Abstract
Presented within this article is a systematic discourse analysis of the arguments used by the then Australian Prime Minister and also the Minister for Indigenous Affairs in explaining and justifying the extensive and contentious intervention by the federal government into remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. The methods used within this article extend the socio-legal toolbox, providing a contextually appropriate, interdisciplinary methodology that analyses the speech act’s rhetorical properties. Although many academics use sound-bites of pre-legislative speech in order to support their claims, this analysis is concerned with investigating the contents of the speech acts in order to understand how the Prime Minister’s and Minister for Indigenous Affairs’ argumentations sought to achieve consensus to facilitate the enactment of legislation. Those seeking to understand legislative endeavours, policy makers and speech actors will find that paying structured attention to the rhetorical properties of speech acts yields opportunities to strengthen their insight. The analysis here indicates three features in the argumentation: the duality in the Prime Minister’s and Minister’s use of the Northern Territory Government’s Little Children are Sacred report; the failure to sufficiently detail the linkages between the Intervention and the measures combatting child sexual abuse; and the omission of recognition of Aboriginal agency and consultation.
Highlights
How did an Australian federal administration justify legislation facilitating an unprecedented intervention into remote Aboriginal1 communities after years of inaction? In May 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular Lateline national television program aired an interview with Nanette Rogers, the Crown Prosecutor for the Northern Territory (Jones 2006)
The federal government, through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), convened the Intergovernmental Summit on Violence and Child Abuse in Indigenous Communities. Recognising that these issues existed for Indigenous communities throughout Australia in urban, rural and remote areas, COAG expressed concern that:
While the Ministers may not have been concerned about the quality of their argumentation and chose to focus only on the outcome, the real success within the pre‐legislative discourse was the creation and use of a synthetic necessary truth
Summary
In May 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular Lateline national television program aired an interview with Nanette Rogers, the Crown Prosecutor for the Northern Territory (Jones 2006) This program catapulted the long‐standing issues of Aboriginal community degradation and reporting of child sexual abuse onto an international stage (see Mercer 2006). Over 500 pages of hastily designed and inherently complex legislation to tackle the systemic problems surrounding child abuse in the Northern Territory’s Indigenous communities were introduced into Parliament on 7 August 2007 in three main bills These were passed expeditiously in the Senate, as noted by both Pritchard (2007) and Edmunds (2010), in order to receive Royal Assent by 17 August 2007. Others have suggested the response was ‘disproportionate and extreme’ (Tedmanson and Wadiwel 2010: 11) and a case of ‘sheer political opportunism to advance an already in‐motion agenda [to move Aboriginal people off their lands], and to score points in an election year’ (Martiniello 2007: 124)
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