NT Intervention


Lajamanu — police communications back to the Stone Age

Concerns about the Northern Territory Police’s call centre operations have been around for a while.

Cox: how about asking Tent Embassy why they’re so angry?

Why do so few of the media reporters actually ask the Aboriginal demonstrators why they are so angry with being told to change tactics?

Aboriginal crime and punishment: incarceration rates rise under neoliberalism

The number of indigenous prisoners has increased for the 11th year in a row, despite the prisoner population falling for the first time in a decade. Inga Ting reports a history of failed government policy.

The cunning of consultation: school attendance and welfare reform

Kids, even in remote indigenous Australia, do not live by school attendance alone, they also need food. And families with no income will inevitably become an economic burden for others in their community, writes Jon Altman.

Crabb: Liberals like a nanny state as long as they’re the nanny

Conservatives in Australia have their long johns in a knot over planned pokie regulations, arguing that Australia is turning into a nanny state. So why were they pro the Howard-led Intervention in the NT against indigenous Australians? asks Annabel Crabb.

The intervention is dead, long live the intervention

The most recent data on progress suggests that the intervention is failing, at least if its aim is to close gaps of socioeconomic disadvantage between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in the NT, writes ANU professor Jon Altman.

NT govt gets real on remote service delivery … maybe

The most challenging part of Olga Havnen’s new job will be to renew the faith and trust in governments as service providers of choice among the NT’s Aboriginal communities.

The media release the minister should’ve written on the NT Intervention

Here is a draft alternative media release for Jenny Macklin — what she should have said as a response to the current consultation rather than harping on about truancy and grog.

Crikey Says: Crikey says: must have a short memory

An interesting example of how short the public’s memory is from Essential Media today:

Intervention sign wars in the Tanami Desert

Bob Gosford writes on the amusing political war going on in Yuendumu, where locals deface (perhaps improve?) the signs spruiking the government’s NT Intervention and erect their own signs.

Crikey Says: Crikey says: helps to have a long memory

Put it down to another case of the Perpetual Present to which some members of the Press Gallery are so prone…

Cox: new intervention proposals … same old, same old

A new consultation process on more intervention proposals does not please the many critics of the current version’s costly failures.

Questions Gillard should ask in Alice Springs, but probably won’t

It is four years this month since the Mal Brough emergency intervention in the NT and today the PM goes to Alice Springs to see the “progress” supposedly being made.

Pat Anderson: intervention neither well-intentioned nor well-evidenced

Pat Anderson co-authored the Little Children are Sacred report for the NT government. The subsequent NT intervention ignored everything the report recommended, says Anderson.

NT Intervention: the divide between opinion and evidence

The over-publicised tweet by Larissa Behrendt needs to be seen as part of a wider issue.

NT intervention … why it just didn’t work

The intervention has failed because of what was done and the way it was done, and it did not consult or engage with local people or, in many cases, address their problems.

Whatever happened to evidence-based policy making?

The federal government is adding another serious question to its social and financial policy competence by informing the public that it is proceeding with the promised evaluation of the New Income Management Program.

NT government and police — losing the plot on traffic crime in the bush?

I was interested to see if there has been an increase in the number of traffic matters before the court, particularly since the massive increase in police numbers in remote communities following the NT Intervention in late 2007.

Drunks or spiritual gurus: media (mis)representations of Indigenous Australians

The way the indigenous people of this country get portrayed in media reports continue to be along the “the savage and the noble” lines. We need to move beyond these simplistic stereotypes, particularly in the post-2007 NT Intervention media landscape.

Workers say they’re being ripped off under indigenous housing program

Aboriginal people say they are working for the BasicsCard on the federal Government’s $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) in Northern Territory communities, writes Paddy Gibson, senior researcher, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS.

Generation gap over Twiggy’s indigenous jobs campaign

Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s GenerationOne movement is a “pernicious smokescreen” which will not further the rights of Aboriginal people, says an anti-NT intervention group opposed to the campaign.

Children still at risk despite income management

Does income management work to make children safer? The evidence is not clearly there in the various evaluation studies that have been done.

Slavery returns to Top End

Today, workers at the small townships of Kalkaringi and Dagaragu in the Victoria River district of the Northern Territory will be out on strike over their pay and conditions. As Bob Gosford reports, it’s a case of history repeating.

Business as usual under Labor’s ‘new’ income management

Implementation of income management reforms has just meant one more round of racist, humiliating interaction with government bureaucracy for communities suffering under the intervention, writes Paddy Gibson.

CERD committee serves; ball in Oz court

The UN committee on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (the committee) has given Australia another serve in its latest report, writes Robyn Seth-Purdie, a public policy and governance consultant.