Lindy and Azaria Chamberlain

Lawyer for the Chamberlain family want a Northern Territory Coroner to make an official finding that Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo at Uluru (Ayers Rock)in 1980, reports ABC News.

The third coronial inquest returned an open finding on the disappearance of Lindy Chamberlain’s daughter, over which she was charged with murder and imprisoned following the second inquest.

The fourth coronial inquest will be held in Darwin this Friday.

Lawyer Stuart Tipple told the ABC that the open finding was no longer “sustainable” because of additional evidence that would be presented.

He said correcting the record would also raise awareness of the dangers dingoes pose to the public.

“There are still a lot of people out there who don’t understand the danger that dingoes present to humans, particularly in the situation where they have been conditioned by human contact,” he said.

“We are not talking about dingoes in the wild, we are talking about dingoes that have had a lot of contact with humans and don’t act like the wild dingoes.”

Territory Opposition Housing spokesman Adam Giles says he’s “not surprised” to hear that 65 of the new houses built in Alice Springs two camps during the past two years need repairs, although Territory Alliance says the faults are “cosmetic” and not structural.  It may be too soon for alarm bells, but it’s a reminder of the historically proven need for vigilence when it comes to building on Aboriginal communities. 

Last week Alice Online ran the first part of an interview with Paul Pholeros of  Healthhabitat, a social company which has organised repairs in thousands of Aboriginal houses around the country and  fixed a total 186,000 items. Healthhabitat found that, after lack of maintenance, poor initial construction was the next major cause (21 percent) of the faults; “things that are built upside down and back the front. Whether it’s in remote areas or urban areas seems to make little difference. A light switch is put in, and a light, but no wires connect the two. A toilet is put in with no waste pipe to connect it to the sewer. A handbasin with no water connected to it: really gross, poor construction that we simply have to fix.”

So has the Federal Government learned anything about getting Aboriginal houses built properly?

Last year  Healthhabitat won one of two United Nations Habitat Awards,  which rewards practical and innovative solutions to current housing needs and problems, from 250 other entrants. The announcement came only weeks after FaHCSIA ( the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) decided not to renew its contracts with the company.

In the second part of the interview, Paul Pholeros reveals that houses built in Alice Springs by Tangentyere Council came up “better than average” under Healthabitat assessment several years ago before the transformation plan was implemented. 

I also asked him why he believed FaHCSIA had decided to break off its relationship with Healthhabitat.

Look I think it’s two main reasons. We were starting to find too many houses, built both under SIHIP and under the new national partnership agreement program in other states, that simply didn’t comply. They weren’t built well enough. They had significant faults. We were finding that in our data. Our program has never been that popular with State, Territory or Federal governments. It finds too many skeletons in too many closets, and people are quite happy to say: “We’d probably be better off if we weren’t hearing this.” So that’s one side.

The other way of looking at it is that the Federal Government said that after 12 years of running this program the States had all the skills that we’d developed;  therefore they could do all this work without our involvement. I think that’s great, if that’s true. I mean, we have a sunset clause in the company saying if we walk into a community and function rates are at this level, we shake the hands of all community members and we walk out.

We’re not in the business of trying to make money; that’s not the aim of the company.

You sound a little bit like a social business to me.

It is a social business. Exactly. Iwas lucky enough to meet Mohamed Yunus back in 2008 in Italy, when he was just writing the book Social Business, and to us that was the model we set up on. It’s interesting, because we didn’t set up as not-for-profit, a charity, an NGO. We set up as a private Australian company, which he, Mohamed Yunus believes, is actually the right model, and then to say we will make a profit, or we will charge fees, or we will take money from any source, but that money then gets recycled into solving a problem and the problem is improving health.

Are you confident that Government can do what a social business like yours does? Have you got an advantage, in a sense?

Look, I think New South Wales, including the Health Department in New South Wales – if there’s a model at the minute, i would say that’s the model. For ten years, New South Wales Health has been running our program in New South Wales. A government department. I think they’ve done a spectacular job. They’ve trained people, they’ve used their environmental health officers. It’s interesting that the Health Department is running it, not Housing. They liaise with housing, and Housing co-operates – that’s fine, but they see it as a health problem, and they see the benefits of the Health Department running a housing improvement program for indigenous people as being profound. Because they enter Aboriginal communities not as environmental health officers trying to pick fault with the way Aboriginal people live, which is how they’re perceived.

