Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

To the extent that this bill and the motion that has been put before this parliament would restore alcohol-protected areas in town camps in Darwin, Katherine, Tennant and Alice Springs, it would achieve no more than carrying out what the Northern Territory government has now committed to doing urgently. In this regard, if I thought that this motion was genuine, I can tell you what Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory would say to me, that they are sick of being the political football in this House. We are sick of being the political football and of the mere words that are talked about in this House. It is merely political point scoring. It is a divisive and conflict-seeking piece of legislation not unlike the negative role played by the bill's proponent in the passage of legislation which restored to the Northern Territory the right to pass its own laws in relation to assisted dying. It is nothing but a ploy to get some more east coast followers on Senator Price's Facebook page.

The member for McPherson, who I have listened to in this chamber and who I have some respect for, has walked right in and played into Senator Price's hands. But much more importantly, to the extent that this bill seeks the restoration of the APA's regime to the huge number of communities out bush would have reverted to general restricted area status, it does. It is insane and it is vandalism. To explain what I am talking about, we need to take a flashback detour to mid-2007, to a time we can now call the Intervention. That was the sudden shock-and-awe initiative launched by the then Prime Minister John Howard and then Indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough, which, in one fell swoop, imposed a series of measures with the purported aim of reducing child sexual abuse in the bush. I want to remind members that in the 510 pages of the Northern Territory emergency response legislation, children were not mentioned once. That is the disgrace of what occurred from those members opposite when they intervened in the Northern Territory. They stand up here and they purport to pass legislation in the interests of Aboriginal children and women in the Northern Territory yet they have a track record of using Aboriginal women and children in the Northern Territory for political weapons. It is for their own political gain—

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