Club Troppo

Letter to the Editor NT News:

I don’t hold any brief for the CLP, or Labor for that matter (although I did a long time ago).  However I have strong moral objections when I see someone’s reputation trashed unfairly.  That especially includes politicians, a human sub-species about whom most people love to believe the worst even though most pollies I’ve met on both sides of the fence are thoroughly decent, hard-working people with a strong sense of public service.

Now that the transcript of CLP leader Terry Mills’ conversation with former Lingiari candidate Leo Abbott has been published in full on the NT News website, I can’t help asking what the fuss was all about?

If that’s all that was said, there was certainly no “bribery” on the part of Terry Mills, or anything else that could possibly form a foundation for an allegation of corruption or illegality of any sort.  I don’t even think there was anything ethically or morally questionable about anything Mills said.  It was an entirely appropriate conversation for a Party leader to have with a problematic candidate who he was trying to persuade to step aside.

In the circumstances I can’t help wondering why the NT News continues to publish a story with a headline like “Mills secret chat to hand Abbott a deal”?

I couldn’t agree more with FOI expert Peter Timmins about the latest Wikileaks “disclosures”.  I have no idea whether Assange is a rapist or not, but he’s certainly succeeded in setting the cause of public sector whistleblowing back by a decade or more.  The documents so far disclosed indicate little or no public misfeasance by the US or anyone else, so there is simply no legitimate public interest in their disclosure.

Old leftie columnist Ken Davidson reckons Labor’s Victorian defeat is all down to its failure to invest in suburban rail infrastructure.  Not being a local I have no idea whether he’s correct, but as far as I can see there’s no other obvious explanation for the defeat of a mostly competent government, apart from a generalised “it’s time” factor and perhaps Justin Madden’s arrogant handling of the Planning portfolio.  The latter at least is arguably symptomatic of a government needing a spell on the Opposition benches to vanquish accumulated hubris.

Davidson’s hypothesis brings into focus Nicholas Gruen’s proposal for an independent RBA-style body to certify responsible levels of public debt, thereby making borrowing for productive public infrastructure politically feasible.  It’s difficult to see any other workable way of ameliorating the simplistic public perception fostered by Howard and Costello that public debt is always and for all purposes evil.  On the other hand the Gillard government’s refusal to agree to a Productivity Commission cost-benefit analysis of the National Broadband Network inspires no confidence that it could be trusted to exercise responsible stewardship over infrastructure spending if that public perception is ever broken down.

Sinclair Davidson’s posts are often worth reading.  It’s a shame his compulsion to play the Coalition apologist so often gets the better of him.

(Continued)

The release in federal Parliament yesterday of the report into last year’s Montara oil spill off Australia’s north-west coast is just the latest chapter in a saga of NT government incompetence:

“Industry, government and regulators must be absolutely committed to a culture of high safety standards and environmental protection within a framework of continuous improvement.”

Mr Ferguson also told Parliament the Northern Territory’s Department of Resources failed to adequately regulate operation of the oil well.

“The commissioner found that the Northern Territory Department of Resources was not a sufficiently diligent regulator, adopting a minimalist approach to its regulatory responsibilities,” he said.

“The way in which the regulator conducted its responsibilities gave it little chance of discovering PTTEP poor practices.” …

“At the heart of this matter is the failure of the operator and the failure of the regulator to adhere to this regime.

“Montara was preventable.

“If either, or preferably both PTTEP AA or the Northern Territory designated authority had done their jobs properly and complied with requirements, the Montara blowout would never have happened.”

Mr Ferguson says the Government will move to have a single, national offshore regulator of the industry.

The conclusion eerily echoes that of the Howard government in 2007 after the appalling child abuse revelations of the Little Children Are Sacred report led to the federal Intervention.  As Indigenous academic Marcia Langton more recently observed:

(Continued)

At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape “payback violence” after a stabbing murder in Alice Springs.  That was despite the presence of a police taskforce sent there specifically to try to prevent such an outcome.

The extent to which a perverted form of “payback” vengeance is embedded in Aboriginal society is illustrated by this unashamed and uncompromising observation:

Senior people in one family say they fear the conflict will not end until they are allowed to carry out tribal punishment on the other family.

Troppo’s Alice Springs informant Bob Durnan anticipated just such an outcome in an ABC radio interview only last week

Anti-violence campaigners in Central Australia are increasingly concerned that cultural practices, such as payback, are being distorted and used to commit acts of terrible violence.

There were 455 violent assaults in the first three months of this year, and in the past six years assaults in and around Alice Springs have almost doubled.

The murder rate is very high and payback is being used as an excuse for endless feuds between individuals and groups of young men.

