On 21st June 2007, the Australian government's minister for indigenous affairs, Mal Brough, acting on reports of widespread child abuse in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, declared a "national emergency response" and tore up a generation's worth of social policies. The new programme unveiled by Brough and the long-serving conservative prime minister, John Howard, adopted a draconian approach to Australia's most far-flung Aboriginal people and struck hard at a particular idealising vision of the indigenous world, unleashing a tide of moral indignation.
Brough's programme was sprung as a surprise, without consultation with the affected communities, and without any notice given to the Labour government of the Northern Territory, the large and mostly desert region home to 60,000 of Australia's Aborigines. If the "intervention" was initially sold to the public as a set of measures undertaken in defence of children at risk of abuse, it soon became clear that Brough and the federal government were stalking much bigger game. They proposed a complete overhaul of the remote communities: investments in infrastructure, a prohibition on alcohol consumption, a ban on pornography, medical checks on all children, compulsory acquisition of township leases and the abolition of the bizarre welfare system that had become entrenched over decades. John Howard, who had struggled throughout his 11 years in office to come to terms with indigenous issues, at last had a cause to fight. And his opponents had a cause to resist—which they did with fervour, Aboriginal affairs being, as throughout the past 200 years of European settlement, a distorting glass in which mainstream society sends out signals to itself.
The heart of the Brough revolution lies in its coercive approach to welfare reform. Not even the most dewy-eyed admirers of indigenous spirituality would argue that life in the average remote community is on the upswing: there are no jobs to speak of, illness, poverty and illiteracy are widespread and domestic violence near pandemic. Why, after so many years of costly social programmes? There are two broad schools of thought. One places the weight on the devastating effects of invasion and colonial disruption, and concludes that Aboriginal political powers need to be strengthened; the other holds that passive welfare, or "sit-down money," has rotted away the heart of the remote indigenous domain. The former notion was generally dominant in the initial years after 1975, when Northern Territory Aboriginal people received land rights, a measure that eventually gave them control over 41 per cent of the territory. The second paradigm is now in the ascendant: it begins from the observation that the core activities in remote communities are gambling and the consumption of alcohol and marijuana, not to mention the introduced curse of kava, a potent non-alcoholic drink consumed throughout the western Pacific—and that these appetites are financed by welfare payments. Hence the element in the Brough plan to "quarantine" such payments; half the payments will now be made in the form of vouchers, for food and essential goods in local stores. The other key reform involves the phasing out of "community development employment projects"—make-work schemes that were a key aspect of life in the remote communities until one day, a few weeks into the intervention, when Brough canned them, declaring that "real jobs" would be provided instead.
This reformist zeal has not come cheap: the price tag on the intervention so far is more than A$1.3bn (£585m) over four years, more than half of it to resolve the housing crisis; occupancy rates are often higher than 20 per dwelling, a figure that accounts for much of the family violence and disease blighting indigenous communities. Large sums are also to be spent on schools, policing, child protection, dental and ear disease programmes, and, inevitably, on the teams of managers who have been recruited from the higher ranks of the federal public service to run, as proconsuls, the 73 designated Northern Territory communities that will bear the brunt of this social engineering campaign. The emergency response—"ER," as it is known—has a five-year time frame, but its concealed architects, austere department heads in Canberra, know they are reshaping a particular part of Australia for good. (The federal government is not able to impose its writ on Australia's states the way it can in the Northern Territory, but would certainly like to see states with big indigenous populations, like Western Australia and Queensland, follow its lead.)
This blueprint applies a kind of triage to the indigenous Northern Territory communities: the larger centres are intended to grow into viable societies with economies and services, little mirrors of mainstream Australian life, while around them will be smaller settlements with far fewer facilities. There is a tension in this centralising "hub and spoke" model, for one key strand in the recent history of indigenous societies has been the "outstation movement"—a decentralising drive to set up tiny, family-based bush homelands, based on the idea that culture and language are best preserved away from the fringes of western towns and cities. As a result, there are more than 1,000 tiny camps and communities sprinkled, at great expense, across the face of the country: many are deserted; few are economically viable. Dreams and hopes have been invested in this movement, and lie there still, and that freight of idealism explains much of the anguish in the response to the federal government's drastic intervention.
Both the "emergency response" and the referendum have received bipartisan support, so in theory they will remain on the map even if, as seemed likely at the time of writing, a new phase in Australian politics is inaugurated at the end of November by the steely, cerebral Labour prime ministerial candidate, Kevin Rudd. In the indigenous world, by contrast, bitter divisions have emerged. These are tricky issues to discuss, especially as unity is the key tenet of Aboriginal society. The communities targeted by Brough's intervention form a small, ultra-disadvantaged sliver of the total indigenous population, and almost all the articulate indigenous voices speaking out on their behalf come from elsewhere. Over half a million people of varying degrees of Aboriginal descent "identify" as such, but only 60,000 of them live in the Northern Territory, and only 30,000 of those will be affected by the new rules.
Throughout the 1990s, indigenous leaders argued for greater political and land rights, and much went their way. In 1992, the high court declared a right of "native title," acknowledging historic indigenous rights of land ownership. Official reports illuminated the fate of the "stolen generation"—mid-century part-Aboriginal children removed from their families by the state—and promoted reconciliation. But even amid these developments, the chaos of the remote Aboriginal world was becoming impossible to ignore. The dawn of Howard's conservative era in 1996 saw the emphasis shift. A "history war" sprang up, with conservative authors impugning the new "black armband" histories of the blood-stained colonial frontier. The Aboriginal representative body set up under the previous Labour government became mired in scandal and collapsed, and in the remote bush, alcoholism and petrol-sniffing made the headlines. In response to these trends, Noel Pearson, the dominant young indigenous leader of the 1990s, decided to retreat to his home base in remote northern Queensland, where he synthesised a new account of indigenous Australia's plight. Having been a rights campaigner, Pearson now began to advocate responsibilities. He saw alcoholism and drug addiction as diseases of mind and spirit, not symptoms of colonial dispossession. Passive welfare was depriving his people of the need to study, find jobs, pay for housing, be mobile and adventurous. To the horror of his former comrades, the voices of other Aboriginal leaders fell away: it was Pearson who shaped thinking. And he was the main legitimising figure behind the June 2007 intervention, although Brough's project worked from a broader and rather more aggressive reform blueprint than his.
