitor David McLeod] told AAP today.

Mr McLeod said the public, most of whom supported the return of Hicks to Australia after more than five years in the US military's Guantanamo Bay jail, would be confused by the government's move.

"There will be a large number of the Australian people who voted for this government because of the Hicks case and they will be puzzled at why the attorney has made a decision such as this," he said."David Hicks has been treated as a political prisoner here in Australia and the United States for the last six years.The attorney had a chance to close the chapter on David Hicks but instead he has chosen the pathway of the previous government in its treatment of this man by continuing to demonise him."

Asked about the issue in October, while still opposition leader, Kevin Rudd said a Labor government would take advice from the AFP about any control order.

#4 Victorian Court of Appeal (Melbourne)

Mr Geoff Clark has, as The Age reports, lost his appeal against a damages award.

# 5 Central Australia

Over the last three weeks ABC RN's The Law Report has broadcast three programs about Central Australia: the intervention , regulating grog and , broadcast today, bush courts.

At the moment you can still listen to all three programs and read transcripts of the first two (I expect today's transcript will follow shortly).

Next steps...towards the far horizon

Nicolas Rothwell, the Northern Territory- based journalist, has gone into print twice in the last week analysing the situation in the Territory since the previous Coalition government launched its intervention into indigenous communities several months ago.

The first, "Aboriginal surprise", is in the British magazine Prospect. I've not yet read the full article as it's only available (unless you can access it via a library's online database) if you pay, though The Australian published an extract in its Cut and Paste section:

Things have already begun to play out in intriguing ways in the deep deserts where the intervention task forces began their work in August. School attendance is up, communities are quieter, crime is down. Why, then, the hand-wringing and the outrage heard in the state capitals of southern Australia? Surely the mainstream population might be expected to welcome such an injection of resources into the deserts and the far north? That, though, would be to misunderstand the strange condition of the Australian intelligentsia and its intense engagement with indigenous causes.

Polls suggest that most Australians are mildly in favour of the intervention, to the extent that they care at all about Aboriginal matters, but the shrill hostility of the progressive classes drowns out this approval. In the rallies, television panels and opinion pages, it is not an intervention but an "invasion", a land grab, a rollback of Aboriginal rights, an episode that brings shame on the nation.

This mood of indignant moral fury on indigenous questions has become, over the past decade of conservative government, a key characteristic of a certain segment of Australian society one might call the "reconciliation class". Its moment of glory was a mass walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge (in 2000), when a quarter of a million demonstrators gathered in support of indigenous reconciliation. This largely metropolitan tendency has been deeply hostile to the Howard government, regarding the presence of a conservative populist at the helm of the nation as an insult.

For three decades, the standard setting for the management of indigenous affairs has been the enlightened Left's welfarist prescription, a prescription now being shredded by the "emergency response". These ideological dimensions explain much of the fire in the anti-intervention rhetoric, as all eyes turn to the little communities of the Northern Territory.

The second piece "No time for dreaming" is in The Weekend Australian. Rothwell knows the Territory well: read his recent book Another Country if you don't believe me.

[Prime Minister] Rudd can opt to maintain the drastic social engineering package on trial in the desert and Top End; he can roll back its coercive bite and impact or sharpen its effects and broaden its geographic scope. On the choices he makes, and their success, depend the fate of a people, the future of remote communities and even, in the long run, the economic structure of the inland and the north.

[ Indigenous Affairs Minister] Macklin has been receiving her departmental briefings this week, in private, and knows the inside story of the intervention and the trends and patterns across the remote Aboriginal domain. Despite strong signs that the federal taskforce's initial efforts are succeeding - school attendances in the centre are up as much as 30per cent, while gambling and domestic violence are down - the overall landscape remains sombre.

Vast sums have been poured into Aboriginal development during recent years, but they have been ineffectual. There is virtually no economic activity and most of the remote communities remain surreal fiefdoms presided over by outside administrators.

.....

Opponents of the intervention denounce it as an invasion and call for it to be wound back. Supporters see it as the last opportunity to prevent social meltdown in a damaged world.

