History wars and Stronger Futures laws : a stronger future or perpetuating past paternalism?

This article highlights the relationship between the history wars and the Stronger Futures laws. The dominant discourse in the history wars has promoted a narrative of benevolent colonists acting primarily for the benefit of Aboriginal peoples. This is interconnected with early colonial ideas about the superiority of Eurocentric culture and how the norms of that culture were benefits to be bestowed upon a supposedly inferior Aboriginal one. In 2007, following the Little Children are Sacred report, 1 there was a return to a discourse that disparaged Aboriginal culture in order to justify the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention). The 2007 Intervention was, as Irene Watson argues, founded upon the 'cultural profiling of the other as barbarian'.2 In this sense, the laws and policies embodying the Intervention cannot be seen as divorced from the history wars. They have drawn upon a colonialist discourse stretching back to the earliest days of Australian colonisation.