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It's great to be back in the desert, where the sun never stops shining, and everything is peaceful except for that massive mushroom cloud over there which bears an uncanny resemblance to John Howard's grinning skull.

In its latest feat of pre-election scapegoating, the government has pulled out a massive (I am tempted to use the word 'dastardly') plan for controlling Indigenous communities via economics, welfare, law and order, and (in particular) land. The bombshell is in fact the culmination of a trajectory of planning the re-institutionalisation of Aboriginal people, stripping communities of hard-won land rights and self-determination, struggles which haven't yet had time to be fully achieved, let alone effective.

I guess we can stop wondering where the next Tampa is coming from now.

I don't know if it's going to work, but the last few years bode ill. The stage has been set by the anti-black PR the feds have been doing, setting up Indigenous communities as havens of child sexual abuse worthy of a Catholic order in the minds of ignorant Middle Australia. (Did they send the Queensland police, or the military, into every church? Of course not, that would be an affront to their independence.) Forced medical checks, military control, removal of ability to control own space through permits, probable removal of children, withholding of income to starve people into submission... next stop, genocide.

Surely not genocide, you say. But 'national emergency' sounds like wartime conditions, doesn't it? This 'we all have to pull together' language. Who are 'we' at war with? Having already discovered the convenience of declaring war on abstract nouns, Howard is now turning against other abstract, potential, dare we say non-existent dangers.

I'm not saying that child sexual abuse doesn't happen in Indigenous communities. It happens everywhere, unfortunately. I'm saying Howard and his ilk don't give a flying fuck if some little kid gets raped. They are exploiting the situation. It's simply a convenient way of fabricating moral hysteria which justifies unethical and yes, racist actions. We don't need another short-term government intervention, particularly not after ten years' defunding the social services that have been doing the hard work of supporting women and children. Extant services like NPY, whose entire youth team's Federal funding just got handed to inexperienced, Christian missionaries. Or the women's shelter where I used to work, struggling to make ends meet, where we sometimes couldn't afford to evacuate women and children from violence and abuse, let alone find safe alternative housing in town.

Arguing that the proposed strategy is ineffective would be a waste of breath. The proposed strategy is not actually there to combat sexual violence, it's there to strip people of their land and power, as CLC has already argued. It's there to push the nasty, discriminatory agenda of this government. I particularly like the childish payback on town camp leases. Couldn't do it democratically, Mal? No worries mate, do it with a sledgehammer.

It's times like this I wish we had a constitution, some written ethical standard by which we could gauge this descent into madness. But we've been defeated by our own moral relativism.

At the moment, it is just a set of proposals, most of which are still probably illegal according to anti-discrimination legislation, and i'm hoping someone smarter than me will take it to court (hopefully before they get rid of that too, which is already on the cards - Brough has said “Let’s act, and if we breach the Racial Discrimination Act then we need to deal with that in the legislative fashion”). I'm hoping this will be the last straw. If this energises white and black to fight the fascist scumbags that happen to be ruining the country, all the better. But somehow I suspect that our habitual cowardice and ignorance about Indigenous struggles will prevail, like it has for so many years. Particularly when Labor's babbling about bipartisan support for this shit. What happened to the occasional visionary moments like Kalkarinji (Wave Hill) and Keating's Redfern speech? Fluffy symbolic gestures, never backed up by actual commitment to self-determination. October is shaping up to be three rounds of Evil vs Spineless. (Mundine for PM!)

Here's a plan for you. Let's barricade the highways. There's only three paved roads into the Territory, and airports are easy enough to close. Bugger statehood, i reckon it's time we seceded. Our new flag can be a massive mushroom cloud which bears an uncanny resemblance to John Howard's grinning skull.

* * *

On a brighter note, I was stoked to hear that Alexis Wright took out the Miles Franklin. Carpentaria's depiction of a small town in the throes of racist psychosis is a perfect, if rather more enjoyable, microcosm of the above hysteria. The counterpoint, the interweaving of a continuity between trad and contemporary cultures, absolutely glows. It's a rare book that makes me less afraid of taking risks in my own writing, and I'm grateful to it.

Books are so much better than people. I wish I could jump through Alice's looking glass and start a secessionist movement in the imaginary world, but I'm having trouble finding even that reliable exit. I still have a cold, I'm withdrawing from nicotine, and my landlord just rocked up with a chainsaw. Oh, it's great to be back in the desert.