The final Yoorrook report delivers unapologetic truths
The final recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission call for fundamental change across nearly every major area of public policy in this state.
From how the water and land is managed, to the administration and governance of critical services in health, education, criminal justice and family violence and down to the number of houses built through existing government programs, the Yoorrook recommendations offer a radical blueprint for Aboriginal self-determination.
They also make clear this can only be done at a significant cost to the state, with unquantified money needed to redress past and ongoing injustices and fund Aboriginal control over their own affairs into the future.
The projected cost of redress includes economic loss and non-economic, cultural loss, plus interest owed on both. Given it is 174 years since Victoria was declared a colony, that will amount to quite a tidy sum.
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To finance greater self-determination, including an expanded role for the First Peoples' Assembly currently negotiating a series of treaties with the Allan government, the commissioners recommend the establishment of a new fund, taken as a share of land, water and natural resource related revenues.
How much might such a fund hold?
Amid the bleak familiarity of statistics showing that Aboriginal people are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, three times as likely to die by suicide, 10 times more likely to access homeless services and far less likely to finish high school, another figure stands out.
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Sydney Morning Herald
10 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's clear what was behind Kumanjayi Walker's killing. So why can't we say it?
Indeed, some are calling for a federal truth-telling commission while simultaneously lamenting the non-implementation of those royal commission recommendations. It speaks to the absurdity of the status quo and post-referendum fragmentation in Indigenous affairs to call for the same form of inquiry to achieve something we unequivocally know it can't. What can history tell us? While formal policies of compulsory racial segregation established by protection legislation ended in the latter part of the 20th century, there was little institutional reckoning with the role police had played in administering that regime. Police forces, which for over a century had played a key role in the enforcement of the system of Aboriginal reserves, missions and curfews, were reconstituted in the post-protection era as ostensibly neutral enforcers of the rule of law with no corresponding effort to reform the institutional culture or confront its origins in racial control. Loading The phenomenon of over-policing – where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly youth, are disproportionately surveilled, detained and prosecuted for conduct that may not attract the same police or judicial response when committed by non-Indigenous peers – is not speculative. It is extensively documented across decades of institutional review and legal analysis, including the 2017 Australian Law Reform Commission's Pathways to Justice report. These are not isolated or anecdotal claims. They form part of a consistent body of empirical and legal evidence that demonstrates a structural problem embedded within our institutions. But equally confronting, for those calling for more truth-telling to replace structural change, is that Australians say they know the truth but want to move on. That's a truth that needs to be grappled with. This is possibly why the sky did not fall in with the Yoorrook findings of genocide in Victoria. They were, by and large, not controversial because this was already historically supported, perhaps demonstrating that societies do move on and the temporal, ideological motivations of the Aboriginal history 'culture wars' have disintegrated with the passage of time. It has been more than three decades since the release of the deaths-in-custody royal commission report, Australia's first truth-telling commission. There is much sentimentalising of the report. The inquiry emerged in a markedly different Australia, an era in which Australians trusted public institutions and politicians. Its findings were released when Aboriginal political structures were more unified and institutional forms such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission provided a national platform for Indigenous voices. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed significantly. Aboriginal communities have experienced fragmentation, and the post-ATSIC policy environment has become saturated with a proliferation of individuals and organisations purporting to represent Aboriginal interests, often in unaccountable ways, and which commodify identity and political authority. Loading The royal commission was unequivocal in its central finding: that systemic change would be achieved only by reducing Aboriginal contact with the criminal justice system altogether. This imperative remains as urgent now as it was then. Yet, despite its clarity, much of the contemporary criminal justice response has been directed towards superficial modifications at the sentencing stage, design interventions and cultural overlays that attempt to 'Indigenise' the system without altering its foundational logic. These are, to borrow a phrase, cosmetic adjustments, lipstick on a pig that leaves the structural