As NT marks 40 years of self-government, former Labor MLA Ken Parish says the system has been problematic

The Northern Territory should become the “test bed” for reforms proposed in the Uluru statement and establish a formal Indigenous voice to parliament, a former Labor parliamentarian and political analyst says.

On Sunday, the Territory is marking 40 years of self-government. In Darwin and Alice Springs and many remote communities, locals will celebrate the same way they do every year: buying and exploding large amounts of fireworks during a day-long free-for-all.

Self-government has been a rocky ride. The Territory became the first place in Australia to introduce euthanasia laws in 1996, before they were nullified by the federal parliament a year later. The 2007 federal “intervention” involved overruling Territory laws.

A year on, the key goal of Uluru statement remains elusive Read more

Ken Parish, a former Labor MLA and academic at Charles Darwin University, said the system of government thrust upon the Northern Territory in 1978 had been problematic and that, while self-government should continue, the system should now be reformed with a view towards statehood.

“What we got at self-government was basically a cookie cutter colonial Westminster constitution and there was no consultation about the model we got, [prime minister Malcolm] Fraser just dumped it on us. There was no thought given to whether that model was appropriate for our mix of population,” Parish said.

“You already had statutory land rights with very powerful land councils. What they actually built was a model for conflict with two competing sources of power, the government and [land councils].



“It was and remains a paternalistic model and you don’t encourage people to take mature responsibility for their own lives ... by dictating to them.”



For the first 23 years of self-government, the ruling Country Liberal party opposed the land rights agenda. Labor spent the next 11 years in power, but by 2012 had fallen out of favour with many of the Territory’s indigenous communities, who were fed up with “super shires” that replaced community councils, and claims of systematic underspending in the bush.

The Northern Territory chief minister, Michael Gunner, recently signed a memorandum of understanding with land councils, the first step towards signing a treaty.

Almost a third of the population is Indigenous. Parish said the treaty could provide the impetus for the Territory to pilot a system of Indigenous representation similar to what was called for in the Uluru statement from the heart.

“We’ve had a history not only of frontier massacres, frontier wars ... we’ve had the stolen generations, ongoing things like taking people’s rights to take peoples land away from them. There’s a lot of reconciliation and truth telling that needs to be done.

“I think we should be [seeking an Indigenous voice to parliament] and it could be done now. There’s a number of models that we can adopt and none of them require us to be a state.”



Polling has always shown Territorians broadly favour statehood, but the push has gone off the boil in recent years. Concerns about the proposed model were blamed for the narrow defeat of a 1998 referendum.

NT signs historic Barunga agreement to begin Indigenous treaty talks Read more

Three years ago, the then chief minister Adam Giles received backing from state and territory leaders for the NT to become a state, with a goal date that expires on Sunday.

Indigenous leaders labelled it a “distraction”. Pat Dodson, now a Labor senator, said at the time Aboriginal people should have “their rights and interests ... entrenched in some Territory formal constitution”.



Gunner said he was laughed at when he attempted to revive the idea of statehood at his first Council of Australian Governments meeting.

“We got taken backwards a long way by the last CLP administration with our national reputation. We’ve got a lot of building to do to get back credibility into the statehood debate.”

Rolf Geritsen, an Alice Springs-based academic, told the ABC this week statehood was unachievable in its current form because of the divide between the Top End, particularly Darwin, and the rest of the Territory.