Every now and again, for decades, the same issue gets a big headline
The Advertiser5 days ago
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
In 1972, police at an Aboriginal settlement at Papunya, several hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, closed down a travelling Slim Dusty concert after some of the young men somehow got access to alcohol and became drunk.
Many in the crowd welcomed action against the drunks ruining the concert but resented the element of group punishment in having the concert abruptly stopped. Some, including some of the troublemakers, walked to the heavily fenced police compound and began shouting. Someone threw stones on the roof.
There were police wives and children in the dwellings, and a constable emerged with a shotgun. He fired into the air, and, soon after, the crowd dispersed.
The next morning, ABC AM ran a one-sided report on the "riot", calling for all police in outback settlements to be issued with Armalite automatic rifles so they could defend their nearest and dearest when under attack. A score or so of people were charged over the disorder, and the matter came before the notorious Alice Springs magistrate, "Scrubby'' Hall. When the cop told of firing his shotgun in the air, Scrubby stopped him to ask why he didn't fire directly into the crowd.
Scrubby was regularly given to giving vent to his prejudices, though usually they did not get anything like the circulation of the above instance. Some of his defenders insisted that his outbursts were teases of his lack of affection for what today might be called "woke" Southerners oozing sympathy for Aboriginal people or disapproval of how cops set out to handle Indigenous people. I never saw him engage his brain before opening his mouth.
His usual habit if he realised that he had gone too far was not to apologise but to "row back", usually with an acquittal on some highly technical and seemingly invented ground, or with a sentence so mild that the defendant would have been mad to appeal. That way, it would not come up for critical comment from a higher court.
It was not so easy when his words had sped down the overland telegraph. The federal attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, intervened in the case.
Nothing that Murphy, or the Whitlam government, or any other person from Canberra has ever done since has had much effect on the culture of the NT Police Force or done much to prevent repeats of what became known as the "great Papunya massacre". Nor has it ever succeeded in affecting a prevailing culture of the white residents of the NT, many of whom, thanks to remoteness subsidies intended for the benefit of Indigenous residents, give non-Aboriginal residents one of the highest standards of government service in the world.
This week saw the report of the coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker - shot dead six years ago by Canberra's own Zachary Rolfe, who left Canberra Grammar for the army and Afghanistan, then joined the NT Police Force. Rolfe was acquitted when charged with murder, but the inquest, while not traversing the acquittal, investigated the circumstances and background.
Almost every confrontation has caused police spokesmen to demand that NT police are better equipped to face their tormentors. The recent Walker inquest is almost unique in suggesting that police moving around in Aboriginal settlements should not carry guns. But it would be bound to face heavy resistance from the police union, which controls the asylum. More representative of the Rolfe-like factions than bush cops or enlightened ones, it tends to believe that it is only by the gun that the Indigenous residents are awed. Perhaps it is strange that Aboriginal deaths in custody are only rarely at the hands of locals. The trouble tends to come when outsiders, disrespecting the locals, come in to show them how it is done.
Yet NT police are like most state - and AFP - officers, in being more and more armed than ever. They are dressed as paramilitary figures, with armour, gas, tasers and guns, and any number of vehicles looking like tanks. Cops are doing more driving and shouting than walking and talking. Police public relations agents speak of community policing even as fewer cops are to be seen in the community, and more and more involved in petty administration such as rosters and fudging public complaints. Police activity is these days more intrusive, and with increasingly scant regard for privacy and dignity or human rights. They are increasingly not "of" the community in any sense.
This is as true in the NT as in the ACT, except that, if anything, NT police numbers are such that they command significant local political power and a craven press. And, usually, they are at the top of the anti-woke crowd.
During the inquest, we were read Rolfe's emails in which he complains to family, girlfriends and colleagues about the failure of the NT police to accept his request to join the tactical response group, the unit which has a tendency to think of itself as a civilian SAS. Fitness, guts and martial spirit count for nothing, his superior tells him. Rolfe has been told that he needs more experience in working with Aboriginal people, particularly in rural settlements. But Rolfe despises cops working in settlements and thinks them lazy and unambitious. "The order of preference these days is blacks, chicks, gays and lazy f---s ... and then [you]," said a colleague of Rolfe's in a text message exchange.
The attitudes of young cops are repugnant, even to other more reasonable cops who cannot seem to change the culture. But it reflects the attitudes of many young men and women (white men and women, that is) in the Alice Springs community.
From about 15 minutes after they blow in - and about 80 per cent of white Territorians are blow-ins who weren't there 10 years ago, they inveigle against "Southerners" and folk in Canberra who reputedly have no idea of the privations they suffer. Chief of these is not remoteness, because the overwhelming proportion live in comfortable cities with schools and civic services of Canberra standard.
