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Aborigines facing army intervention to tackle child abuse, violence and alcoholism
Howard criticised as police and troops are sent into drink-raddled townships

by Nick Squires

1 July 2007 - Sunday Herald (UK) - IT IS a shocking indictment of the dysfunction and despair to be found lurking around the rust-red deserts and sun-baked savannah woodlands of the outback. Australian soldiers - accustomed to fighting vicious ethnic militia in East Timor and battling the Taliban in Afghanistan - were last week deployed to their own backyard.

In an unprecedented move, troops fanned out to more than 60 isolated townships to support police reinforcements as they try to tackle an epidemic of child sex abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence.

Like the soldiers, many of the Australian Federal Police officers have worked in strife-torn countries, from Sudan to the Solomon Islands.

The crackdown has been launched by the federal government in Canberra, in the wake of a shocking official report released last month.

The report, titled Little Children Are Sacred, claimed that "rivers grog" alcohol were leading to the breakdown of Aboriginal society, with children as young as three exposed to hardcore pornography and others sexually abused by both black and white men.

Teenage Aboriginal girls, the report said, were prostituting themselves for drugs and alcohol with white miners in remote parts of the outback.

Of the 45 Aboriginal outposts visited by the report's authors, not one had escaped incidents of child sex abuse.

In response, the federal government announced it would ban alcohol in remote communities, confiscate pornography and make welfare payments conditional on good parenting.

Announcing the most dramatic shake-up of Aboriginal affairs for 40 years, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, said the alcohol-fuelled abuse of Aboriginal children was a "national emergency".

"We are dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present. Exceptional measures are required to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation," he said.

The report was limited to the Northern Territory, but similar abuse is thought to go on in other states which have isolated Aboriginal communities, including Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia.

The report shattered any lingering image of Aboriginal settlements as tranquil desert outposts of dot painting, didgeridoos and "Dreamtime" legends about the Earth's creation.

The sad reality for a large proportion of the country's 450,000 indigenous people is unemployment, ill-health and high rates of crime, social alienation and suicide.

Shops and clinics are broken into so regularly they are protected with wire cages reminiscent of scenes from the Mad Max films. Petrol-sniffers stagger about in the dust, mountains of rubbish and empty beer cans pile up under trees and children play with mangy dogs while their parents drink themselves senseless.

Alcohol causes the death of an Aboriginal adult every 38 hours, and accounts for one in every four deaths in the Northern Territory. In some townships, 12-year-old girls become mothers, and there are grandmothers as young as 22, according to the federal indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough.

But the government's robust intervention has sparked a firestorm of debate, with some politicians and Aboriginal leaders saying it smacks of discrimination.

Malcolm Fraser, a former conservative prime minister, said the government's actions were a "throwback to past paternalism" because there had been no consultation with the Aboriginal people.

An Aboriginal activist and academic, Boni Robertson, described the emergency measures as "knee-jerk nonsense" that breached Australia's anti-discrimination laws.

Jon Stanhope, the chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, which encompasses Canberra, labelled the initiative as "racist".

But the government is adamant that the Northern Territory government has failed to tackle the problem and that prompt action is required. It has effectively stripped the administration of many of its powers and dealt its aspirations to become a fully-fledged state a mortal blow.

Dozens of troops, police and government officials descended on six remote communities last week and were cautiously welcomed. It helped that some of the soldiers were Aborigines from Norforce, a mostly indigenous reconnaissance unit of the army reserves.

"It was good to see some indigenous people in army uniform come out, that was a big hit with the locals," the chief executive of the Titjikala community, Harry Scott, told reporters.

One of the townships was Mutitjulu, a forlorn shanty town ravaged by the scourge of petrol sniffing, which sits in the shadow of Ayers Rock, or Uluru.

IT is just a few hundred yards from the base of the famous monolith, but a 30-year-old permit system means that until now it has been closed to outsiders, including the 400,000 tourists who visit Ayers Rock each year.

