What is the true motive behind the Federal Government’s Northern Territory intervention? The morning press reports on John Howard’s four hours at Hermannsburg yesterday, a day in which he finally revealed his deeper purpose in Aboriginal affairs. Now we see the rationale behind the intervention and its drastic, hastily legislated measures supposedly aimed at arresting an epidemic of child s-x abuse in black communities.

If s-x abuse was the primary concern, why the emphasis on land title, welfare and fundamental social structure? Why, as we report today in Crikey, the plan to seize Aboriginal community assets and rent them back to their former owners?

This is what the PM said yesterday in Hermannsburg:

Whilst respecting the special place of indigenous people in the history and life of this country, their future can only be as part of the mainstream of the Australian community.

This is much more than a targeted intervention aimed specifically at eradicating s-xual abuse. Here the PM is talking about assimilation. About what some would see as the eradication of identifiable, self-reliant, self-determining aboriginality. He is talking about winding back the clock to the nineteenth century. Isn’t that something the rest of us should talk about first?