Prime Minister John Howard announced on June 21 that Australia will ban alcohol for northern Aborigines and impose new controls over release of welfare money, among other measures. The announcement followed a report by the Northern Government linking alcohol consumption to high rates of child abuse in Aboriginal communities.
The report also links social problems in Aboriginal communities to unemployment and poverty, both inevitable products of capitalism. However, the bourgeois government conveniently focuses on alcohol abuse in order to exculpate the real culprit—the profit system—from its destructive impact on the social fabric of the most oppressed communities.
Aborigines suffer from higher rates of poverty and significantly shorter life expectancy than the rest of the country’s inhabitants. Aboriginal leaders have denounced the measures as racist and paternalistic.