They start by saying we’re going to give you a hand to fix up the houses. They work one-on-one with Aboriginal people. It changes the perception of those individuals in the indigenous community, and they say, “Well, gee, these people have actually come to help.” So then there’s a new relationship, and when it comes to kids’ health, maybe vermin eradication, help with water supply –they call it building a bridge. That’s what they see, the housing program builds a bridge. Then they can do a lot more health work with those communities, and it’s been profoundly good.

The Territory Government has been trying to do something like this, hasn’t it?

I think, probably 15 years ago, the Territory Government probably had the most advanced link between the living environment and health, by a long way. They had some great guidelines and regulations. I think somewhere along the way they dropped the ball, and I think perhaps under the previous and current Commonwealth governments we’ve had an enormous push on this building of houses.

Everyone says that’s a great thing. I’m an architect, and I love to build houses, but houses in themselves are not going to solve any problem. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but they are simply masses of stuff, and until the Health Department sees clearly they have a reason to get people’s living environment better …. Because about eighty per cent of what walks into a health clinic in the Northern Territory is going to be developing infectious diseases. If you can knock that out, you’ve got a lot more time with your highly trained medical staff to do much more serious and difficult medicine, to make bigger changes in people’s lives. No doctor wants to see that stuff walking through the door every day – the same kid with the same problem. It’s just tedious, it’s dull, and it’s hard to fix. If you can fix it before they get to the clinic, they’ll have a lot more time.

These are the kids who don’t have a shower every day. What was that figure you gave?

At the moment, Australia-wide, only 35 per cent of houses occupied by indigenous people have a working shower. Sixty-five per cent of people in those houses can’t have a shower. I’m talking urban, rural, remote and very remote. That’s the whole of Australia. It’s a surprisingly consistent rate. And when I give these numbers in Australia, I have never had anyone in a talk jump up and say, “Hang on, I don’t get that.” Recently I was in New York City and I was in London, in close succession. Both times, in both talks, unscripted by me someone jumped up and said: “Sorry mate, I must be misunderstanding you, because you’re telling me one of the richest countries on the planet can have any part of its population living in houses with that number of things wrong.” Ten per cent of houses have safe electricity supply. Ninety per cent are unsafe when we enter.

 Can you talk about some of your Alice Springs experiences?

Sure. It’s a while back, and a lot has happened in Alice Springs, and a lot of that, I hope, will be proved to be really good work. In 2006 we took on a Housing For Health project in all the town camps – 185 houses. It was the end of the Howard government, just before the Intervention. Mal Brough was the minister. There was a lot of talk about the town camps.

Look, I’ve come to Alice for 25 years. I certainly know they’ve never been less than controversial, and I had very little experience in the town camps. I was pretty much ignorant. The manager we had in Alice started the project as any other. It was interesting because what we found was – and don’t get me wrong, some of the town camps, I think, are very tough places. There are all sort of social issues and problems, and I’m not wallpapering that. But if you look at the data for what we found in the houses, the actual function rate of the houses, in terms of the Northern Territory, in terms of national, was actually not that bad.

And that surprised me, because I’m as biased and as bigoted as everyone else, and you hear the stories and you think, God, these houses must be terrible. But when the teams collected all the info on all the town camps, and we looked at it in the cold light of day, we said, well, it didn’t look that bad. In fact it looked pretty good. And then we said, well, hang on, there is Tangentyere Council, often maligned and they’ve got all the problems – but they did have trades, and they did have a management system and a maintenance system, and I think this is doing something.

Clearly, the results showed these houses weren’t the worst. We worked with the same local team for a year, with great assistance from Tangentyere Council, because they had Aboriginal housing officers, skilled people. At the end of the project, after the Intervention had started, and the town camps had been singled out, when we looked at the final results and we compared them with the NT and the national, they were some of the best results we’d ever got. And that means that the baseline that you start from is probably a little bit higher. And then when you put the effort in you get a much better result.

We had a pretty open debate at the time, because when the new Government got in, the Labor Government got in , they were saying that the town camps were one of the worst examples of housing in Australia. Well,it simply didn’t fit with the data we had. We had to say, look,if you think there are problems with housing in the town camps, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, violence, whatever, I’m not going to comment because that’s something I know nothing about. But the minute you talk about the housing being in really poor condition because of vandalism – well, we had numbers on it. It simply wasn’t true. People might take the violence out on each other, but in the houses it wasn’t true. Now that wasn’t listened to, at all, and I think that was a really big mistake.

