First published in The Age

COALITION frontbencher Tony Abbott says the Coalition will not return to the ''authoritarian'' policies of its 2007 intervention in the Northern Territory, but will work with remote communities to devise solutions to their problems.

Mr Abbott, Coalition spokesman on indigenous affairs, called the intervention an ''emergency response'' as remote communities sank into ''a permissive paralysis, where anything goes and nothing really happens''.

But he said any long term solution to Aboriginal disadvantage would be different. ''To work, any intervention would have to be more respectful of local opinion than the original intervention was,'' he conceded.

''It was authoritarian. It was top down. It was based on mainstream Australian rather than Aboriginal values.''

In future, he said, the Coalition would work with communities and churches to restore some agreed form of authority. ''In remote places, first you had traditional authority, which was replaced by mission authority, which was replaced by no authority'', he told a conference run by the Melbourne Institute and The Australian. ''We can never recreate the past, but it would be silly to jettison the good things of the past.''