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As the fourth anniversary of the Northern Territory (NT) intervention approaches, calls are being made for a new round of regressive measures against Aboriginal people, including a “second intervention”. Like the Coalition government’s intervention in June 2007, which was preceded by a lurid media campaign about child sexual abuse, similar coverage has come to the fore centred on crime and violence in Alice Springs in central Australia.
Nominally the intervention, which involved the use of police and military, was directed at helping children and alleviating social disaster in Aboriginal communities. The expressions of humanitarian concern were, however, a smokescreen for a socially retrograde agenda.
Blaming Aboriginal people for their terrible conditions, then prime minister John Howard used their plight to enact a long prepared plan to close “economically unviable” communities, open up Aboriginal land for exploitation and private profit, and develop a cheap labour force by undermining welfare benefits. Aborigines, the most oppressed section of the working class, were used as a test case for punitive measures against welfare recipients nationally....
When the Labor Party took office in November 2007, the intervention was expanded. By the end of 2008, welfare quarantining had been forced on 15,000 Aborigines in 73 communities. By June 2010, the Labor government had extended it to all welfare recipients across the Territory. The new legislation allowed for welfare quarantining to be imposed nationally...Meanwhile, the federal and NT Labor governments were preparing a further assault on Aboriginal people with the unveiling of the Working Future policy in May 2009. Under the guise of overcoming “indigenous disadvantage”, the plan involved the establishment of 20 economic hubs or growth towns. Virtually all the growth towns were situated on Aboriginal land. Traditional land owners were required to sign long term leases allowing open access to business as a precondition for government infrastructure aid. At the same time, government funding for hundreds of remote homeland settlements was either frozen or axed. As a result, settlement residents would be forced over time to move to the growth centres...
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