The original HG Nelson in 1922, fresh from leading rebellious riots in Darwin, and about to become the first Federal MP for the NT. He was also the father of Jock Nelson. HG, also known as Harry, is pictured here on his trusty Velocette motorcycle, outside the old Alice Springs Telegraph Station, doubtless on the campaign trail. (Rampaging Roy Jeisman is seen here in typical pose supporting the candidate, and the fence).

The wild history of our fight for Federal representation

Bob Durnan

The controversy over Gillard’s decision to try to railroad Nova Peris through the pre-selection process has reminded me of a few adventures along these electoral paths in the past – adventures which may not be known to many recent arrivals in the Territory, and which have probably been forgotten by most other residents anyway.

The NT has only had fully fledged representatives in the Federal Parliament since the election that saw Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal-Country Party coalition defeat Gough Whitlam’s ALP in December 1975.

There had been Territory MHRs commuting to Canberra before this, but their votes were only counted if the legislation under consideration had direct relevance to the NT.

They included two members of Labor’s fabled left-wing Nelson family.

There were no Senate seats for the NT until 1975.

The single NT House of Representatives seat had been first won by the original Harold ‘HG’ Nelson, when it was created following his agitation for it in 1922.

HG had come to the NT from Bundaberg with his young family to work at his trade of as engine driving at Pine Creek in 1913, at the age of 32.

Pine Creek was then still a gold and tin mining boom town, with a public school and several hotels, and was probably the largest population centre in the NT outside Darwin. It had been connected to Darwin by a railway as early as 1889, many years before the old Darwin-Katherine rail link was established, and had a population of 3,000 people at its peak.

In 1914 HG became the first secretary of the newly created Darwin branch of the Australian Workers Union, which expanded very rapidly under his leadership.

In 1917 Harold was elected to the Darwin Council, and won a campaign to improve wages for Territory meat-workers.

In November the following year the NT’s Administrator, Dr John Gilruth, refused requests from some workers for time off to celebrate the end of the 1914-1918 war (WW1).

HG led a series of protests, which culminated in the Darwin Rebellion. On December 17th 1918, Harold led a march to Liberty Square, in front of Government House, demanding the dismissal of the Federal Government’s Northern Territory Administrator.

These protests continued until Gilruth removed himself from the Administrator role in February 1919. Other senior officials fled after him out of Darwin.

HG then commenced a campaign for representation of the NT in the national parliament, and began a movement to refuse to pay taxes until representation was granted.

During this campaign he was gaoled, but he won this battle too, with the granting of a non-voting seat in the House of Representatives.

As a side adventure, HG attempted a crossing of the continent by motor bike, on his brand new Velocette machine, in 1922. He nearly died of dehydration in the desert south of Alice Springs in the process. Many years later Philip Nitschke was inspired by HG’s epic motorbike ride, and undertook similar trips on vintage machines.

In the same year HG won election as the first Parliamentary representative of the Northern Territory, winning the new NT seat in Federal Parliament at its inception. He represented the NT in the national capital until he was defeated at the 1934 election by a conservative Independent, Adair Blain. After his defeat HG relocated his family to Alice Springs, where he died in 1947.

A surveyor by trade, Adair Blain had attended university in Adelaide, worked as a surveyor in WA, and served as an AIF corporal in France in WW1.

On his return to Australia he worked around remote Queensland, and then across the NT top end for several years. In 1934 he got himself elected to the Canberra parliament on a platform of pledging to gain the full vote for the NT Federal representative, or resign; a promise on which he subsequently reneged.

Blain remained the NT’s Member of the House of Representatives (MHR) for fifteen years.

During this time he lowered his age and enlisted in the Royal Australian Engineers as a sergeant, fought against the Japanese in Malaya, and was captured by them during the Fall of Singapore in 1942. He spent the rest of the war as a POW, first in Singapore and then in Borneo.

On release in 1945, he wore his uniform into Parliament in Canberra, received a standing ovation, and was then sent to hospital for two months to recover.

HG’s son Jock Nelson, a stockman, bore driller and miner, who was also a second world war (WW2) veteran, won the Territory seat in 1949 from Blain, holding it until he retired in 1966.

Jock then became mayor of Alice Springs. In 1973, Whitlam appointed him to the position of Administrator of the NT, ironically the position that his father had in 1919 chased out of the NT.

Jock retired here in Alice, and died in 1991 aged 83. Jock’s partner, Labor stalwart Peg Nelson, still resided at the Old Timers’ Home until she passed away in early 2010. The Commonwealth’s main building in Alice is named after Jock.

From Jock’s retirement in 1966, Sam Calder, a Country Party member and another war hero, who flew planes for the Alice-based Connellan Airlines, took over the non-voting position as MHR in Canberra.

Part 1: Searching for a Super Nova

Watch for Part 3. After Gough’s Intervention

Alison Anderson (Photo ABC)

Outstation housing maintenance needs funding

By Bob Durnan

On Saturday 5th January, NT Indigenous Advancement Minister Alison Anderson’s office placed a large ad in the NT News.

The ad outlined the facts concerning Anderson’s intention to fund some house repairs on outstations (aka ‘homelands’ and ‘homelands communities’ in the top end).

The advertisement followed a couple of months’ speculation about the details of Anderson’s proposal, and allegations about the grants being personal rewards to bush electors for having voted CLP.

Critics of Anderson’s policy often framed their accusations in terms of the envious urban “us” being discriminated against, and missing out on favours based on discriminatory political generosity to the privileged rural poor “them”.

The newspaper ad repeated information which had been stated by Anderson several times since the August election which brought her party to government.

One of those statements had been issued by her office in a media statement on 7th December. It said:

“Minister for Indigenous Advancement says that contrary to comments published in the media today, bush residents are not ‘being given a $5200 Christmas present’ and to suggest that they are is both inaccurate and inflammatory.

