Category Archives: Politics – Northern Territory

Letter to the NT News – Aboriginal affairs

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It won’t get published because it’s too long, but worth saying just the same:

Dear Sir,

Peter Murphy’s always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection.

This week’s column (12 September) blaming Warren Snowdon and Jenny Macklin for all the accumulated ills of Aboriginal affairs is a case in point.  Murphy not only ignores the fact that the Howard government was in charge of the area until 3 short years ago, but also that Labor has largely continued the Howard government’s NT Intervention policies.  In fact many commentators assess that Labor’s embrace of the Intervention is a major reason why Snowdon experienced such large voting swings against him in remote communities.

However, should those electoral reverses now lead to a wholesale expedient abandonment of Intervention initiatives?  My own view is that they shouldn’t.  The Intervention was like the curate’s egg; good in parts.  More police and medical services and much greater (if botched) spending on housing were undeniable positives, as was the crackdown on alcohol, drugs and porn.

Income management is more problematic.  It would have a valuable role to play if applied only to welfare recipients persistently acting irresponsibly, but not when arbitrarily and indiscriminately imposed on everyone.

More generally, many Intervention initiatives have been imposed on communities with little or no involvement of Aboriginal people themselves. Long experience, not to mention unchallenged research by the Productivity Commission, shows that the only initiatives that work in remote communities are ones created by “partnerships” where communities have a genuine sense of “ownership” of the program or enterprise.

Community ownership needs to be matched by full accountability for the way programs are actually run , but without genuine partnership and mutual respect nothing sustainable is ever achieved.  Those lessons appear to have been forgotten in the panic to be seen to be doing something to attack child sexual abuse and endemic Indigenous disadvantage.

If Murphy was delivering a real evaluation rather than a partisan puff piece he would acknowledge that none of these problems are susceptible to a quick fix and neither political party has yet found a magical solution.

Drilling down into the NT federal election result

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As part of my duties as CDU’s designated political analyst/commentator for NT electoral purposes, I’ve been delving into the interstices of the booth by booth results in the NT seats of Solomon and Lingiari.  The results are quite fascinating, especially in Lingiari.

Starting with Solomon (essentially metropolitan Darwin and Palmerston), the result is not too surprising.  I confess I expected the ALP’s Damian Hale to hang on narrowly, partly because he hadn’t done a bad job but also because of an outbreak of Country Liberal Party infighting over the last week of the campaign.  However, the infighting arose from revelations that the CLP’s Aboriginal candidate for Lingiari Leo Abbott had not only been subject to a Domestic Violence Order but had also been subject to recent court action for breaching it.  CLP NT Opposition Leader Terry Mills, supported by his federal counterpart Tony Abbott, called on the party’s management committee to disendorse Leo Abbott.  However the management committee refused to do so, with one of its central Australian members suggesting publicly that Mills’ demand was part of a “mean and tricky” tactic orchestrated by former Liberal Party National President Shane Stone to make Leo Abbott a sacrifical lamb so the CLP could generate a renewed focus on similar (though arguably less serious)  domestic violence allegations against the ALP sitting Member for Solomon Damian Hale.  The whole fiasco ended up with CLP Alice Springs MLA and former parliamentary leader Jodeen Carney announcing her immediate resignation from Parliament, other CLP MLAs refusing to campaign for Leo Abbott and CLP President Rick Setter resigning early this week.

However the immediate electoral wash-up from the fiasco is less clear.

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Another attack of lunacy – letter to the NT News

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Dear editor

I wonder how many of the 84% of NT News respondents who think NT courts are too soft on criminals are aware of any of the following indisputable facts:

  1. NT judges and magistrates are tougher on crime than other states and territories. The NT has an imprisonment rate almost 4 times higher than the Australian average, while the crime rate per head for both property and violent crimes is around twice the national average.
  2. We have many more police per head of population than any other jurisdiction.
  3. Crime rates for property crime actually rose while mandatory sentencing was in force for those offences up to 2001 (although that’s probably a coincidence).
  4. Crime rates have fallen in most categories of property crime over the last 5 years, while robberies and assaults have risen significantly and homicides and sexual assaults have remained about the same.
  5. The Territory has higher crime rates overall than other parts of Australia because we have a much younger population, many more indigenous residents, a much higher population suffering significant socio-economic disadvantage, and much higher levels of alcohol consumption.  All but the last of those factors is almost completely beyond the control of any Territory government irrespective of what actions it may choose to take.

