AUSTRALIA:The Australian government has announced a six-month ban on the sale of alcohol in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory in a bid to curb child sexual abuse.
The ban follows the publication of a report last week which revealed shocking levels of abuse fuelled by "rivers of grog" in remote indigenous communities and catastrophic failures in the education system.
Prime minister John Howard said: "We regard this as akin to a national emergency . . . We will ban the sale, the possession, the transportation, the consumption and [ introduce] broader monitoring of takeaway sales across the Northern Territory."
The alcohol ban is part of a series of measures being imposed on Aboriginal communities. All indigenous children in the territory are to undergo a medical check and welfare payments are to be linked to school attendance.
"We will provide the resources and we will be appealing directly to the Australian Medical Association to assist," Mr Howard said.
"We will bear the cost of medical examinations of all indigenous children in the Northern Territory under the age of 16."
In tandem with linking social welfare to school attendance, 50 per cent of such payments to parents in the affected areas will be quarantined for food and other essentials.
"We will be ensuring that meals are provided to children at school, with parents paying for the meals," said Mr Howard.
The government is also taking over the running of remote Aboriginal areas on five-year leases to ensure property and public housing is improved.
The possession of X-rated pornography is being banned and publicly funded computers will be searched for evidence of stored pornography.
The announcements yesterday were generally welcomed on all sides of Australian politics, but Megan Davis, director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales, said she was sceptical about the government's motives.
"My research shows this abuse has been going on for decades and decades so why is this a national emergency now? I think it's because there's an election coming up," she said.
"No one disagrees that children need protection but people will and should disagree with some ways of going about that. I think it's another example of announce first and worry about the detail later."