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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Violence and vandalism in Alice Springs became a national fascination this year.

First Peter Dutton, then Anthony Albanese flew into town, after rates of alcohol-related assault rose by 68 per cent in 2022.

One community meeting, held by a group calling itself ‘Save Alice Springs’ became a focal point of the media’s coverage.

But another meeting took place as well… on the edge of town, hundreds of Indigenous leaders and community members came together to discuss the crisis.

Today, Gunaikurnai and Wotjobaluk writer, and contributor to The Saturday Paper Ben Abbatangelo, on the real issues facing Alice Springs.

It’s Tuesday, February 21.

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RUBY:

So Ben you recently went to Alice Springs and you made that trip in the wake of a string of media reports about a youth crime wave, alcohol fuelled violence and all of this unrest in the town. So tell me about why it was that you decided to go to Alice and what you were hoping to do there.

BEN:

Yeah. For many of us that are engaged with Indigenous affairs and the lives of Aboriginal people across the continent, we can see how history is often alive, how it often repeats or it echoes and the media firestorm over the last couple of months is very reminiscent of what we've seen in yester years. And consequentially when that narrative gets out of control. We've seen policies be put in place that further expand the carnage rather than, you know, act as an antidote. So I was very interested to go down there and not look inwards on these communities like their problems to be solved, which much of the analysis has been centred around, but rather meet them where they are. Look out at the world from their vantage point, an attempt to capture those stories and that analysis.

RUBY:

Well let’s talk about the media firestorm for a moment then. Can you tell me about those news reports that we started to see about Alice Springs and the way in which everything seemed to kick into this higher gear once that happened?

BEN:

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, what's been really obvious is that within mainstream society, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from remote parts of the country take up this very fascinating space within the imagination.

Archival tape -- Sky News Reporter:

“Businesses in Alice Springs say they are under siege.”

Archival tape -- Ben Fordham:

“How many times have you been broken into?

Archival tape -- Unknown Person:

"41 times."

Archival tape -- Ben Fordham:

"41?!"

Archival tape -- Unknown Person:

"41 times. Now, that includes, I’ve had 2 vehicles stolen from my home…”

Archival tape -- Sky News Interviewee:

“So I have Indigenous friends, you know, and I've got some, I don't see them as indigenous, I see them as mates.”

BEN:

And what we've seen in the reporting again is these people from the outside looking in at these people from remote communities as alien-like problems that need to be solved, that require more reforming, that require more civility, you know, through government intervention.

Archival tape -- Sky News Reporter:

“The Prime Minister and the Chief Minister flew into Alice Springs amid crime and violence crisis.”

BEN:

But we've seen people take up positions within that media and public discourse

Archival tape -- Peta Credlin:

“Now, last night you recall I showed you footage from a street fight on Saturday at the front of one of the main…”

BEN:

And take on almost characters to further propel the discourse around Alice Springs. And that culminated in a cosmetic nurse positioning herself as an outback nurse, someone that knows remote communities intimately.

Archival tape -- Peta Credlin:

“Joining me now is the woman who filmed that footage, a former nurse, now local business operator, Rachael Hale.”

BEN:

And was just given free passage...

Archival tape -- Rachael Hale:

“There were so many children on the streets and they were just filled with hatred.”

BEN:

On 2GB Radio on the Today Show. A lot of the hand-wringing sort of conservative publications.

Archival tape -- Rachael Hale:

“I've seen things that will haunt me forever. And I'm not alone. All of my colleagues see the same thing on a daily basis.”

BEN:

And that really, I think, poured a ton of fuel on what was already a raging inferno. And with her voice paired with images of violence, you know, really inflamed the scenario.

Archival tape -- Peta Credlin:

“I mean, I am holding myself together because I find this harrowing. And what happens when you what happens when you report that up the chain there is a multitude of organisations I drove past in Alice Springs, all paid for by the taxpayer to protect these kids. So when you report that, what happens?”

BEN:

So we're seeing, you know, people take up these positions, put on these facades and are further endangering Aboriginal people in these environments and laying the foundations for a policy response which reproduces the very harm that they are describing to want to see minimised.

