In a June 25 joint statement issued with his Australians All co-patron and former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) chairperson Lowitja O'Donoghue, former Coalition PM Malcolm Fraser attacked the Howard government's June 21 announcement that it was taking control of 60 Aboriginal communities in remote areas of the Northern Territory as a "throwback to past paternalism".
Two days before federal police officers and the military began moving into the communities under the pretext of curbing child sexual abuse, Fraser and O'Donoghue said that public spending on Indigenous education and health had long been too stingy, contrasting it with resources for white families in remote areas such as the School of the Air.
They also criticised the Howard government's refusal, following its abolition of ATSIC, to create a new elected representative body to give Indigenous Australians a national voice. "Instead today there is an appointed advisory council, a throwback to past years, to past paternalism which assumed superiority of government and its instruments", and placed rural Aborigines' lives under the near-total control of white government bureaucrats.
The Fraser-O'Donoghue criticism is similar to that voiced by many others, including the co-author of the report — Little Children are Sacred — that the government used as the pretext for its police-military intervention announcement. Rex Wild, QC, told ABC's June 26 Lateline Business program that the government had ignored the key recommendations in the report and instead decided to send in the "gunships".
While PM John Howard's announcement has generated a storm of criticism from Aboriginal leaders and supporters of Indigenous people's rights to control their own lives, the federal ALP leadership has given in-principle endorsement to Howard's move.
As part of the intervention plan, federal Aboriginal affairs minister Mal Brough has stated an intention to amend native title laws so that Canberra can retake ownership of the land of "prescribed Indigenous communities".
Both Howard and Labor leader Kevin Rudd, as the June 29 Australian observed, "have refused to address concerns of indigenous leaders that the government's emergency takeover of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is a smokescreen for a 'land grab' ... The Australian submitted a series of questions to Mr Howard and Mr Rudd yesterday and on Wednesday, asking them if they could refute the criticism and reassure indigenous people the moves would not result in long-term changes in land ownership.
"Mr Howard referred The Australian's inquiries to comments made earlier by Mr Brough, who had simply denied the claim ... 'There is no point in the commonwealth taking them (lands) back for some economic gain', Mr Brough said on Tuesday.
"Mr Rudd initially referred inquiries to Labor indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jenny Macklin, who on Wednesday declined to offer a specific answer."
The ALP leadership's me-tooism on this issue — as on a range of others from individual contracts (AWAs) to the fraud of "clean coal" — is driven by its desire to win support from big business, particularly the big mining corporations.
In doing so, the ALP leadership is following the same path in the lead-up to this year's federal election that it did in the last — offering voters a "choice" between the reactionary policies of a full-strength John Howard and the ALP's brand of Howardism lite.
Not surprisingly, as the ALP's policies converge toward those of the Coalition government, the gap in voter support between the Coalition parties and Labor has begun to narrow.
The key lesson for working people from this is that we cannot rely simply on voting for Labor to defeat Howard's right-wing agenda. On its current course, even if Rudd Labor does not snatch electoral defeat from the jaws of victory, a Rudd Labor government promises to be only marginally less right-wing than a re-elected Howard or Peter Costello-led Coalition government.