Last year a new police station was built at a cost of A$2.5 million, but until recently it was occupied only by part-time auxiliary officers. For the last year the village has had no resident doctor or council services.

Now it will be manned by Australian Federal Police officers drafted in from outside the Northern Territory, backed up by army logistical support.

There was no question of armed infantry patrolling the dusty streets, Brough said.

"They're not rolling in there in tanks, they're not rolling in there with weapons, they're rolling in there with communications and assistance," said Brough, a former soldier.

As part of its sweeping overhaul, the government will scrap the system that required outsiders to have a permit to visit Aboriginal townships.

Canberra said the arrangement had enabled a veil of secrecy to be drawn over appalling levels of violence, substance abuse and domestic violence in the isolated communities.

But Aboriginal groups claimed that scrapping the permit system would leave settlements more vulnerable to drug dealers and "sly grog runners", as smugglers of prohibited alcohol are known.

"Removing permits could provide a free-for-all peddling of alcohol and marijuana and pornography, or the inflicting of further sexual or physical abuse on children," said David Ross, director of the Central Land Council in Alice Springs.

"At least with the permit system it was possible to ask somebody what they were doing in the community," he added.

Successive governments have spent billions of dollars trying to address the catastrophic disintegration of Aboriginal culture, but solutions have been depressingly elusive.

The dysfunction is passed from one generation to the next, as welfare-dependent, drunken and drugged parents neglect their children, who then drop out of school and get into trouble.

Girls end up pregnant, boys in prison, perpetuating the cycle of misery. Aboriginal leaders say that restoring law and order, and clamping down on alcohol and pornography, should be part of a much broader effort to improve people's lives.

What blighted communities really need is jobs, better education and substance abuse rehab programmes.

"What the government has announced are short-term, extreme measures which don't address the underlying issues," said Priscilla Collins, head of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency.

"Employment is key - if you don't have a job, you sit at home all day and it becomes very depressing. We need to improve the services in these remote places - petrol stations, clinics, shops - and that will create employment. It's not rocket science."

Collins has worked in the desert regions of central Australia for 18 years and knows of only two settlements which have substance abuse programmes.

"In the other places, if you ban alcohol, there's nowhere to dry out, no help, and addicts take out their anger on their families. Or they move to a town like Alice Springs where they can get alcohol, so you just shift the problem," she added.

Shocking overcrowding also needs to be urgently addressed. In some Aboriginal settlements, a shortage of homes means that up to 20 family members share the same house. Many buildings are old, dilapidated and leaky.

Australia's record on trying to haul its indigenous people out of poverty is a dismal one, and compares poorly with the treatment of Maoris in New Zealand, First Nations people in Canada and native American Indians.

THE urgency with which the federal government has seized the initiative offers cautious hope that things may be about to change, said Fred Chaney, the director of Reconciliation Australia and a former Aboriginal affairs minister.

"The great risk, however, is that as in the past, a report like this causes a great flurry of concern, and shock and horror headlines in the newspapers, but then the next week nothing much happens," Chaney said.

"The implementation of what the government has announced is going to be a long and drawn-out affair. But I think the fact that the prime minister has put his reputation on the line is really important. It's a significant shift and overturns 30 years of joint responsibility between the federal government, the Northern Territory administration and the Aboriginal communities themselves."

However, questions have been raised about why it has taken Howard, who has received countless reports about Aboriginal disadvantage during his 11 years in office, so long to act.

A federal election is expected by the end of the year and opponents of the prime minister accused him of engineering a feel-good, vote-grabbing initiative.

Howard dismissed the charge and likened the scale of abuse in Aboriginal townships as being as damaging to Australia as hurricane Katrina was to the southern United States.

He said many Australians had "looked aghast" at the US government's failure to cope with the lawlessness and chaos that engulfed New Orleans in 2005.

"We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now," said Howard.

Source: Sunday Herald (UK)

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