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George Newhouse: The Australian government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities is discriminatory and dehumanising | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The Australian government’s intervention in aboriginal communities
The Guardian 3 Dec 08 the Howard government was in election mode and one doesn’t have to be too cynical to see that the “little children” were used to implement a hidden agenda. The intervention was an ideologically driven campaign by a government that was opposed to communal ownership of Aboriginal land and assets.
t allowed the government to grant secretive star-chamber criminal investigative powers against Aboriginal men that had only ever applied to terrorists and mafiosi before. It allowed the government to quarantine the social security payments of indigenous Australians. It allowed a rollback of indigenous cultural institutions such as teaching local languages and the integration of traditional law into our legal system.
……………….It was a brilliant strategy. We could hardly object to protecting women and children from abuse. It didn’t matter that the thrust of the government’s policies were not connected to child abuse at all……………………..If the government’s primary objective was to address child abuse, it would have implemented the recommendations in the report and taken a national approach to the problem……………….We cannot celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights while the first Australians are suffering from regressive and discriminatory laws.

George Newhouse: The Australian government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities is discriminatory and dehumanising | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

December 4, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized