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NT Community Services Minister Marion Scrymgour. |
THE POINTED VIEW: Divide, conquer
Issue 141 - 01 Nov 2007
Issue 141, November 1, 2007: The reaction to Marion Scrymgour’s speech about the NT intervention has highlighted a split within Indigenous leadership, writes PROF LARISSA BEHRENDT*.
It was a packed house when Marion Scrymgour, MLA for the Arnhem Land electorate of Arafura, delivered the 2007 Charles Perkins Oration in the Great Hall at Sydney University. She received a standing ovation for an evocative and eloquent speech that didn’t deny the problems facing communities in the Northern Territory, but directly challenged the Howard government’s intervention as the best way to deal with them.
At the heart of Scrymgour’s speech on the aspects of the intervention that were failing, she said: “Aboriginal Territorians are being herded back to the primitivism of assimilation and the days of native welfare. It has been a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life.”
It was not surprising that the federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough didn’t like what he heard. He has never brooked any questioning of his intervention, preferring to denigrate those who have challenged his tactics by claiming the critics are protecting paedophiles, rather than explaining and justifying the extreme measures he was employing.
His petulant response to Scrymgour’s speech was predictable. Brough, backed by Howard, said Scrymgour should be sacked.
“She’s not just another politician, she is in fact a minister of the Northern Territory Government and she’s wrong,” he said on ABC radio. “It (Aboriginal culture) has been drowned in alcohol and it’s been snuffed out with drugs, and I think it’s time we all understood that and we dealt with it, and it’s time Marion actually resigned if she can’t actually support trying to save her own people.”
Firstly, Scrymgour is not wrong. She knows the views of the community she grew up in (and has been elected to represent) and she knows better what it is that her community needs than outsiders who have foisted the intervention upon them without adequate and proper consultation.
Another Aboriginal person in the Northern Territory government supported Scrymgour. Karl Hampton, the MP for the central Australian electorate of Stuart, said: “People in my electorate strongly feel that they have been disempowered by this approach by the Howard Government.... People are feeling very disempowered and very upset by how the whole thing has been handled.”
Further, the research shows that Scrymgour’s approach is the one that has been proven to work by highlighting that meaningful Indigenous involvement is the key to successful policy development and program implementation.
There is no evidence to support the effectiveness of the top-down approach that Brough and his supporters favour.
Secondly, if being wrong were grounds for dismissal from a ministerial post, the Government would be in real trouble. For a start, it would be time to show Philip Ruddock the door.
When he said that the result in the Noongar native title case would jeopardise public access to beaches, he was clearly wrong.
John Howard said that interest rates wouldn’t rise under his government. Wrong.
Mal Brough believes that the top-down approach to Aboriginal policy that has failed so far will work this time. Wrong again.
While Brough stays true to form in belittling an Aboriginal leader speaking out against the intervention, Rudd was keeping true to form as well: quick to agree with the Coalition with his “Me too” approach to Indigenous issues.
He not only distanced himself from Scrymgour’s comments, he said that she was wrong because the Little Children Are Sacred report, released earlier this year, highlighted Indigenous child abuse that exceeded any “acceptable national norm”. (I wonder, Mr Rudd, what you think the “acceptable” norm is?)
Rudd said: “That’s why dramatic intervention was necessary… It certainly was controversial, I accept that, but we’ve got to give a new approach a go because that report was so dramatic in its findings on the abuse of children in those communities.”
Firstly, Scrymgour did not deny that there was a problem in Aboriginal communities, she disagreed with the best way to address it and argued that Brough’s was not the right way. Rudd did not take the time to fully appreciate what a member of his own party had said.
Secondly, Scrymgour highlighted in her speech the fact that the intervention did not actually implement any of the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report and that the measures in the intervention are actually contrary to what the report said was the best way to approach the issue, especially in relation to the need for community consultation.
Rudd, in saying that the report justified the intervention, not only supported the worst aspects of it, he showed his complete ignorance of the report and its recommendations and gave further evidence of the fact that he did not understand the nuances of Scrymgour’s speech.
Thirdly, Rudd’s criticism of Scrymgour’s speech seems inconsistent with his pledge that, if elected, he would reintroduce the permit system and CDEP. These promises show that he understands that aspects of the intervention are bad policy and yet he criticised Scrymgour when she says precisely that.
Rudd wasn’t the only person who attacked Scrymgour. The Australian made much of comments made by Alison Anderson, former ATSIC Commissioner and now the MP for the central Australian electorate of Macdonnell.
She told The Australian, “My people need real protection, not motherhood statements from urbanised saviours. I live my law and culture and I will represent my people regardless of what’s fashionable. My people need the help and want the help from this intervention.”
While Anderson has since clarified that these comments were meant for Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin, they played into The Australian’s pro-Howard agenda.
Anderson’s attack on Scrymgour highlights one of the unfortunate ways in which the intervention has divided the Indigenous community between those who support Howard and those who are critical of the methods employed by the intervention.
Anderson’s comments can be understood in the context of her representing a group of people who have been neglected by governments at all levels, and are welcoming the additional resources that have come along with the intervention. This can explain, but not excuse, a view that says fundamental rights and flawed policy are acceptable if communities are given some scarce resources they have long been entitled to.