“Housing on remote communities is often over-crowded and homelands provide an important alternative that reduces the burden on community housing.  As a result of many years of inadequate funding these houses are often in a poor state of repair and due to their remoteness, ongoing repairs and maintenance is very expensive.  This funding is not a ‘handout’ and Indigenous householders in remote communities are not ‘being given $5200 to do up their homes’. The $5200 will be provided to Outstation Service Providers to be spent on necessary repairs and maintenance where:

the resident does not have another government supported dwelling;

adult residents participate in the economy;

children of the household regularly attend school.

“This is an equivalent amount of money to what Territory Housing currently spends on repairs and maintenance to properties in Tennant Creek each year. To portray this sort of necessary government spending as ‘a taxpayer-funded “thank you” to bush voters’ is irresponsible and divisive.”

(Anderson’s media statements may have more effective if they had explained to the fairly uninformed public that most outstation housing has had little maintenance funding in recent years, as it has not been eligible for repairs under the SIHIP and NTER “Intervention” programs).

Although Anderson may have been disloyal to the ALP, an often offensive critic of her opponents, and a loose cannon and contrary advocate in many situations, I believe that she had a valid point to make in this instance.

Her media releases had made it clear that the $5200 grants were to be spent only on a small subset of homeland housing: those where the occupants used the houses as their principal addresses, engaged in economic activities, and managed to get their children to attend school.

As there are far fewer than 10,000 homeland dwellers in the NT (according to Pat Dodson’s report to the NTG in 2009), being mainly people who live in family groups, usually of no more than 50 people, the total number of occupied outstation houses is probably around 2000. Most of these houses have had little, if any, repair work done on them in recent years, since the demise of ATSIC’s grants programs in 2005.

More recently, Minister Anderson has published a more detailed explanation about what her policy involves (see the NT News, pp. 22-25 from Saturday 26th January).

Here Anderson explains that the housing maintenance grants are to be known as the “Homelands Extra Allowance”. She says “we want it to provide a framework that opens the way for similar commitment by other stakeholders. In particular it is a platform for the Commonwealth Government which controls the Aboriginal Benefits Account, and the Land Councils, which manage Aboriginal land on behalf of the traditional owners, to step up their commitment to homelands housing.”

This seems to imply that Anderson thinks the Commonwealth can be induced to reverse its decision to prioritise other housing needs above those of the homelands, or be politically wedged if they don’t agree to make this reversal. However, given that the Commonwealth has already reversed its decision to make the homelands an entirely NT government responsibility, and committed itself to ploughing more than $200 million over the next ten years into outstation/homelands’ essential services operations and maintenance, the wedging opportunities are probably extremely limited, as this is far more than the NTG has committed itself to spend on the outstations.

The big beneficiaries from this funding will probably be the Urapuntja outstations (aka “Utopia”) northeast of Alice Springs, as well as around one hundred permanently occupied outstations in the coastal regions (especially in north-east Arnhem Land), plus a number at Hermannsburg, and a few round each of Harts Range, Mt Allan, Papunya, the Barkly, Borroloola, the Kings Canyon region, and other isolated instances scattered here and there around the NT.

Even if all 2000 houses received the grant, the total expenditure would be not much more than $10,000,000.

Given that many, if not most, outstation families would be disqualified from receiving these grants because they would not meet the criteria cited by the minister (see dot points above), as they often do not occupy their outstations for much of the year, and/or fail to send their kids to school consistently, and/or have a second house in the nearest community, and/or don’t have jobs or non-welfare income, it follows that the actual expenditure would be much less than ten million dollars, and possibly less than half of the that maximum.

Terry Mills may well be a pathetic fool and a doddering hypocrite, a spineless and willing puppet of the CLP’s faceless backroom boys and power-crazed hard men, and surrounded by a gang of greedy brigands called “advisors”.

Terry and his gang of pirates may be making extravagant, hypocritical claims about financial black holes, as though CLP governments had not run the same deficits for decades, while he hastily helps his mates to line their ‘consultant’ pockets with gold, and finances his scam by fleecing the poor who depend on power and water to survive the heat and cold of the NT summers and centralian winters.

He may also be a political goose, likely to be cooked soon by his political foes for having abolished the Banned Drinkers Register and SMART Court, eliminated police and teacher support positions, annihilated many valuable youth programs, binned greatly needed child welfare and domestic violence prevention worker positions, and stupidly dismissed many other loyal, competent senior and junior public servants who will ultimately be very difficult to replace.

This does not mean that absolutely everything that he and his ministers do or say is wrong.

Although it is quite natural for us, his unhappy subjects and victims, to be suspicious of every royal decree he makes, in this particular case his government’s proposal appears to be justified: not only did they make their intentions plain before the election, there is a high public value associated with maintaining most of these outstation houses.

A bit of well-supervised maintenance work on these dwellings will improve living conditions for many impoverished people living in what are mainly publicly funded but badly neglected buildings. Repairs needed on these houses were basically ignored by Brough’s SIHIP program, and do not benefit from the Stronger Futures funding; Anderson’s program will thus help maintain what are ultimately semi-public assets, which would otherwise rot and fall into ruin around the poor people who have to live in them.

Most people would agree that it is good policy to improve living conditions for these people, particularly when the repair work is calculated to reward the good behaviour of those who are trying to pull their weight with the raising of children, leading responsible independent lives, and working for much of their income.

The CLP’s opponents should not fall into the mistake of using an easy tactic to inflame more public anger at Terry Mills’ gang of bushrangers by further provoking unjustified jealousy of Aboriginal people or public suspicions about this program. There are other more ethical ways to focus our anger about this exploitative cabal which masquerades as a government. We should all take that deep breath, and admit that – for once – a very bad government has, amazing as it may seem, actually gotten something pretty right.

Nova and Julia in Canberra. Photo from the PM’s Facebook page

By Bob Durnan

I am a long term ALP member, having joined the NT branch in 1983. I have participated actively in every Federal ALP election campaign since that of 1974, every NT ALP campaign since that of 1977, and held many party positions. I have often been a campaign manager, in a variety of NT seats, including for several Aboriginal candidates.

