Kathy Newnam
& Jon Lamb, Darwin
The race card came up trumps for the Labor Party in the June 18 Northern Territory elections, which saw the ALP returned to government with an unprecedented 12% swing in its favour. The Country Liberal Party, which ruled the NT for 27 years until its defeat in 2001, has been thrown into disarray. It now looks like winning only four seats in the 25-seat parliament — with its leader, Denis Burke, losing his seat of Brennan.
Traditionally the realm of the CLP, the race card was played early in the election campaign by Chief Minister Clare Martin with her promise of jail for "habitual drunks" (code for impoverished Aborigines).
Burke, who led the CLP to its election defeat in 2001 defending his government's racist mandatory sentencing laws, hypocritically responded to the ALP's campaign by telling ABC TV's Stateline program on June 17: "I don't care if I lose a few votes in the northern suburbs, it's to cater for a redneck white".
The CLP certainly did lose votes — despite its "zero tolerance" policy on "anti-social behaviour". The ALP quite simply beat the CLP at its own game — race politics. As One Mile Dam community leader David Timber told the June 18 Melbourne Age, the politicians "don't give a stuff about Aboriginal people. Both sides of politics are playing the race card. If they didn't they probably wouldn't be elected."
Opposition to this bipartisan racism and the pro-corporate agenda of the ALP and CLP was reflected in the support for the NT Greens, along with a range of progressive independents and Network Against Prohibition (NAP) candidates. The NT Greens received between 3.8% and 15.8% in the 11 seats they contested — their best result being in the seat of Nightcliff contested by long-time Darwin activist Ilana Eldridge.
"The Greens is a vote for integrity and true democracy", Eldridge told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly. She believes the big swing to Labor came about for two reasons. Firstly, with the internal ructions of the CLP, "The media abandoned any attempt at impartiality in the final week of the campaign. In particular, Murdoch's NT News described and endorsed Clare Martin's government in glowing terms".
Eldridge also identified Labor's "law and order" push as a major factor in their win. "Stifling internal dissent, Clare Martin's team promised jail for drunks, cut funding to community-based programs that deal with homelessness and substance abuse and withheld funding to various non-government organisations in a successful attempt to stifle public protest".
Nelly Riley, an independent candidate in Denis Burke's former seat of Brennan told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly that "neither of the major political parties actually addressed any real issues, but rather held on to hardline scare tactics which in themselves generally prove counterproductive in the longer run in dealing with so-called 'anti-social' behaviour".
Riley, who received an impressive vote of 11%, is also a member of a recently formed prisoner support group, Families Outside.
A common justification for the draconian racism of the NT is that "it's different up here" — a view articulated in the June 20 Australian editorial: "While armchair commentators in the southern states might dismiss as populism — even Hansonism — Ms Martin's policy of jailing habitual drunks who refuse treatment, they do not have to live with the same daily realities as Territorians themselves, white and indigenous alike."
Martin, of course, denied playing the race card, claiming she had campaigned against "itinerants". However, Sharon Payne,
director of the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service, told the June 17 Stateline program: "People have been talking about itinerants but they don't mean tourists, they don't mean backpackers. They are actually itinerants in Darwin. So it's very clearly while we're using code words, it's absolutely directed towards a particular group in the community who are Aboriginal."
Payne also commented upon Labor's targeting of "habitual drunks": "Offensive language is an offence, so we already have those on the books. But this is about just being drunk. It's not about being drunk and abusive; it's not about being drunk and violent. It's just about being drunk...
"White fellas tend to have places where they go to drink — they have homes to live in. A lot of our mob don't. They've been coming to this country for thousands of years — it's actually quite a natural thing for them to come in here and camp around the place and do business and then leave again."
The program also aired more about the "daily reality" for many Indigenous Territorians, with one man reporting that "in Darwin City Police Watch House they just lie on a wooden floor, only one blanket, no pillow". Another stated: "Bit cold. They give us only a blanket, that's all. And you sleep on the floor. I am not a dog."
Over the past 27 months at least 42,000 people have been taken into police custody for being drunk — the overwhelming majority of them being Aborigines.
The June 20 Australian editorial echoed Martin's denial of playing the race card and provided as evidence the fact that "no fewer than a fifth of members in the new assembly will be Aboriginal — a record that no other legislature in Australia comes close to matching".
According to Kimberley Hunter, the head of the Yilli Rreung Regional Council, "I think that we've got five Indigenous people in parliament today and obviously the people that vote for the majority of those people are Indigenous people". Hunter told the ABC News Online on June 20 that the word of the Labor's campaign would not have reached the remote communities.
Hunter said that there is a need for an Indigenous party to defend the interests of Indigenous people. He said that while there are no steps toward such a party at this stage, he was certain one will exist before the next NT elections.
[The authors are members of the NT branch of the Socialist Alliance].
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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