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Labor minister lashes party over intervention

By Joel Gibson, Indigenous Affairs Reporter

24 October 2007 - AUSTRALIA'S first female Aboriginal cabinet minister has broken ranks with federal Labor in a firebrand speech in Sydney, accusing it of doing little more than "hanging on to the Coalition's political apron strings" over the intervention in the Northern Territory.

The measures adopted to stop child sexual abuse were "a circus" and the Government's response to critics amounted to "a vicious new McCarthyism," said Marion Scrymgour, who is responsible for child protection in the Territory.

One Central Australian community had been visited "by 164 Commonwealth public servants and consultants related to the intervention for a population of a few hundred over a period of 10 weeks", Ms Scrymgour said in her Charles Perkins Oration at the University of Sydney last night.

"This included a departmental visit from public servants flown in from Canberra to download data from the community's computer on to a Government memory stick," she said.

"That same data had been emailed to the same department, to their Canberra headquarters, 10 days beforehand. Stories like this abound."

Survey teams visiting more than 70 Aboriginal communities in the Territory had learnt nothing that both governments did not already know, she said.

"Like philosophers debating the numbers of angels on the head of a pin, or physicists counting exotic sub-atomic quarks and hadrons in particle accelerators, the Commonwealth has documented all this and more …

"We know the results. They will tell us that for generations Aboriginal Territorians have endured poor housing, poor health, low educational outcomes and few job prospects.

"While not necessarily directly causal in relationship, these social factors, which the Commonwealth has known about for 30 years and which the current Federal Government has presided over for 11 years, have undoubted impact on the incidence and severity of community and family violence, sexual abuse and substance abuse."

In 2001 Ms Scrymgour became the first Aboriginal woman elected to the Northern Territory Assembly. She is now the Labor Government's Minister for Family and Community Services, Child Protection and Young Territorians.

The emergency response was, in fact, the "second intervention" in the Territory, she said. The removal of children such as her father, Jack, and the late Charles Perkins was the first.

And the Government's response to critics went far beyond "if you're not with us, you're against us".

"According to Mal Brough [the Indigenous Affairs Minister], 'if you're not with us, you are for the perpetrators'. The new world order for Aboriginal people requires, it seems, a vicious new McCarthyism."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

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