The Northern Territory intervention has allowed the Australian government to experiment with ‘quarantined’ welfare provision – by rolling out ‘Basics cards’ – in the region. Today the ABC has published an interview in which the system is called ‘apartheid-like’ – although this type of rhetoric has been around since 2008 (see rollbacktheintervention). The comparison of separate shopping lanes in 2010 NT and post-1948 South Africa is apt and evocative, but perhaps overdrawn: apartheid had nothing to do with natives’ welfare; it functioned to allow the settler community to manage only its own people, to allow them, in fact, to clean their hands of any such responsibility.