RUBY:

And in the midst of all this - there was a public meeting that was held in Alice Springs - 3,000 people turned up at the convention centre and there was talk of trying to get compensation from the Northern Territory Government over damage that had been done to businesses and properties. And that meeting, it received quite a lot of media attention. What do you know about what happened?

BEN:

Yeah, I mean it's very obvious that no one's content with the circumstances in Alice Springs. No one wants to see distress, no one wants to say anguish, no one wants to see violence. No one wants to see crime. You know, it's not something that any faction of the community is interested in propelling forward or maintaining. So the first town meeting brought together thousands of people from Alice Springs.

Archival tape -- Alice Conference Centre Meeting speaker:

“We're here to try and get compensation to rebuild our own town, and sadly, we're going to have to rebuild it on our own back.”

BEN:

And the architects of that meeting were business owners, small business owners who, you know, have been impacted by the distress and an increase in vandalism and property crime.

Archival tape -- Alice Conference Centre Meeting speaker:

“The negligence that we are being provided by our government needs to stop.”

BEN:

But the analysis of what was taking place and then also the proposed way forward was very disconnected from the ambitions of indigenous communities, not just in Mparntwe or Alice Springs, but right across that sort of central desert region.

Archival tape -- Alice Conference Centre Meeting speaker:

“Every single time you see a group of kids, whoever they are, during school time, ring the police do a welfare check.”

BEN:

And there was a little bit of a cognitive dissonance I felt when these business owners were talking about suing the government for neglect. We've just come out of an intervention era where the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended and a breathtaking suite of race based controls was imposed on these communities. And in the town camps and in the outstations, where there's been perpetual underinvestment and neglect, you've got sometimes three or four generations of families living in the same house. So to hear business owners talk about neglect, when you've got some of the most impoverished communities on the planet on the doorstep, yeah, it was, became evident, you know, who this group of people were and what part of the community they are speaking for.

RUBY:

And there was a second meeting that you went to when you were in Alice Springs, which sounds like it was very different to that meeting. Can you, can you tell me about it?

BEN:

Yeah, I'd call it. And as it was framed throughout that forum, just a continuation of grassroots people coming together. It was under the backdrop of elevated media coverage, a lot of scrutiny on the town. So this forum was very different. It was a closed forum of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across that central desert region.

I mean, these communities on four days notice, some of them were travelling 400 kilometres to be there. It was really evident that no one cares about these communities or their children than the community themselves.

I was provided access to that forum as an indigenous media representative. No non-Indigenous media representatives were allowed to be in attendance. And at at the peak of the community forum, it was absolutely overflowing, you know, that the organisers that brought it together were expecting a decent turnout, but they weren't expecting it to overflow where they had to open the doors, that they had to secure more roaming mic's so that everyone could be engaged, could have their say. So it's just really obvious that the history of the Northern Territory intervention and the decades of dominance before it are still metastasising. The intervention hasn't necessarily had time to even scar. You know, the wounds are still open, they're still fresh, they're still hurting. So there was a real mix of input. There was an extensive agenda that was put in place that was very direct and thorough, starting off with the theme of “our kids”.

And it was just obvious very early on that if the region is going to find solutions to get out of this melee and out of this distress, then first nations people need to be at the fore of that.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Ben you recently went to a closed door meeting in Alice Springs, that was organised by Aboriginal people in the Central Desert region. And you said one of the things in fact the first thing that was spoken about was quote “our kids”. So tell me about those kids?

BEN:

The view of these children is very different from those that were at the convention centre versus those that were at the Desert Knowledge Centre. You know, the communities that travelled to that forum, the first agenda point was our kids. And then the second agenda point was parents of the children of the intervention. Now these kids are adolescents. They range between the age of give or take, 10 to 18, 19. A lot of them were born at the time of the intervention when the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended and the army and police swarmed these communities, they were born into an environment where their communities ability to self-govern themselves and stay connected to the things that sustain them was stripped. So they've grown up in a point of time where their parents have been shamed out of parenting them, particularly Aboriginal men. Knowing how visceral the campaign was, laying the foundations into the intervention where all Aboriginal men in these remote places were cast as paedophiles, as rapists, as child molesters. And in the forum a lot of the women spoke about the impact that that has had on the men's ability to parent their own children, that they've been shamed out of parenting their own children because of the prospects of being labelled a devious person.