drivers of over-incarceration intact. The royal commission's recommendations on non-criminal justice system solutions are a pathway forward. The pursuit of these should not form part of the closing-the-gap monolith that hoovers up all things Indigenous these days – the wicked problem they've created to solve the wicked problem. A core insight of the royal commission, too often cited but insufficiently read, is that communities need autonomy and agency, and the safety of Aboriginal people depends on them avoiding the system altogether, not their adaptation within it. We've done the reverse over 30 years and wonder why the gap in disadvantage grows wider. The royal commission further called for a withdrawal of bureaucratic control and the reallocation of authority to Aboriginal communities. Ironically, the most recent national attempt to institutionalise this principle, the proposed Voice to parliament, was framed by its opponents as an exercise in bureaucratisation, despite its primary aim being to devolve authority to communities and reduce administrative gatekeeping. Loading In the aftermath of the failed referendum, bureaucratic entrenchment has, if anything, intensified. Critics of over-bureaucratisation have grown conspicuously silent, while initiatives such as justice reinvestment attract significant public expenditure without demonstrable systemic returns. The Justice Policy Partnership, established under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, is dominated by bureaucratic actors. Several Aboriginal members have made serious accusations about its ineffectiveness. Yet, as is often the case in Indigenous policy, their concerns about the bureaucrats are ignored by the bureaucrats, and the dysfunction continues with no course correction. Today, the right of self-determination, as articulated by the royal commission, is far from the concept defined then. It has been reduced to 'partnership with government', whatever that means, and in practice it means incorporation via corporations statutes. In this way, self-determination has become synonymous with corporate compliance. What relevance these observations to the NT Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquest? The second version of the closing-the-gap framework adopted in 2020 pushed the Commonwealth's constitutional obligations and leadership responsibilities from 1967 back to the states and territories, which were notoriously bad at Indigenous policy. Now Aboriginal organisations are required, by agreement, to stand side-by-side with state and territory governments which claim to be in partnership with them while they implement draconian and ruthless criminal justice policies that render nugatory the various KPIs of justice, health and wellbeing that the closing-the-gap framework purports to achieve. The asymmetry and absurdity of the arrangements were evident when the Walker coronial inquest recommended, among many things, diversionary justice programs for Indigenous youth four days after the NT announced restricting youth offenders from accessing diversionary justice programs. Two ships passing in the night. The federal government has declined the invitation of the Indigenous sector to take more leadership. The most compelling solution here is for the Commonwealth to assume responsibility for Indigenous criminal justice and bring some leadership, accountability and coherency to the sector, if we are serious about the national closing-the-gap agreement and its justice outcomes. Something more serious is needed than the annual performative lamenting the gap.
The Advertiser
2 days ago
- The Advertiser
Every now and again, for decades, the same issue gets a big headline
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.
The Age
3 days ago
- The Age
What's the point of truth-telling if we can't handle the truth?
Indeed, some are calling for a federal truth-telling commission while simultaneously lamenting the non-implementation of those royal commission recommendations. It speaks to the absurdity of the status quo and post-referendum fragmentation in Indigenous affairs to call for the same form of inquiry to achieve something we unequivocally know it can't. What can history tell us? While formal policies of compulsory racial segregation established by protection legislation ended in the latter part of the 20th century, there was little institutional reckoning with the role police had played in administering that regime. Police forces, which for over a century had played a key role in the enforcement of the system of Aboriginal reserves, missions and curfews, were reconstituted in the post-protection era as ostensibly neutral enforcers of the rule of law with no corresponding effort to reform the institutional culture or confront its origins in racial control. Loading The phenomenon of over-policing – where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly youth, are disproportionately surveilled, detained and prosecuted for conduct that may not attract the same police or judicial response when committed by non-Indigenous peers – is not speculative. It is extensively documented across decades of institutional review and legal analysis, including the 2017 Australian Law Reform Commission's Pathways to Justice report. These are not isolated or anecdotal claims. They form part of a consistent body of empirical and legal evidence that demonstrates a structural problem embedded within our institutions. But equally confronting, for those calling for more truth-telling to replace structural change, is