Australia cracks down on Aborigines

Federal troops arrived Wednesday to enforce tighter regulations on welfare payments and a ban on pornography and alcohol in Aboriginal communities.

from the June 27, 2007 edition

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'Employment is key,' leaders say

Successive governments have spent billions of dollars trying to address the catastrophic disintegration of Aboriginal culture, but solutions have been depressingly elusive.

Aboriginal leaders say that restoring law and order and clamping down on alcohol and pornography should be part of a much broader effort to improve Aborigines' lives.

What is really needed for blighted communities are jobs, better education, and substance abuse rehabilitation programs, they say.

"What the government has announced are short-term, extreme measures, which don't address the underlying issues," says Priscilla Collins, head of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency.

"Employment is key – if you don't have a job, you sit at home all day and it becomes very depressing. We need to improve the services in these remote places – petrol stations, clinics, shops – and that will create employment. It's not rocket science."

Ms. Collins has worked in the desert regions of central Australia for 18 years and knows of only two settlements that have substance-abuse rehabilitation programs.

"If you ban alcohol, there's nowhere to dry out, no help, and addicts take out their anger on their families," says Collins.

Questions have also been raised about why it has taken Howard, who has been prime minister for more than a decade, so long to act.

The prime minister's opponents have accused him of cynically engineering a feel-good, vote-grabbing initiative ahead of an election due this fall.

Howard dismissed the charge and likened the scale of abuse in Aboriginal townships to hurricane Katrina.

"Many Australians, myself included, looked aghast at the failure of the American federal system of government to cope adequately with hurricane Katrina and the human misery and lawlessness that engulfed New Orleans in 2005," Howard said. "We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina, here and now."

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