Last Drinks: The Impact of the Nothern Territory Intervention

Quarterly Essay #30

by Paul Toohey

When Mal Brough and John Howard announced the Northern Territory intervention in mid-2007, they proclaimed a child abuse emergency. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Paul Toohey unpicks the rhetoric of emergency and tracks progress. One year on, have children been saved? Will Labor continue with the intervention? What are the reasons for the social crisis - the neglect and the violence - and how might things be different?

Toohey argues that the real issue is not sexual abuse, but rather a more general neglect of children. He criticises the way both white courts and black law have viewed violent crime by Aboriginal men. He examines the permit system and the quarantining of welfare money and argues that due to Labor's changes to these, the intervention is now effectively over - though the crisis persists. In Last Drinks, Paul Toohey offers the definitive account of how the Territory intervention came about and what it has achieved.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Essays

146 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[RM · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sloppy, shoddy and built on sweeping claims about Aboriginal people and cultures. Much like the Intervention itself, really.

[Rueben · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[ivana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Northern Territory Intervention was widely criticised by us city folks to be a disaster; absolute shambles.

And in a lot of ways, it was. There is not a fuck of a lot that legislation is going to do in repairing entire livelihoods, communities, generations or diasporas. Nor is silly, unthought-out policies about how much alcohol one can buy (less than $100 unless you want to be put on a register) or what land is going where.

However, there were a few good things that came out of it: once they (the bureaucrats - in the form of the Howard and Rudd governments) pulled the 'child sexual abuse' wig off their heads, and actually started trying to fix things up, a few things did go right: children had their first medical examinations since they were born; food started being bought; people started feeling useful.

The excellent part about this edition of the Quarterly Essay is the hindsight that Toohey can exercise: a cumulative, how-far-have-we-come sort of perspective. It's also written in a wonderful style, although with a bit too much anecdotal evidence for my taste. He also seems to meander all over the place, failing to sustain one idea or one argument, arguing in some cases that Mal Brough (the federal Indigenous Affairs minister at the time, succeeded by Jenny Macklin in the Rudd government) was doing the right thing, at other times he wasn't.

I'm looking forward to following up on this edition with the correspondence from the next - the Quarterly Essay is rather like getting two goes in the lucky dip in that respect.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard read, and one I think I'll have to come back to. Toohey makes no apologies for his contention - that the intervention was warranted based on the testimony of indigenous women and children.

The essay takes a long, hard, clear eyed look at the issues facing remote and remote town communities, and the hard measures that need to be taken to address then. These are measures far from those we who are far away would consider, and measures I remember being shocked by. I don't agree with everything Toohey says, but I also am aware of my ignorance on indigenous affairs - I just haven't seen things myself, or experienced them myself.

I need to be more educated on this matter, and so - while abroad - reading books such as this is the first step. Next step, read Stan Grant's essay.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book challenged me in a pretty profound way. I've always been uncomfortable with paternalism and the notion of taking away the autonomy of aboriginal people as happened during the intervention.

After reading this book, I'm pretty keen to find out more for myself and sample a wider range of views.