I understand Nova Peris lives in Canberra; presumably that is where she is on the electoral roll. Nova appears to have been living in Canberra and other interstate cities for most of the last twenty years. She doesn’t seem to be very well known in remote NT communities.

If Nova is such an ideal candidate, and a necessary ornament to the ALP nationally, then it is difficult to understand why head office (located in the ACT) didn’t instruct the local sitting ALP Senator in the ACT to step aside. That would have enabled the first Aboriginal woman to enter Parliament from Canberra, her current local community, and a place where she is probably even better known and more at ease than she is in the NT.

An entrance to politics in Canberra would have been a lot more graceful and less ham-fisted than bulldozing Nova into the Senate via the NT. Imposing her on the NT ALP has involved running roughshod over long term, committed Aboriginal party members. Some of these members, although reluctant to be seen trying to knock off a hard-working sitting member, would have liked the chance to put their hands up for the Senate job if they had known in advance that Trish Crossin was being made redundant by the management of the firm.

If head office had taken this route, parachuting Peris into its own local patch rather than here, it would then have been in a position to have some real sense, in advance, of what the local political fallout from such a move was likely to be. It is apparent that in this case, head office had no idea about how badly the move would go down amongst politically aware Aboriginal people and other voters in the NT.

The national ALP has successfully shot itself in the foot, making Gillard look like a bully, and local Aboriginal ALP members look disrespected and unwanted.

In the process it has cruelled some of the ALP’s chances of holding Lingiari or taking back the Darwin seat of Solomon in the next election.

What could have been a triumph for Aboriginal people, democracy, and the Labor Party has thus been turned into a fiasco.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Peris, who seems quite naive about politics and the NT ALP, may be so shocked by all this that she drops out of the race before the election, putting us back to square one.

(I should probably state here that I was co-ordinator of Pat Anderson’s near-successful efforts to gain NT ALP pre-selection for the Senate position, in competition with Trish Crossin, in the late nineties).

I have also supported many other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ALP members for positions within the Party, as well as for pre-selections (including both Marion Scrimgour and Alison Anderson).

I do not support Constitutional reservation of seats for Indigenous representatives.

I do think that it is incumbent on all political parties to ensure they support the inclusion of Indigenous people in their membership drives, and also in their mentoring of candidates for party and other positions. This should include support for candidates in general elections for both safe and non-safe seats. I don’t believe that it is good practice to choose celebrities from outside, who seem to be good ideas at the time, and parachute them into seats.

Watch for Part Two: Back story – the wild history of our fight for Federal representation

Clams break free.Photo by Clam Nation, Wiki Commons

By Bob Durnan

Are we not sentient molluscs?

In central Australia, as in many other parts of our turbulent galaxy, we find isolated clam populations surviving in government aquaria, as well as their natural habitats; they still live buried in sand or mud, siphoning air, despite the fierce tides of climate change, corporate malfeasance, fund fiddling bankers, and Terry Mills’ deceitful election promise to reduce living costs, which all swirl around them.

Unlike other molluscs, such as the darwinian marine bivalves breeding prolifically on the coastal fringe to our north, the central Australian variety hangs suspended in something of a discourse backwater, and seldom squeals about these injustices, or remonstrates with oppressive authority.

Rather, as a sub-species they have chosen throughout their evolution to remain pretty well closed-mouthed in the face of all manner of stupidity and provocation, spending most of their lives burrowed deep into the infertile sediments of their arid seabed existences.

But hark: climate scientists predict that this is likely to change in 2013, as significant variations in the social and economic currents which govern their environments are agitating our normally placid inland political seas, producing conditions which may bring unprecedented turbulence to these normally tranquil waters. As the serene calm of their habitats is disturbed by the brutality of government imposts which they cannot afford, will the central Australian clams find their voices and begin to speak up? We can only trust that this will be so, and that the silence of the clams will soon be ending.

To assist in facilitating this evolutionary leap, some at the local clam-face are working hard at the production of a Clam Liberation Advancement Moment. As a contribution to this process, I wish to here seek your advice, Alice Online readers, in considering the following propositions.

Central Australian clams are generally subject to the oppression of social circumstances best described as ‘like living in a fish bowl’. Most work for one or other of the many layers of government departments and quasi-government organisations, or for NGOs and private corporations, in the small, tightly bounded rock pool which is known as Alice Springs. The governments and corporations often cultivate an ambience of servility, conformity and quietude amongst their employees. They try to keep the defence cowboys from conversing with the community garden farmers. They are happy to support the rev heads and the art heads so long as they stay in their separate pens, and don’t conspire to question the pool’s status quo. This is an unhealthy regimen for everybody, but most especially it is lethal for the wellbeing of the democlamic process, as it conspires to repress active participation by employees and other members of the local clam masses generally in the pond’s public and political life.

Being oft-times shy, politically inexperienced life forms, central Australian clams are usually loath to raise their voices outside the confines of their burrows or favourite drinking spots.

Central Australian clams habitually adhere to the psychological disorder known as ‘large clamshell syndrome’, and turn savagely on any other clam which chooses to clearly display its opinions, often forming packs and devouring whole any clam perceived to be too big for its gumboots.

Although central Australian clams are theoretically blessed with a plethora of fora in which they can express their molluscular opinions, they are rarely game to do so. For example, they rarely put bivalve to keyboard and write to the editors of the dominant Rupert-owned Clamtralian Advocate, Dave Richards’ fabulous Alice Clam Online, the Central Clam Council’s Clam Rights News, or Erwin and Kieran’s feisty Alice Springs Clam News Online. Nor do they bother much to avail their little clammy voices of the phone-in opportunities available on the ABC’s Clambake Morning Show or Afternoon Clam-time programmes on CLAM Radio 783; CLAAMA Radio’s 8KIN FM; community radio’s 8 Triple Clam at 102.1 FM; and Murray Stewart’s exciting Territory Clams Today on 8HA, at 900 on their underwater receivers. All these media exist in theory to enable greater flows of information and propaganda to clams of every opinion, creed or colour.

Why then do so few of our fellow clams choose to emit emails to these journals, or call the plaintive ABC announcer who begs them daily to call her, anytime, about whether they too have ever wondered what they had for breakfast, and why on earth any self-respecting clam would listen to boring seahorse droppings like these?

Why is it that only the likes of a few brave and confident shellfish such as Alex Nelclam, Hal Dueclam and Russell Goldclam can be bothered to put bivalve to keypad with any regularity and express views that could cause the average reading mollusc to light up its nerve cell?

Would all central Australian bivalves not benefit from having lively, interesting discussions occurring in all our media about local events, Territory politics, national issues and universal questions? Come on clams, you can do it! Have you not got feelings in your tiny beating hearts, and thoughts fermenting in your fledgling brains? Well, maybe not, but you know what I mean. Open your incipient orifices, and learn to speak.

Like the ABC Morning Clambake announcers, we too would love you to fill in the comment square below, and give us your thoughts. You can always use a nom de keyboard if you are that shy or fearful.

Let’s make January 2013 the month known as that eternally memorable time when the humble central Australian clams threw off their salt-encrusted chains, grew larynxes, and yelled their miseries and joys, and even their well-considered thoughts and defensible views, into the great wellsprings of clam opinion and debate.

Northern Territory citizens would do well to think carefully about accepting a law enforcement direction which abandons due processes for people accused of committing crimes.

Some of our valuable liberties seem to be coming under systematic attack from those who wish to remove hard-won civil rights that were established during centuries of struggle for the rule of law. They want to replace the rights with streamlined processes for imprisoning people suspected of being troublesome to the good order of our society.

For example, it would appear that prominent Alice Springs community leader (by his own account he’s “not a vigilante”) Councillor Steve Brown wants juveniles, as a class of suspected offenders, to be denied the right to apply for bail when they are arrested on suspicion of having committed offences.

This would take away the discretion of the magistrate or other judicial officer who would normally deal with this issue. (See Steve’s own words, and at his discussion of others’ comments on that article Posted January 6, 2013 at 4:42 pm).

At the same time that keen student of the Australian legal system, Janet Brown, apparently wants people accused of domestic violence offences to be automatically evicted from their homes prior to charges being laid or convictions being recorded (see her comments Posted January 7, 2013 at 8:43 am).

The Browns seem to want us to move into a system in which the due processes of our legal system give way to the presumption of guilt when it comes to accusations against members of marginalised groups; something like a return to the no-nonsense can-do ways that they did things in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, or Moscow in 1937. Into detention, or off to the gulag, and don’t ask questions, once somebody has made an accusation against you.

Presumably then Janet and Steve would agree as well with NT Acting Chief Minister Robyn Lambley when she decided to announce that a young woman who had died at a town camp recently had been murdered in a horrific incident of domestic violence before even a committal hearing had taken place for the man accused of having been involved in her death.

The Browns probably also concur with NT Attorney-General John Elferink’s resolve to send people who are drunk and addicted to alcohol off to mandatory detention for three months in remote work camps regardless of whether they have committed any offence whilst drunk, and regardless of whether they are likely to gain long term benefit from such incarceration (see link).

After three months in detention, Elferink’s prisoners will be allowed out. If they get drunk again, straight back to the work camp. John thinks that regardless of whether it does them any good, the benefit of the compulsory incarceration for the inmates will be to enable them to “revisit their world view”. The benefits for the rest of society will be that they don’t have to view them anymore. Out of sight, out of mind. The historic parallels for this are obvious. The Cherokees? Cossacks? Jews? Gypsies? Palestinians? Hmong? Hararis? The list is pretty long.

Perhaps Janet and Steve would also agree with Elferink’s ministerial colleague Peter Chandler’s judgement that NT citizens who object to the sudden very steep hikes in power, water and sewerage rates are like children who have been treated too generously in the past.

What a brave new world our elected masters and their consorts wish to design for us. These drastic infringements on the civil liberties and legal entitlements of citizens are apparently justified in the eyes of these reactionary politicos, but the simple requirement to produce an ID when purchasing alcohol was judged by the esteemed A-G and the Browns to be “excessive inconvenience, … adding to an already heavily regulated industry”, thus justifying the abolition of the surprisingly beneficial and popular Banned Drinkers Register (BDR) (again in the Alice Springs News ).

If conservatives aren’t game to persuade their supporters to put up with the tedium of having their ID checked at bottle-shops, but prefer to treat problems as opportunities for repression and erode the principles of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, habeas corpus and due process, then we will be in for a tough ride indeed in the Northern Territory.

Acting Chief Minister Robyn Lambley

By Bob Durnan

Like the NT’s Acting Chief Minister Robyn Lambley, I too am saddened by yet more needless deaths of young Aboriginal people in the Alice Springs region over the Christmas and New Year period.

One woman, who was visiting Alice Springs from the Engawala community, died at the Mpwetyerre town camp on South Terrace very late on Christmas Eve, apparently from violent causes.

Another woman, a local town camp resident, was run over by an L-plated motorcycle rider as she lay sleeping on Sturt Terrace, next to the Todd River, in the early hours of New Year’s Day.

These deaths came just after a Wallace Rockhole couple and a woman from Hermannsburg were tragically killed in a vehicle rollover three days before Christmas; the rollover followed a police chase near the Ntaria drinking camp 90 km west of Alice Springs on Larapinta Drive.

A Bloomfield Street resident was seriously injured when he was allegedly bashed with baseball bats by two men after he asked his neighbours to turn down their music late on New Year’s Eve.

It has been said that alcohol was involved in all these incidents.

Along with many other citizens, however, I am also concerned about the Acting Chief Minister of the NT’s unseemly eagerness to take advantage of the quiet Christmas-New Year news period to go in hard and dangerously on one of these incidents while it was still the subject of police enquiries.

What the Acting CM said:

STATEMENT ON DEATH IN ALICE SPRINGS

31 December 2012

The Acting Chief Minister, Robyn Lambley, has expressed her shock at the murder of a young woman, after a savage attack at Abbott’s Camp on Christmas Day.

The death of this young woman is a sign that despite the mandatory reporting requirement for Domestic and Family Violence in the Northern Territory, women are still being savagely beaten and murdered in domestic disputes.

“I have been advised that family and friends of this woman knew that the victim was being subjected to extreme violence and abuse by her husband prior to her death,” Ms Lambley said.

“I am deeply shocked and deeply saddened by this young woman’s senseless, cruel death. I want to understand how this happened and form a clearer understanding of what could have been done to prevent it.

“We also need to ensure that Domestic and Family Violence strategies are targeted at the people must vulnerable with an emphasis on prevention.

“After only 4 months in Government – it is the policies of the former Labor Government that have failed to make an impact on the spiralling rate of violence against women.

“Women should not be losing their lives in this way, we need to examine what failed this woman.”

Someone in Lambley’s position should be well aware that it is erroneous and possibly prejudicial to cry ‘murder’ when there has been no such conviction by a court. The Acting Chief Minister and her media advisors should understand at least the very basics of the law relating to homicide. Murder is a very specific offence, and it does the NT Government no credit to have Ms Lambley respond in hysterical ignorance.

It is also disturbing that Ms Lambley has chosen this occasion to beat the populist law’n’order drum loudly during the quiet of the Christmas period, sensationalising the incident and probably shaming innocent relatives of the deceased woman. It is possible that Lambley may have prejudiced the police efforts to build a case. She has certainly shown herself as unable to resist the opportunity for gratuitously kicking out at her political opponents in a cheap manner, on a most inappropriate occasion.

Ms Lambley seems to be implying lack of action by the dead woman’s family, saying “that family and friends of this woman knew that the victim was being subjected to extreme violence and abuse by her husband prior to her death”, thus making it seem as though there were failures on their parts to notify police about the woman’s situation.

The Acting Chief Minister has chosen to omit the extremely salient point (communicated by police on Friday 28th December in a media release) that the deceased woman had in fact taken out a domestic violence order (DVO) against the man who has now been charged in relation to her death.

Action to prevent Domestic Violence: the central Australian context

Whilst it is tragically true that central Australian Aboriginal women are still being killed and injured in DV-related situations at many times the rate for non-Indigenous women here or elsewhere, it is equally relevant that the rate of killing and serious injury of central Australian women has declined in recent years.

It is very likely these rates would be even higher were it not for the Henderson government’s introduction of new family and domestic violence prevention measures, the most important of which are the mandatory reporting requirements, the domestic violence intervention teams in the hospitals, and other Alice Springs-specific initiatives introduced in the last twelve months.

Most significant amongst these innovative measures are the very close collaborations between police and other key government and non-government agencies when dealing with actual and threatened violence, their high levels of care, and their implementation of sound strategy, such as a Family Safety Framework, with its practical integrated response measures.

The decline in the killings of women is almost certainly related to the very efforts which the Acting Chief Minister chooses to portray as possibly worthless and ineffective.

If we are to have a balanced and productive debate, the basic relevant facts must be acknowledged by participants in the discussion.

How can Ms Lambley possibly know enough detail about what has occurred to judge whether or not the incident is related to the former government’s family and domestic violence prevention measures, including mandatory reporting?

Young people experiencing violence are often very mobile, and can easily slip between the cracks in the systems established by services. Our clinics, women’s services and police stations are often over-stretched because of insufficient staff, inexperienced workers, high staff turnover rates, unrealistic workloads and logistical problems in dealing with clients over great distances.

What is Ms Lambley’s evidence for the alleged ineffectiveness of the mandatory reporting regime and the other Henderson government family and domestic violence prevention measures?

The Acting Chief Minister must acknowledge that no single measure – such as mandatory reporting – is a guarantee against some continued level of violence against women, and one death does not invalidate the long term worth of mandatory reporting of domestic violence.

Abolition of the Banned Drinkers Register

Perhaps whilst she has been publicly discounting the mandatory reporting of DV, and abolishing the DV support worker positions which had been stationed in NT hospitals, Ms Lambley is in fact worried about whether the abolition of the Banned Drinkers Register (BDR) by her government could possibly have been a factor in this tragic situation.

Perhaps she has considered that a person who was the subject of a DV restraining order would normally have been placed on the BDR, and wondered, if the BDR had not been so hastily abandoned by her government after its election in late August, whether this incident would have been much less likely to have occurred.

The necessity for caution

The former NT government, its public service and NGO agencies had been making bravely radical efforts to grapple with the extraordinary problems around DV. They recognised that many young children grow up witnessing and experiencing a great deal of violence, which thus becomes normalised in their conscious and sub-conscious feelings and beliefs.

It is not unusual for violent behaviours to begin early in relationships, and for such behaviour quickly to become severe, with sometimes fatal consequences.

Ms Lambley, of all people, with her background as a senior social worker at the Alice Springs Hospital, should appreciate that courageous measures, even though controversial, should be maintained at least until they have been rigorously evaluated, and that dedicated frontline workers should be supported. Neither should be prematurely dismissed or undermined without strong evidence of the need to do so.

Bob Durnan is a community development worker in central Australia, and has worked as an adviser to the Keating and Clare Martin Labor governments.

NT News: BDR lapse lets murder accused back on grog.

