Those are the findings of a government report, released quietly at the end of October, on the performance of what is now called the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

The report, Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory, reveals average attendance rates for primary and secondary school from January to June was 63 per cent, unchanged from June 2007.

Assaults in the indigenous communities rose by more than half since 2007. In the same period, substance abuse incidents have increased by 71 per cent and the number of alcohol-related incidents rose from 2271 to 3940.

A spokesman for Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin said some of these increases were due to a higher police presence in remote Northern Territory communities, particularly in places that previously had limited or no police, which led to more reporting of incidents.

The number of confirmed incidents of child abuse rose from 66 in the 2006-07 financial year to 227 in 2008-09. The intervention was introduced by the Howard government in June 2007 as a response to a report, Little Children are Sacred, which detailed the abuse and neglect of children in Northern Territory indigenous communities.

Paddy Gibson, an organiser of the Stop the Intervention Collective, said the intervention had made conditions in indigenous communities worse, not better.

''Anyone who reads the report gets a sense of the increasing social chaos caused by the disruptive, coercive measures imposed by the NTER,'' he said.

''For an intervention that has cost more than $1 billion, it's an absolute disgrace. The money is not going to the community organisations that have been demanding it for years, it's going to a bureaucracy that is trying to micromanage people's lives.''

The new report also reveals the Rudd Government failed to remove the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act for measures under the intervention, which it had promised to do by October.

For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times