Opposition to the intervention, and to Pearson's role, was quickly mobilised. The charge was led by prominent urban Aboriginal campaigners, backed by a phalanx of academic supporters. They rallied in the state capitals of the southeast, and found strong support among the liberal media. Six weeks after the intervention, ringing condemnations filled the air at the Garma festival in northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, one of the strongholds of traditional indigenous culture. The offensive was led by Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the animating genius of Garma who had served, for the past generation, as the totemic hero of the land rights struggle. It was then something of a surprise when a month later, Yunupingu, after a secret conference with Mal Brough, Marcia Langton (an indigenous precursor to Pearson) and Pearson himself, made a public declaration of support for the intervention. This was a critical development in Aboriginal politics, and may prove to mark the beginning of a long-term divergence between the priorities of traditional remote area leaders and other indigenous representatives. Traditional leaders want, above all else, to ensure the survival of their languages and religions; urban leaders tend to seek recognition and influence within the greater nation. The gap in positions may make the maintenance of a united Aboriginal movement, always a heroic fiction, increasingly implausible.
Things have already begun to play out in intriguing ways in the deep deserts where the intervention task forces began their work in August. School attendance is up, communities are quieter, crime is down. For all the chaos attending such drastic administrative change, the immediate aims of the intervention—to "stabilise and protect" the desert's archipelago of settlements—are on the way to being fulfilled.
Why, then, the hand-wringing and the outrage heard in the state capitals of southern Australia? Even if indigenous political strains have been brought out into the open by the spectacle of doctors and military engineers setting up camp in remote communities, surely the mainstream population might be expected to welcome such an injection of resources into the deserts and the far north? That, though, would be to misunderstand the strange condition of the Australian intelligentsia and its intense engagement with indigenous causes. Polls suggest that most Australians are mildly in favour of the intervention, to the extent that they care at all about Aboriginal matters, but the shrill hostility of the progressive classes drowns out this approval. In the rallies, television panels and opinion pages, it is not an intervention but an "invasion," a land grab, a roll-back of Aboriginal rights, an episode that brings shame on the nation. This mood of indignant moral fury on indigenous questions has become, over the past decade of conservative government, a key characteristic of a certain segment of Australian society one might call the "reconciliation class." Its moment of glory was a mass walk across the Sydney harbour bridge eight years ago, when a quarter of a million demonstrators gathered in support of indigenous reconciliation. This largely metropolitan tendency has been deeply hostile to the Howard government, regarding the presence of a conservative populist at the helm of the nation as an insult. One result has been a kind of hyper-moralisation of public discourse, in which Aborigines play a crucial part. Radical causes with traction in Australia are few—social homogeneity is striking, overt class distinctions impermissible—and hence there is an urgent need for marker issues to distinguish the best from the rest. Exorbitant political positions are the peacock's tail in this race to the high ground. As the commentator Paul Kelly lamented recently in the Australian Literary Review, the prevailing task of today's intellectuals has become the making of moral judgements—the more aggressive towards politicians, and the more distant from the average heartland view, the better.
With the consolidation since the 1980s of a centrist political consensus, the collapse of the ultra-left and the widespread adoption of green ideas, the sole remaining fortress for radicalism is the Aboriginal cause—a traditional bastion of progressive thinking, and with good reason, for no group in Australian society has suffered such grievous treatment. For three decades, the standard setting for the management of indigenous affairs has been the enlightened left's welfarist prescription—a prescription now being shredded by the "emergency response." These ideological dimensions explain much of the fire in the anti-intervention rhetoric, as all eyes turn to the little communities of the Northern Territory. Indeed, one is sometimes tempted to conclude that had Aborigines not existed in the first place, it would have been necessary for Australians to invent them to have something to talk about.
What about the subjects of this story? Do they welcome the intervention? The limited media reports from the field have been, depending on ideological stance, either hostile to or blithely uncritical of the emergency response. The truth is still emerging, and will be measured in the frame of years. It seems that desert women, who were the principal victims of alcohol and drug-fuelled domestic violence, are optimistic that a new phase has begun. Council leaders and prominent men, often the beneficiaries of the old system, are more circumspect. The intervention is being mounted largely for the generations to come: the 45 per cent slice of the remote community population under the age of 18. "Remoteness" is not just a geographic but a tonal indicator. That world is an archipelago, a galaxy: those who go out into it feel themselves divorced from the surrounding Australia, yet painfully aware of its control. Emotions are more vibrant there: pain, joy, grief and memory whip across the social landscape like summer storms. Almost everything seems true of it at once: there is brilliance and educational disaster; obesity and malnourishment; an explosion of births and endless early death. There is art and artlessness; marital rules and sexual exploitation; the sacred and the political. Above all, it is a domain defined by interwoven patterns of resistance and accommodation to outside society—and gathering it more fully into modern Australia will spell the end of much in it that is distinctive. This is the deep, dark, sad heart of the intervention project: if it succeeds in moving the remote communities of the Northern Territory from immiseration towards relative prosperity, its stroke will carry an inevitable assimilating edge. The dilemma now before Australia is that of the well-intentioned colonist: how not to destroy, by your mere presence, what you most wish to save.
