I thank the Sydney Institute for the opportunity of this platform to speak on the subject of the Government's response to the challenges facing the indigenous communities of the Northern Territory.

I do welcome the fact that the Sydney Institute continues to provide for people of all political persuasions a forum for significant thoughtful addresses and as a result make a very big contribution to public policy debate in our country.

Tonight, in our rich and beautiful country, there are children living out a Hobbesian nightmare of violence, abuse and neglect.

Many are in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. To recognise this is not racist. It is a simple, empirical fact.

If anything, our duty of care is greater because of who and where they are.

We can debate root causes until the proverbial cows come home. Governments and NGOs at all levels can consult and search for a cherished consensus on what to do and the order in which to do it. We could all declare with abject timidity that by 2020 indigenous and other Australians should all be equal.

Frankly, that would be the easiest thing in the world to do.

We can do all this in the sure knowledge that without urgent action to restore social order, the nightmare will go on - more grog, more violence, more pornography and more sexual abuse - as the generation we're supposed to save sinks further into the abyss. Even worse, believing that what is happening to them is quite normal.

There comes a point where the obligations of national governments take over. Action cannot be delayed by concerns that it's not 'culturally appropriate'. No culture - and certainly no indigenous culture - believes child abuse is appropriate.

This is not an Aboriginal problem or a Northern Territory problem. It's an Australian problem that calls for national leadership.

I believe the Australian Government's obligation to the vulnerable indigenous children of the Northern Territory is clear, compelling and paramount. Where possible, it's to give them the chance of a childhood and some hope for the future.

My purpose tonight is to further outline the Australian Government's response to the Little Children Are Sacred report, to explain why we believe it warrants the description of a national emergency, to answer some of the questions and concerns that have arisen in recent days, and to assure all Australians that the full power and resources of the Commonwealth will be directed to making lasting change, where we can, in the daily lives and future prospects of the most vulnerable fellow citizens in our nation.

The emergency response plan I announced last Thursday with the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, is radical, comprehensive and highly interventionist.

This is not laissez-faire liberalism or light-touch government by any means. It represents a sweeping assumption of power and a necessary assumption of responsibility.

It follows what can only be described as a horrifying portrayal of life for many indigenous children in the heart of our nation. The report by Rex Wild QC and Pat Anderson that was handed to the Northern Territory Government eight weeks ago documents in sickening detail the human misery and dysfunction in many remote Aboriginal communities.

It catalogues a litany of abuse and neglect, with cases reported to the inquiry of young men raping and abusing children as young as six months and six year olds acting out sexual behaviour in groups.

The inquiry was told of one community living in fear and shame because of their inability to prevent a 17-year-old boy from showing pornographic videos to younger children and making them act out scenes. He was described as running a 'little empire', but the community felt helpless to prevent it.

This social malaise cannot and should not be seen as just a failure of government. The primary responsibility for the care and upbringing of children must rest with parents and we should be honest and mature enough as a society to recognise this fact.

Still there is no escaping the patent inadequacy of the old approach where immediate government responsibility for these matters rests with the states and territories.

Many Australians, myself included, looked aghast at the failure of the American federal system of government to cope adequately with Hurricane Katrina and the human misery and lawlessness that engulfed New Orleans in 2005.

We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still.

It's largely been hidden from the public - in part by a permit system in the Northern Territory that keeps communities out of view and out of mind.

Now many indigenous people - men and women - are speaking out. And so we are determined to change course.

At least in the near term, I believe the level of extreme social breakdown in some communities demands a highly prescriptive approach centred, in the first place, on restoring law and order.

Freedoms and rights, especially for women and children, are little more than cruel fictions without the rule of law and some semblance of social order imposed by legitimate authority.

We will have additional police on the ground in the Northern Territory within 10 days and I welcome the promise from New South Wales and Victoria of more of their police resources.

This immediate increase in policing levels will be paid for by the Commonwealth and additional resources devoted to establishing an Australian Government sexual abuse desk.

This issue will be formally referred to the Intergovernmental Committee on the Australian Crime Commission meeting this Thursday, allowing it to identify and locate perpetrators of sexual abuse of indigenous children in other areas of Australia.

In terms of the broader response, a team of officials including from Centrelink, the Departments of Employment and Workplace Relations, Health and other Commonwealth officers are at this moment preparing to go out to the first identified communities in the course of this week.

The key task will be to assure communities about our purpose and to provide an initial report on conditions to the Minister, Mr Brough.

