Indigenous health: is the Intervention working?

Latest figures give cause for hope, but the Territory still has the highest Indigenous mortality rates in Australia. The solution is to lift people out of poverty Debra Jopson guardian.co.uk, June 5, 2013 ‘Stabilise, normalise, exit.’ That’s how the Army officer turned Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough summarised his government’s response to the emergency which it declared in Australia’s Northern Territory six years ago. There has been no exit. The emergency response which put soldiers’ boots on the ground in remote communities as the nation reeled from revelations about Indigenous child abuse and violence against women in the Territory has morphed into the Intervention, run by civilians. It has shifted its focus to more broadly addressing Aboriginal disadvantage in ways that Canberra sees fit - which do not always coincide with local Indigenous aspirations for self-governance and service delivery. Jody Broun, a Yindjibarndi woman from Western Australia who co-chairs the Close the Gap Coalition, says that the message indigenous people got at the start of the Intervention was this:’We’re coming to take your children; all your men are sexual predators and offenders.’ But as we approach the Intervention’s June 21 anniversary, the Territory is the star performer in one of the most important Indicators of relief from the burden of disadvantage. It has made a difference to this one sad statistic: Aborigines have a significantly higher mortality rate than other Australians, particularly in the Territory…… The image of the Army thundering into the communities of the Red Heart raising dust in troop-carriers as the Intervention began was one of Canberra taking control. ’And they removed responsibility from people’s lives,’ says Broun. But in Indigenous affairs, there is one more thing that policy-makers often forget. ’For Aboriginal people, the culture is central,’ she says. It seems they just don’t want to be ‘normalised.’ As Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, star of the 1950s movie Jedda and an anti-Intervention activist has said: ‘If we lose our identity, we lose our culture. We become a carbon copy of [a] mainstream Australian. We become a nothing.’ Read more http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/05/indigenous-health-survey-intervention