Northside Foodland bottle shop in quiet moment

By Bob Durnan

(see previous post by Bob)

Update Sunday 27th:

Friday evening saw even more cops out and about, with three by the Woolies liquor entrance each time I passed by. They were very relaxed, joking and chatting. It didn’t look like there were many punters from prohibited addresses attempting to smuggle contraband through that particular checkpoint. They were still outside the Eastside IGA as well. Perhaps they have worked out a way to check people’s photo ID addresses against a list of illegal grog destinations? If retailers did this, the police presence would be near well obsolete, other than for tailing rogue cab drivers.

I didn’t get time to pay much attention yesterday, other than a social research visit to Liquorland, where a single cop stood guard next to the exit around 2pm, protecting the Banrock and Hardy’s Crest chardonnays, each priced at a very competitive $8; i.e. 104 cents per standard drink, with 7.7 SDs per bottle. This compared to their 700ml Bundy @ 175 cents per SD, and VB cartons (24 cans @ 163 cents per SD, or 30 cans @148 cents SD), or a side trip to the Todd Tavern’s take-away, where you can still slake that thirst for an 83 cent SD of Renmano’s Chard if you have the $17 entry fee.

However later in the afternoon, around 4pm, I couldn’t see any police around the Northside IGA car park. Inside Lhere Artepe Enterprises’ business model was providing easy access to life’s little pleasures (best buy from an alcoholic’s viewpoint: Pokerface Chard @ 127 cents/SD i.e. $8.99/bottle. I bought one for the barbecue. In comparison, their VB in a slab was 173 cents, and Jim Beam 700ml worked out at 195 cents/SD, five cents cheaper than their Bundy. )

In response to my Friday Alice Online post, I have heard from one interstate Twitterer, who had broadcast it on his extensive network of followers, and a local Aboriginal leader who is planning a complaint to the Human Rights Commission (about the police action, not me). A local acquaintance – a very experienced observer of these things – sent me the following note early Saturday:

“I see groups of drinkers on my daily afternoon dog walks and lately they have moved further north around Spencer Hill , up the hill itself and further north on the river side, and have found new and even more secluded spots.  I watched the police on dirt bikes ‘move on’ about 15 people on Tuesday, about 20 minutes later they had re-grouped and were retrieving their hidden cartons from the buffel along the river bank.  I agree with you that appropriate licensed premises for these people would be a good solution, rather than these games of cat and mouse that go on every afternoon, tiresome for both parties methinks.”

Now that LAAC (and the Commonwealth) are saddled with these IGAs and their bottleshops (surely one of contemporary capitalism’s most counter-intuitive investment decisions) it would seem to be the most sensible solution to a range of predicaments if the governments assisted in their conversion to club or bar premises, emphasising on-licence consumption, and with take-away sales restricted to members. This would kill two birds: restore much of the amenity to these neighbourhoods, and provide safe options for the drinkers. It would also improve health and crime stats, and help the Police Commissioner to retain the services of his staff.

How about it, Delia?

Choose your poison. Stronger is cheaper. Photo ABC

By Bob Durnan

Thursday May 24th

Alice Springs in lockdown? There’s cop on the door of every grog shop when I leave work. A polite young constable is handing out ‘No belt no brains’ deodorisers for your car at the entrance to the Woolies bottle-o, and accosting Aboriginal shoppers to ask them where they are heading with that one-litre bottle of Hardy’s Chardonnay (11 standard drinks for $11.99) or that 700ml Bundy (just gone on special at $32.99, or $1.65 per standard drink – down a fair bit form its normal $39.99.)

If the customer is not quick-witted enough to supply a plausible story about a lawful destination, and admits that the grog is:

– destined for a town camp lease, an Aboriginal Land Trust area or community living area (all prescribed areas under Mal Brough’s 2007 Intervention legislation); or

– to be taken to a home declared dry by the NT Licensing Commission (many NT Housing premises have been so proclaimed at the request of their tenants); or

– will be drunk in a public place (prohibited under the Alice Springs Town Council’s ‘Dry Town’ status),

then the treasured bottle is seized.

At Coles, an officer on a bicycle keeps a keen eye on the entrance to Liquorland as well as the nearby taxi rank from the vantage point of the pawn shop breezeway. The Eastside Foodland IGA has a helpful officer sharing notes about Cellarbrations customers with the garrulous Sudanese security guard, and questioning dark-skinned passengers in parked vehicles.

After dinner I forsake my ABC Silks habit to walk into town, collect my mail and buy some groceries.

Late in what must be the coldest day of the year so far – below seventeen degrees maximum – the streets are fairly deserted as the mercury searches for zero. Someone has nevertheless found the time and energy to raise a ruckus; sirens are wailing, police cars and an ambulance whiz along Hartley Street. Later I drive to Gillen to collect the ironing, and pass two paddy wagons speeding towards Larapinta. Another ambulance follows.

I am told that all the other liquor outlets (there are another eight which sell take-away alcohol to the general public) are receiving similar attention from the constabulary. This has only begun in the past few days, following four years and eight months during which Brough’s restrictive regime has theoretically been in place, but in practice has been almost universally ignored, at least in relation to the purchase of take-away supplies. The law against transporting alcohol onto town camps or consuming it there has also been much more honoured by its breach than by its observance.

There must be a lot of very angry workers out there who believe that are being treated unfairly, and habitual binge drinkers who are in a state of semi-shock. There are probably also a lot of women feeling relieved that the everyday mayhem has receded, at least for a while, and many kids feeling snug and safe at home for a change, or enjoying the quiet and catching up on sleep that is normally much disrupted.

How long can the police keep up this pressure? While they do so, the incidence of crime and injury will probably plummet, as it did during the week-long football carnival influx in early April when the Licensing Commission heeded their request for cask wine and one-litre bottled wine to be temporarily removed from sale.

If police don’t keep the pressure on by virtue of their presence around the outlets, most consumers will quickly find ways to continue their old behaviour patterns, albeit without the aid of the taxi fleet.

Big crowds of drinkers from the bush will be heading to town for each significant footy contest, the Finke race weekend, and, most tellingly, for the school holidays, which are replete with several compelling attractants: the Beanie festival, the Bush Mob art expo, the Alice Springs Show and NAIDOC week celebrations.