In addition, the Government will move swiftly to put in place a series of measures and controls relating to alcohol consumption, health care, welfare payments, school attendance and pornography. They include:

* widespread alcohol restrictions on Northern Territory Aboriginal land initially but not limited to six months, with the expectation that the Northern Territory Government during that time will develop a comprehensive plan to tackle what the Wild-Anderson report described as the 'rivers of grog';
* compulsory health checks on all indigenous children in Aboriginal communities, with provision of necessary follow-up medical care;
* quarantining of 50 per cent of welfare payments to stem the flow of cash going towards alcohol and other substance abuse and to ensure that funds meant to be used for children's welfare are actually used for that purpose;
* enforcing attendance at school by linking income support and family assistance payments to school attendance; and finally
* a ban on possession of X-rated pornography in prescribed areas, together with checks for pornography on all publicly funded computers.

Simultaneously, we will begin the task of cleaning up the towns and bringing some normalcy to the environments in which people are living.

This is the recovery phase. It will stabilise the situation. It will bring law, order and protection. Then we will start the rebuilding.

The Commonwealth will take control of townships through five-year leases to ensure that property and public housing can be improved. This will include payment where necessary of just terms compensation.

Coupled to this will be intensive on-ground cleanup and repair of communities, including the marshalling of local workforces through Work-for-the-Dole-type arrangements. All able-bodied, working age community members who receive Newstart, that's the unemployment benefit, will be required to participate.

We will aim to improve governance by appointing managers of government business in the relevant communities.

The permit system for common areas, road corridors and airstrips for prescribed communities on Aboriginal land will be scrapped. Private residences and sacred sites will continue to be protected.

If required, a special sitting in the winter parliamentary break will consider legislation to implement these measures.

I've been greatly heartened, as have my colleagues, by the support we have received in recent days right across the spectrum of Australian society, including from many in the indigenous communities.

Mr Brough is assembling a talented group of eminent Australians to oversee the plan's operation. I want to record my personal appreciation to the Western Australian Magistrate Sue Gordon, the chairman of the National Indigenous Council and author of the 2002 Gordon Report into Aboriginal child abuse in Western Australia, for agreeing to take a leadership role on the Taskforce.

Others on that group are:

* Shane Castles, who led the Australian Federal Police operation in the Solomon Islands
* Dr Bill Glasson, a former federal president of the Australian Medical Association
* John Reeves QC, a practising barrister, the chairman of the Northern Territory Red Cross and the former Labor Party member in the Federal Parliament for the Northern Territory
* Roger Corbett, a member of the board of Reserve Bank Board and former Chief Executive of Woolworths Ltd; and finally
* Miriam Rose Baumann, the principal at St Francis Xavier Catholic School at Daly River and member of the National Indigenous Council.

In addition to these people, both the Secretary of my Department, Dr Peter Shergold, and the Chief Executive of the Northern Territory Department of the Chief Minister, Paul Tyrrell, will be members of the Taskforce. That will ensure the coordination of support from both the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments.

It is anticipated that this Taskforce will operate for at least 12 months and will be supported by full-time administrative and field staff. I thank them all for their willingness to serve in this important role.

I can announce tonight that, together with Mr Brough, I will attend the first meeting of the Taskforce to be held this coming Saturday in Brisbane.

I also want at this juncture to pay special mention of the moral courage, the intellectual rigour and historical perspective which Noel Pearson has brought to the challenges of indigenous dysfunction in recent years.

No Australian can be other than impressed by his personal crusade to overcome the social problems of his beloved people.

It goes without saying that Mr Brough and I take full responsibility for the success or failure of this plan. We are under no illusion that it will take time to show results and that it will have painful consequences for some people. We will make mistakes along the way.

Yet we believe the overriding responsibility and duty of care we have for the young of this country justifies the scale, the breadth and the urgency of our response.

Let me now seek to explain and answer some of the questions and concerns that have arisen in some quarters since Mr Brough and I announced the emergency response.

First, aren't we just picking on one group when this problem exists across our society?

Yes, abuse does occur in mainstream society, but not on this scale and not in these appalling, virtually inescapable, circumstances.

This has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with recognising a need to counter a tragic deterioration in social norms and responsible behaviour, often aided and abetted by the worst excesses of modern Western culture.

We believe this is as much a breakdown of traditional customs and laws as it is of 'white man's law'. There is nothing intrinsic to indigenous culture that makes neglect of children or sexual abuse any less of an affront to indigenous Australians.

We recognise too that the abuse of Aboriginal children is in no way confined to Aboriginal offenders. The alcohol, the drugs, the petrol and the pornography have flowed just as readily through white as well as black hands.

The Secretary of my department will meet next week with the Minerals Council of Australia to discuss what support our mining industry can lend, focusing on their own employees.

Second, why just in the Northern Territory and why only now?

Answer: because we can, given our constitutional powers, but also because the scale of the law and order crisis is particularly apparent in the Territory.

In Galiwin'ku, for example, an area with a population of more than 2,000, the Northern Territory Government has only recently agreed to provide a police presence following concerted pressure from the Commonwealth and the provision of more than $7 million for a police station and officer accommodation.

