Finding themselves flummoxed by the former Government's Northern Territory intervention, parts of Australia's progressive movements were unsure how to respond. In the rush to take a large step sideways from positions in which one might risk being labelled as indifferent to child abuse, an opportunity was lost to debate the methodologies and philosophies mobilised to achieve the former Government's stated aim to protect Aboriginal children.
The NT intervention legislation invited questions around what circumstances, if any, a government can claim moral legitimacy in stripping Aboriginal communities of rights that others take for granted.
By 'quarantining' Aborigines' welfare payments to ensure they could spend their money only on certain items, the Howard Government played at social engineering to an extraordinary degree, attempting to control even which shop people choose to buy their groceries from.
Aborigines in communities covered by the intervention lost the right to appeal Centrelink decisions regarding quarantining and 'income management' — although the connection between exercising your right to review government decisions and child abuse remains unclear.
In effect, the Howard Government saw welfare payments as contingent on recipients conforming to notions of 'acceptable citizenship' — those who abrogated their family and community responsibilities were denied basic living support.
The methodology of the intervention was made possible in part by an evolving conception of recipients of Centrelink payments as, at best, in need of the firm guiding hand of the bureaucracy and, at worst, as would-be (or actual) criminals taking the government and its ever-suffering taxpayers for a ride.
This attitude is manifested in a culture of punishment within Centrelink and its parent departments — particularly the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. An obvious example of this punitive approach appeared in the Welfare-to-Work legislation, according to which job-seekers can be left with no benefits for up to eight weeks for missing appointments or turning down jobs.
The manner in which this legislation is being implemented was exposed in a series of newspaper stories. One man reportedly had his payment cancelled for missing an appointment with Centrelink. Apparently, he didn't have a 'reasonable excuse' for missing the appointment despite Centrelink being advised by paramedics that he had collapsed in the Centrelink queue and was being taken to hospital.
More recently, the Sydney Morning Herald exposed what welfare rights advocates had long been observing — that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has been spending big running a legal campaign to recoup sometimes tiny amounts of