Australia Could Ban Booze For Aborigines
Australia's prime minister announced plans Thursday to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight what he called a crisis of child sex abuse among them.
Prime Minister John Howard was responding to a report last week that found child abuse was rampant in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, fueled by endemic alcohol abuse, unemployment, poverty and other factors causing a breakdown in civil society.
"This is a national emergency," Howard told Parliament. "We're dealing with a group of young Australians for whom the concept of childhood innocence has never been present."
Some Aboriginal leaders immediately slammed the plan as paternalistic, saying they were not consulted about it and that they objected to restrictions on how indigenous people can spend their welfare benefits.
Howard announced the measures for the Northern Territory — an Outback region where his federal government retains powers that it doesn't have over Australia's six states — and urged state leaders to apply similar tough rules in their jurisdictions.
The new measures would apply to about half of the Northern Territory — which is about twice the size of Texas — on land that has been returned to Aboriginal ownership under federal law over the past 30 years.
The sale, possession and transportation of alcohol would be banned for six months on the Aboriginal-owned land, Howard said, and sales would be reviewed after that. The child abuse report found drinking was a key contributor in the collapse of Aboriginal culture, neglect of children and creating opportunities for pedophiles.
Hardcore pornography, which the report found was rife in Aboriginal communities and available to children who were desensitized to sex with adults and at times caused them to act out scenes with each other, also would be banned. Publicly funded computers would be audited to ensure that they had not downloaded such images, the government said.
Some Aboriginal leaders immediately slammed the plan — which the government had not previously indicated it was considering — saying it was the kind of government behavior that has disenfranchised their people and created the problems in the first place.
"I'm absolutely disgusted by this patronizing government control," said Mitch, a member of a government board helping Aborigines who were taken from their parents under past assimilation laws who uses one name. "And tying drinking with welfare payments is just disgusting."
"If they're going to do that, they're going to have to do that with every single person in Australia, not just black people," she said.
The federal government can change laws in the territory with an act of Parliament, where Howard has a majority that ensures he can implement his policy.
Howard also called on state governments to send police to the Northern Territory to address a shortage on Aboriginal land there and offered to pay their expenses.
About 60,000 of Australia's roughly 400,000 Aborigines live in the Northern Territory — the highest proportion of indigenous residents of any region in the country — and many of them live in isolated, impoverished communities where jobs are scarce and substance abuse is widespread.
Australia's original inhabitants are now a tiny minority among its 21 million people, and suffer much higher rates of poverty, alcohol and drug addiction, and other problems. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of other Australians.