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Peace prize for Dodson, a critic of the intervention

By Debra Jopson

21 May 2008 - PATRICK DODSON, the "father of reconciliation", has urged the Federal Government to reconsider its use of constitutional powers to support the intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Mr Dodson, who was named as the recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize yesterday, said the intervention was being used to "to force some lifestyle model on indigenous people".

The Federation fathers had given government the power to make special laws "for the people of any race" except Aborigines, he said. Then campaigners fought for the 1967 referendum that allowed the laws to be made for Aborigines, too. But the Government was flouting those democratic principles. "I don't think [the intervention] was the intention of the people who fought for it in 1967," Mr Dodson said.

He had spent the day flying over the wide, brown land from his hometown of Broome to Sydney to become only the second Australian to win the peace prize in 11 years. He presented the prize to the first Australian to win it, the former governor-general Sir William Deane, in 2001.

Mr Dodson will not receive his prize until November 7, but yesterday's journey by the Yawuru leader was symbolic of his return to national life. After years of rebuff by the Howard government when he was chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, he was said to have "gone bush" in recent times, working successfully on native title claims around Broome.

While he quit trying to be heard by the Howard government, which he considered "ideologically driven to remove what remains of indigenous society", he never gave up on the Australian people.

Australia was a decent country that could include its indigenous people properly in its constitutional preamble, create a fitting memorial to the stolen generations, and make its highest court a place where serious injustices were righted, he said.

He was enthusiastic about such a court in South Africa, which he visited last year. "You walk in the foyer and there is a traditional tree under which the old chiefs used to sit and it was a cultural focus of justice before the Boers and the British," he said.

Inside, the judges have a working knowledge of indigenous cultures and languages. South Africa's "inspirational" constitution and honest appraisal of its own harsh history refreshed the campaigner, who at 60 has had a couple of health scares. "I got enough energy to have another go," he said.

For 18 months he has worked with the Northern Territory Government on restructuring its local government. Now he wants Canberra to pull its military arm out of Aboriginal communities and to negotiate with indigenous people on a new plan.

The Government's apology to the stolen generations was welcome, but giving extra money in the budget to the intervention was wrong, he said. "It is a misuse of the soldiers. Move the soldiers out. Get them to protect the borders," he said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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