When Prime Minister Howard and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough made their big announcement about the National Emergency in Aboriginal Affairs in the Northern Territory it reminded many of us here in central Australia about Colin Powell’s United Nations speech on the Iraq emergency.

It was big picture stuff, with Mal Brough pinching Pat Anderson’s “rivers of grog” tag line as he promised to bring in the troops, the cops and the medicos to save the children. Like Powell, Brough’s army was going to search and capture and destroy the weapons of mass destruction of grog, pornography and child abuse.

It wasn’t just having a go at Aboriginal people in Central Australia, as they were told they would lose control over entry to the bigger towns and communities with compulsory leases and abolition of permits. It was having a go at the many health workers, nurses, police, night patrol, drug and alcohol, petrol sniffing and child protection workers in the bush who have worked hard sometimes over many years in very difficult situations. They’ve done it on no resources against the odds.

When prosecutor Nannette Rogers blew the whistle early last year on Lateline on child abuse in Central Australia, a big thing has been forgotten. Every case she talked about had been brought to the courts as a result of the work of just those people who Brough announced would be taken over by (highly paid) volunteer health teams that would examine the remote area kids.

Yes, Rogers successfully prosecuted, but the material she had to work with came from health and other professionals in the field. Brough has done nothing but imply that they are just rubbish: he just chucked the experienced front line troops to one side.

Well, nine weeks on and we still haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction.

In Central Australia around 1000 kids have come forward for medical checks across 18 communities, from Kaltukatjara in the south west to Ti Tree in the east. This represents only 60+% of the number of kids estimated to live on those communities. They are wrapping up central Australian communities in the next week or so, before moving north to the Barkly, Katherine and Top End regions.

Brough started with military enthusiasm for intrusive sexual health checks, but no doctor would do that, as health minister Abbott made very clear at the time. But even scoring only 60+% in “general” voluntary check ups doesn’t seem like a huge achievement in the search for the weapons — especially as it is a far lower figure than registered by health clinics through central Australia, who regularly achieve more than 90% vaccination rates for kids.

The figures are kept highly secret, but it is known in Central Australian health circles that the numbers of referrals for abuse and neglect reported as part of the mass health screening has been tiny — not much more than a handful.

Meanwhile word has it from the National Task Force that the national emergency is so vitally important that the Intervention medical check teams will have a Christmas holiday. They’ll be knocking off on 14 December and getting back to work a month later on 14 January.

That’s nice for them.

I’ll bet the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan would like that sort of R&R.