People don’t like the facts some times. I talk to people, and they say, mate, you’re making it up. And my point is, well, why would we make it up? We had no reason to make it up.

Getting to your point about housing not necessarily solving the problems, or maybe not being the issue, have we gone down the wrong road?

No.Look I certainly think within the town camps within the time there was a need for more houses and I don’t think that’s a problem. I’m not saying that building is bad. What’s being built and how well it functions is yet to be tested. I think Tangentyere Council is keen to do some sort of evaluation, audit on how the new housing and the upgrading of housing is being handled. Now, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and I hope it’s being done really well.

If those houses have all been well-designed and function well, then this could be a great win, because it’s starting off from a good base. Plus, and I have to declare an interest, I’m a board member of the Central Australian Affordable Housing Company, which is currently charged with the job of really managing those houses. The contract ends in the middle of this year.

Part of my fetish is to say we need function data. I don’t believe we’re going to go round and manage and maintain houses without knowing how good they are. They’ve been keeping to the budget they’ve got, and house function is increasing.Which I think is a really good sign. I think if Tangentyere can get together and do a proper audit of how it’s all gone, I think it could be a great success story. And that’s what we want. We don’t want disasters. We want examples of … In one area. I’m certainly not saying it solves all the problems of the town camps. That would be Pollyanna-ish. But if you knock off one problem, maybe you can then knock off another problem. Maybe if you’ve got a little bit better place to live, you’re going to have a little bit better day when you get up in the morning. There’s evidence around the world that shows if you reduce someone’s bundle of problems just by a few, it does actually improve their life. I think sometime we worry too much about solving everything.

What’s the future for Healthhabitat?

We’re not going to go away. That’s not our nature. We’ve shrunk a lot because of ending the federal contract. We’re still working in New South Wales, that’s great, obviously. Some communities get us to work with them, and we still will do that. They’re smaller jobs, that’s good. But we’re certainly boosting the overseas. In October last year we won the UN’s World Habitat Award, which is about as big as there is. It was out of 82 countries, and there were 250 finalists. We won that. so we’re getting help from UN Habitat at the minute to basically spread the principles of what we do, not necessarily the work we do in indigenous houses, but the principles they believe help the health principles should be spread. So we’re spending a lot of this year – a few of us, some of the managers we’ve employed in the past, and the directors, we’re spending time getting to the States, will be one, we’re going to put a lot more into Nepal to expand that, in a few weeks we’re going Bangladesh, they’ve asked us if we’ll show them what the toilet program we’re running in Nepal is and if it’s applicable to Bangladesh. We’ve got a small group of organisations in Africa who are doing almost micro-scale work,small-scale enterprises and are trying to get them all together, so we’re going to have a session with them and see if we can help them in any way.

We’re really looking at pushing the thing internationally.

Territory Alliance workforce early 2010. Photo FaHCSIA

Some materials used in 65 new houses built in Alice Springs town camps are beginning to “buckle and crack” and will have to be repaired, ABC Alice Springs has reported. But Territory Alliance says the faults are “cosmetic”.

The ABC report said that the fault has been discovered in three quarters of the new houses, which were built under the Federal Government’s Alice Springs Transformation plan.

The company would have to strip back the walls on the affected homes before replacing joining materials and replacing the structures, the ABC said.

The report quoted Territory Alliance manager Alan McGill saying he didn’t know how much they would cost to repair, but ”we accept responsibility for the need to work to be done”.

“Who’s ultimately responsible beyond that is what we’re still checking out. You know, checking whether that material used was right or wrong, etcetera etcetera. But we’re the builders, so we accept responsibility and we’ll do the work that needs to be done to rectify it.”

Opposition housing spokesman and member for the Alice Springs seat of Braitling, Adam Giles, told the ABC contractors had “taken shortcuts”and it was the second problem with the houses he had heard about.

“I’m not surprised that houses in Alice Springs town camps need repairs. At the time they were being constructed, I was hearing concerns about he walls not being fully filled with the correct substance up to a certain level.”

Most new Alice Springs SIHIP homes need repair: ABC Online

Photo Emma Sleath (ABC Online)

Developers say they will destroy the town’s drive-in screen by the end of the month unless someone takes it off their hands.

