Opinion piece by Janet Hunt, President of ANTaR. First published in the Canberra Times, 29 October 2009

One year ago the Federal Government received the final report of the Northern Territory Emergency Response Review Panel. It concluded “the intervention diminished its own effectiveness through its failure to engage constructively with the Aboriginal people it intended to help”.

The review panel advised that “sustainable improvements in the safety and well-being of children and families in remote communities will only be achieved through partnerships between community and government”.

A year on there is little evidence of real partnerships between community and government. And despite the Government’s indication in its highly acclaimed national apology that it wanted to reset the relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, little seems to have changed as top-down policies are rolled out.

The recently-related progress report on the intervention (re-badged Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory) shows an impressive flurry of resource “inputs” but tells us little about the real outcomes. We do not know how effective all this expenditure will be and we get no sense of what Aboriginal voices think about it all.

Yet more than two years after the intervention began many Aboriginal people report feeling despondent and disempowered by the many changes that have washed over them like a tidal wave. Their aspirations don’t seem to be taken seriously-they are simply being asked, or coerced, to become like us and join the “mainstream”.

The simple lesson outlined in Little Children are Sacred report and reiterated in the review panel’s report, is that better outcomes will be achieved by genuinely engaging and supporting Aboriginal communities than by coercing and stigmatising them. However, after almost two years in office, the Rudd Government is still maintaining discriminatory stigmatising aspects of the policies and approaches it inherited.

If governments look at what is already working in communities they will find that Aboriginal solutions to Aboriginal problems usually yield the best results. Imposing solutions across the board will certainly not work and may in fact prove counter-productive.

As we await the Federal Government’s proposed changes to the intervention to fulfill its commitment to bring its measures into line with the Racial Discrimination Act, it is worth dwelling on two of the policies that Aboriginal communities have expressed strong concerns about in relation to their unfair and discriminatory impacts.

The compulsory income management of about 15,000 people at a cost of approximately $100 million per year stigmatises entire communities as dysfunctional and incapable of taking responsibility for and control of their own lives. The review strongly recommended this should become voluntary, or case by case, but it appears unlikely the Government will alter its approach.

The Government’s pre-condition that communities receiving new or upgraded housing and infrastructure must lease control of their community land to the government for 40 or 60 years is also seen by many Aborigines as profoundly disempowering. They see it as a discriminatory condition for receiving basic services and they anguish about it in terms of the binding effects of their decisions on future generations.

The Government wants to retain both policies. Imposing mainstream solutions and control means sacrificing local initiatives and solutions and undermining community capacity.

There is a better way. Governments must understand that the only “silver bullet” is the one produced through genuine partnerships with Aboriginal people based on respect and trust.