The NT Intervention: Living with a Racist Policy; Public Forum and Demo

P1 joins the group of people who see a bad idea and want to apply it to everyone. If it does not work in isolated communities then I doubt it will work for all of us.

At least my fascist policies aren’t racist 🙂

I personally think that the problems we are talking about, those the the Howard Govt claimed the “intervention” would address are mostly ones of isolation and lower socio-economic circumstance. The get confused with racial issues because most of the unemployed people in remote communities in NT are Indigenous.

The Intervention was clearly done for political reasons but it appears that as a result violence & assaults are way down in many remote communities.

I bet the speakers at this forum are pretty well educated & can look after themselves. They were not the people getting bashed & belted because of the drunken violence.

what i want to know is where the actual instances of child abuse were reported. were they on community lands, or in the local towns? and who made the claims?

seems to be a bit like the “WMD” and iraq…

if these abuses were occurring, the intervention would have uncovered them. It hasn’t. what will happen now?

and P1, if we embargoed welfare payments for all, how would they be able to purchase things that the cards didn’t accept? not smokes and booze, but a bus ride, a taxi fare, drycleaning for an interview, etc, etc. Not all welfare recipients are sitting around with their hands out, in fact it is a few that tar the rest with the same brush.

sepi said :

The experts recommend talking to each community, identifying community leaders, setting up specific programs for that area, and leaving the programs in place for long enough for them to start working.

Also, getting better access to medical services and nutrition and baby health information.

Isn’t that the path that has been tried over and over for the past 40 years?

Baby health information – I think you’ll find there has been plenty of that handed out for the past few decades as well, but if people aren’t going to take any notice of it, then it’s just more wasted breath.

dexi said :

Why not support an embargo on all wages for being a asshole?

Typical leftie reply there!

By the way, the word is arsehole – unless you are a dumb American-wannabe.

genuine law enforcement as we expect in our cities wouldn’t hurt either.

Is embargoing a portion of welfare really that bad an idea? Trying to restrict public money being spent on alcohol/ciggies/drugs as opposed to food can’t be all bad.

Let’s leave the ‘racist’ bits out for now, but I am genuinely curious as to whether embargoing would work.

The experts recommend talking to each community, identifying community leaders, setting up specific programs for that area, and leaving the programs in place for long enough for them to start working.

Also, getting better access to medical services and nutrition and baby health information.

The money spent on the one compulsory medical examination for every child in the NT could have paid for the extra ongoing medical services that remote NT ares have been crying out for forever.

And with no money provided for follow up care after the single compulsory health examination, they are just an insult really – most children are healthy (surprise surprise), and where problems are identified there are no services to deal with them.

And no child abuse was uncovered – which was the rationale for the whole thing anyway.

Mr Evil is first in with the unhelpful generalisations. You might take the time to listen to the speakers and the communities involved.

P1 joins the group of people who see a bad idea and want to apply it to everyone. If it does not work in isolated communities then I doubt it will work for all of us.

Why not support an embargo on all wages for being a asshole?

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy said :

What p1 said.

+1

What p1 said.

I am all for the concept of embargoing payments to welfare recipients, but applied to *ALL* welfare recipients.

And what do the ‘experts’ suggest?

I don’t think the intervention has actually made any inroads into any of those issues. John Howard just wanted you to think it would.

Instead it has caused new problems. Today’s paper says that old people and the illiterate are suffering as they cannot work out how to use the shopping cards they now get instead of normal welfare payments like the rest of the country.

The intervention shows how messed up things get when govt tries to rush in and organise something overnight, without listening to any of the experts.

Yeah, let them go back to drinking themselves into a stupor, beating the sh1t out of one another and screwing their children.