It would be a lot easier, saner and more manageable for the NT’s Alcohol Policy Minister Delia Lawrie and her government to save the police, the drinkers and the taxpayers a lot of this bother. They could simply amend the Liquor Act to allow the Licensing Commission to set the price of alcohol, it could then do so – that is, bring in a floor price – and beer would become the cheapest popular tipple.

The current price of a standard drink of VB in Alice Springs is $1.43 at the big supermarket outlets, as against 83 cents for the same amount of pure alcohol found in the ultra-popular Renmano cask plonk, sold at that old favourite, the Todd Tavern’s Thirsty Camel bottle shop.

This would almost halve the amount of pure alcohol entering the bloodstreams of many of the problem drinkers, and more than halve the associated troubles. It would make the everyday working life of your average copper a much happier lot. It would let many women and kids get on with their lives, and open up a world of possibilities for the providers of schooling, vocational education and private sector jobs.

It would be a crime not to try it.

 Friday May 25th, 12 noon

Where this sudden blitzkrieg against Aboriginal alcohol consumption will lead is anybody’s guess at this stage. One possibility is greater sobriety and less trouble. There is likely to be a significant shift of patronage from bottle shops to bars, where people can drink on the premises. This means profits shifting from the supermarkets and convenience stores to the pubs, clubs and restaurants, and is not at all a bad thing. Applications for club memberships are probably about to explode, if they aren’t already doing so. This will pose a new challenge for police, licensing inspectors and club staff, as some of these patrons will be looking to maximise their take-away entitlements as club members, and some purchases are bound to find their way on to the black market.

Another, and not necessarily a totally contradictory outcome, would be a period of low-intensity conflict, or sporadic resistance incidents, such as occurred at Hidden Valley at 4:30am this morning, where a dozen drinkers are reported to have laid into a trio of luckless coppers who were trying to confiscate their illegal grog. Police are still seeking suspects and arranging medical treatment and vehicle repairs.

This period of stand-off accompanied by skirmishes will probably continue until such time as the punters refine their stories about drinking destinations, identify secluded drinking places that are not easily accessible to the police (most likely in the hills near town camps, or screened by bushes off dirt roads), and develop a new network of private transport. It is probable that the drinkers will outlast the enforcers of the law; but with any luck it won’t come to that, and a sensible compromise based on regulation without attempts at enforced prohibition in private houses will come to apply.

The danger in this is obvious: a worsening relationship between police and some elements of the Aboriginal community, together with less access to help when things go wrong in the hidden drinking places, and more pressure on people not to call police when needed on town camps and in suburban houses.

A far better outcome would be for the Lhere Artepe IGAs and Tangentyere Servewell to convert their alcohol retail licences to on-licence venues, providing more Aboriginal-friendly drinking places, while turning down the take-away tap. If this was done at the same time as the introduction of a take-away floor price tied to the cost per standard drink of full-strength beer, Alice Springs and the town camps would be much changed for the better.

Anti-NTER rally poster from 2010

Rebuilding the Chaos, from the Ground Up: anti-Intervention groups call for a return to year zero in remote Aboriginal communities. (A version of this article also appears on The Drum.)

By Bob Durnan

Winter is icumen in, here in central Australia; the car windows are filling with frost.

The solstice is nigh.

With the winter solstice, as in the three years just past, comes the anniversary  (1 ) of the announcement of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (2), and thus also the ritual gatherings of the anti-Intervention Shushers3 at street parades, and in other gatherings, endeavouring to defeat the NTER demons.

Prominent amongst the Shushers – besides some Aboriginal leaders – are several sub-groups: some tediously dogmatic socialist fragments; the moralistic section of the greens, distinguishable by their emotive sloganeering about the Intervention; Foucauldian oppositionists (a determined band of anti-governmentalists, who recite obscure theoretical mantras); and the white rastafarians, who about this time of year are heading north on their annual pilgrimage to jamboree in the warm Arafura sun.

Meanwhile, down at the Jumbunna House of Tweets (4), Shusher researchers are busy issuing new edicts.

One such has come my way. It is titled Rebuilding from the Ground Up . It is a virtual manifesto of post-Intervention Shushism, and is bound to form the basis of much fervent shushing in the next few months.

As proof of its status, Rebuilding’s demands “have been widely endorsed” by the Intervention Rollback Action Group (Alice Springs) (5), the Stop the Intervention Collective (Sydney) (6), ‘concerned Australians’ (7) (Melbourne), and unspecified “Aboriginal community leaders”.

The content of the document signals a continuing commitment to naiveté about Aboriginal issues. It embodies the Shushers’ perennial romantic idealisation of Aboriginal society, but with freshly focussed anxiety about one of their central concerns: they must never contemplate or admit to any limitations or problems associated with slogans such as “community control”, “culturally appropriate” or “self-determination”.

The first demand clearly illustrates the extent of the Shushers’ flight from reality: it advocates a return to the system of “community government councils” in the remote Aboriginal communities of the NT. It demands that we “Restore decision making power and administration of municipal services to these councils” – the same principle that three successive Aboriginal Ministers for Local Government under Clare Martin described as wholly dysfunctional.

The present Shire system may be inadequate and needing reform, but a return to the bad old days of ever escalating social problems, chaos, corruption and waste in many communities does not readily recommend itself as a way forward for the residents of remote areas. The Shushers here display their incompetence as policy thinkers: they are amateurish in their response to this genuine crisis and its policy challenge. They clearly demonstrate this by their advocacy of a return to the very system that allowed twenty-five years or more of ruinous irresponsibility in many places, where non-accountability became the enabling mechanism for the creation of generations of grossly neglected children, dysfunctional families and early deaths.