In Mutitjulu, the Commonwealth again paid for a police station and agreed with the NT on a permanent manned presence, only to have this result in a sporadic presence of Aboriginal community police officers who do not have full policing powers.

I want to reaffirm tonight the Commonwealth's desire to work with the Northern Territory Government to ensure we best meet the needs of indigenous people in these communities.

This Thursday, I will meet with the Chief Minister, Clare Martin, in Queensland to ensure the necessary follow up on the ground is forthcoming.

As to the problems in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia, the simple fact is that we do not have the power and the authority in those jurisdictions to act in the same way. The core of the problem - and that's law and order - is the exclusive responsibility of the states under our constitution.

It's true that for a long time the Commonwealth persisted in the hope that all states and territories would discharge these responsibilities appropriately.

Almost four years ago, I convened a roundtable on family violence and child abuse in indigenous communities. After that in a series of steps, we committed more than $150 million to family violence and substance abuse programmes and to legal aid services.

In the end, however, it took Mal Brough's energy and determination to provide the necessary focus on law and order that is at the heart of this issue.

He was criticised by some for doing so and tomorrow will mark exactly a year since he convened a National Summit on Violence and Child Abuse in Indigenous Communities. This in turn saw the Commonwealth commit a further $130 million for police infrastructure, drug and alcohol treatment, health checks and other services.

The simple truth, however, is that you cannot make lasting changes in areas like health, education and housing while ever women and children are petrified of violence and sexual molestation. Without physical security no amount of extra resources will give these people a genuine future.

I continue to urge state governments to increase their policing presence on the ground and to deliver a similar response to abuse and neglect where it is occurring in their jurisdictions.

Why now? Because if we had held back after the release of the Wild-Anderson report, we would have stood condemned, and rightly so.

If people want to interpret what we have done as a political act so be it. I'll cop those accusations if it galvanises all governments and responsible authorities into action.

Third, why are we taking a blanket approach to the quarantining of welfare and family payments and why aren't we extending this action across the community?

In the first stage, the overriding objective is to reduce the amount of money finding its way towards alcohol and drugs in indigenous communities. As well as providing a clear signal to the communities, we hope to avoid situations where responsible adults find themselves intimidated and threatened physically because they are easy targets.

Mal Brough has highlighted the case of an elderly woman in Wadeye, a responsible carer for her grandchild, who faces intimidation and threats of violence from intoxicated young men if she does not go to an automatic teller and hand over the money.

She could get Centrelink to quarantine money voluntarily now, but fear for her own safety prevents her from doing so. To minimise this practice known as 'humbugging' in the Northern Territory, we believe that, at least initially, there needs to be an across-the-board move towards quarantining.

As to the wider Australian community, Federal Cabinet will at its next meeting consider a proposal from Mr Brough to extend the quarantining of welfare payments in certain circumstances to the wider community where individuals are abusing their children or failing to fulfil their parental responsibilities.

Again, this issue has got nothing to do with race. It has got everything to do with the parental responsibility that accompanies their right to welfare support.

We need to ensure that welfare payments provided by government for the care and support of children are used for that purpose. And from there, we must do everything possible to encourage school attendance on the basis that education offers the only lasting path out of welfare dependency and despair.

Finally, isn't this emergency plan an admission that nothing seems to work in indigenous affairs?

I say to that not at all. Parallel to these communities in crisis there are stories of extraordinary achievement by indigenous Australians, overcoming adversity and taking advantage of all this country has to offer.

We should not lose sight of progress that is being made, slow and uneven as it is.

In the 12 months to the end of May 2007, Job Network placed into employment some 46,100 indigenous job seekers, an increase of 13 per cent over the previous 12 months.

More indigenous students are staying at school and then going on to higher education. Forty per cent of indigenous students progressed to Year 12 in 2005, up from 29 per cent in 1996. Still not enough, but a steady improvement.

A little known fact is that employment rates and starting salaries for indigenous graduates are higher than for other Australians. And more indigenous Australians are going on to own their own homes.

So there is good news and in our desire for radical change to many deep-seated problems we should also remember that progress is being made.

Just a month ago, our nation recognised the generation of patriots who pricked our national conscience 40 years ago and inspired the most resoundingly successful referendum ever in Australia.

I said then that the right of an Aboriginal Australian to live on remote communal land is no right at all if accompanied by grinding poverty, overcrowding, poor health, community violence and alienation from mainstream society.

A truly colour blind society must recognise that Reconciliation has little meaning in a narrative of separateness from that society.

A truly colour blind society must recognise that we are dealing in this crisis with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present.

And on that basis, a truly colour blind society must take exceptional measures to deal with an exceptionally tragic situation.

Thank you.