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

Toohey

Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention: Quarterly Essay 30
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Black Inc.
Country
Australia
Published
2 June 2008
Pages
128
ISBN
9781863952156

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

Toohey

When Mal Brough and John Howard announced the Northern Territory intervention in mid-2007, they proclaimed a child abuse emergency. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Paul Toohey unpicks the rhetoric of emergency and tracks progress. One year on, have children been saved? Will Labor continue with the intervention? What are the reasons for the social crisis - the neglect and the violence - and how might things be different? Toohey argues that the real issue is not sexual abuse, but rather a more general neglect of children. He criticises the way both white courts and black law have viewed violent crime by Aboriginal men. He examines the permit system and the quarantining of welfare money and argues that due to Labor’s changes to these, the intervention is now effectively over - though the crisis persists. In Last Drinks, Paul Toohey offers the definitive account of how the Territory intervention came about and what it has achieved. ‘What if the greatest threat to a home came not from outside its walls but from within? Such was the charge levelled against Aborigines on 21 June 2007, the day the intervention was announced.’ - Paul Toohey, Last Drinks

Review

This fascinating Quarterly Essay looks at the Northern Territory intervention from the perspective of a Darwin-based journalist with an intimate working knowledge of the situation leading up to the intervention, the way it unfolded on the ground, and the politics behind it. He also writes about the personalities involved: Mal Brough, blunt, passionate, a ‘drill sergeant’; NT Chief Minister Clare Martin, whose politically motivated inactivity on the situation of Aboriginal communities led to the federal intervention; the well-meaning but destructive white lawmen who regularly bargained down Aboriginal men from murder to manslaughter in the spirit of cultural sensitivity. ‘It didn’t matter that Brough was an insensitive thug,’ he reflects. ‘Insensitivity was urgently required.’

Toohey welcomed the intervention on the grounds that something had to be done – not about child sex abuse, which was the official impetus for action, but about the more general neglect of Aboriginal children and the violence meted out to Aboriginal women. He does express doubts, though, particularly about the abolition of the CDEP programs that provided valuable employment, moving 7000 Aboriginals onto welfare. He concludes that the intervention, clumsy though it was, was a good thing – and that the ALP’s (well-meaning) watering down of some measures jeopardises the intervention’s most valuable gains. Candid and incisive.

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