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CANBERRA - Prime Minister John Howard says extra police will be in the Northern Territory within 10 days as part of his plan to crack down on child abuse in indigenous communities.
The federal Government said last week it will impose alcohol and pornography bans in the territory's
indigenous communities and carry out medical checks on all indigenous children in the area.
Howard said yesterday that the first part of the operation would be to restore law and order in indigenous communities. NSW and Victoria have agreed to send police officers and he expected other state Governments would follow. Federal police would also be sent.
"The first thing is to establish law and order and to start to clean the place up," Howard said. "The next stage will be the medical operation. You can't expect the medical operation to start until you've established better law and order."
Howard dismissed criticism of his plan, saying that action was more important than philosophical debate.
"The biggest single problem in these communities is that the women and the children are scared to death of complaining about the violence and the molestation.
"And unless you get police on the ground, unless you establish the atmosphere of physical security, or a greater atmosphere of physical security, nothing is going to change and that is the first and most important requirement. We have gone along with the idea that these are state and territory responsibilities, which technically they are," Howard said. "We'd persevered with that, we'd worked the old paradigm but we just came to the conclusion that wasn't going to work and we've decided, in effect, to put aside the old approach and to adopt in the short-term a highly interventionist approach."
Howard rejected concerns that intervention in indigenous communities could lead to another "stolen generation" of children being taken away from their families.
"Why do we inject concepts like stolen generation?" he said. "We're not talking about stealing a generation, we're talking about saving a generation and I think that ought to be our prime obligation."
Labor leader Kevin Rudd says if he becomes prime minister he will ask members of the Opposition to join a "war cabinet" to deal with problems facing indigenous communities.
Rudd said both sides of politics should work together to find solutions.
"Neither side of politics has covered itself in glory on this in the past," he said, "so let's take the politics out of it. If we win the election later this year what I'd propose is establishing the equivalent of a national war cabinet. ... to deal with this problem of child abuse and the sustainability of these remote Aboriginal communities into the future.
"I think the nation is so fed up with us all taking pot shots at each other on this, I think the time for bipartisan real action has now come but measured against real time lines and real targets to bring down these terrible numbers of incidents of child abuse."
- AAP
