Racism and the NT Intervention

One of the clearest examples of the tenuous link between child abuse and many measures in the NT intervention, is the brazen undermining of Aboriginal land rights.

Provisions include:
- The Australian government forcing compulsory 5-year leases on all major Aboriginal communities in the NT. No negotiation or lease document is required. ‘Just terms’ compensation will only be paid ‘if warranted’. The leases do not guarantee Aboriginal people right of residence – it is not clear whether the government could evict Aboriginal people from their own communities.
- The government compulsorily acquiring town camp leases and vesting freehold title in itself. This dispossesses Traditional Owners of their land. No notice or process is required. Compensation may be payable but is not guaranteed.

The implications of these provisions are two-fold. One: these changes dilute Aboriginal control of land and expand their potential for commercial development. The context of the NT intervention was a push for an Aboriginal community in the NT to host a nuclear waste dump on their land; twinned with corporate agitation for the expansion of uranium mining and exports. The change of government in Australia last year did not also see a change in the aims – or influence – of the mining lobby. Mining interests have led opposition to the notion of Aboriginal land rights, and certainly have not opposed the NT intervention: weakening as it does Aboriginal control of land, easing access to land for powerful corporate players.

The NT intervention destabilises Aboriginal control of land, and community structures enabling the making of decisions regarding land. Secondly, it destabilises Aboriginal communities themselves, with reports today of the movements of outer communities in the NT moving into town centres as the NT intervention spreads across the territory in size and scope. Again, this undermines the force of Aboriginal decisions regarding access to land.

These provisions display the racist extensions of the intervention beyond even the inherently racist aspects of the invasion. The undermining of Aboriginal land rights not only weakens Aboriginal communities and culture, but also further advances exploitation of land and Aboriginal people being dumped with the problems associated with storing nuclear waste or with the consequences of uranium mining. The environmental racism implicit in the intervention adds further importance to greenies supporting the alliance for Indigenous sovereignty.

Though sudden and intense, the NT intervention is not new policy: but an extension of government ideologies towards Indigenous people. The intervention is a development that already deserves its own shocking – but not new – place in the ongoing history of Indigenous genocide in Australia.