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Authors of the Little Children Are Sacred report, Rex Wild QC and Pat Anderson. Govt should be more “thoughtful”: Anderson Thursday, 4 March 2010 12:46:58 PM By Stephen Johnson NATIONAL Issue 196, March 4, 2010: The co-author of a report that sparked the Northern Territory intervention says the Rudd government could be more thoughtful about the way it treats Indigenous people. Indigenous health worker Pat Anderson helped compile the Little Children Are Sacred report, released in 2007. The report into the sexual abuse of Indigenous children was used by the Howard government to launch the Northern Territory intervention and impose measures such as the controversial income management scheme. The federal government last month introduced draft legislation which would quarantine welfare payments for all “vulnerable” people in the Territory regardless of race. But Ms Anderson says she remains unimpressed with the Rudd government’s handling of the intervention since coming to power. “I think that we could handle the situation in the Northern Territory in a much more thoughtful and conscious and mindful way,” Ms Anderson told reporters last Wednesday at a Parliament House function, which had seated her next to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin. Ms Anderson said the continued quarantining of welfare payments was reactionary. “I see what’s happening now going back to how it used to be when we couldn’t travel, when the superintendent of native welfare was responsible for what was then called a child endowment payment,” she said. “My mother had to go to the superintendent of native welfare and explain to him how she was going to use her child endowment - the predecessor of family allowance - before he would give it to her. It’s all been done before.” The Little Children Are Sacred report was commissioned by the Northern Territory government in 2006 to find ways to protect Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. - AAP Printer Friendly Version  Email Story to a Friend Submit Letter to Editor