And it highlights the unfortunate splits occurring between the Indigenous leadership where those who are speaking out about problems with the intervention are being attacked by other Aboriginal people in precisely the same manner that Howard has done throughout his Prime Ministership. He has long claimed that the discussion about protecting the rights of Aboriginal people is a “luxury of the elite” and created the false dichotomy that those who speak about rights are out of touch with reality.
It was not surprising that amongst those who attacked Scrymgour in this way was Chair of the National Indigenous Council, Sue Gordon. But Gordon saved her most vicious attacks for Social Justice Commissioner and Race Commissioner, Tom Calma.
She said: “Tom Calma gets up and preaches about human rights but he doesn’t mention the rights of the child, and when I mention it I get shot down in flames. I haven’t been very happy with Tom’s performance. He said a lot of words but where was he with Kalumburu (in Western Australia) exploding? He has been commissioner for three years.”
How Tom Calma got dragged into the conversation might seem like quite a mystery, but only if you missed the episode of the ABC show, Difference of Opinion a fortnight ago. It looked at the Northern Territory intervention.
Calma and Gordon shared a panel and he seemed to out-argue her on every point, from whether the intervention was working to whether or not the Prime Minister’s proposal for a Constitutional referendum could be reconciled with his refusal to sign the United Nation’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Calma said it couldn’t be; Gordon said that they were two separate issues).
During the show, Gordon made the following comment to the show’s host, Jeff McMullin: “Jeff, my problem is I’m different from the other three in as much as I’m a magistrate and I’ve taken an oath of office without fear or favour, ill-will or affection so I don’t get involved in politics. I can’t be involved in politics. I have to be neutral. I’ve sat on a lot of committees for both commonwealth and state, mostly Labor, but I really can’t answer that, because of my oath of office.”
Being the Chair of the contentious National Indigenous Council is not staying out of politics. Being the Chair of the intervention Task Force is not staying out of politics. Publicly attacking the Social Justice Commissioner in such a personal way is certainly not staying out of politics.
In another highlight during the same show, Gordon said, “I only deal in facts”. Well, the fact is that the job of the Social Justice Commissioner is to review the impact of laws and policies on Indigenous peoples, report on Indigenous social justice and native title issues and promote an Indigenous perspective on issues.
It is a monitoring and a reporting position. It is not mandated to intervene or interfere. And it does not have the role of advising on policy like the National Indigenous Council does. Nor does it have the ear of government... like the National Indigenous Council does.
Tom Calma has been a tireless critic of the government on those issues. He was also the first to speak out when the issue of child sexual abuse was raised by Nanette Rogers in 2006.
On the ground, Aboriginal people seem far happier with the work of the Social Justice Commissioner than they are with the National Indigenous Council.
The problem with attacking the person rather than attacking their arguments, like Gordon has done with Calma, is that it will fuel her critics who do not believe that she has the proper grasp of the substance of the issues she purports to be debating.
Classic Keating challenges the Liberal government on its economic record
A highlight of the election campaign so far has been the re-surfacing of former Prime Minister Paul Keating when he launched Greg Combet’s election campaign for the safe Labor seat of Charlton in Newcastle.
Keating made the kinds of irreverent larrikin remarks about the Howard government that were a reminder of his great performances in parliament during question time when he was in government.
Combet is the former Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). The Howard government has been conducting a self-confessed scare campaign about the number of former union leaders who will be in a Rudd Labor government.
Keating threw a grenade into the Howard anti-union camp when he pointed out how hypocritical the attacks on the union movement are. He pointed out that Howard’s political hero, Sir Robert Menzies, once represented the Waterside Workers Federation when he was a barrister.
He called for an end to the “rancid, wicked” demonising of trade unions which was “a daily affront to over 2 million Australians”. He said, “I can think of no more noble thing to do than to serve the working people. It will take more than John Howard to knock unions off their democratic perch, and it’s not going to happen any time soon.”
Keating also took aim at Howard’s repetitious mantra that his government has the economic credentials that the ALP doesn’t have. To Howard’s claims that only his party has the ability to run the economy, Keating said that far from being able to claim that his party has the best ability to keep interest rates low, Mr Howard was Australia’s interest rate “king” since the interest rates of 22 per cent in the 1980s occurred when Howard was Treasurer.
The current Treasurer, Peter Costello, also got a serve with Keating calling him the “laziest, most indolent, unimaginative treasurer in our post-war history” since it was the Hawke-Keating Labor governments that had set Australia up so well economically and that Costello had spent “ten years in a hammock”.
He produced notes from a 1995 cabinet meeting to show that wage restraint and low inflation rates were the achievement of the unions, not the Reserve Bank who only subsequently co-adopted the policy. All classic stuff.
But what it underlined was the fact that the ALP have let the Howard government create the myth that they are great economic managers and that the ALP’s union ties mean that they are not only against business, they are not able to handle the economy.
Keating’s history lesson is something that the ALP should have been highlighting at every turn and will now need to stress in order to undermine the dominant perception that Howard and his government are the only party that have economic credentials.
larissa@nit.com.au
• Larissa Behrendt is the award-winning author of the novel Home, and a Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.
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