home | news l

State control for Aboriginal dole

By Phil Mercer

17 January 2008 - BBC UK - Welfare recipients in one of Australia's largest Aboriginal communities have had half of their benefits placed under state control.

Payments in Wadeye settlement will be "quarantined", officials say.

This means half of all dole cheques will be paid automatically to shops for essential items like food and medicine.

The move comes as ministers meet to discuss the progress of a controversial government intervention in indigenous communities that began last year.

Changes to welfare payments at Wadeye, in the Northern Territory, have been introduced less than a month after clashes between rival gangs armed with spears, iron bars and rocks.

The Australian government has insisted the "income management" scheme would help to ensure that children were properly looked after in the troubled community of 3,000 people.

There have been concerns that state benefits have been used by parents to buy cigarettes and alcohol or frittered away on gambling, leaving little for essentials such as food, rent and medicine.

Fifty percent of welfare allowances will be under state control.

Radical intervention

Officials have said that residents in Wadeye have been fully consulted but some Aboriginal leaders believe the measures are paternalistic and racist.

They have argued that indigenous Australians are able to sort out their own problems.

The changes at Wadeye, an isolated township 420 km from Darwin, are part of a radical government intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

The reforms were designed to curb high rates of child abuse and began in the middle of last year.

Extra police officers and soldiers were deployed and bans were imposed on alcohol and pornography.

The unprecedented policy has the support of Australia's recently-elected Labor government.

In Canberra, ministers have held their first meeting with members of the intervention's task force.

They have reported that good progress has been made in many areas but have warned that much work still needs to be done to help Australia's most disadvantaged people.

Source: BBC

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

|| click to go to the top of this page