Yours faithfully

Ken Parish

Finishing unfinished business in the NT

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Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.

Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and their own happiness with allowing the whiff of racism to float about their policies in order to secure the skeptical, largely non-aboriginal urban seats. But calling CLP policies racist is actually a lazy copout, because the NT Government was powerless to change the policies — the Act and welfare — that made the difference.

There’s slow, very slow, change going on. Say what you like about the Intervention, it acted as a political circuit-breaker. What was previously unspeakable became discussable. Essentially, NT politics was a meeting point of political continents: the NT’s Legislative Assembly, the Land Councils and the Senate in Canberra. The Intervention was the earthquake that came after years of building pressure.

While the policies of the 70s were well-intentioned, they failed. It’s as simple as that. The prior policies of assimilation gave us the Stolen Generations, but the policies of the 70s-2000s gave us the Wasted Generations.

About six months ago the NT Government hired a “Remote Services Coordinator” in Bob Beadman, a long-time observer and participant in aboriginal affairs in the NT. His first report has been published, and it makes for refreshingly blunt reading. Usually these sorts of public reports are written by invisible shinybums, couched in the most obtuse and polished bureaucratese possible. But that’s not for Bob: he lays out his own opinions without the usual “it could be argueds”, “some have observeds” and “in some quarters”:

I want to hammer one final point, before turning to what I am supposed to be doing.
The building of houses and roads and sewerage systems is the easy part of this development effort; the social reconstruction, the rebuilding of people, the restoration of their pride and self-worth is the far more difficult, and more important.

And bearing in mind the old adage that the single most important social welfare measure we can take is to provide a person with a job, Governments must be even more proactive on the social side of the infrastructure/social scales, else all of this will be for nothing.
…
If, again, Indigenous people sit under a tree and watch this frenetic effort by government agencies of every kind with increasing astonishment, we will have squandered another opportunity for social reconstruction. We are unlikely to get another one with all of the features available to us right now. … As noted anthropologist Peter Sutton recently said the incentives for remaining outside modernity must be withdrawn.

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The Unforgivable Sin: Ethics

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I am ambivalent about recently-axed SIHIP head, Jim Davidson.

His history shows that he can be sweepingly arrogant, convinced of his own intellectual superiority, and able to enjoy the very sourest of grapes. When he lost to my former employer, David Tollner, in the 2004 Federal Election, he remarked that he’d lost because soldiers voted for Dave Tollner so they could go to Iraq and earn danger pay. He’d called them, in so many words, mercenaries. Unsurprisingly he was not invited back for the 2007 election.

Today Davidson was out sinking the boot into various persons related to the SIHIP program, including the shiny-bums sent to look his shoulder by Jenny Macklin. Just another example of his propensity to lash out when things don’t go his way.

But, as I said, I am ambivalent about Mr Davidson. Putting his personality to one side, let’s focus on what he did. In my opinion, Jim Davidson got the sack for behaving ethically.

Davidson is an engineer by training and experience. Engineers, like medicos and legal eagles, hold themselves to a strict, high standard of ethical integrity.

Amongst other things, engineers are required to tell their employers the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be. When Davidson saw Alison Anderson and told her that SIHIP would only be able to build perhaps 300-400 buildings, instead of 700, he was doing the ethical thing: telling the truth to his employer.

It was, of course, not a truth that was politically acceptable. It was a truth that NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson did everything in his power to discredit. Davidson had done the one thing that the foolish leader cannot forgive: he told the truth, despite the fact that his masters did not want to hear it or have it heard.

I find Davidson’s conduct as a professional engineer was ethically correct. I find Henderson’s punishment of that ethical correctness to be contemptible, low and self-serving.