.....

Rudd's strategy is becoming clear; it has been telegraphed by his ministerial picks and his administration's first position statements. It will be underlined by key appointments to the commanding heights of the bureaucracy in coming weeks. Its intellectual rigour and consistency will be sharply tested by the political challenges lying close ahead.

Macklin is the key choice. By opting for his established shadow minister, Rudd has also opted for Macklin's view of Aboriginal affairs, which has been substantially shaped by deep contacts with the pro-intervention Aboriginal leadership during the past six months. The new minister shares the key beliefs of the radical reform camp; she telegraphed them in uncompromising fashion in these pages last weekend . Her view is that the crisis in remote indigenous communities can be best addressed by pragmatic measures, such as restrictions on alcohol spending to control the plagues of addiction and family violence.

It is the view that lies behind the frankly coercive aspects of the intervention: the quarantining of incomes, increased policing, the requirement that communities send their children to school and the alcohol and pornography prohibitions.

The second key appointment was a negative one. By naming the territory's Warren Snowdon, a determined critic of the intervention, as Defence Science and Personnel Minister, Rudd binds this main mouthpiece of the antediluvian Left to cabinet solidarity and removes his voice from the debate.

.....

There has been a drastic political realignment in Darwin, with the emergence of a new Chief Minister speaking the language of co-operation, Paul Henderson. Henderson knows his term in office will be judged by his ability to provide tangible improvements in the condition of remote NT communities and he has pledged himself to this goal.

One key to the indigenous policy direction of the Rudd-Macklin era lies in the new Government's choice of Aboriginal interlocutors. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the monarch of northeast Arnhem Land, has Macklin's ear: his message to her is one of respect for traditions and contempt for the provision of passive welfare payments to Aborigines. Alongside Yunupingu stands the University of Melbourne's Marcia Langton, a long-time believer in drastic social control measures to combat alcoholism and family violence.

Yunupingu envisages a generational reconstruction project in the territory, rechristened as the "special measure" program and buttressed by the formation of a council of traditional leaders.
Langton accepts the broad thrust of the emergency response and views it as a defensive campaign undertaken on behalf of indigenous women.

In flat contradiction to this stand, a group of more recently established Aboriginal spokespeople, marshalled by figures such as Olga Havnen and Larissa Behrendt, want the intervention stopped at once and replaced by consultation with the targeted communities.

This split in indigenous ranks, a divide over first principles rather than mere tactics, seems more profound than past disputes. It spells the end of pan-Aboriginal campaigning and may well hasten the development of different strains of indigenous identity and political programs based on region, philosophy and economic circumstance. More immediately, it forces the Rudd Government to choose between stark alternatives: to back the realist tendency represented by Langton and Yunupingu or make concessions to the rejectionists, whose campaigns have broad support from Labor's progressive wing.

Hence Macklin's longing for an indigenous compromise and her desire for the anti-intervention campaigners to sit down with their opponents and broker a development program that may give the takeover in the NT, in its Rudd version, a softer face.

Hence, too, the temptation the new Labor team feels to modify key elements of the intervention, as it promised in the election campaign on the advice of NT Labor strategists. Rudd is thus committed to restoring aspects of the territory's community development employment programs, closed down by Brough early in the intervention.Not even CDEP's few proponents regard this strange make-work system, which pays remote community part-time employees slightly above welfare rates, as anything more than a stop-gap.

But the true grotesquerie of the environment CDEP engenders is little understood by outsiders. A typical CDEP program is run by a highly paid white adviser and provides basic work teams fulfilling municipal and public tasks, in effect subsidising the NT Government and local councils. Many art centres rely on CDEP to pay their indigenous staff low part-time wages and thus use the program as a kind of taxpayer subsidy to keep the price of artworks competitive. False economic signals fly everywhere and create a shadow realm that barely meets the outside financial system. CDEP, with its dependent workers, thus acts as a force to maintain poverty and deprive people of the chance to fulfil their capabilities.