The ABC has reported that real estate agent David Forrest, one of a syndicate of local business people who want to turn the site of the drive-in into an accomodation complex, has offered $15,000 to help move the screen.

The Drive-In, developed in the early 1960s, was recognised as a heritage site by the Government, but Heritage Minister Karl Hampton decided to revoke the listing after meeting with the consortium.

David Forrest told the ABC the consortium was willing to donate $15,000 to the cost of moving the screen. But Show Society President Brad Bellette said it would cost at least $35,000 to dismantle and move it, and possibly more than $20,000 to reassemble it on another site.

He said the Show Society Society Committe had not ruled out putting in an application to take the screen, which it could use for outdoor movies at show time and hire out during the rest of the year.

“Green Dot Awards” for “excellence in green products and services” are given annually by the Farmani Group, which sponsors charities and organises international awards for art, photography and design.

Revealing The Spirit of Parson’s Street is a concept brief by Alice Springs photographer and town planning advocate Mike Gillam.

As he outlines in his application, his brief, “an informing philosophy for designers, architects and architects who intend to work in Parsons Street” focusses on the eastern end of Parson’s Street, which dissects the Todd Mall:

The proposed walkway expands an east-west link to and from the Todd River and nearby retail areas that are experiencing a severe economic downturn. Improvements to peestrian amenity in parsons street are linked with plans to reintroduce traffic into the northern end of the mall.

Local government and private investment is virtually at a standstill and calls by Mall traders for action on “anti-social behaviour” are echoed throughout the community.

In the centre of Parsons Street an ancient red gum is surrounded and obscured with exotic plantings. These choke off a dramatic sightline that once connected the Todd River and a range feature 9km distant. The tree, a registered sacred site, is also part of a song-line stretching from Mparntwe (Alice Springs) to Larrakeya (Darwin).

John Langdon Parsons

Alice
 Springs 
is
 a
 troubled
 and
 polarized 
town.
 Beyond
 the
 media
 stereotyping
 of
 stabbing
 deaths 
and 
racially
 motivated 
assaults,
this
 is 
also 
a
 place
 of
 hope 
and
 promise,
 where 
inter‐racial
 respect
 and 
friendship 
has
 persisted
 against
 a
 backdrop
 of
 violence.
 This
untold 
story
 of 
Alice
 Springs 
emerged
 gradually
 and
 grew
 unexpectedly
 through
 my 
research
 on
 Parsons
 Street 
and
 its
 namesake,
 Hon. J. Langdon 
Parsons, 
the
 most
 senior
 government 
official 
in
 the
 Northern
 Territory
 from 1884‐1892.



As Bill reported on the Land For Wildlife blog, he received “bittersweet” tidings from  Dave Price in the form of a photo of a roadkilled Spectacled Hare-wallaby Lagorchestes conspicillatus he and wife Bess Price had spotted just north of Rabbit Flats on the Tanami Road.

Bill reports: Initially they thought it might have been a Mala Lagorchestes hirsutus, but these are sadly now almost certainly gone from the wild in this area. The Spectacled Hare-wallaby is still holding out though. This is a slightly larger animal which is easily identified by the prominent rufous “spectacles” for which it is named.

Interestingly, in 1997 a population of Spectacled Hare-wallabies was discovered in the south-west of Papua New Guinea, making it one of very few macropods that isn’t endemic to Australia.

It’s always a shame to see wildlife killed on the road, but I guess it at least shows us that they’re still out there and gives us a chance to see some of these more elusive animals close up. We’d love to hear from anyone else that has found an out-of-the-ordinary roadkill. If you do a bit of driving and find anything of interest drop us a line and let us know about your discovery.

According to Linda Staker in The Complete Guide to the Complete Care of Macropods, the spectacled hare wallaby once occupied a vaste swate across Northern Australia but is now found in only isolated patches of the region.

Apparently it likes to live in thick grass tussocks, most of which have burned or over-grazed in recent decades. Predators such as feral cats are also a threat.

Crew members, including Sydney-based journalist Joe Hilderbrand were getting footage at about 6.30pm (CST) on Wednesday for a documentary to be titled Dumb, Drunk and Racist, which had been commissioned by ABC2.

Production company Cordell Jigsaw managing director Nick Murray told AAP there were five on-screen staff and five camera operators working when two women, who appeared to be very drunk, approached the crew.

