This fascinating Quarterly Essay looks at the Northern Territory intervention from the perspective of a Darwin-based journalist with an intimate working knowledge of the situation leading up to the intervention, the way it unfolded on the ground, and the politics behind it. He also writes about the personalities involved: Mal Brough, blunt, passionate, a ‘drill sergeant’; NT Chief Minister Clare Martin, whose politically motivated inactivity on the situation of Aboriginal communities led to the federal intervention; the well-meaning but destructive white lawmen who regularly bargained down Aboriginal men from murder to manslaughter in the spirit of cultural sensitivity. ‘It didn’t matter that Brough was an insensitive thug,’ he reflects. ‘Insensitivity was urgently required.’

Toohey welcomed the intervention on the grounds that something had to be done – not about child sex abuse, which was the official impetus for action, but about the more general neglect of Aboriginal children and the violence meted out to Aboriginal women. He does express doubts, though, particularly about the abolition of the CDEP programs that provided valuable employment, moving 7000 Aboriginals onto welfare. He concludes that the intervention, clumsy though it was, was a good thing – and that the ALP’s (well-meaning) watering down of some measures jeopardises the intervention’s most valuable gains. Candid and incisive.