The tragedy is that it is the best system so far devised and the best indigenous societies have been offered. Brough canned CDEP only when it became clear that its payments could not legally be quarantined, but this was the reform that most urgently signalled to Aboriginal communities that a new world was upon them.

Rudd and Macklin will be urged by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations teams overseeing the Northern Territory project to keep alive the most ambitious aspect of the intervention's mid-term blueprint: the promise that all jobs on communities will be paid at standard rates, with features such as career development, education and superannuation.

The second change federal Labor endorsed in mid-campaign is the retention of the permit system controlling access to communities. No reporter committed to press freedom could support access permits, which are granted by land councils, and function to ensure favourable media portraits of communities and the powerbrokers who control them.

But the NT Labor Government, despite being stuffed full of former journalists, bizarrely opposed, and still opposes, Brough's extremely limited plan to lift the permit requirement for road access and public areas in large communities.

It is salutary to bear in mind how vital permits have been in maintaining the silence over sexual abuse and violence in remote communities. Permits also limit economic initiatives from outsiders and touristic activity. The system's defenders portray them as a force protecting culture, whereas strong cultures are those in robust contact with the world and seclusion produces inevitable decline.

.....

In the remote communities today, a controlling elite seeks to limit and control access, so as to prevent the intolerable from being seen and felt and reported to the wider world. A masking version of reality is circulated and an oppressed class, in this case female, is maintained in fearful subjugation.

There are caricatural aspects to this summary of a complex social map, different in every tiny community, but the control system tends always to function in a similar way and to breed estrangement from the energies of the wider world. This is a straightforward moral issue for Rudd and, with his immense political capital, he can intervene in the policy debate to open up the bush while guaranteeing adequate policing and social services in communities.

Intervention, emergency, special measure: whatever the reforms in the NT are called in the Labor era, the process is set to continue. In truth, if it aims at raising remote societies to Western education and health levels, it is a project with at least a 50-year time frame. It has hardly even begun.

The commander of the emergency response, Dave Chalmers, gave an update this week on progress in the 73 target communities across the territory: 5000 health checks have been completed in 45 communities, 39 additional police have been stationed in the remote NT, 10 community stores have been licensed and 38 business managers are in place, overseeing the new order.

This is a pinprick on the surface; vast additional resources will be needed and fresh measures as yet undreamed of by policy architects if the Aboriginal societies of the centre and the north are to thrive and prosper and mesh on their own terms with the wider world.

As Labor leaders contemplate Brough's dream and seek to avoid it mutating into their own open-ended nightmare, they may want to consider far more ambitious levels of reconstruction than the conservative political order envisaged.

One key to unlocking remote Aboriginal disadvantage lies in a new description of the bush: the "failed state" model, advanced by former top NT bureaucrats Mike Dillon and Neil Westbury a year ago, explains the collapse of indigenous communities in terms of their systematic neglect and underfunding, but also in terms of the chaotic political and governance arrangements in place.

This is the far horizon of the intervention, which Rudd and Macklin will eventually have to face.

Rothwell asks more questions than he answers, but it should be clear where his (and my) sympathies lie. He seems relieved that these issues are now more out in the open than they were, but any optimism he has will be tempered by the enormity of the tasks, many of which are yet to be defined, the long time frame and the huge financial investment (not handout) required.

I hope to post more about these matters, but not now. I will be interested to see how letter writers and commentators react to Rothwell's forthrightness: the worst thing that could happen is that few will care.

National emergency: Feds rush in

The Federal government has announced its intention to intervene swiftly and in (at seems from Messrs Howard and Brough's rhetoric) military and paramilitary force in the Northern Territory following the Territory government's delayed publication of the report on indigenous child abuse.

For reports see The Australian and The Age . No doubt there will be much more analysis of both the plans and their implementation.

Like, I imagine, almost every other Australian I support the federal government's forthrightness and commitment to act. This doesn't mean that I won't suggest better ways of doing things or make other criticisms, but for the time being I'll wait to see the details emerge.