The Government's Indigenous 'Intervention' isn't
causing the urban drift in the Northern Territory.
Image: iStockphoto

Indigenous Territorians are on the move regardless of the NT Intervention and not necessarily because of it, according to research from Charles Darwin University.

The study, by CDU’s School for Social and Policy Research, discredits recent claims that the Northern Territory Emergency Response (known as the 'Intervention') is causing urban drift among the Indigenous population.

Undertaken by Dr Dean Carson and Andrew Taylor, the research findings argue that any attempt to link migration patterns to events such as the Intervention required knowledge of historical trends and contemporary mobility patterns.

The paper contains evidence gathered from more than 400 Indigenous people from four large remote communities within the NT (two in the Top End, one in the Katherine region and one in Central Australia).

Participants were interviewed to ascertain personal migration habits and to determine whether they felt recent events (specifically the Intervention) had affected those habits.

They also were asked if they had observed changes in migration patterns among their wider communities. These experiences were compared to results from an analysis of Census data from 1991 onwards.

The study found that claims that the Intervention was the prime cause of urban drift were made in ignorance of under-laying trends and in absence of research to support such claims.

“Urbanisation has been happening in the Territory for decades and this is entirely consistent with models of migration from rural areas (and by Indigenous people) elsewhere in the world,” Mr Taylor said.

“So-called ‘bad’ urban drift, like going into town for the wrong reasons such as to drink alcohol, was also conveyed as phenomenon existing prior to the Intervention. In some cases the NTER may have created a spike in these already observed events, but in others it also may have reduced it,” he said.

Their paper also argued that global mobility facilitators such as improved transport networks and access to information and communication technologies (i.e. the internet) also must be recognised as enablers of Indigenous migration.

The researchers said the overwhelming perception of respondents was that people who wanted to move around, for whatever reason, would do so in spite of whatever rules were imposed by the Intervention.

They said that reversing provisions of the NTER would be unlikely to “reverse” migration patterns observed through this research, and what was needed was better informed public debate that took into account the history of mobility and included all the patterns currently being blamed on the Intervention.