First published in The Canberra Times

ASSAULTS have increased, substance abuse has soared and school attendance rates are unchanged in the NT indigenous communities targeted by the Federal Government's intervention.

Those are the findings of a government report, released quietly at the end of October, on the performance of what is now called the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

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''.

By Sarah Burnside, First published in New Matilda

Jenny Macklin said she would reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT by the end of October — but that has been delayed as the Government tries to find a way around the law

On 21 June 2007 Australia became, in the words of Guy Rundle, "the first member of the Coalition of the Willing to invade itself". The Howard government's Northern Territory Emergency Response could only be implemented by suspending the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (RDA).