I wish Jim Davidson further success in his career. We who are engineers, or in professions aspiring to that august title, could learn from his example.

Additional: There’s some confusion amongst non-NT readers about the order of events. Dave’s remarks give a good summary; I’ve also posted a comment below with a potted summary.

Additional remarks from Dave Bath below the fold.
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NT Labor may yet survive

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Independent MLA and “kingmaker” Gerry Wood has just about made up his mind how he’ll vote on Friday’s Legislative Assembly no confidence motion, and is delivering tantalising cryptic hints:

Mr Wood says he has almost made up his mind and will tell the leaders of his decision before Friday’s vote.

The latest whisper is that Wood is saying he thinks he should cast his vote in a way that “minimises disruption to the Territory economy”.  Now I admit it’s a real exercise in divining the political tea-leaves, but I tend to read that as suggesting that Wood is leaning in favour of voting against the no confidence motion and allowing Labor to continue governing in minority with his tacit support.

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Live broadcasting the fall of a government?

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Friday’s NT Legislative Assembly debate will probably be more peaceful than proceedings in Taiwan’s parliament, but you never know …

This Friday 14 August will witness the NT Legislative Assembly debating a “no confidence” motion in the current Henderson Labor government (see my previous post for the background). Starting at around 10:30 am CST I will be part of a panel broadcasting and commenting live on the debate on ABC Darwin local radio. The panel will be chaired by ABC morning presenter Leon Compton. Apart from yours truly, panel members will include veteran CLP apparatchik Peter Murphy (senior adviser to 5 successive Chief Ministers) and ABC TV Stateline compere Melinda James.

Troppo readers interested in following political history as it’s being made can listen live by going to the ABC Darwin website and then clicking on “launch player” under the heading “streaming now”.  I’ll also be on another panel on Stateline itself on Friday evening.  However at this stage it’s looking like Independent Gerry Wood, whose vote will probably determine whether the government stands or falls, will be one of the last speakers in the debate.  If he maintains his current stance (that he wants to listen to the parliamentary debate before finally making up his mind), then we may not know the outcome until close to midnight.  I’m told that current negotiations between Labor and the CLP have resulted in a tentative agreement that both party leaders will have 40 minutes to speak and everyone else 30 minutes each.  Indications are that every one of the 25 MLAs will speak.  That suggests a debate running almost 13 hours.

Troppo season comes early to the NT

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As Charles Darwin University’s designated “expert” political commentator, I’ve been doing lots of media interviews in the last week or so for both national and local media. As many Troppo readers will have noticed, the Henderson Labor government seems to be in the process of self-destructing just 12 months after it scraped back into government by 74 votes with a majority of just one seat after “Hendo” called an opportunistic election almost 12 months early.

One of the election promises Hendo made and actually kept was to introduce fixed four year terms for the future.  Section 23 of the Electoral Act embodies the new four year fixed term system, while sections 24, 25 and 26 contain provisions governing exceptional situations where an early election may be needed because the government has lost the confidence of Parliament or a supply/budget bill has been rejected.

Hendo wouldn’t have imagined in his wildest nightmare that the exceharveyptional early election provisions would be pressed into action less than a year after enactment.  However, the last few months have seen a prolonged if very entertaining process whereby the two most prominent indigenous Labor politicians, Marion Scrymgour and Alison Anderson, have been at each other’s throats and dragging the Hendo government down with them.  Scrymgour was Deputy Chief Minister shortly before she quit the ALP in high dudgeon a few months ago, partly because she disagreed with its policy of partially defunding smaller Aboriginal outstations (many of which are very expensive holiday camps occupied only a few weeks per year) and concentrating scarce health and education resources in larger, more viable communities, and partly because she suspected that one of Hendo’s spin doctors had leaked to the media a story to the effect that Scrymgour had been tired, emotional and crying in a Caucus meeting.  The result was a minority Labor government, with Scrymgour promising not to support a no confidence motion against the government and to vote for supply.

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