“They got very upset and attacked the crew with rocks and got very aggressive,” Mr Murray said.

“They broke some of our camera gear and the crew ran back to their hotel.

“Two of these people came and smashed up part of the foyer of the hotel.”

The camera crew was in Alice Springs filming a documentary for ABC2 called Dumb, Drunk and Racist, which follows four Indian citizens around Australia as they investigate the stereotype that Australians are dumb, drunk and racist.

Joe Hilderbrand told the ABC  one of the drunken women attacked one of  the Indians with rocks.

“We decided to get the hell out of there and run into the hotel and get out of the way.”

He said the attack was unprovoked.

“We made no effort to approach them, we didn’t film them, we weren’t even aware of their presence until they came up to where we were filming and started shouting and harassing us.”

Aurora Hotel manager Ron Thynne told the ABC  his staff were OK, but  some of them would need counselling,

“The girls are okay and Tomo, who got pounded across the head with a metal bar off a tripod off one of the cameraman’s cameras, got the okay from hospital about midnight last night.

“And Hope, who in actual fact probably saved the life of one of those cameramen by dragging him back to the back office of reception, was extremely distraught and I haven’t been able to contact her today.”

For two days delegates at the conference, organised by Infrastructure Australia, explored the vexed issues of how to improve the poor state of houses, amenities, roads, communications and just about everything else on Aboriginal communities, especially in remote areas.

Aboriginal control, greater private sector involvement, philanthropy, Aboriginal-run corporations and high-speed broadband were some of the ways put forward to Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body that makes recommendations to the Federal Government.

Prof Yunus, at the invitation of Infrastructure Australia, prerecorded a video talk on ‘social businesses’: businesses that are set up to solve problems – not to make money.

He illustrated how big companies had invested in making revolutionary improvements in the lives of the poor: a cheap yohgurt that provided malnourished kids with essential micronutrients, shoes for barefoot children created by Adidas, which sold for the price of about a euro . Once the projects were up and running, the companies were paid back their investment, with no profit.

Healthabitat has been running its own kind of  business for decades, making practical, health-enhancing improvements to houses in Aboriginal communities, with most of their workforce drawn from the communities themselves.

The company had its origins in Central Australia in 1985 when the then-director of Nganampa Health Council, Yami Lester, approached a doctor, an enviornmental health specialist and an architect to work with Anangu “to stop people getting sick.” Paul was the architect.

Out of these discussions also came the landmark UPK (Uwankara Palyanku Kanyitjaku) report on environmental health, as well as the legendary Shower Block Song, which sang the praises of the simple shower as a way of keeping healthy.

But, as Healthabitat was to discover, getting kids into the shower is not much use if the shower doesn’t work – either because it hasn’t been maintained or, as is often the case, wasn’t properly installed in the first place.

After the conference I spoke with Paul Pholeros about the work of Healthabitat. He told me the story of how this not-for-profit company has become an international enterprise, beginning in small communities in the north of South Australia:

Our work started by going to existing houses, and, on the very first day, not entering the house until we had the tools we needed to make some change to the house.

In the early days it was really basic. We would try to fix a tap or a toilet just to give the families some slightly better house. While we were doing that we would be checking the house and if the money was around we’d do more work. It was very crude and very simple.

But in the last 10-15 years we’ll often enter a community again. We’ll only enter a community when we can fix things on day one – not in a week, not in a month.

We’ll be taking 70-80 tonnes of equipment with us, and plumbers and electricians, but we’ll also require 75 per cent of our team to be local indigenous people.

On day one we’ll train them up how to test their house and how to check it very carefully to make sure that everything works, using a 250 point checklist. We’ll also give them some on the job training on how to use tools to fix the house.

As they assess the house, that information gets fed into a local computer on-site, produces a worklist, the licensed trades will fix the things they have to do by law – the bigger things.

The fix work will go on for six months or a year, using local people to assist the trades. Then we do exactly the same test at the end of the six months or a year: local people again, in each house test it all again. Only then do we say the house functions.

The key bit is we are trying to get the house to function. Not just the house, but the outside yard; the living environment. It’s got to function, because that’s the only benefit to health. It doesn’t come from houses sitting out on the paddock. It comes from houses that actually provide a function, when the shower works, the kitchen works, the toilet works: tedious, mundane things, but the middle class always assume those things work. It’s a given. What we find in indigenous communities is that that is simply not true.

