Articles by: Dan Tout

In December 2015, Megan Davis opened her article for The Monthly, 'Gesture Politics', with the following words: 'Despair. In a word, this is the universal sentiment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders I have spoken to about the state of Aboriginal policy in Australia'. More recently, Jon Altman has written in The Guardian and on the 'Arena' blog on the Coalition government's 2016 Budget and its damaging disregard for Indigenous affairs, alongside the…

The Northern Territory Intervention as a strategy of settler colonialismThe Northern Territory Intervention and its continuation in the form of the perversely misnamed Stronger Futures legislation (which at the time of writing is set to pass the Senate in a rare instance of bipartisan cooperation) has already been subjected to critical analysis from a wide range of perspectives. Yet five years after the Intervention's announcement and on the eve of its ten-year extension, this radical…

Western Australian premier Colin Barnett has announced plans for the forced 'closure' of 'at least 100 or more' of the 274 remote Aboriginal communities across the state. It seems that South Australia may soon follow suit, with sixty locations in that state also earmarked for 'closure'. As with the Howard government's Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention) and its extension under the Gillard government's perversely named Stronger Futures legislation, we are seeing what Patrick Wolfe…

Review(s) of: The last man: A British genocide in Australia, by Tom Lawson, I. B. Taurus, 2014