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Tough questions about Australia's tough love

By Kristen Gelineau

17 June 2009 - WADEYE - Along the dusty red road that leads from the lonely airstrip into town, the signs flash by: "No alcohol", says one.

"Petrol sniffing kills", admonishes another. "Don't bring gunja into our town", warns a third.

And then, one more: "Welcome to Wadeye. Give every Aboriginal kid a chance."

This town of 2500 is the largest Aboriginal community in Australia's remote north, so isolated that it can only be reached by air for half the year when monsoon rains flood the main road.

For years, Wadeye was a drugged-up, crime-ridden wasteland and a painful reminder of Australia's tortured relationship with its oldest inhabitants - a relationship it has tried to both fix and forget.

Now this battered town is in the middle of Australia's latest attempt at a fix, a tough set of policies known as The Intervention.

In the past two years, the Government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory - and forced upon them strict new rules.

Residents are now required to spend half their welfare cheques on family essentials such as food.

Welfare payments are suspended if parents in some settlements don't send their children to school.

Pornography and alcohol are banned - although in Wadeye, many white people are allowed to drink in their homes.

But what is pitched as tough love has a downside. A Government review of the intervention last year found feelings of betrayal and resistance.

Many Aborigines complained of "intense hurt and anger at being isolated on the basis of race and subjected to collective measures that would never be applied to other Australians".

So is tough love enough? Or is it doomed, like past approaches, to fail - condemning Aborigines to a Third World life in a First World nation?

Walter Kerinaiua is an Aboriginal leader in Nguiu, about 500km northeast of Wadeye.

He's thrilled with the 25 new homes built in his community, but he still struggles to describe his feelings about The Intervention.

Finally, with a sigh, he settles on one word: "Frustrating."

The new rules were confusing at first. Eventually, Kerinaiua says, most residents warmed to the programme, understanding it was meant to help.

But how and whether to help Aborigines has been a loaded issue since the first white settlers came to Australia in 1788.

British colonists brought diseases that wiped out vast numbers of Aborigines; and those who survived were driven off the land they had lived on for generations.

For much of the 20th century - through the 1970s - the country forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their families, creating what is dubbed the "Stolen Generations".

Australia claimed it wanted to protect children from neglect or abuse.

But in most cases, children were taken with no evidence of mistreatment, and were instead abused by their adoptive families and in orphanages.

In June 2007, a Government-commissioned inquiry concluded that child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities had become an issue of "urgent national significance".

Former Prime Minister John Howard's Government used its constitutional powers over the Northern Territory to impose strict measures aimed at protecting children.

As well as banning alcohol and pornography, the Government pledged to improve schools, homes and health care, and create jobs.

The initiative cost A$687 million ($860.67 million) in the 2007-08 financial year alone.

Some Australians were outraged, calling it paternalistic and unforgivably racist.

But officials argued they had to do something in the face of so much suffering.

But when it comes to measuring the problem today, information is unavailable, uncollected or unreleased. The communities are too small for the Department of Justice to bother tracking data on them.

The Australian Crime Commission is preparing a report - but has no plans to release it publicly.

"We know that women are still being bashed," acknowledges Alison Anderson, the Northern Territory's Minister for Indigenous Policy.

"We know that certain children are still being abused."

But how many? And is it fewer than before?

Anderson, like other government officials interviewed, says she simply doesn't know.

William Parmbuk, one of Wadeye's elders, sees the good in intervention - more money is flowing in, more jobs are opening up.

He also sees the bad - particularly, the ban on alcohol. Wadeye has technically been a dry community since 1988, but the intervention did not strike down a local rule that allows some people - overwhelmingly white - to get permits to drink in their homes. To Parmbuk, the disparity smacks of racism. No one here, he says, should be allowed to drink.

He doesn't dispute the town needs help. A few years ago, long-simmering rivalries between clans erupted into violence, with spear and machete-toting men roaming the streets.

Some residents now say reports of the melees were exaggerated, but the damage to Wadeye's reputation was done. Today, the streets are quiet - but problems remain.

An average of 17 people live in each house. On what should be a school day, hundreds of children roam barefoot through town. Playing cards litter the ground; gambling is big in this community.

Some believe the strict approach has led Aborigines to feel even more hopeless.

"Tough love alone will not deliver outcomes," says Jon Altman, director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Altman questions how the Government measures progress. For example, he says, officials ask store owners if people are buying more food, then claim that as proof the welfare rules are working.

Pat Rebgetz, who spent more than three years serving as Wadeye's doctor before quitting in December, also questions the Government's rosy portrayal of its efforts. Rebgetz says the town he left behind is still a mess: Women continue to be raped, most children can't speak English, housing is abysmal.

The intervention has created 1700 jobs in fields such as child care, education and art.

Anderson, who is Aboriginal, says her people are accustomed to surviving on welfare, with up to 30 people living under one roof. A job or a new house alone won't change their mindset, she says.

Still, she is adamant the intervention will work. In the past, she says, sensitive race relations scared officials away from making hard decisions.

"Tough love has always worked, you know?" she says. "It's worked in my life and it'll work in anyone's life."

BLACK AUSTRALIA
* Aborigines make up about 2 per cent of the country's 22 million population.
* Despite billions of dollars pumped into community programmes, education and housing, Aborigines remain the poorest, unhealthiest and most disadvantaged minority, with an average life span 17 years shorter than other Australians.
* The intervention policy covers about 60,000 Aborigines in 83 settlements.

- AP

Source: NZ Herald

Further information: NT Intervention issues page - includes news index and external links