What does it tell us about Australian politics in 2015 that Mal Brough might lose his job over Peter Slipper’s diary rather than from his role devising the Northern Territory intervention into Indigenous communities?

Ashbygate is, you might say, the quintessential 21st century scandal: a grubby affair of near Talmudic complexity, occasioned by tactical manoeuvring detached from any particular policy outcome and with almost no significance to anyone other than political insiders.

The intervention, on the other hand, was a policy watershed: a disastrous return to bipartisan paternalism in Indigenous policy. Yet, politically, Brough’s culpability for it seems less significant a factor in his political career than the comparatively trivial shenanigans involving Ashby and Slipper.

In an interview with Tony Jones in mid-2007, John Howard credited Brough as the real force behind the intervention.

“He’s a former military man,” Jones responded. “It’s almost as if you’re treating the Northern Territory in this regard as a failed state.”

The comparison was more apt than Jones probably realised. The intervention was so distinctive precisely because it utilised the methodology recently employed in Iraq – except against Indigenous people.

With Iraq, the neocons in the Bush administration had been advocating regime change since the late 1990s. Within hours of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld realised that the public’s horror at the devastation suddenly made an attack on Saddam politically possible. Notes scribbled by one of his aides documented his thoughts: “Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.”

Similarly, Australian conservatives had long argued decried the very limited forms of self-determination won by Aboriginal communities since the 1970s, particularly in remote communities. They argued instead that Indigenous people should be induced – even coerced – to embrace the market economy.

But they knew there was no public appetite for such a shift.

Everything changed in 2006 after media reports (particularly by Lateline) of sexual violence against children in the Northern Territory. The issues raised were not new. Similar concerns had been raised by the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991, by the Bringing Them Home report in 1997 and by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Council in 2001.

Furthermore, many questions might have been asked about Lateline’s more sensational allegations – as New Matilda’s Chris Graham subsequently revealed, the whistleblower presented by the program as an anonymous youth worker was actually the senior public servant advising Mal Brough on violence and sexual abuse.

Nevertheless, public outrage spurred the NT government to form the Northern Territory board of inquiry into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. The inquiry was chaired by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild. After extensive consultation with Indigenous people about sexual abuse in their communities, they produced the Little Children are Sacred report.

In it, they identified the concepts they believed were central to addressing the problems: dialogue, empowerment, ownership, awareness, healing, reconciliation, strong family, culture, law. They listed nearly a hundred specific policy recommendations. The very first of them was that “both [the Northern Territory and federal] governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities [to address child sexual abuse].

The report came out in April. In June, citing the NT government’s failure to respond to Little Children are Sacred, John Howard and Mal Brough launched their own “emergency intervention”.

The measures they announced (the deployment of military personnel; bans on pornography and alcohol; the removal of customary law; compulsory acquisition of townships; the abolition of the Community Development Employment Projects scheme; and so on) bore no relationship to anything the report advocated.

“There is not a single action the commonwealth has taken so far that corresponds with a single recommendation,” lamented Pat Anderson in 2007.

John Reeves, QC, a member of the prime minister’s taskforce, later explained:

While the Little Children are Sacred report was the catalyst for the NT National Emergency Response, it was never the intention of the commonwealth government to implement the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report.

In her contribution to the recent book The Intervention, a tremendously important anthology compiled by Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss, Anderson says:

The NT government’s inaction gave the prime minister the opportunity to advance his agenda in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, central to which was the undermining of rights to land: the intervention as the counter-revolution to Wik and Mabo. This, I think, was central to the intervention, and explains why almost none of the recommendations of Little Children Are Sacred were included.

Go massive! Sweep it all up, things related and not!

A sign, stating a stance against the government?s intervention policies in Aboriginal communities appears in the outback town of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory, Saturday, May 19, 2012. Photograph: Xavier la Canna/AAP

Even at the time, Pat Dodson spoke of an “Iraq-style of intervention” and journalists Misha Shubert described a “shock and awe blitz”. In no other circumstances would the government have got away with announcing, almost overnight, cuts to welfare in the NT, the overturning of the Land Rights Act and the system of permits used to regulate entry to Aboriginal land and the replacement of elected councilors with appointed business managers. Key measures were explicitly racially discriminatory, with suspension of anti-racist laws necessary so that the government could quarantine part of the income support benefits paid to Indigenous people in the targeted communities.

Many of the policies seemed derived from little more than rightwing prejudice. For instance, the intervention implemented a censorship regime unparalleled anywhere in the country. But, if you look at the Anderson/Wild report, the Indigenous people they found decrying “porn” were often discussing sexy movies on SBS, not hardcore videos. In any case, even if there were any scientific link between child abuse and X-rated movies, there’s far more porn in Canberra (the nation’s capital of erotica) than in any remote community.

But, evidence or not, conservatives just knew porn was somehow to blame – and so Indigenous communities had to live with big blue signs outside their homes warning strangers against bringing pornography. Not surprisingly, many found this intensely humiliating – a “shame job”, they said.

Throughout 2006, Aboriginal communities across the Territory had sat down with the NT board of inquiry, bravely discussing the crises facing their townships and how they thought these crises might be addressed.

In 2007, they discovered that, once again, all their input had been completely ignored, abandoned in favour of a Canberra-devised plan that entailed, quite literally, a military deployment.

In no other context would anyone consider using soldiers to fight the sexual abuse of children. In no other context would the use of soldiers be so damaging.

