Tuesday, 28 August, 2007

by Stuart Rintoul
The Australian

At the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in Adelaide, chief executive Neil Gillespie, father of Australian cricketer Jason Gillespie, said indigenous people remained suspicious that the intervention was a "trojan horse" for the takeover of Aboriginal land.

He said he was "appreciative that the Government is finally doing something" about both child abuse and disadvantage, but he was concerned that none of the recommendations of the Northern Territory's Little Children are Sacred report had been followed. He said he suspected the Government did not have a coherent program to deal with abuse, and questioned why no charges had been laid despite two months of police and military activity.

Nor had the Government made the case for linking child abuse and the five-year compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land and the abolition of the permit system controlling access to communitues.

"What's land got to do with child abuse?" he asked. "Is it to provide access to mining companies? Is it a trojan horse? With the proposed sales of uranium, is uranium waste going to be on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory?"

The president of the Aborigines Advancement League in Melbourne, Alf Bamblett, said the intervention appeared to have reinvigorated old political agendas, including the break-up of the large Aboriginal land councils in the Territory, which had created a belief throughout indigenous Australia that the intervention was a land grab dressed up as concern for children. "I suppose that's politics," he said. "It's a bit dirty, a bit nasty though."

In Sydney, NSW Aboriginal Land Council chairwoman Bev Manton said the intervention was discriminatory, punitive, top-down, ill-conceived and a land grab. The issue of child sexual abuse had been made worse by funding cuts during the Howard years, she said, and Mr Howard had now "kicked the door down on affected communities in the NT to apply a Band-Aid in the dying days of office".

In Western Australia, the chief executive of the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, Glen Kelly, said there was a general view that the intervention was a backward step, paternalistic and "harking back to an earlier generation of intervention which failed then".

But Mr Kelly said the imperative of tackling child abuse had stifled criticism. "It is really quite a difficult thing to talk about because people want to make sure that child abuse is not tolerated," he said.

"It is difficult ... to make strong comments against the actions ... for fear of being labelled as a ... group, which has no commitment to resolving those underlying issues."

Asked what he thought the result of the intervention would be, he said: "A similar type of intervention happened in the 1900s for many decades and that didn't work. In fact, it created many of the problems that we have today. If that style of intervention didn't work then, it's really hard to imagine that it would work now."

John Tregenza, a consultant in the Pitjantjatjara lands of the Territory and South Australia, said the intervention had resulted in confusion, concern, suspicion and infighting.