An Australian strategy to improve the lives of Aboriginal women and children in remote Outback camps was not only racially discriminatory but ineffective in parts, a UN official said Wednesday.

The final report by United Nations Special Rapporteur James Anaya found the government’s "intervention" in the Northern Territory was incompatible with Australia’s human rights obligations.
 

The government plan, which was rolled out under the previous conservative administration in 2007, introduced compulsory income management and banned the sale of alcohol and pornography in more than 70 Aboriginal townships.

The programme "has an overtly interventionist architecture, with measures that undermine indigenous self-determination, limit control over property, inhibit cultural integrity and restrict individual autonomy," Anaya wrote.
 

He said there was only limited evidence the programme had benefited the isolated and impoverished communities it aimed to help.
 

"It is extraordinary to have measures of this kind targeting a racial group," Anaya told AFP via telephone from the United States.
 

"With regard to the ban on alcohol, for example, the evidence that I have seen is that there has been an increase in alcohol consumption, alcohol-related problems," he said.
 

"I don't speculate why; my point is there is no evidence that the bans have helped."

Plans for reform
The government plans to reform the intervention strategy later this year, and Anaya said he hoped this was done in consultation with indigenous groups.
 

In launching the intervention in 2007, former Prime Minister John Howard suspended the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory as he sent troops and police to help curb alcohol-fuelled sex abuse and domestic violence.
 

Centre-left Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd refused to scrap the policy when he won office in November 2007, despite issuing a historic apology for the wrongs suffered by Aborigines since white settlement began in 1788.
 

The special rapporteur on the human rights of indigenous people, who was in Australia briefly last year to visit Aboriginal communities, said the government was right to try to improve the lives of indigenous people.

Pain over intervention
But he said he had been surprised by the "degree and consistency of frustration, pain, anger and resentment" of Aboriginal people towards the intervention.
 

"Aboriginal people throughout the country where I visited seemed to identify this measure as affecting them as well, whether or not they were directly affected by it," he said.

Aborigines make up 2.5 percent of Australia's 22 million population and suffer disproportionate rates of infant mortality, health problems and suicide.
 

Source: AFP