So these kids are from the intervention. If you zoom out further, they're the grandchildren of many Stolen Generations members and people. They're the great grandchildren of those that were also institutionalised and rounded up on two missions and they're the great grandchildren also of those that were massacred. And a lot of that analysis has been missing in the coverage and perhaps on top of that too, to round that out. Many of these kids have also been removed from their families and are growing up in, you know, what is called to be out of home care. So dispossession and displacement lives within each of these young people. And, you know, the response from all prisons, more police or send in the army is certainly only going to amplify what's happening on the ground rather than, you know, act as a balm or an antidote for what the community needs.

RUBY:

So what you're saying is that there is a direct line that can be drawn from the present day situation in Alice Springs back 15 years to the beginning of the Northern Territory intervention. So can you tell me more about how those Intervention era policies - so we’re talking about things like alcohol restrictions and welfare quarantining, and changes to governance structures, how those changes impacted people’s lives? And how that’s being felt today?

BEN:

Yeah, well, that it's alive and well. Beyond that, they stripped the local decision making and councils and absorbed them into super councils under a sort of north and south model. And for people that are listening, that's the equivalent of Victoria being governed only out of Melbourne and perhaps Mildura. It's nonsensical. You know, there was a lot of other measures that were put in place beyond the quarantining of welfare. The blocks on alcohol and pornography. There was government seized control of assets and property and renewable five year leases. That meant that communities were herded off their homelands and centralised in these outstations, which have also been perpetually neglected. And I think on top of that, the one thing that's been missing and a lot of the old people knew it at the time, is that big business is thriving in the region. You know, you've got people that have been propelled into perpetual neglect and poverty while, you know, the extractive industry and big business is thriving.

So it's been coded under, you know, a lot of people have branded complex to explain the region and which is coded language. You know, if you just look at the facts that are in front of us, a lot of people were worried that this calamity, you know, they didn't know what the calamity would look like. They knew that it would be ahead of us. And unfortunately, the Northern Territory intervention has, yeah has further decimated these communities, rather than restoring what sustains them.

RUBY:

And so just finally, when you think about the Alice Springs of the convention centre meeting and then the Alice Springs of this other meeting that you went to the Desert Knowledge Centre, what do you think happens now going forward? How does a town like Alice Springs kind of continue on?

BEN:

Yeah, it's going to take time and paucity and a lot of the community members at that Desert Knowledge Centre forum are, you know, unanimous and have consensus on the fact that you can't restore and rebuild from the ruins at the click of a fingers. It's going to take more collaboration. It's going to continue to take people coming together. But ultimately, when the media cycle dies down, it’s these communities that are left to pick up the pieces.

And what I saw was a groundswell of young people, of old people from in Alice Springs, from the town camps just outside of Alice Springs, from the outstations, hundreds of kilometres away that have committed to seeing their communities not just surviving but thriving, to rebuilding the things that sustain them, to contributing to the policy settings that are going to improve their lives, you know, rather than destroy them.

So I'm you know, I'm very optimistic that these communities can, you know, with the devices that they've got and within the ruins that are imposed upon them, you know, hopefully birth some beauty out of the destruction.

RUBY:

Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time.

BEN:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Staff in universities across the country have been underpaid by more than $80 million since 2020.

According to an analysis by the National Tertiary Education Union, the University of Melbourne was the leader when it came to shortchanging staff, with an estimated $31 million in stolen wages.

The report attributes the wage theft to a casualised workforce and poor management, with the NTEU president criticising the sector for having wage theft quote “baked into universities’ business models”

AND

There are growing calls to ban a type of stone that could be causing lung disease in up to a quarter of stone workers.

The imported “engineered stone” is a popular material used for kitchen benchtops.

But unions and scientists are saying that no level of exposure to the dust from this stone is safe. And, it could be responsible for more than 70 recent cases of silicosis - a disease that some have called “the new asbestosis”.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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