For a few moments on Wednesday, I thought maybe I was being a bit too cynical about the apology. I slept in on Wednesday morning, so missed an opportunity to engage in the national screen-mediated moment of apology. I didn’t miss everyone talking about the event, though. It seemed important on Wednesday, in social interactions, to say where you were at 9am, to voice your opinion about how great Rudd’s speech was, and to lambast Brendan Nelson for missing the point. (Awesome post on that note here.) And, yeah, if the apology makes some indigenous folks feel better about the conditions of dispossession, I’m glad. Because who wouldn’t want to to feel better?

But on the other hand, I’m wary of the mass sentiment this has provoked. It’s not new for non-indigenous people in Australia to express sorriness on Sorry Day. But it is new for this to be a government-mediated matter, where it becomes necessary to echo the terms of the Rudd apology in order to articulate one’s disgust at the past and present effects of the Stolen Generations. And the Rudd apology is still insufficient, even if it weren’t subject to the critique below. Nationalist calls to end one bad epoch and start a new good one always are.

So what to explore instead? Go read Elizabeth Povinelli’s essay, “Doing It For the Kids,” (via s0metim3s) on the connections between the militarised intervention in Northern Territory indigenous communities, states of exception, and the failure of multiculturalism. Or read Ange’s essay for Dark Matter, “The materialisation of race in multiculture”.

Nothing about the apology reduces the continuation of militarised control over NT indigenous communities. Under these circumstances, it might be germane to focus on Labor’s future plans for the ‘intervention’. And timely, today. Labor just announced that it intends to reinstate the permit system on rural indigenous communities in the NT. Journalists and government workers will still be able to enter communities without a permit, because apparently, it is important that journalists have all areas access to anywhere, ‘in order to carry out their work.’ The Indigenous Affairs Minister has already worked out how to spin this to Labor’s benefit. She claims the permit system is useful in keeping out grog and drug runners.

The strategy becomes clear: deploy the mainstream media as freelance surveillance experts and mobilise a system designed for indigenous community autonomy to enable more regulation of who goes in and out. This is what we can expect from a Labor government: the increased modulation of control according to minute differentiations, the recuperation of ‘left’ discourses like self-determination into biopolitical management. Nothing new, of course. Except that Howard’s explicit xenophobia mobilised a different populist affective register, and was less liberal-friendly.

Here is where the towels and soap come in. The NT intervention continues the project of ‘cleaning up Aboriginal communities’ that began with Shared Responsibility Agreements: community agreements tying welfare payments to children’s cleanliness and school attendance. Under the terms of the Mulan agreement, the community was given petrol bowsers and increased health ‘monitoring’ in return for residents ensuring that their children showered and washed their faces twice a day. I’m also remembering a scene from Battlestar Galactica where two imprisoned characters are tied up by disgruntled Marines, and struck repeatedly with bars of soap wrapped in a towel. The prisoners are struck in the stomach, where you can do a lot of damage without causing too many bruises. It’s a way for those in power to practice deceptive violence, using apparently innocuous instruments. Prisoners have to be protected; this enfolds violence in the means of protection, of humanitarianism. It allows those in charge to turn around and ask, “Why are you looking so unhappy? We feed you, we clothe you, we give you soap to wash with and a towel to dry yourself with. Don’t look so ungrateful!”

Those face-washing programs at Mulan are still going, just like the quarantined dole payments and mandatory health checks for children on indigenous communities. Under these circumstances, it’s hard not to see the apology as anything but a massive softening up exercise in readiness for more body blows.