Is the continued existence of indigenous drunks a good measure of the success or failure of the intervention?

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On Planet Latte if you don’t perform the miracle of performing a 100% cure to a problem then what you have done has “failed”. This precisely the mindset that is very much in evidence in the Age piece by Lindsay Murdoch.

In a report to the NT government, Mr Beadman said bush communities are concerned about drinkers being squeezed into the unsafe, unhygienic camps, which were usually on the edge of alcohol-free areas many kilometres from facilities. ”Anyone who has moved around the bush will have seen the mountains of cans and bottles.”

Mr Beadman, a senior administrator of Aboriginal policy since 1973, said bush families were worried that ”not even the governments which make the laws that inadvertently create these places have any duty of care about the consequences of their actions”.

”It is these more-affected people – the ones needing more help – who are now further removed from support as a consequence of the prescribed areas,” he said.

Here at the Sandpit I have been a long time supporter of the intervention in the NT, not because I am concerned about the drunks but because I am concerned about the women and children in indigenous communities.  It may well be less than ideal for the slaves of the grog but is this new paradigm not achieving a safer home environment for the women and children?

As I remember it the aim of the intervention was to benefit the women and children being abused and neglected because of the idle and the drink sodden. There is clearly an associated problem of just how to address the drinkers but that problem does not mean that the intervention is a failure only that it was always only ever going to be a starting point for fixing the problems in our indigenous communities. There is no easy and quick cure for any sort of addiction before the intervention these addicts had a problem and they still have a problem now.

Cheers Comrades

 

 

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2 thoughts on “Is the continued existence of indigenous drunks a good measure of the success or failure of the intervention?”

  1. Good point Iain.

    I would have also thought that the thrust of The Age article was a good argument in favour of income management, so that those who have problems with alcohol stop spending most of their incomes on it.

  2. Well I thought that the Age piece was a classic example of the mistaken belief from the left that perpetrators of drunken violence are as much victims as well as those that they abuse and harm. However to my mind getting them out of the communities proper is damn good start to solving the problem. After all as the old axiom goes the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time…

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