Australian Government Defends Aborigine Plan

The Australian government introduced a bill in Parliament on Tuesday to fight child sex abuse among Aborigines, in a plan a retired judge branded "extremely discriminatory".


In introducing almost 500 pages of legislation, Indigenous Affairs Minister Mel Brough described Outback Aboriginal communities as "a failed society where law and order and behaviour have broken down and where women and children are unsafe".


"Do we respond with more of what we've done in the past or do we radically change direction with an intervention strategy matched to the magnitude of the problem?" Brough told Parliament.


The government plans to seize some of the powers of the Northern Territory government in response to an officially commissioned report that found child abuse was rampant in indigenous communities on Australia's tropical northern frontier.


Under the plan, alcohol and hardcore pornography will be banned from Aboriginal communities and Aborigines will be forced to spend a portion of their welfare checks on family essentials like food.


Former Federal Court Judge Murray Wilcox said the government has acknowledged the plan is racially discriminatory because a clause in the proposed legislation exempts it from anti-discrimination laws.


"I think it's constitutionally valid, but it's extremely discriminatory legislation," Wilcox told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio. Brough said the government was prepared to bypass anti-discrimination legislation "in the interest of saving children".


Aboriginal leaders from the Northern Territory came to Canberra, the national capital, on Tuesday to lobby the government to delay the legislation, which the government wants passed this week.


A delegation leader, John Ah Kit, told reporters "this week will see our culture being smashed to smithereens and that's unacceptable".


Child abuse on Aboriginal-owned land in the Northern Territory, covering an area the size of Texas but populated by only 30 000 people, is fuelled by alcohol abuse, unemployment, poverty and other factors leading to a breakdown in society, the report found.