CPA - The Guardian

Aboriginal Elder Richard Downs has slammed the Northern Territory intervention as a racist policy that undoes 50 years of progress. Mr Downs is on a speaking tour to rally support for a protest camp set up outside the Ampilatwatja community in the NT.

Residents of the camp say they won’t move back into the community until the intervention measures are lifted. “I want people around the country to know what it is like to live under the intervention,” Mr Downs said in Sydney.

“At check-outs in Woolworths and Coles ... we have got one line for the black people who have these special basics green cards and you have got the other check-outs which are open to the general public. It is an embarrassment.

“We have just gone backwards 50 or 60 years, back to the welfare days.”

Mr Downs said the intervention had not brought any improvements and claims of positive change were just that – claims. “We have had night patrols for years ... we have had Centrelink income management ... but it was a choice,” he said.

The intervention had taken away Aboriginal people’s human rights, Mr Downs said, adding that the policy must be scrapped. Politicians must return to the drawing board and work with Aboriginal people to find solutions, he said.

Following a number of meetings held across NSW, Mr Downs confirmed the NSW union movement and Amnesty International were supporting the walk off. He also said the protest camp of Ampilatwatja was in desperate need of funds to build a bore as currently the community was carting water to the camp.

Anyone interested in supporting the Ampilatwatja Walk Off can find more information at interventionwalkoff.wordpress.com.

Meanwhile, leading human rights lawyer Julian Burnside QC said the federal government must rework or scrap racist elements of the intervention program in remote Indigenous communities and honour Australia’s obligations under international law.

Labor is moving to reinstate the legislation that allowed some of the more controversial measures to be rolled out.

But Mr Burnside said Australia would fail as a signatory to a number of UN conventions and violate its own laws, unless there were changes to the intervention’s “overtly discriminatory” measures.

“This is a moral obligation on the part of the Government and nothing less would be acceptable,” he said. “The removal, or redesign, of special measures is an essential starting point.”

The Howard government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act to allow for the intervention’s more extreme measures, such as compulsory welfare quarantining. But the Rudd government announced plans to reinstate the Act when it gave public support to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Mr Burnside said that if Australia wanted to abide by the agreement it made with 144 other countries in April, it had to take into account the findings of James Anaya, the UN’s special rapporteur on Indigenous rights who described the intervention as racist and discriminatory following his tour of Australia in August.

The Koori Mail

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