that Australians say they know the truth but want to move on. That's a truth that needs to be grappled with. This is possibly why the sky did not fall in with the Yoorrook findings of genocide in Victoria. They were, by and large, not controversial because this was already historically supported, perhaps demonstrating that societies do move on and the temporal, ideological motivations of the Aboriginal history 'culture wars' have disintegrated with the passage of time. It has been more than three decades since the release of the deaths-in-custody royal commission report, Australia's first truth-telling commission. There is much sentimentalising of the report. The inquiry emerged in a markedly different Australia, an era in which Australians trusted public institutions and politicians. Its findings were released when Aboriginal political structures were more unified and institutional forms such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission provided a national platform for Indigenous voices. In the intervening years, the landscape has changed significantly. Aboriginal communities have experienced fragmentation, and the post-ATSIC policy environment has become saturated with a proliferation of individuals and organisations purporting to represent Aboriginal interests, often in unaccountable ways, and which commodify identity and political authority. Loading The royal commission was unequivocal in its central finding: that systemic change would be achieved only by reducing Aboriginal contact with the criminal justice system altogether. This imperative remains as urgent now as it was then. Yet, despite its clarity, much of the contemporary criminal justice response has been directed towards superficial modifications at the sentencing stage, design interventions and cultural overlays that attempt to 'Indigenise' the system without altering its foundational logic. These are, to borrow a phrase, cosmetic adjustments, lipstick on a pig that leaves the structural drivers of over-incarceration intact. The royal commission's recommendations on non-criminal justice system solutions are a pathway forward. The pursuit of these should not form part of the closing-the-gap monolith that hoovers up all things Indigenous these days – the wicked problem they've created to solve the wicked problem. A core insight of the royal commission, too often cited but insufficiently read, is that communities need autonomy and agency, and the safety of Aboriginal people depends on them avoiding the system altogether, not their adaptation within it. We've done the reverse over 30 years and wonder why the gap in disadvantage grows wider. The royal commission further called for a withdrawal of bureaucratic control and the reallocation of authority to Aboriginal communities. Ironically, the most recent national attempt to institutionalise this principle, the proposed Voice to parliament, was framed by its opponents as an exercise in bureaucratisation, despite its primary aim being to devolve authority to communities and reduce administrative gatekeeping. Loading In the aftermath of the failed referendum, bureaucratic entrenchment has, if anything, intensified. Critics of over-bureaucratisation have grown conspicuously silent, while initiatives such as justice reinvestment attract significant public expenditure without demonstrable systemic returns. The Justice Policy Partnership, established under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, is dominated by bureaucratic actors. Several Aboriginal members have made serious accusations about its ineffectiveness. Yet, as is often the case in Indigenous policy, their concerns about the bureaucrats are ignored by the bureaucrats, and the dysfunction continues with no course correction. Today, the right of self-determination, as articulated by the royal commission, is far from the concept defined then. It has been reduced to 'partnership with government', whatever that means, and in practice it means incorporation via corporations statutes. In this way, self-determination has become synonymous with corporate compliance. What relevance these observations to the NT Kumanjayi Walker coronial inquest? The second version of the closing-the-gap framework adopted in 2020 pushed the Commonwealth's constitutional obligations and leadership responsibilities from 1967 back to the states and territories, which were notoriously bad at Indigenous policy. Now Aboriginal organisations are required, by agreement, to stand side-by-side with state and territory governments which claim to be in partnership with them while they implement draconian and ruthless criminal justice policies that render nugatory the various KPIs of justice, health and wellbeing that the closing-the-gap framework purports to achieve. The asymmetry and absurdity of the arrangements were evident when the Walker coronial inquest recommended, among many things, diversionary justice programs for Indigenous youth four days after the NT announced restricting youth offenders from accessing diversionary justice programs. Two ships passing in the night. The federal government has declined the invitation of the Indigenous sector to take more leadership. The most compelling solution here is for the Commonwealth to assume responsibility for Indigenous criminal justice and bring some leadership, accountability and coherency to the sector, if we are serious about the national closing-the-gap agreement and its justice outcomes. Something more serious is needed than the annual performative lamenting the gap.
