A Decade On, The Fraud Of The NT Intervention Is Exposed
Michael Brull has written extensively on the Northern Territory intervention. A decade after it was launched, it’s time for another look.
On June 21, 2007, the Intervention in the Northern Territory was launched by the government of John Howard. 10 years on, I think it is important to re-establish a few points about it.
Firstly, the pretexts on which it was launched were all demonstrably fraudulent. Secondly, the grounds on which it was justified are also all demonstrably false.
The fraud of the Intervention’s pretexts
My boss, New Matilda owner Chris Graham has demonstrated at length one part of the Intervention fraud. To simplify and summarise, the Indigenous Affairs Minister at the time, Mal Brough, claimed that there were paedophile rings in all Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
He started receiving criticism in the media for his unsubstantiated claim. Then he received stunning vindication from the ABC, when it aired explosive allegations by a youth worker, who claimed that all of Brough’s lurid claims were true.
There was a paedophile ring in an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal children were traded as sex slaves, the youth worker claimed.
But the youth worker, as it happens, wasn’t a youth worker. He worked for Brough, and had a history of making things up about life in Mutitjulu. For example, he claimed to have lived there for nine months. In fact, he had never lived there at all.
The Australian Crime Commission was given extraordinarily powers to investigate the alleged paedophile rings. Despite spending 18 months and millions of dollars, the ACC eventually concluded that there was “not organised paedophilia in Indigenous communities”. Not that there was no evidence of these claims – that these claims were actually false.
But that came 18 months later. When the Intervention was launched, public opinion was primed to support the measures in question. They had heard gratuitous smears of Aboriginal communities from the high-brow liberals at ABC, which quickly spread across the mainstream political and media spectrum.
The ABC story was followed by an investigation into sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the NT. Though its investigations were launched on a fraudulent pretext, the report itself, “Little Children are Sacred”, was excellent. Pat Anderson and Rex Wild dealt with the issue of sexual assault in Aboriginal communities seriously and respectfully. They were
“impressed with the willingness of people to discuss the issue of child sexual abuse, even though it was acknowledged as a difficult subject to talk about. At many meetings, both men and women expressed a desire to continue discussions about this issue and what they could do in their community about it. It was a frequent comment that up until now, nobody had come to sit down and talk with them about these types of issues. It would seem both timely and appropriate to build on this good will, enthusiasm and energy by a continued engagement in dialogue and assisting communities to develop their own child safety and protection plans.”Aside from the commitment of Aboriginal communities to addressing sexual abuse, there was a lot of resentment at media stigmatisation of their communities. Wild and Anderson expressed concern that “Aboriginal men have been targeted as if they were the only perpetrators of child sexual abuse in communities. This is inaccurate and has resulted in unfair shaming, and consequent further disempowerment, of Aboriginal men as a whole.”
They observed that “While the Inquiry found no evidence of any ‘paedophile rings’ operating in the Northern Territory, there was enough evidence to conclude that a number of individual non-Aboriginal ‘paedophiles’ had been infiltrating Aboriginal communities and offending against children.”
The closest the report came to vindicating Brough’s claims of paedophile rings was this passage:
“A number of reliable people in one community alleged that a rampant informal sex trade existed between Aboriginal girls aged between 12-15 years, and the non-Aboriginal workers of a mining company. It was alleged that the girls were provided with alcohol, cash and other goods in exchange for sex. It was further alleged that the girls would actively approach the workers and, at times, would climb over the fence into their residential compound.”
However, the predators here were non-Aboriginal men, connected to powerful mining interests. This type of paedophile ring evidently didn’t interest the politicians and media, who had worked themselves into a frenzy at the thought of Aboriginal predators. When the Intervention was launched, on the pretext of this report, no attempt was made to target the non-Aboriginal men in question, let alone their communities. Instead, 73 Aboriginal communities were “prescribed”, and specifically denied various rights that everyone else in Australia had access to.
By itself, this demonstrates another layer of fraud to the Intervention. But let us return to the report that was used to justify the Intervention.