New Aboriginal Video Campaign Aims to Overturn Intervention in Australia’s Northern Territory

Posted by clnews _Featured_, Featured Videos, Human Rights Monday, March 12th, 2012

(The Australian)

A new campaign to overturn the federal government’s intervention in Australia’s Northern Territory claims Aboriginal communities are at “breaking point” and people have been made to feel like criminals in their own lands.

In a powerful video aimed at YouTube and social media, Dhalulu Ganambarr-Stubbs, a Yolngu scholar and artist from Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, says that in 2012 the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory are suffering.

But she says that after five years of federal intervention, begun by the Howard Government and continued by the Rudd and Gillard Governments, the policy has failed, with indigenous imprisonment up 41 per cent, lower school attendance, inadequate housing, a 38 per cent rise in the number of children removed from their homes by social services and a doubling of cases of self-harm and suicide.

Ms Ganambarr-Stubbs, a member of the Northern Territory’s first Indigenous Affairs Advisory Council, is the latest voice in a concerted campaign against the Northern Territory intervention.

In November last year clan leaders in the community of Ramingining, in East Arnhem, issued a statement declaring the intervention had brought hatred and discrimination and was slowly drowning Aboriginal culture.

“After five years, it feels like the water level has climbed up to our neck,” said Mathew Dhulumburrk, on behalf of six clan groups.

“Another 10 years will bring it way over our heads. The government is drowning us slowly and wonders why twice as many of our young people are attempting suicide. There is no valid reason to discriminate against Yolngu in this way.”

The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples also called for an end to “big stick” policies saying “misdirected” policies had led to “stigmatisation and disempowerment of Aboriginal communities”.

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To take action and find out more, go to: www.standforfreedom.org.au