Saving the Children.

For most of his eleven years in office, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been accused of doing too little to right the problems of indigenous Australians. Not any more: now he's being criticized for attempting too much, after announcing the most startling government intervention in Aboriginal affairs in decades. A week after an inquiry released its appalling findings on the rampant sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory, home to 12% of Australia's 455,000 indigenous people, Howard on June 21 outlined a plan to tackle what he says is "akin to a national emergency." Just a few days later, Australian soldiers and police were preparing to move into the most crisis-stricken communities.

Based on visits to 45 Aboriginal communities, the Little Children Are Sacred report revealed the horrors regularly inflicted on many of the Territory's 23,000 Aboriginal children. It told of babies being raped, young children acting out scenes from pornographic movies, teenagers selling themselves for food and drugs. Without swift action, it warned, "real disaster faces Australia within a generation." Alcohol fuels much of the violent chaos poisoning Aboriginal life, and Howard's federal intervention, using constitutional power to leapfrog the Territory government, begins there, banning it in about 60 communities for an initial period of six months. Even more radical is the government's welfare revolution: the docking of welfare checks if children miss too much school, and the quarantining of some government payments to ensure they're spent on food rather than drugs and alcohol. The government also plans to take over township leases so that homes and infrastructure can be repaired; it will ban hard-core pornography and carry out health checks on all children. The rigid permit system that restricts the entry of outsiders such as journalists into communities will be largely scrapped, and Howard wants traditional Aboriginal law removed as a mitigating factor in criminal sentencing. He agrees they're drastic measures: "It is interventionist, it does push aside the role of the Territory to some degree—I accept that," he said on June 21. "But what matters more, the constitutional niceties or the care and protection of young children?"

A flurry of critics have decried the plan as a rushed and heavy-handed stunt that will crush Aboriginal autonomy. Aboriginal academic Boni Robertson has been waiting for action on child abuse since she authored a major report in 1999 detailing crimes against Aboriginal women and children in Queensland. But she fears that applying punitive welfare measures to everyone will imply all Aborigines are "irresponsible monsters, when there are many parents who are doing the right thing." She warns too that, without extensive rehabilitation services, banning alcohol will only shift the problem elsewhere. As in the N.T., many communities in her state have tried to stamp out alcohol abuse—only, she says, to see shanty drinking camps spring up on their fringes.

Army logistics teams began assembling in the N.T. last week; extra police, including many seconded from other states, will follow, some into communities that currently have no full-time police presence. Rumors of their arrival have spread among Aboriginal people, many of them exhausted by a long string of failed policies. "Half the people here don't know what's going on," says one leader wearily. Dr. Peter Beaumont was working last week as a locum in Jabiru when soldiers turned up. They told locals they were "just looking around," he says. "Maybe they were, but people were nervous." Old fears linger: the inquiry found sexual abuse often went unreported because people were afraid their children would be taken away—as many were last century by white authorities intent on assimilation.

With a federal election due this year, there's cynicism too about the timing of the strike. But many side with highly regarded Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who believes that whatever the government's motives, the problem is so bad, and has gone on for so long, that decisive action must be welcomed. There's detail still to come: no one can say yet how much the response will cost, or how long it will last. But many Australians, including the federal Opposition, which has offered bipartisan support, are willing to give the Prime Minister his head.

There were reports last week of people fleeing Mutitjulu, the 500-strong community which will be the first stop for the army and police, but one long-time social worker there says she's seen no such panic. "They aren't frightened of the police and the army, and they're not running off to the sand hills," she says. "I don't think many women will have any problem with having extra police around." Rather, there's cautious optimism that this time, help might be coming. Pearson has called for skeptics to give the Howard intervention a chance. "I'm just amazed," he said, "that anybody would put the protection of children secondary to anything else."

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