The Indigenous Cabinet Minister Marion Scrymgour’s Speech on the Government Intervention in Northern Territory

Australia’s first female cabinet minister Marion Scrymgour delivered the Charles Perkins Oration at Sydney University on 23 October, and talked about the government’s intervention in Northern Territory. Below are some notes from her speech (http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2006)

The government’s reaction to the Little Children Are Sacred report into child abuse in aboriginal townships was John Howard’s ‘rabbit out of a hat’ – “the black kids’ Tampa” – an audience at the University of Sydney heard last night.

Marion Scrymgour, Australia’s first ever female Indigenous cabinet minister, used the annual Charles Perkins Memorial Oration to launch a scathing attack on the federal government’s response to the report, calling it a ’second intervention’. The first, she said, led to the creation of the stolen generation.

“John Howard and Malcolm Brough, this evening I am doing far more than merely criticising you and your government’s assault on Aboriginal Territorians, I am condemning its motivation; I am condemning its operations; and I am condemning – outright – its moral basis and the moral authority you purport to exercise in ’saving the children’.

“You are doing nothing of the kind,” Ms Scrymgour said.

In the 500 plus pages of the National Emergency Response legislation, the words ‘child’ or ‘children’ are not mentioned once, she said, adding, “The legislation does not address any of the 97 recommendations of the report.

“It’s as if the second Intervention has given the Commonwealth permission to enact a great undoing of our lives. Aboriginal Territorians are being herded back to the primitivism of assimilation and the days of native welfare. It has been a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life.”

Ms Scrymgour is a Labor member of the Northern Territory’s Legislative Assembly, representing the seat of Arafura which covers western Arnhem Land and the Tiwi islands.

During the oration she spoke of her father Jack Scrymgour, the Aboriginal Territorian and contemporary of Charles Perkins, who had been forcibly removed as a child from his home in Central Australia, saying she wanted to, “Stick for a bit with the unfinished business of my father’s childhood”.

“I want to pause here and ask you to imagine what it would have been like for my father – not just as a child, but throughout his whole life – to not know from what family and what place he was taken, let alone for what purported reason,” Ms Scrymgour said.

She quoted Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, who wrote in 1927 that the attempt to assimilate fair-skinned aboriginal children was so ‘they would not know in later life that they had Aboriginal blood and would probably be absorbed into the white population and become useful citizens’.

“The words sound harsh and discordant today, but in my opinion they are not really all that different from those of the current Prime Minister, with his fixation on ‘one Australia’ and the culture and values he wants to impose through his new citizenship test,” said Ms Scrymgour.“

It is as if the second Intervention has given the Commonwealth permission to enact a great undoing of our lives. Aboriginal Territorians are being herded back to the primitivism of assimilation and the days of native welfare. It has been a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life,” said Ms Scrymgour.

“It is, in other words, a leap back to the days of the first Intervention, to the days of assimilation, control and coercion; to the days when Aboriginal people were regarded as too naïve, and too simple, to control their own affairs.

“And it has nothing to do with the protection of children,” she said.

Ms Scrymgour added that it was an ‘honour” to be invited to speak at the 7th Charles Perkins Oration.“Thirty odd years ago, Charles Perkins wrote a biography called A Bastard Like Me. In the years to come, in my own different ways, I’ll try to be a bastard like him,” she said. She received a standing ovation at the close of her speech.

The Dr Charles Perkins AO Memorial oration was established in 2001 to commemorate the University of Sydney’s first Indigenous graduate, Dr Charles Perkins.