Arrernte elder Rosalie Kunoth-Monks’s description of what the intervention meant in her home community of Urapuntja is sadly typical:

[S]oldiers in uniform, the police and public servants arrived, and we were ushered up to the basketball stadium and we were all told that we were now under the intervention. We don’t have access to newspapers, a lot of us we don’t have access to TV, a lot of us were going along our normal way, living at home, and just doing the normal everyday things but on the day that they landed it was incredible. We really thought we were going to be rounded up and taken, because John Howard had made the statement and Mal Brough of course carried it out, that we were now under the intervention.

How did the government get away with it?

Again, think of Iraq. The call for war in 2003 was instigated by the neoconservative right. But it became much more persuasive when echoed by the liberal left. Many of the loudest voices urging an attack did so with progressive rhetoric about freedom and democracy and human rights. The government had a responsibility to intervene, they said – and if you didn’t agree, they called you a supporter of Saddam.

So it was with Indigenous policy.

In 2006, the Australian’s in-house cartoonist Bill Leak illustrated the right’s emerging consensus about Aboriginal people with a picture of two Aboriginal men discussing sexual violence. In typical Leak fashion, they were thick-lipped, flatnosed stereotypes of the kind featured in The Bulletin, circa 1892.

Labor backed the intervention from the start. Progressive pundits fell over themselves to endorse Brough and Howard.

“Rape’s out, bashing’s out,” said one to another. “This could set our culture back by 2000 years.”

Of course, the right could barely contain its glee at Brough’s plan.

“Restrictive pass laws have made the homelands secret places, gulags almost,” wrote Frank Devine. “Only by opening them to the public gaze will there be adequate and indispensable private participation in the huge task ahead.”

Yet the intervention was also supported by a great number of ostensible liberals, people who really should have known better. Labor, of course, backed the intervention right from the start. Progressive pundits fell over themselves to endorse Brough and Howard, to commend them for taking action. The plan might not have been perfect, they said, but at least the administration was doing something. Previous generations had neglected Indigenous Australia but that stopped now. The new scheme was a turning point. From now on, things would be different!

Identical pledges have accompanied the outbreak of every recent war supposedly fought on humanitarian grounds. Solidarity with the women of Afghanistan! Stand up for the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq! Protect the civilians of Libya!

Then, as these supposedly progressive ventures produce the traditionally catastrophic results for those they were supposed to save, the liberal interventionists tiptoed away from the disaster, quietly forgetting those they pledged always to remember (heard much about Libyan civilians recently?).

After John Howard lost power in December 2007, successive Labor administrations kept the guts of the ‘intervention, rebranded as the “Stronger Futures” policy. We’ve had, in other words, eight years of the policy revolution spurred by Brough.

As Eva Cox argues in The Intervention, “even the government’s own contracted evaluators have not been able to find positive outcomes either in the NT generally, or in specific projects such as income management …. [M]ost of the Territory’s wellbeing statistics have deteriorated over the last few years, post intervention.”

In particular, she notes that the number of alcohol-related presentations to emergency departments and public hospitals by Indigenous people in the Northern Territory has “increased dramatically since the mid-2000s”, while imprisonment rates of Indigenous people in the NT have increased at a faster rate than anywhere else. In March 2007, there were 30 Aboriginal women in prison in the NT; in March 2015, there were 125. The equivalent numbers for men show a rise from 650 to 1300.

Earlier this month, Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, warned that Indigenous children were being removed from parents at “alarmingly high rates”.

“We now think it is about almost equivalent to another Stolen Generation,” he said. “[I]n about another 50 or 60 years we will have another person standing up in parliament and apologising.”

He went on to condemn the government’s Healthy Welfare Card – a development of the intervention’s income management policy – and the new work-for-the-dole scheme.

It’s very hard to find evidence about the intervention’s effects on sexual abuse (indeed, serious assessments of the whole strategy are in short supply). But the ongoing royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has now highlighted the ubiquity of sexual abuse, a problem apparently rife within many organisations. Yet no government would contemplate using the coercive measures unleashed on Indigenous communities to police the white institutions currently under scrutiny.

[W]hat seems to be here is a range of measures that have been designed to target Aboriginal people particularly, and they’re interventions that wouldn’t be used or wouldn’t be deemed to be acceptable to any other group within the Australian community.

That was prominent Aboriginal advocate Olga Havnen back in 2007.

Her words highlight a crucial and often forgotten point: namely, Aboriginal people warned that the NT intervention would fail while – or even before – it was being rolled out.

Indeed, the Little Children are Sacred report could not have been clearer.

“[T]he issues are complex,” it said, “and there are no magic solutions and certainly no ‘quick fix’ options which can deal immediately with the gravity of the underlying problems … The thrust of our recommendations … is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the communities, of [the] solutions.”

There was no consultation. There was no ownership. Instead, there was a “quick fix” based on already existing rightwing shibboleths.

Mal Brough hasn’t been in the Indigenous portfolio for a long time. There are plenty of others to share the blame for what’s happened. Nevertheless, historians will remember Brough as the minister responsible for resetting the paradigm of Indigenous politics, moving the consensus away from consultation and self-determination toward a kind of coercive neoliberalism.

Hopefully, he’ll lose his job over Ashbygate – they got Al Capone for tax fraud in the end. But even if he does, the damage has already been done.