Bob Durnan has been working in Central Australia for 33 years and says payback has become a major problem for the region’s communities.

“Young fellas who drink get all fired up about the need to avenge some real or imagined slight or sorcery, or whatever, and go and assault and often stab people who are trying to sleep or lead a normal life,” Mr Durnan said.

(Continued)

High profile constitutional law academic George Williams argues in today’s SMH that  the federal laws prohibiting self-governing Commonwealth territories (NT, ACT and Norfolk Island) from legalising voluntary euthanasia should be repealed.

As a Territorian and public law academic you’d expect me to agree, and indeed I do.  However I vehemently disagree with Williams’ principal rationale for this proposition:

As a matter of democratic principle and good governance, the Commonwealth should not remove power from a self-governing jurisdiction. Removing power is a blunt instrument that prevents the making of any laws on a subject, whether for good or ill. It also calls into question the good faith of the Commonwealth in granting self-government to the territories in the first place.

This is not to deny the role of the Commonwealth to govern for all Australians. Where issues arise in a territory or state, the Federal Parliament can be right to intervene. It should do so in the national interest by legislating for the country as a whole and not by opportunistically taking advantage of its power over the territories.

Why?  A territory is not a state and section 122 of the Constitution gives the Commonwealth almost unrestricted power to legislate for Commonwealth territories, including by granting them self-government on whatever terms the Commonwealth chooses, and by amending or even completely removing any grant of self-government.  Thus there is no doubt the Commonwealth has constitutionally conferred legislative power to restrict or remove the Territories’ power to legislate in any area including euthanasia.

Williams is instead arguing that some general political principle of democratic fairness should be regarded as making it illegitimate for the Commonwealth to treat territory legislatures differently from states.  But why?  It’s just a bald assertion.

(Continued)

Bob Durnan is an old ALP colleague who has worked in Indigenous communities in central Australia for the best part of 30 years.  Like me, he has witnessed the tragic deterioration of living conditions in many if not most remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territory over that period of time.  As such Bob is a strong supporter of many aspects of the Howard government-initiated NT Intervention, especially the income management system.

Bob has just emailed me a copy of what I think is a very important speech delivered to the Australian Alliance of Lawyers last Friday in Alice Springs by Bess Price, a senior Warlpiri woman from Yuendumu.

The background is the release last week of the Bath Report into children’s services in the NT, which revealed that not much had improved in that area since the “Little Children Are Sacred” report which triggered the Intervention in 2007.  NT Minister Kon Vatskalis said last week:

“The communities out there are in total collapse. There is a crisis in the communities,” Mr Vatskalis said.

“Yesterday, I was thinking, I said where is the person like Martin Luther King to come out and say ‘I’ve got a dream?’, because I can’t see anybody in the Indigenous community at the moment coming out and saying ‘I’ve got a dream’ and lead the communities. There is no leadership.”

Ms Price is certainly an Indigenous leader whose voice needs to be heard more widely.  Her address is over the fold. Please read it.

(Continued)

It won’t get published because it’s too long, but worth saying just the same:

Dear Sir,

Peter Murphy’s always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection.

This week’s column (12 September) blaming Warren Snowdon and Jenny Macklin for all the accumulated ills of Aboriginal affairs is a case in point.  Murphy not only ignores the fact that the Howard government was in charge of the area until 3 short years ago, but also that Labor has largely continued the Howard government’s NT Intervention policies.  In fact many commentators assess that Labor’s embrace of the Intervention is a major reason why Snowdon experienced such large voting swings against him in remote communities.

However, should those electoral reverses now lead to a wholesale expedient abandonment of Intervention initiatives?  My own view is that they shouldn’t.  The Intervention was like the curate’s egg; good in parts.  More police and medical services and much greater (if botched) spending on housing were undeniable positives, as was the crackdown on alcohol, drugs and porn.

Income management is more problematic.  It would have a valuable role to play if applied only to welfare recipients persistently acting irresponsibly, but not when arbitrarily and indiscriminately imposed on everyone.

More generally, many Intervention initiatives have been imposed on communities with little or no involvement of Aboriginal people themselves. Long experience, not to mention unchallenged research by the Productivity Commission, shows that the only initiatives that work in remote communities are ones created by “partnerships” where communities have a genuine sense of “ownership” of the program or enterprise.

Community ownership needs to be matched by full accountability for the way programs are actually run , but without genuine partnership and mutual respect nothing sustainable is ever achieved.  Those lessons appear to have been forgotten in the panic to be seen to be doing something to attack child sexual abuse and endemic Indigenous disadvantage.

