The NT gets away with madness because its ideas (and money) are imported

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/03/the-nt-gets-away-with-madness-because-its-ideas-and-money-are-imported

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All countries need to have an abject other to bolster the aspirations of the rest. In Australia, this role is served by the NT, long a place where people seeking radical escape from their own psyches seek regeneration in the anarchic, forgiving and forgetful borderlands. The territory serves as our national space of exception, a place boasting the aggravations of too many men and not enough women; where crocodiles regularly maim tourists; and Indigenous people are discriminated against. Political mavericks are easily incubated here.

On the ground, the Territory’s sense of difference feeds contradictory tendencies. Foremost is a magnificent boastfulness about the Territory character. Here, attributes of the truly unique environment are grafted onto the less unique sojourners who bulk out the population, and legends are spun. In a similar transformation, imported ideas (often outdated) go from carbon copies to instances of proudly original achievement. And because the place is so small and so highly subsidised, local policy decisions can be inefficient, or poorly evidenced, and still be hyper-inflated in terms of their claimed significance. Such is the nature of Territory parochialism. The place can be a circus, and no one really minds. How so?

In part, mad things can be gotten away with because of extra budgetary loadings (that is, a generous distribution of the GST that is largely calibrated around remote area pathology); and what’s more, because that national desire for a margin in turn fosters marginality.

Take the occasion when Adam Giles, now under siege, ousted Terry Mills barely eight months into the government’s new term. Back then, the Northern Territory became the first of Australia’s self-governing states and territories to have an Indigenous leader, an extraordinary occasion. Well no, not really – the event gained little national media attention. As now, it competed with other revolving door leadership issues in the same period: Victoria lost its premier the same week; there was yet another challenge to Julia Gillard; Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope in 600 years to resign from office. The efficiency of the papal replacement against the manufactured fuss of domestic leadership frenzies led political observer Annabel Crabb to call for the invention of a new process:

“Habemus chief minister!” would have been a much more dignified way...for Australians to have learnt this week that Somebody-Or-Other had stunningly replaced What’s-His-Name as supreme leader of the Northern Territory.

Spectacle and irrelevance are twins, but as the removalists shift the furniture out of the chief minister’s office and key documents get shredded, consider this. As I have written before, Australian perceptions of an insular, exotic, isolated frontier disguise the north’s role as a key military hub for the United States Armed Forces; and with this masking, important debates about Australia’s current and future regional interests are all too easily sidelined.

It is worth remembering too that the Territory actually can claim unique survivor status. Its capital city, Darwin, has been resurrected four times in its short settlement history, while the Territory’s Aboriginal families resisted pursuit of their extermination so successfully, they are now a decisive force in the region’s political and economic fortunes. (The old formulas for maintaining government — spend in the white suburbs and ensure cranes are on the horizon — are no longer potent enough to hold power.)

Perhaps this will help remind us that, under current policy configurations, Australia’s national wealth still hinges on a resource race for what’s left – and that the tributaries feeding these survival fights are not quarantined to a frontier, but are embedded in economic flows that line many pockets. Racialised inequality can be only isolated to the margins in our national imaginary, not our socio-economic reality. And as a survivor on the climate margins, the Territory holds important lessons for Australia on what to expect as the seas turn to acid and the jelly fish bloom. Perhaps then, instead of enjoying this the familiar entertainment of another Territory political stoush, we should be looking to the north as an explainer in more serious registers.