Preventing crime by easing poverty

By ERWIN CHLANDA

The elephant in the room is poverty, says Greens candidate for Namatjira, Blair McFarland, in the election campaign mostly focussed on what to do about crime.

“We’re already the most over policed region in Australia. If public safety depended on police numbers we’d be one of the safest places in the world.”

Declared the Northern Territory’s Australian of the Year 2024 for his involvement in the development of Opal, a non-sniffable petrol, he says: “The success was in our prevention strategy in reducing sniffing. We didn’t get tough on sniffers, nor fill up the gaols with them in an endless revolving door arrangement. We prevented it.”

In November 2004 Supercheap installed a cage (in the background) to prevent the theft of inhalants. Pictured are (from left) the store’s manager; Jane Vadiveloo, Tangentyere’s manager at the time; Attorney General Peter Toyne and Mr McFarlane with a manual for retailers about preventing sales and thefts of inhalants. Mr Toyne had declared an emergency due to sniffers moving into Alice when avgas (which also cannot be sniffed but ruined cars) rolled out in the bush.

Mr McFarland says while reducing poverty with welfare is a Federal responsibility, the NT can do its part by lobbying Canberra and even by diverting money. However, he doubts that a Labor government in Darwin would take to task the one in Canberra.

“Aboriginal people are doing what any really poor subset of people will do. They steal, break the law,” he says.

“Poverty is the driver for all gap indicators, substance misuse, chronic illness. Some people are at the very bottom of the social order. They scramble from day to day to live and eat and put electricity into their houses.

“The poverty we impose on people on Centrelink is an absolute national disgrace and we cop the consequences. What we’ve got is an increasingly alienated subclass of people who have no respect for the system.”

NEWS: How do you fix it? Simply give them more money?

McFARLAND: Pretty much. Remember in Covid? Suddenly everyone had $550 a fortnight extra. Crime went down. There were other factors as well. Pubs were closed. People moved back out bush. People could live out bush. They could shop. The shops out bush are the most expensive shops you find anywhere in Australia. And they are servicing the poorest people in Australia. So they come into town, exacerbating the problems, because they literally can’t feed their kids in their country.

NEWS: How do you define poverty?

McFARLAND: The Federal Government hasn’t got a poverty line, if they did they’d have to acknowledge how many Australians are underneath it, and that the money they give them deliberately impoverishes them. If it doesn’t have a name it doesn’t exist.

The Melbourne University has worked out that inclusive of housing costs, the poverty line is $1145.61 per week for a family comprising two adults and two dependent children.

A couple with no children gets $691.80 a week from Centrelink, just over half of the Melbourne University’s poverty line.

“There was a 16th century English Lord who said the English legal system in its bountiful fairness prosecutes rich and poor alike for sleeping under bridges and begging for bread,” jokes Mr McFarland.

Referring to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, he says governments frequently spend money in a counter-productive way.

Maslow states the basic needs must be met first – air, food, water, shelter, clothing, reproduction and sleep.

Once these are in place security, education, employment, resources, property and health can be taken care of.

After that come friendship, love, intimacy, family and community.

These are followed by self-esteem, respect, status and freedom recognition.

And ultimately, self actualisation can occur.

NEWS: Is the Prime Minister Albanese’s special grant of $250m being spent along these lines?

McFARLAND: They are hitting the ground two layers up. They are not addressing food security, or energy security. It’s really cold. If you have consistently not enough money to both feed your family and to keep the power on, then what respect are you going to have for the system?

NEWS: Some people prefer being in gaol in winter.

McFARLAND: There is power and blankets and food. It’s a crazy system.

He says the budget of a bush school funded from the Albanese grant shot from 1.4m to 3.3m a year and from two teachers to nine.

“Because of poor alcohol policies over generations, there are kids needing specialist support, and without this it will burn the teachers out and the kids will just be floating around, having nothing.

“These are the kids who will be in and out of gaol.”

McFarland says the NT Government, as a remote area food subsidy, could put money into people’s Basics Card, which cannot be used for alcohol, instead of spending it on such projects as the national Aboriginal art gallery in Alice Springs.

“Instead we have people coming in from bush and stealing and we’ll have this big empty mausoleum, a monument to a tourist industry that’s lapsing as nobody wants to come to Central Australia because of the crime,” he says.

“Government could be allocating money more cleverly, on things that make sense in that Maslow way.

“We already have so many tourist attractions. But what we also have is a reputation that we’re a dangerous place.

“The Territory doesn’t have the scale, money and the political capacity to make the big changes, but if you can mobilise the NT Government to do it, you could put pressure on the Federal Government, in the election year, to make those changes.”

The Federal elections have to be held on or before September 27, 2025.

Mr McFarland came to The Centre in 1986 doing volunteer work for the Conservation Commission as a tracker and snake catcher. Then he worked for Corrections for eight years and worked for Tangentyere supporting night patrols from 1995.

He spent three years in Papunya as the Western Desert Corrections Officer and founded the Central Australian Youth Linkup Service 2002.

Mr McFarland and fellow Greens candidate Asta Hill between them have decades of experience with troubled young people.

[FOOTNOTE: See also our profiles of Independent Robyn Lambley and the CLP’s Bill Yan. We invited Labor’s Gagandeep Sodhi and Allison Bitar to be interviewed but they did not respond.]