A bad week for the Northern Territory...

The week of June 18-22 will be a difficult one for Aboriginal communities in the NT, and defenders of Aboriginal rights the nation over. While rallies and meetings will take place to commemorate June 21 - the anniversary of that fateful day when John Howard and Mal Brough announced the NT Intervention - Labor's Stronger Futures legislation is expected to pass through the Senate on June 18.


Here's a talk I wrote thinking about that, and about the Yolngu friends and colleagues who will bare the brunt of whatever might come next.


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This talk will be a bit different to others I have given, although it feels like I’ve been talking about the NT intervention for so many years I don’t have to think about it.

I did think about it this time though. For many years, whenever I gave a talk about the struggle of Aboriginal people in Australia, it was me, a non-Aboriginal person, talking by and large to other non-Aboriginal people, about something I’d glimpsed and thought I knew enough about that I could share it.

These days, on a typical day, as a non-Aboriginal person, I am often in a minority.  I work and travel with Yolngu - the First People of the North East Arnhem Land region. Often I have no idea what is going on. The people I call my colleagues, friends, family, are affected by the government’s racist policies on a very personal level: their son is in prison, their daughter attempted suicide again, their grandchildren are disengaged from mainstream education because all of a sudden it’s all in English - their fifth language. They themselves have been diagnosed with a disease otherwise eradicated from the First World.

So these days, when I think about the NT intervention, these are the things that first come to mind. And I feel I owe it to the people I work with to bring some of that into this talk.

That’s not to say it isn’t political. In fact, what we’re talking about cuts to the very heart of
Australian politics: we’re talking about a country founded on racism, on dispossession, a wealthy First World nation made so with stolen resources taken from stolen Aboriginal land, on the back of unpaid Aboriginal labour. When I travel through Arnhem Land today, I think what I am seeing is just the continuation of those colonialist, assimilationist, interventionist policies we
may have hoped ended with the so-called era of self-determination.


It’s the pointy end of what, actually, Labor is doing everywhere. Maybe it’s just more obvious in the NT, where Aboriginal people make up 30% of the population, as opposed to less than 4% in other states.

The NT Intervention was launched by the Howard Coalition government in 2007. Its extension, insultingly called “Stronger Futures”, is a wake-up call for anybody who’d forgotten about
the bipartisan nature of Australian racism. Labor’s Stronger Futures strengthens many of the more punitive aspects of the NT Intervention - the ridiculously harsh grog laws, income management, the linking of welfare payments to school attendance - and enshrines them in law for decade.

By the time the legislation is up for review in 7 years, there will be Yolngu teenagers who have lived their entire lives under this apartheid system, regulated by laws nobody else in Australia is governed by.

I feel I owe it to my Yolngu friends and colleagues to re-frame some of the things I said at the start of this talk. Aboriginal people are imprisoned at much higher rates than non-Aboriginal people, they die much earlier... there are so many shameful statistics that I hope many people here are already familiar with. But it is important to also celebrate their strength, resilience, their spirit of resistance and survival. Not only did the first nations of this continent live sustainably in sometimes pretty harsh environments. They have resisted and survived 220 years of explicit or implicit genocide at worst and government neglect at best.

They still hold their heads up high and speak with pride of their language and culture. Where I spend my time, Yolngu people still practise their rich cultural and legal traditions. It might
be banned in the schools, but they’re still speaking their languages - the oldest living languages on the planet. We have to celebrate that.

In the last year, there has been a movement in Arnhem Land to revive the Yolngu Nations Assembly. This isn’t a new development on one level - it’s a reminder of the political and
legal institutions that existed here long before someone decided planting a flag on a beach meant anything significant.

But in a way it’s a new development - the onslaught of the intervention and Stronger Futures policies has forced Yolngu leaders to regroup, to unite to fight. They’re doing it combining their own ancient languages, political structures and clan associations with a feisty, media-savvy, campaigning approach that personally I find quite humbling. People who don’t speak an awful lot of English are moved by the solidarity coming from down south, and are gaining the confidence to do things like radio interviews, or fly to Sydney to speak at rallies. 


They might have to stand on top of the troopcarrier to get mobile coverage, and they might have to put on the first pair of socks they’ve ever worn, as they fly into a NSW winter, but they are seeing the importance of grassroots campaigning and solidarity in a way reminiscent of the Gurindji struggle, and Vincent Lingiari’s fundraising trips with unionists and radicals.

I’d encourage everybody to have a look at the statement the Yolngu Nations Assembly released condemning the Stronger Futures package as it prepared to pass through the Senate. (www.concernedaustralians.com.au)

The statement calls on traditional owners and land councils to refuse to release any more land for government leases until the Stronger Futures legislation is withdrawn in its entirety. That’s quite radical. They call for homelands –some of which may only have 20 or 30 people – to be given equal weight to larger communities in terms of resource allocation and economic development.

That is important because, at the same time the federal Coalition was rolling out the intervention- literally rolling, in army tanks – the NT Labor government was enacting a “Hub Towns” policy that starved the homelands of funds, channelled people into large communities. And all the evidence shows that the health, education and general wellbeing indicators on homelands far outweigh those in the larger communities.

The Yolngu Nations know this, because this is their home: the government might not have graded the road for five years, there may be no medical services, the place might be inaccessible during the wet season, but the homelands are their strength. It’s where they go to get away all the heavy crap the government keeps laying on them. It’s where they take their kids who are trapped in the cycle of racism and poverty and are succumbing to petrol sniffing. It’s where they are alive and strong.

But these aren’t things the government is concerned about. The economic rationalist agenda implicit in the government’s “Closing the Gap” strategy doesn’t quite have the imagination to work out how 30 people living simply with a diesel generator could be “economically viable”.

How does the government encourage the important things like private home ownership and economic participation in a place where there is only one house, and no economy – at least nothing resembling the market economy the government is hellbent on thrusting  onto Aboriginal communities, never mind it’s the same market economy that is destroying the climate and undermining workers’ rights.

I think the homelands movement is an important precisely because it doesn’t fit this capitalist modus operandi – it asks us to think differently about “economy” and “employment”. It asks us to take risks and allow Yolngu to take risks too – maybe even risks that a resourced by the taxpayer, god forbid.


I don’t believe Stronger Futures, and all the associated federal and territory neoliberal policies, will destroy Yolngu communities. But that says everything about my confidence in the strength of the First Nations – not about my conviction that these racist, regressive laws are a huge step backwards that will take years to recover from. Aboriginal people will survive. With our help, they will change the laws, and rebuild.

But they will need our support and solidarity. It will be a long struggle. It will require that we take risks, are willing to take the lead from an ancient people with a wisdom very different from our own.


Healthy homelands, successful two-way learning, strong and confident community leaderships can take years to build up. And, as recent policy shifts show us, they can be destroyed in the time it takes to pass a new law through the Senate. But the underlying resilience, the fighting spirit and commitment of Aboriginal people, are still there. These will be the foundation for whatever struggle comes next.

When the dust settles on Stronger Futures and apartheid in the NT is “normalised” for another generation, let’s make it our duty to not let this fall off the agenda. Yolngu will continue to fight, in ever-changing ways, and we can make it our pledge to fight alongside them.

In the future – the truly stronger future, when we live in a society that celebrates human worth, community control & a sustainable environment- we will look back with pride, in ourselves and our Aboriginal brothers and sisters that we ensured the  world’s oldest living culture survived even this - and shame that it came so close to destruction.