They also advocate the removal of the GBMs -General Business Managers (8) without any thought being given to ensuring an ongoing Federal Government presence. (One of the great benefits of the NTER has been its implementation of a new Australian Government commitment to guaranteeing the quality and co-ordinated delivery of government programs on the ground. The removal of this presence would be another giant leap backwards, comparable to the sudden, very premature withdrawal of Commonwealth public servants from remote NT communities in the late 1970s).

The second major demand is that rivers of government money must flow to provide full services “wherever Aboriginal people choose to live”. This demand doesn’t broach the question of what equity principle might be operating here. Will other needy and vulnerable citizens (including Aboriginal workers, students and pensioners) support such an open-ended and costly policy? What evidence is there that the funding invested, in previous decades, in hundreds of now abandoned outstations was a wise investment? How does that investment compare to what might have been achieved if the money had been spent on other priorities, such as early childhood and parenting skills programs, and effective education? Would other impoverished citizens mind if their living standards suffer because a huge proportion of the Australian Government’s budget were to be absorbed providing a full range of services to single family outstations in extremely remote places?

The enormous cost implications of this demand is compounded by demand number three, which wants good jobs created for everybody who wants one, wherever they want to live. This again is to be, presumably, via the government payroll, and regardless of the economic logic of the investment or productivity of the jobs, just so long as they are “under community control”. The approximate quantum of dollars needed to achieve this utopian ideal remains un-estimated here, as in all parts of this document.

Demand number four goes further: it requires government to “Rescind all township leases signed since the Intervention began in 2007”. These township leases cover a tiny proportion of Aboriginal-owned land, way less than one per cent. Abolishing the leases would remove the township areas from any form of public ownership, and return the land to control by sectional interests, beyond the reach of the majority of residents, with its governance again not being subject to the principle of the “common good”. (In the process there would be a retreat from the possibility of creating some of those good jobs demanded in the previous demand).

Demand number five requests another retrograde move: “Return administration of housing stock from the NT Department of Housing to local Indigenous housing committees attached to the community councils”. Large sums of money, great responsibilities, huge expectations, major risks, but, under this model, little accountability or capability, and no economy of scale, for the crucial task of managing, developing and maintaining social housing stock in the remote communities.

Demand number six, concerning education, is not as silly as its precursors, and contains a number of sensible demands, but spoils the effect by finishing with a demand that the new pressure on parents to send their kids to school should be removed.

Demand number seven mandates the removal of the widely popular and very useful compulsory Income Management program. This is to occur before many people become functional and strong enough to protect themselves and their vulnerable family members from the ubiquitous grog and cannabis fuelled humbugging, bullying, abuse and violence that necessitated the introduction of Income Management in the first place.

Demand number eight is for greatly needed and easily justifiable services, such as “early childhood programs, youth services, men’s programs and women’s centres”, but advocates that they be placed under the direction of the dead hand of the departed, unlamented “local councils”.

Demand number nine outlines sensible health services, and thankfully doesn’t require that they be subject to the wishes of “local councils”.

Demand number ten effectively proposes that all questions relating to alcohol be left in the hands of “the community”, thus absolving governments of all responsibility for moderating the impact of this extremely serious problem that dominates daily life in many communities, and which destroys many people from most communities. It also includes the demand that the communities – no matter how small – have local alcohol treatment programs, regardless of the practicality, cost or need, for them.

Last but not least, demand number eleven is for the government to “Recognise customary law as an important vehicle to empower communities to take responsibility for offending and improve community safety”. It fails to mention whether this recognition would include the sanctioning of the violent or deadly punishments which are common and integral parts of “customary law”.

It may be more accurate for the Jumbunna House of Learning researchers and their supporters to consider renaming their document “Rolling back reality”. The proposals as they stand could never be funded. They fail to take into account individual community needs and desires. They demand full community control, but make no mention of financial realities, accountabilities and responsibilities. Most importantly, they overlook the everyday reality of very high levels of violence in many communities; violence being used casually in too many inter-personal relationships; extraordinarily excessive consumption of alcohol and cannabis by many people in many places; untenable levels of child neglect; and the implications for the weak and vulnerable if there is a return to control by the most powerful in some of these remote places.

The real pity of this is that the more Jumbunna, IRAG, WGAR, STICS, GLW et al promote this “rights-driven” approach, the more confusing and debilitating it all becomes for Aboriginal people in remote communities. The modus operandi of many in these protest groups is to turn up wide eyed at meetings or communities, take at face value whatever they are told by whatever Aboriginal people are willing to talk to them, and then regurgitate whatever parts of it fit their own utopian ideals, as legitimate demands of the people. Seemingly on principle they refuse to factor in things like the possible good faith or policy logic of government programs. They also ignore such small considerations as past policy and program failures, very poor track records of some of those making the utopian demands, and the urgency of addressing issues such as endemic violence, child neglect and substance abuse, let alone the need to prioritise spending. They thus encourage Aboriginal people to make impossible demands on government, and enter into delusional assumptions about what is just, reasonable and logical.

In the process, the chances of governments being able to engage in productive and realistic dialogue and negotiations with local Aboriginal populations are often greatly diminished. This means we all lose; but in particular, it is Aboriginal people who lose when policy development and advocacy are conducted in such a chaotic manner.

Footnotes:

(1) Announced on 21st June 2007

(2 ) NTER, aka ‘the Intervention’

(3 ) Shushers: those who believe that all native peoples are ultimately innocents; refuse to admit seeing wrong doing when it occurs; decline to hold people responsible for any bad behaviours; avoid speaking critically to, and/or object to hearing criticism of, Indigenous people.

(4 ) Jumbunna House of Tweets: The Shushers’ spiritual home at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS)

(5) Aka IRAG

(6 ) Aka STICS

(7)  Alastair Nicholson, George Newhouse, Jon Altman, Malcolm Fraser et al 8 Government Business Managers, employed by FaHCSIA and placed in many remote communities to ensure the implementation of Australian Government programs and policies to assist Indigenous people

A version of this article also appears on The Drum.