It's the challenge of law and order coming from young Aboriginal men and women who have drifted into town but who do not find there comfortable accommodation, services or jobs. Mostly they hang around fringe camps and, when they can, and if they have the money, grog shops. Most would be better off, and in a less tumultuous environment, were they to remain in, or return to, settlements. But government, and boredom, is effectively pushing them out, in part by propagating the canard that welfare beneficiaries should go where the work is, and that Alice Springs is such a place. It isn't, at least for drifters without much education or experience. The lawlessness is obvious enough. It is the despair even of people well-disposed to Aboriginal people, and a substantial Aboriginal middle class, because it manifests itself in burglaries and theft, in fighting, and in young people drifting around the streets at all hours of the day or night. It is also manifest in drug and alcohol abuse, most of which, given the practical homelessness of many of the offenders, is in the street or on the riverbeds.
It is, of course, also the despair of the police, white traders, and government officials, at all levels of government. In over 100 years of white settlement, non-Aboriginal culture has found itself unable to cope with the phenomenon and bereft of new ideas. They have tried curfews, originally requiring all Aboriginal people to be out of town at sundown, now reintroduced around grog laws and slightly more sophisticated. They have tried any number of welfare schemes, sports and other youth activity services, some of which alas, aggravate the lure of the city without adding much to its social capital. Most of all, they have tried the "firm hand", usually at the hands of the police.
The NT is currently going through a law-and-order phase. The white electorate voted enthusiastically for a "do the crime, do the time" regime, even for juveniles, and has wound back the ages at which children are held criminally responsible. Over the past year, imprisonment rates, already among the highest and most shameful in the world, have virtually doubled, if with no discernible effect on obvious street crime. An enormous proportion of Aboriginal folk are behind bars for minor traffic crimes. Only a few years ago, the inadequacy of juvenile detention facilities was an international scandal and the subject of a royal commission. The government, and, it seems, most of the white population, have decided to give up on it: crowding and abuse in juvenile detention centres and jails is now manifestly worse than before.
The coroner in the Walker inquest found that the NT police service was racist, sexist, and homophobic. It was also adept at evasiveness and avoiding accountability and responsibility. It had almost a reflex propensity to cover up misbehaviour by officers, and to look after mates, right or wrong. That tendency was balanced by considerable bitching and backstabbing, and failures of leadership and supervision by officers at the sergeant level.
RELATED: Who is Zachary Rolfe: the story of the NT cop with prominent Canberra parents
Had Rolfe been held accountable earlier in his career for his propensity to prefer violence as a solution, Walker's death at Yuendumu might not have occurred. Some of the internal police correspondence between senior police also suggested a culture of blame-shifting and attempts to limit the scope of the inquiry while always pretending to be entirely cooperative.
Leaving Rolfe out of it, a number of very senior cops have, over recent years, been active in perverting the course of justice, and sometimes convicted of it. It is, in this, a semi-criminal organisation in urgent need of fundamental reform. Perhaps like the Australian Public Service after three years of half-hearted efforts to root out and punish the perversion of good administration of the Scott Morrison era. Or perhaps put another way, a fairly typical bureaucracy in which the control systems, such as the Australian Public Service Commission, have been a central and essential part of the mechanisms for keeping the public out of the loop about rorting and corruption in the system.
MORE JACK WATERFORD:
One must bear this in mind when considering the shocking findings of the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage. No one can be surprised at findings about many of the NT police members being systemically racist, sexist and homophobic, but the force is still treated with respect by politicians, and, usually, the media. The crisis of Aboriginal lawlessness - which generates the usual free pass for police misbehaviour - is real enough, but the reality of conditions under which police lawlessness and violence come into regular conflict with Aboriginal lawlessness and violence is too often overlooked. On balance, I am on the side of law and order, but they do carry a lot of lead in their saddle. There are noble NT cops, and people doing their best, particularly in Aboriginal communities, but the credit this deserves is undermined by the open contempt that many frontline cops have for the law. And many of those provide the political context for demands for "firm action".
The primary industry in the NT is skimming off government grants for Indigenous services. Business is booming, not least from $4 billion the federal government is throwing at Aboriginal housing to be seen to be doing "something". So is money from programs intended to recreate Aboriginal-controlled services deliberately destroyed by governments, Liberal then Labor, from nearly 20 years ago. And, these days, as the extent of need for disability services is being understood, in rorting the NDIS scheme. As ever, most of the money being spent on Aboriginal welfare is going to white contractors and white public servants. But when the music stops, Aboriginal people cop the blame for being feckless and irresponsible, as if they wasted it themselves.
