Both men and women complained about pornography. Other communities' economy simply collapsed after CDEP had been abolished.Įverywhere we went, everyone complained. Many enthusiastic local young workers missed out on work that was given to external contractors. The abolition of Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) saw many Aboriginal communities lose their youth to work opportunities elsewhere, and increased levels of drinking. But this 'solution' compounds the problem and sends a very powerful message to Indigenous people which says that 'you are no good, you can't sort out your problems, you need us to do it'." Constant reiteration of this message causes Aboriginal people to internalise this victim attitude. "People want to do something so they jump in and make all sorts of top-down decisions. Others suspect that the intervention was part of "a real tradition in Australian culture of blaming the victim when it comes to Indigenous people". DMS stands for Degrees, Minutes, Seconds which relates to geographic coordinates of the land referenced in the Act, GDA means Geocentric Datum of Australia. Large and red words appear frequently, small and grey words less. The word child is nowhere to be found, but land and area are a-plenty. Word cloud of the full text of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007. In that time there had been 13 official inquiries into sexual abuse of Aboriginal children, 3 of them federal - enough opportunities for him to act. On the day the intervention was announced Howard had been Prime Minster for 11 years. It seems impossible to draft the Act in the short time between publication of the Children are Sacred report and the start of the intervention. The Prime Minster at that time, John Howard, said when presenting the intervention: "It is a disgrace that a section of the Australian population, that little children should be the subject of serious sexual abuse." Ĭritics of the invasion point out, however, that the word 'child' or 'children' does not appear once in the hundreds of pages of the NT Emergency Response Act.īecause the Act has plenty of references to land, many Aboriginal leaders see the intervention as a land grab to make it easier for miners to access Aboriginal land. John Leemans, a Gurindji man from Kalkarindji Intervention critique Our jobs on CDEP that we have been dependent on for the last 30 years, helped us to build our community, have been cut-off and everything has come to a halt. Under the discriminatory laws of the Intervention our communities are collapsing, we are prevented from being self-sufficient, from developing our community programmes and supporting our families.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |