Quarterly Essay 30: Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention.

In June it will be a year since the Northern Territory intervention was announced. In Quarterly Essay 30, Paul Toohey offers a definitive account of how it came about and what it has achieved. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Toohey examines the wholesale attempt to change an entrenched way of life. He takes a perceptive, at times humorous, look at the encounter between outsiders – doctors, police, military and bureaucrats – and Territory Aboriginals. He unpicks the rhetoric of emergency and assesses the reality of change. What has the intervention achieved? Have children been saved? Will Labor continue with it? What will happen to the lost generations of Aborigines? Is the intervention a new form of paternalism? What are the reasons for the social crisis – the neglect and the violence – and how might things be different?