is that the Howard gov't initiated the intervention claiming it was to protect children from abuse, when the initiative was undertaken for other reasons (which they've elaborated on in numerous previous pieces).
There's no claim that thorpe talked about abuse: the claim is that he talked about, & decried, the Intervention: which he did.
The relevant passage from the wsws article:
The Olympic gold medalist then went on to direct his fire against the Northern Territory “intervention”, the program initiated in June 2007 by the former Howard government, with Labor Party support, under the false claims that it was aimed at protecting Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory from child abuse. The raft of punitive measures that have since been introduced include compulsory income management of all Aboriginal welfare and pension recipients, suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and the seizure of Aboriginal controlled land. Elected to power in November 2008, the Rudd Labor government has maintained these retrogressive social policies in the face of growing Aboriginal opposition.
“The intervention,” Thorpe said, “was constructed by the previous government and has since been reported to have been assembled in the space of just one day. The irony is that Aboriginal people had been campaigning for decades about the living conditions and the neglect of their children within their communities.
“The programs to protect and nurture the children had been grossly neglected and underfunded by government over the last decade. What appears to be a political stunt and a grab for government control over Aboriginal people continues to this day under the new government.
“Once more an Australian government has claimed it is doing its best for Aboriginal Australians by taking over their communities, appointing white managers, more government bureaucrats, promising all kinds of things, if Aboriginal people will just sign over their communities under forty-year leases to the Federal Government. And politicians wonder why Aboriginal people do not trust them. The truth is for over 200 years Australian governments have neglected and patronized Aboriginal people.
“The intervention is unlikely to provide any lasting benefit to Aboriginal people because it tries to push and punish them, to take over their lives, rather than work with them.”
The last four paragraphs are thorpe's words, directly quoted. The first paragraph is background on the intervention.
Finally, I suggest that you have no way of knowing the extent or seriousness of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, in aboriginal outposts in australia, nor do you know the severity in comparison with other groupings in australian society, or american society.
what we can know is that australian history does not show the australian ruling class or gov't in a "helping" role vis a vis aboriginal people, & history generally shows that the blanket denial of rights to entire communities is pernicious, whatever the supposed rationale for such denial of rights.
& if it can be done to this community/grouping, it can be done to *any* community/grouping on the same blanket basis.
we also know that the gov't is interested in getting aboriginal lands:
"At the centre of the new scheme is a massive land grab. The Howard government will override the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act and the 1976 Land Rights Act — which granted land tenure to Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory — in order to take over land, initially through five-year leases. No compensation will be paid to the current landholders, despite a constitutional requirement to do so. Instead, they will be paid “in kind” — through government services—a proposal reminiscent of the days when cattle station owners gave Aboriginal workers rations of tea, sugar and flour in lieu of wages."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jun2007/sep-j23.shtml"The Rudd cabinet is rushing through a national land grab in a proposed compulsory forty year scheme holding Aboriginal communities ransom. In the very week that Australia must answer to the UN in response to human rights complaints of an ongoing nature, latest developments put the plan into perspective and expose the earlier machinations of a comprehensive assault on Indiginous Australia. Howard’s NT intervention looks more like an entre as Rudd delivers the main course, an all out offensive against the indigenous nations by means of government coercion and withheld supply to assume control of lands for commercial and other ‘in confidence’ purposes. As the government sells its doom and gloom messages to an arrested nation, Australian history enters another dark alleyway of secret deals, racism and more layers of questionable legislation in an attempt to control remote communities...
http://news.rosettamoon.com/?p=238The Rudd government had demanded a forty-year lease over the town camps in exchange for $125 million worth of upgrades to homes and infrastructure. But Tangentyere rejected the proposal, saying it didn’t trust government to properly deliver housing for Aboriginal people.
In response, Jenny Macklin announced last month that the government would simply compulsorily acquire the town camps, using the NT emergency intervention legislation.
The leaked documents reveal that:
• The Minister was warned in March this year that if she reinstated the Racial Discrimination Act to the NT intervention legislation, there was a “significant risk” the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land for five years would not survive a court challenge.
• Macklin was warned by her department against creating any “formal consultative” process on compulsory land acquisition because it would be very expensive, might not “sufficiently strengthen” the government’s legal position in the event of a court challenge, and was unlikely to get the outcome the government required — “informed consent”. Instead, the official recommends an “informal consultative process on land use approvals which goes some way to providing a consultative mechanism”.
• The government’s current round of consultations with people affected by the NT intervention are aimed, at least in part, at building a better legal case in the event the government is challenged in court. Macklin’s department warns: “
have advised that the addition of will reduce the risk that a court will find the five-year leases not compliant with the RDA. They also note that depending upon the process of consultation during the RDA consultations, this risk may be further reduced.”
http://www.unpo.org/content/view/9785/77/
Governments are going to great measures to transform Aboriginal land into crown land. Under Rudd’s leadership, these latest attacks on Aboriginal people have been increased in the NT and extended to affect Aboriginal people in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Labor is making these attacks because in recent years remote Aboriginal communities have been successful in opposing the establishment of new uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps.
With an expected increase in global use of nuclear power, the price of uranium has rapidly increased and the big mining companies have been pressuring Australian governments to allow the opening of more mines and the establishment of a nuclear waste dump. The forced or coopted loss of Aboriginal control of their land is an important step to achieving this.
http://directaction.org.au/issue7/labor_steps_up_racist_nt_land_grab
& this:
'In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the “national emergency”, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the “unthinkable numbers”. They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia.
What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was “quarantined”. Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: “To see decent, caring fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage.”'
http://daownunder.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/a-new-land-grab-in-australia/
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