Why don’t they work?

We catalogue every item they fix, and check it’s assessed correctly. In ten years we have fixed 186,000 items. In 76 per cent of cases, the prime reason fixing is lack of maintenance – day-to-day routine maintenance you and I need to do in our houses to keep them running. Things wear out and they stop.

The next biggest component, and the one that’s been rising for the last five years is poor initial construction. Twenty-one per cent of the money we spend is on things that are built upside down and back the front. Whether it’s in remote areas or urban areas seems to make little difference. A light switch is put in, and a light, but no wires connect the two. A toilet is put in with no waste pipe to connect it to the sewer. A handbasin with no water connected to it: really gross, poor construction that we simply have to fix.

The last component, nine per cent – and that proportion has been rock-solid, occasionally dipping to eight per cent – is damage, some sort of abuse to the house. We don’t run away from that figure. But if we sorted out all the damage caused by people being angry, putting their hand through a door, whatever, we still would not have solved 91 per cent of the problems.

Yes, we should stop damage, no question, but we should also be building houses a lot better to get rid of the 21 per cent. That should be able to be brought to zero.

There’ll always be a need for maintenance, but we could reduce it by specifying better products, particularly in Alice Springs. High-minerals water does enormous damage to taps and hot-water systems if you pick the wrong ones. If you pick the right ones, you’ll get 10 to 15 times the life out of them. So there’s no excuse. We know what the problem is. We can fix it.

By employing local Aboriginal people, is there any degree of empowerment happening, with people being able to identify what the problems are, if not necessarily fix them?

Look, you’re absolutely right. That’s one benefit. But I’d go back about five steps on that. One of the prime reasons we employ local indigenous people – the main reason, is economic. We simply would not have the funds, with $7500 average to spend per house – that’s our total budget. If we spent that money flying people in and out, most of our money would disappear on that. It’s a cold hard fact that it is better to have local people then add another few layers, local people have local language. they know the people whose houses we’re entering. They’re family, so they get us into the houses, they explain what we’re doing in their own language and their own way. Some communities we visit there are three languages or skin groups, some people can’t work in other people’s houses. we sort all of that out by letting the people decide who goes into which house, so we do waste tie and money saying who can get into Aunty’s house. they do all that. They know about faults in houses. These people live there. They know the common faults, the power problems, all that helps.

We get people. we put them on to tools. We ensist they work full days. It’s not a lurk. They don’t get money for not turning up. They’ve got to work and they work hard. And they get a real wage, not a token wage – but there is no messing about. And people like that. People say to us often this is real work. They’re doing real work valued by their families. And remember a lot of the houses they walk into are their relatives’. So they’re now seen to be not just got their cap on and doing some work, but they’re fixing Aunty’s house. tjis is a pretty big thing.

When we leave the key thing is how do house keep going for the long haul. We’re a circus. We come to town and then we take off. So what? There’s been lots of circuses. We leave tools with the communities. We leave the people who’ve worked on it. We then have a secondary program called maintaining houses for better health that goes on for the long haul. We then take out of the say 20 staff, three or four who self-select; after a year we know the good ones, and people who want to keep doing it, we then give them a better toolkit, we give them better training, they have links with trades. They have formal contracts with trades so they can bring them out in an organised way, not random, coming out when something breaks.we can do a whole lot more to try and keep it it going for the long haul. But we’re not a housing department. We don’t have millions of dollars, so we can’t keep maintaining houses forever. That’s ultimately, under the new rules in the territory, it’s going to be the Territory Government’s responsibility to maintain houses. All we’re saying is, we’re trying to give local people a skill, and we hope that governments charged with maintaining houses see … I mean, I think it’s just blindingly obvious; there is just no other way to do it than to engage local people, get them on to the tools, even it’s only assessing the faults.

Well, it’s massively cheaper, for a start.

Absolutely. And people have self-interest. They want the houses to work.

To be continued.

Our River of Grog’ 236 two-litre wine casks collected from a small section of the Todd River bed between the Schwartz Crescent and Wills Terrace causeways, Alice Springs, on 27th Jan. 2012.

Photo: David Hewitt, PAAC.

As the Senate Community Affairs Committee receives hundreds of submissions on Minister Macklin’s Stronger Futures Bills, the Alice Springs People’s Alcohol Action Coalition (PAAC) is calling on the Federal Government to get serious and place a floor price on take-away alcohol in the NT as a matter of urgency.