If Murphy was delivering a real evaluation rather than a partisan puff piece he would acknowledge that none of these problems are susceptible to a quick fix and neither political party has yet found a magical solution.

As part of my duties as CDU’s designated political analyst/commentator for NT electoral purposes, I’ve been delving into the interstices of the booth by booth results in the NT seats of Solomon and Lingiari.  The results are quite fascinating, especially in Lingiari.

Starting with Solomon (essentially metropolitan Darwin and Palmerston), the result is not too surprising.  I confess I expected the ALP’s Damian Hale to hang on narrowly, partly because he hadn’t done a bad job but also because of an outbreak of Country Liberal Party infighting over the last week of the campaign.  However, the infighting arose from revelations that the CLP’s Aboriginal candidate for Lingiari Leo Abbott had not only been subject to a Domestic Violence Order but had also been subject to recent court action for breaching it.  CLP NT Opposition Leader Terry Mills, supported by his federal counterpart Tony Abbott, called on the party’s management committee to disendorse Leo Abbott.  However the management committee refused to do so, with one of its central Australian members suggesting publicly that Mills’ demand was part of a “mean and tricky” tactic orchestrated by former Liberal Party National President Shane Stone to make Leo Abbott a sacrifical lamb so the CLP could generate a renewed focus on similar (though arguably less serious)  domestic violence allegations against the ALP sitting Member for Solomon Damian Hale.  The whole fiasco ended up with CLP Alice Springs MLA and former parliamentary leader Jodeen Carney announcing her immediate resignation from Parliament, other CLP MLAs refusing to campaign for Leo Abbott and CLP President Rick Setter resigning early this week.

However the immediate electoral wash-up from the fiasco is less clear.

(Continued)

Dear editor

I wonder how many of the 84% of NT News respondents who think NT courts are too soft on criminals are aware of any of the following indisputable facts:

1. NT judges and magistrates are tougher on crime than other states and territories. The NT has an imprisonment rate almost 4 times higher than the Australian average, while the crime rate per head for both property and violent crimes is around twice the national average.
2. We have many more police per head of population than any other jurisdiction.
3. Crime rates for property crime actually rose while mandatory sentencing was in force for those offences up to 2001 (although that’s probably a coincidence).
4. Crime rates have fallen in most categories of property crime over the last 5 years, while robberies and assaults have risen significantly and homicides and sexual assaults have remained about the same.
5. The Territory has higher crime rates overall than other parts of Australia because we have a much younger population, many more indigenous residents, a much higher population suffering significant socio-economic disadvantage, and much higher levels of alcohol consumption.  All but the last of those factors is almost completely beyond the control of any Territory government irrespective of what actions it may choose to take.

Yours faithfully

Ken Parish

Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.

Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and their own happiness with allowing the whiff of racism to float about their policies in order to secure the skeptical, largely non-aboriginal urban seats. But calling CLP policies racist is actually a lazy copout, because the NT Government was powerless to change the policies — the Act and welfare — that made the difference.

There’s slow, very slow, change going on. Say what you like about the Intervention, it acted as a political circuit-breaker. What was previously unspeakable became discussable. Essentially, NT politics was a meeting point of political continents: the NT’s Legislative Assembly, the Land Councils and the Senate in Canberra. The Intervention was the earthquake that came after years of building pressure.

While the policies of the 70s were well-intentioned, they failed. It’s as simple as that. The prior policies of assimilation gave us the Stolen Generations, but the policies of the 70s-2000s gave us the Wasted Generations.

About six months ago the NT Government hired a “Remote Services Coordinator” in Bob Beadman, a long-time observer and participant in aboriginal affairs in the NT. His first report has been published, and it makes for refreshingly blunt reading. Usually these sorts of public reports are written by invisible shinybums, couched in the most obtuse and polished bureaucratese possible. But that’s not for Bob: he lays out his own opinions without the usual “it could be argueds”, “some have observeds” and “in some quarters”:

I want to hammer one final point, before turning to what I am supposed to be doing.
The building of houses and roads and sewerage systems is the easy part of this development effort; the social reconstruction, the rebuilding of people, the restoration of their pride and self-worth is the far more difficult, and more important.

And bearing in mind the old adage that the single most important social welfare measure we can take is to provide a person with a job, Governments must be even more proactive on the social side of the infrastructure/social scales, else all of this will be for nothing.
…
If, again, Indigenous people sit under a tree and watch this frenetic effort by government agencies of every kind with increasing astonishment, we will have squandered another opportunity for social reconstruction. We are unlikely to get another one with all of the features available to us right now. … As noted anthropologist Peter Sutton recently said the incentives for remaining outside modernity must be withdrawn.

(Continued)