Rex Wild's opinion piece, first published in The Age

Child abuse in Aboriginal communities will not diminish until endemic disadvantage is seriously tackled and eradicated.

THURSDAY, June 21, 2007, was an important day for me. It marked the final episode of a criminal trial in which I had been involved for over four years. I telephoned my wife to tell her the news. She said: "Are you near a television?" I assumed that the news of this particular case's conclusion in the High Court that day was being announced. "No," she said, "John Howard is taking over the territory."

The week, and now months, that followed have involved me and the co-chairman of the original inquiry, Pat Anderson, fielding numerous calls from the media. The most commonly asked question, was "what do you think of the Commonwealth Government's response to your report (Little Children are Sacred)?"

To explain our response it is necessary to go to our report, to explain its origins, methodology and findings. The Board of Inquiry was created by the Northern Territory Government in August 2006. The Chief Minister asked us to investigate concerns about serious child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. It was established to find better ways to protect Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. The inquiry was asked to: study how and why Aboriginal children were being abused, focusing on unreported cases; identify problems with the way the Government attempts to protect Aboriginal children from abuse; look at how Government departments and other agencies can better work together to protect and help children and look into how the Government can better support and educate Aboriginal communities to prevent child sexual abuse.

During a period of six months or so we travelled all over the territory gathering feedback from more than 260 meetings with individuals, agencies and organisations. We visited 45 communities to talk with local people and received 65 written submissions. Eventually our findings were shaped into 97 recommendations, which we provided to the Chief Minister. Underlying those findings was the common view that sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was occurring largely because of the breakdown of Aboriginal culture and society and the consequent dysfunctionality of communities.

It is clear that child sexual abuse is a complex and deep-seated problem that, on any view, requires urgent, dedicated and collective action from the entire community. The recommendations we made were intended to offer advice to the Northern Territory Government on how it could best support and empower communities to prevent child sexual abuse. In framing the recommendations, we were conscious of, and referred to, the critical importance of governments committing to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities.

Thus, the thrust of the recommendations, which were designed to advise the Northern Territory Government on how it could help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, was for there to be consultation with, and ownership by, the communities, of those solutions. The underlying dysfunctionality where child sexual abuse flourishes needed to be attacked and the strength returned to Aboriginal people.

It was our view that prevention was the key concept to be developed. We understood the necessity to deal with offenders and perpetrators where they were identified but that the underlying root causes needed to be attacked and eradicated.

It was obvious, from our perspective, that this was a matter of national significance and required the co-operation of the Commonwealth and Territory Governments (and, as it turned out other governments throughout Australia). It was important, in our view, that the goodwill established with the Aboriginal people, and the exposure of the curse of sexual abuse, be used as the basis and starting point for an attack upon it.

It was against this background that we considered the response that has been made by successive Commonwealth governments. So, although we, as the co-authors of the report, were very happy that our report had landed on prime minister John Howard's desk and that it has played some part in him deciding to do something about the plight of Aboriginal people, it seems to us that the response has missed the central point of our recommendations.

The first recommendation was absolutely clear: No solution should be imposed from above. We regarded it of critical importance that governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for their communities. That is, that community involvement of indigenous people with the government should be designed as a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.

When the prime minister and his indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough, initially announced their emergency response, which included the imminent mobilisation of the military, they had no specific consultation with the Northern Territory Government and certainly not with the authors of the report. In fact, it appears from what Brough has recently said publicly that the intervention was devised in a secret, bunker-style Canberra bureaucratic love-in in the three days before its announcement.

It always seemed significant to us that the Commonwealth interventionists seized on the first sentence of our first recommendation and ignored what followed immediately, which gave it its context. Interestingly, the Australian Government's publication One Year On, dated June 20, 2008, contains the following introduction: "The Northern Territory Emergency Response was announced in response to the first recommendation of the Little Children are Sacred report. This asked that: Aboriginal child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory be designated as an issue of urgent national significance by both the Australian and Northern Territory governments." In my view, this perpetuates the mischievous and misleading manner in which the Commonwealth Government(s) has always presented the findings of the report. It ignores, as successive silent bureaucrats have continued to ignore, the necessity to grapple with the underlying significant cultural, social and legal issues confronting indigenous Australians.

And, if it is suggested that urgent steps were required to deal with existing perpetrators and offenders, it may be questioned whether any such villains have been identified in the year or so since the former prime minister's announcement — that is, as a result of the intervention rather than because of other existing police investigations.

Many communities throughout Australia have, of course, welcomed intervention. It is consistent with the desires of communities that there be attention given to the underlying causes of the malaise.

One of the central tenets of our recommendations was that this whole procedure required the co-operation of the three major stakeholders (the two Governments and the Aboriginal communities) and that the predominant role of the Commonwealth would be to provide the funding necessary.

In an interview that I gave more than a year ago, I said: "If the funding doesn't follow the police and the army it will all be a complete waste of time."

We sincerely hope that this is not the case but rather if the Commonwealth response, as it has been inevitably modified during the past year, eventually achieves this result, then we will be very content, but very surprised.

Somewhere recently, I wrote a comment on the anniversary of the intervention. It was to the effect that it was sad that this was not a time for celebration: that is, that the Commonwealth Government's response to the enormous public and political interest in the plight of indigenous people, had not been more positive and welcomed by the people.

The disappointment has been in a lost opportunity, a chance to harness goodwill developed all over the territory, and Australia, to demonstrate real leadership and do something creative and wonderful for indigenous people. We are left to continue the arguments about specific funding needs and programs rather than working together. How hard is it to understand that concept?

I will leave you with some comments from Tony Fitzgerald, the territory's Anti-Discrimination Commissioner. In his June 2008 newsletter he concluded a critical article on the intervention in this way: "The only unqualified success of the intervention is that it has drawn attention to disadvantage in remote communities, and highlighted the need for long-term reform. Federal and NT governments have known about this disadvantage for decades, yet they have continued to neglect, systematically underfund and impose policy from afar.

"The incidence of child abuse in remote communities will not diminish until disadvantage — especially in the areas of health, housing and education — is removed. This will happen when remote communities receive their fair share of the resource cake over the long term. This has never happened, to our eternal shame."

Amen!

Rex Wild, QC, is the co-author of the Little Children Are Sacred Report. This is an edited extract of a speech to be given to the 3rd National Indigenous Legal Conference in Melbourne on Saturday.