It is always hard to compare the honesty and competence of the varieties of territorial government on offer. But a good many rate the nepotism, jobbery, and corruption of the current regime up there with champions of old, not least for the semi-Trumpian tendency of simply ignoring unpleasant information, acting without announcement and, as ever, blaming shortcomings on Canberra. Particularly pronounced, in both Labor and Liberal National Party governments, is the "Buggins's turn" philosophy by which successive regimes believe they have the right to throw out public servants regarded as the other side's mates and cronies and install instead one's own mates and cronies. This is always a sure guarantee that corruption is endemic.
What is not happening is any external will to hold miscreants to account, particularly given the fact NT federal seats are marginal. To think it was only 40 years ago when a federal minister for finance, Peter Walsh, announced he had decided the cost of featherbedding the NT for endless uneconomic projects was greater than the political advantage of holding NT seats. It had to stop. It hasn't.
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Sky News AU
4 hours ago
- Sky News AU
NT Govt departments spent more than $7 million on Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquiry, Budget Estimates documents reveal
Northern Territory Government departments spent more than $7 million on the coronial investigation into the police shooting of Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker. Documents obtained by Sky News show the Coroner's office spent more than $1.9 million on the near three-year inquiry, while the Northern Territory Police spent almost $5.5 million. Mr Walker was shot dead by former police constable Zachary Rolfe in the community of Yuendumu on November 9, 2019. In March 2022, Mr Rolfe was found not guilty of Mr Walker's murder. The coronial inquiry into Mr Walker's death began in September 2022 and was expected to take three months. But it was plagued by delays and legal challenges and took almost three years before Coroner Elisabeth Armitage delivered her final report in Yuendumu on July 7 this year. The cost of the inquiry was revealed in answers provided to questions asked at the NT Parliament's Budget Estimates committee. It shows the Department of Attorney General and Justice spent $1,917,860 over four financial years on the inquiry. The figure dwarfs the average $6,120 spent on 283 other coronial inquiries in 2024/25. It was also almost four times the $497,640 spent on the 'landmark' coronial inquiry finalised last year into the deaths of four Aboriginal women killed in domestic violence incidents. But the biggest cost was worn by the Northern Territory Police, which spent $5,495,078 on the Walker coronial. NT Police Association president Nathan Finn said officers had been 'pushed to the brink' by the fallout and subsequent investigations into Mr Walker's death. 'This coronial, while a necessary process for transparency and accountability, came at an extraordinary $7.4 million cost to taxpayers and has left the Northern Territory Police Force deeply wounded,' he said. 'That level of public investment must result in more than rhetoric, it demands urgent, meaningful reform that restores trust, genuinely supports the men and women who put their lives on the line every day, and rebuilds a police force that has been pushed to the brink by years of relentless criticism, failed leadership and rock bottom morale.' The total cost for NT taxpayers is likely significantly more than the $7.4 million shared between the Department of Attorney General and Justice and the Northern Territory Police, as it does not include the costs for the NT Department of Health. Lawyers for the NT Police and the Department of Health were present during most of the inquiries hearings, as were counsel representing the government-funded North Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency. NAAJA's costs were also not included in the figures provided to the Budget Estimates committee. While coronial inquiries often conduct hearings over a few days, the Walker coronial inquiry sat on 71 days between September 2022 and November 2024. This included challenges to rulings made in the Northern Territory Supreme Court. In October 2023, Rolfe made an application for Ms Armitage to recuse herself, citing allegations of apprehended bias over a two-day trip made to Yuendumu. Ms Armitage refused the application, but the legal process caused a further delay before Mr Rolfe gave evidence in February 2024. In her final report, she found Mr Rolfe was 'racist' and that the NT Police Force had 'hallmarks of institutional racism'. The Coroner made 33 recommendations in her final report. Seventeen of these related to the Northern Territory Police, including a recommendation that an 'Anti-Racism Strategy' being developed is published on the NT Police website. NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro said on Monday the government would 'take our time' to consider the recommendations before making any commitment to their implementation. She said the inquest was something 'everyone wanted to see draw to an end', including Mr Walker's family and the police. 'It certainly went on far longer than anyone expected or liked,' she said. 'It's now delivered recommendations that are six years after the fact, much has changed in that period of time, rendering some of them much less relevant than others. 'It's raised some serious issues that require consideration, and largely a lot of work has been done. 'There'll be much to say, and commentators will commentate – my job as Chief Minister is to make sure that as a government we're looking at each recommendation, considering all of them, and providing our response.'
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NSW government forced to correct marketing strategy after falsely claiming it built '3D printed' social housing unit in three days instead of 20 week reality
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