When you look at this photo of more than two hundred empty cheap wine casks collected from one small strip of the river bed in Alice Springs, you have to wonder how much evidence is needed before we can get rid of this damaging, nasty stuff – or at the very least make it as dear as beer.

The Bills, introduced last November, include provisions for re-instating serious penalties for possessing, supplying or drinking liquor in dry areas; would allow the Commonwealth Minister to request the NT to have licensed premises assessed if they are thought to be causing alcohol-related harm to Aboriginal people; and would give the Commonwealth Minister the final say on NT community alcohol management plans.

PAAC generally supports these proposals. But they are just not strong enough. NT residents over fifteen years old drink 15 litres of pure alcohol per head a year on average, compared to 10 for other Australians. In Alice Springs we lead by a mile at around 20 litres a head.

Meanwhile, we still have the two recalcitrant pubs in Alice Springs – the Todd Tavern and the Gapview Resort Hotel – shamelessly selling this cheap plonk for as little as 75 cents a drink, from 6pm seven days a week, mainly to those who aim to get as drunk as possible on whatever happens to be available at the cheapest price. They continue to do this despite all the local supermarkets having withdrawn cask wine and voluntarily increased the price of very cheap liquor.

These supermarket price changes are not as high as the minimum price of $1.20 we’d like to see for a standard drink (the same as a standard full-strength beer), but at least these traders have shown some goodwill. This wine is the cheapest and most damaging grog in town.

What we really need, right now, is for the Australian Government to take the lead and close this appalling gap by legislating for a floor price on take-away alcohol in the NT, and one take-away free day a week. Then we might have a sporting chance of a stronger future.

Gordon Briscoe

A friend of an Aboriginal man who died in custody last month has told reporters the man was pinned down by police after taking a drunken swing at one of them, and “struggled to breathe” before he was carted to police cells.

There have been reports in interstate newspapers following the funeral of Terrance Briscoe, 28, an Anmatyerre man who was found unconscious in the Alice Springs Watchhouse after being arrested for drunkenness on January 4 and pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

Police have claimed Mr Briscoe fell and hit his head, but there were claims that he had been bashed by police officers. A preliminary autopsy revealed no signs of violence to Mr Briscoe, however.

The Sydney Morning Herald today reported the comments of Oscar White, 21, a cousin of Mr Briscoe’s who was arrested with him and three other men.

According to the report, Mr White, speaking through an interpreter, said Mr Briscoe had refused to give his name to police, and after becoming agitated had taken a “half-hearted” swing at one of four police officers in a room.

The policeman had pushed Mr Briscoe on to the ground, held him face down and sat on his back while other police officers put their feet on him.

Mr White had denied reports that the police had bashed Mr Briscoe, but said they had been “needlessly rough”with him and “were laughing at the same time” and “making a mockery out of him”.

A cut above his eye that had been stitched opened and began to bleed, and he was short of breath. When police picked him up and took him to his cell, he had been “like a rag”.

In The Australian, Stuart Rintoul reported that Aboriginal and community legal services have written to federal and Territory ministers calling for an “urgent independent investigation” into Mr Briscoe’s death.

From The Australian: The death is being investigated by NT Coroner Greg Cavanagh, but in concerns that mirror those of Amnesty International, Aboriginal and community legal services said the collection of evidence and witness statements should not be left in the hands of NT police.

“Police at first claimed a heart attack and later a lung complication,” they wrote in the letter to federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin and Northern Territory Attorney-General Daniel Knight.

“It is clear that he sustained injuries in custody and that the police failed to arrange medical assistance. His family has claimed that he was assaulted by police four weeks before his death.”

Signed by lawyers at Aboriginal and community legal services, under the banner of the National Police Accountability Network, the letter said Mr Briscoe’s death highlighted the failure to implement recommendations of the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission 20 years ago.

AAP also reported the comments of Lutheran Pastor Basil Schild  at Mr Briscoe’s funeral. Mr Schild said Alice Springs “needed peace.”

“There are many difficult deaths in Alice Springs and many people die too young.

“The death of this young man has been surrounded by controversy.

“We pray for a special blessing of peace and for calmness today to say goodbye to him.”

Mr Schild said Alice Springs needed spiritual healing.

“That means reflection and that means making friends out of enemies,” the pastor said.