The
Commonwealth Parliament has now passed five bills described as the
national emergency response to child sexual abuse on Aboriginal
communities in the Northern Territory. It was law making at Canberra’s
worst. The 600 page bills were introduced and passed through the House
of Representatives in less than a day.
They were subject to just a one-day committee review process in the
Senate. When government does not have recourse to an elected Aboriginal
consultative body, when the government controls the Senate, and when
there is an election in the air with an Opposition that refuses to be
wedged on non-economic policy issues, there is little prospect of close
parliamentary scrutiny of bold new policy proposals for Aboriginal
well-being emanating from Canberra.
A central plank of the original proposal was to ensure “compulsory
health checks for all Aboriginal children to identify and treat health
problems and any effects of abuse.” The initial announcement of the
government initiative was so rushed that it took only the most
rudimentary consultation with the medical profession to highlight how
unethical, unworkable and harmful compulsory health checks would be.
The government claimed to be acting urgently, without consultation with
the NT government and NT Aboriginal leaders, in response to the NT
report ‘Little Children are Sacred’. And yet the authors of that report
had said, “In the first recommendation, we have specifically referred
to the critical importance of governments committing to genuine
consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for
Aboriginal communities. ” The authors of the report were not invited to
give evidence to the Senate committee even though they travelled to
Canberra and were in Parliament House.
Those concerned for the well-being of abused children, but not prepared
to take the Commonwealth government’s intervention on trust, asked for
credible explanations why it was necessary for the Commonwealth to
acquire land leases over Aboriginal community lands for five years.
Everyone knew that compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land without
reason and without consultation would engender mistrust in those local
Aboriginal leaders whose cooperation would be essential if any Canberra
initiative were to succeed.
Minister Mal Brough told Parliament, “We cannot allow the improvements
that have to occur to the physical state of these places to be delayed
through red tape and vested interests in this emergency period. Under
normal circumstances in remote communities, just providing for the
clean-up and repair of houses on the scale that we are confronted with
could well take years if not decades. The children cannot wait that
long.”
We are now entering a new phase in Aboriginal policy. It is not just
about protecting the children. Canberra has decided