The Nothern Territory Intervention has failed to deliver on key reforms as set by the Close the Gap goals.
That's according to a new study that also found the federal government policy targetting Indigenous communities is not meeting Australia's international human rights obligations.
The Northern Territory Intervention was launched by the Howard coalition government in 2007 in response to what it identified as a national emergency confronting the welfare of Aboriginal children, relating to child abuse and family violence.
The areas of action included welfare, health, education, housing, employment and law enforcement.
When Labor came to power, it continued the Intervention -- later rebranding key aspects of it as the "Stronger Futures" policy.
It is due to expire in 2022.
Researchers at Monash University's Castan Centre in Melbourne have been evaluating the measures, using the so-called Closing the Gap targets.
These national targets were agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments in 2008, and were designed to reduce differences in outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
One of the report's authors, Dr Stephen Gray, says the assessment overall hasn't been positive.
"We've seen some progress in a few areas. We've seen -- for example -- in child mortality that there's been improvements in those areas. Unfortunately in many others, if anything, that gap has widened. We've seen very limited success in education, in closing the gap in educational attainment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people -- particularly in the Northern Territory."
Dr Gray says of particular concern are the violations of human rights under the Intervention.
"The Intervention appears clearly to fail on a test of equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Indigenous people have not been consulted adequately in bringing in important measures in the intervention and also perhaps, more concerning, is we've seen quite a dramatic increase in Indigenous incarceration. More Aboriginal men, in particular, are going to jail since the intervention than even were going before that. So we already had in the Northern Territory very high imprisonment rates - the highest in Australia for Indigenous people even prior to the Intervention, and since then, those rates have only increased. So, we actually scored the Intervention zero out of ten, because we've seen those rates dramatically escalate."
Dr Stephen Gray says that some of the measures introduced under the NT Intervention have contributed to increased imprisonment among Indigenous Australians.
But, he says, they appear to have failed to address some of the initial issues the policy was meant to address.
"There's certainly been an increase in the level of policing of Indigenous people. An increase in the public attention given to those issues of family violence, and the perception that child sexual abuse is rampant on Indigenous communities which hasn't actually been borne out of what's happened since the Intervention - so those things have led to an increase in imprisonment rates. There's been insufficient attention given -- we think -- to consultation with Indigenous communities, (with)Indigenous people who are most affected by the measures of the intervention. We've seen a huge increase in the bureaucratisation of Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory and perhaps elsewhere which, in a way, has taken the debate outside the realms of ordinary people and into the realm of so-called experts. So all of those things have meant there hasn't been sufficient focus on concrete measures to reduce family violence and reduce other issues of crime and alcohol and so forth without putting more people in jail."
Jonathan Hunyor is from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency -- a legal support group based in Darwin.
He says the findings don't come as a surprise.
"We've known on the ground that things haven't improved as much as they should have, or in some respects haven't improves at all, since the Intervention. And a lot of those lessons that we should have learnt from the Intervention about the limitations and, indeed, the dangers of big top heavy 'government knows best' approaches really haven't been learned. We haven't seen enough of a shift away from those to approaches that really empower people on the ground and getting Aboriginal driving the change that they want to see in their communities."
The Castan Centre report points to the absence of a Closing the Gap target on Indigenous incarceration.
It's calling for one to be added in order to help lower the already disproportionately high number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders affected.
That's a move supprted by Jonathan Hunyor.
"We think it would be useful. It's obviously not going to make a difference in itself, but if it brings a focus and it brings a commitment and it means that governments are going to get real about dealing with the problem or incarceration which we've been talking about for decades and is only getting worse. In the Territory it's only getting worse and that is because of lazy policy making around law and order and mandatory sentencing and it's around a failure to make the sort of decisions and policies that are going to see a real change there."
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