Tomorrow night at 9:30pm, the ABC is screening The Intervention, a doco about the Intervention in the Katherine region.
I know several of the people who feature in this, and remember when it was being shot - as I was in the region at the time. I'm waiting with baited breath to see it.
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6 comments:
It was a very interesting documentary, with plenty of facts and figures, not to mention personal stories that shocked me, and I've been fairly good in keeping up with it.
I still can't believe some of the stories of forced hardship that these people have had to endure, and I seriously applaud their resilience; I doubt I'd cope having to pay $440 round-trip to go to the supermarket to buy $100 worth of food. I tell myself that I'd protest and lodge complaints and all that sort of stuff, and I wonder why people aren't, but they either are, or they have been stripped of their right to appeal.
Oh, another interesting fact that came out of it was a child assault rate in the Katherine East region of 0.52%. Hardly pedophiles in every community. Even the original report only found 6 cases apparently, in the 45 communities visited initially. At a hundred people per community, roughly 30 of them children, 6 cases of assault is only 0.4%.
Did someone say children overboard?
A niggling point - Rex Wild was pretty clear that the original consultancy wasn't about uncovering cases of child abuse but about identifying underlying causes, so the 0.4% figure isn't really of value, imho.
But yeah, i thought it was a good show and probably an eye-opener for the average Australian. It's interesting that as the first year progressed, the focus softened from hunting out the abusers to more general community development activities (albeit sometimes badly executed). I agree with Rachel Willika's comments at the end about how she feels about the intevention now - there are some good things and some bad things.
Bulanjdjan Maïa said:
I bet you know some of these people well;-)!
Bulanjdjan--what did you think of it? And what did those people you know who showed up in it think of it?
Re: the taxi to town thing. I was hearing about that when we were there--that people could only use their food money at Woolies, which seemed like a complete scam to me and ridiculous that the argument was simply that Woolies already had their card-scanners in place.
I trust that the govt has now figured out a way to let people spend their dole food dollars at the local shop?
Ok, ok! I'll stop pretending that I've disappeared and make my pronouncements! ;)
I thought it was a really good show, and they had excellent subjects. It was really interesting to see the Beswick meeting and be reminded of what the expectations were at that time of the scope and follow-through of the intervention, and to see what has and hasn't eventuated. (E.g. rolling out income management across the welfare-dependent population.)
Having not spent quality time in the NT for some time now, I don't feel qualified to comment on what the current state of affairs is, but am inclined to agree with Rachel Willika (and wamut), that there is good and bad. The Government Business Managers are an excellent plus, I think. But as per usual in these small communities, their efficacy is largely a product of their ability to work effectively with local people. And that is dependent on their personalities and attitudes. I've heard some shocking stories about the nature and behaviour of some of the Government Business Managers. But this is the same as some of the stories that one hears about school teachers, and clinic nurses and council CEOs etc. And linguists (can't be so one-sided, I suppose!).
..................NICE.. ^_^v.................
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