When the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC) bought the Ayers Rock Resort late last year there was not a single local Aboriginal employee working there – despite good intentions by the resort’s previous owners and many training programs over the years. So it will be interesting to see if a new program, announced today by Minister for Indigenous Employment and Economic Development Mark Arbib, succeeds.
Like many before it, the focus is on training, this time to be delivered at the ILC’s newly established Indigenous Training Academy at Yulara, benefiting from a $4.9 million partnership with the Australian Government.
A 12 month traineeship program will recruit locally and from across Australia by offering competitive wages, help with relocation and costs of living, retention bonuses and a guaranteed job, either at the resort or in the hospitality and tourism industry.
All up the program is expected to create 350 new jobs at the resort and in the hospitality industry elsewhere.
Minister for Tourism Martin Ferguson said the program complements the National Long Term Tourism Strategy’s focus on improving Indigenous tourism experiences as well as stimulating Indigenous tourism enterprise and product development.
“The Australian Government has also committed to providing funding of up to $1 million from the Strategic Tourism Investment Grants program for the Indigenous Tourism Business Skills Project at Ayers Rock Resort.”
Meanwhile, the ILC will also develop an Indigenous Procurement Strategy for the resort, to strengthen business opportunities for Indigenous suppliers. – Kieran Finnane
Photo: Filling empty resort beds with Aboriginal trainees?
See some of our past reports on this subject:
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron: Throwing money at the black unemployment ‘time bomb’ hasn’t worked.
Ayers Rock Job Program.
Rumble at Ayers Rock: shutting Uluru’s gates?
Ayers Rock jobs farce.
Ayers Rock jobs: who’s right?
Dump easy dole: blueprint for battered Ayers Rock community.
Ayers Rock Resort: Lots of jobs for locals.
Runs on board for new Rock resort owners.
A new jobs program for locals at Ayers Rock Resort – will this one succeed?
Carrots for jobs, sticks for education and grog
New NT Intervention measures
While the Australian Government is extending the ‘stick’ approach in the field of education, tying welfare payments to school attendance, and alcohol, extending income management arrangements for people with alcohol related problems, there was no mention of the stick in relation to jobs. The announcements today, part of the Northern Territory Intervention Mark 2, are all ‘carrots’, sounding very like the carrots proffered in the past. This new bunch cost $19.1 million.
On the government’s school attendance ‘stick’ Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion says: “Labor is all talk and no action with the re-announcement of welfare quarantining of Aboriginal parents who don’t get their children to school.
“This government can re-announce this policy until the cows come home but it is no good unless it is acted on and people are breached.
“The ability to quarantine welfare for truancy has been in the legislation for four years.
“The Coalition had children attending school when the intervention started but Labor let it slip backwards and we lost four years and another generation of disconnected Indigenous primary school children is Labor’s legacy.”
Headlining the government’s new program are 50 new ranger positions in the Working on Country program.
There’s also emphasis on local filling local jobs, with traineeships to support up to 100 Aboriginal people to fill service delivery jobs in their communities.
The traineeships provide job-specific training and a period of “job shadowing” – “supported on-the-job experience”.
The Australian Government will also support for the NT Government’s initiative providing a job guarantee to Indigenous students from Territory Growth Towns who complete year 12.
The announcement said that “jobs brokers” will help connect Aboriginal people with jobs in sectors that have labour shortages.
The Government will extend Indigenous Business Australia’s Indigenous Communities in Business program to two additional communities to help support the development of new businesses and economic activity in remote areas.
Getting children to school
The school attendance ‘stick’ requires children to meet an attendance benchmark. If they fall below it, their families will work with schools and Centrelink to develop attendance plans. Then if parents do not meet their part of the plan, their welfare payments will be suspended. Payments will be reinstated once the parent gives clear signals they are complying with their responsibilities and their child or children re-engage with the school.
This program already exists in Hermannsburg, Katherine, Tiwi Islands, Wadeye, Wallace Rockhole. It will now be extended to Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, remaining schools in Katherine, and Yirrkala, Maningrida, Galiwin’ku, Ngukurr, Numbulwar, Umbakumba, Angurugu, Gapuwiyak, Gunbalanya, Milingimbi, Lajamanu, Yuendumu, Alyangula and Nhulunbuy. The measure will apply to all parents in each community or township, not only Aboriginal parents.
Seminars will be held in each community before the measure is applied to explain to parents their responsibilities.
An “unnacceptable level of under-enrolment” will be the focus of data exchange between schools and Centrelink to ensure that children are enrolled in a school and attending even if they have moved during the school year.
“This will prevent children, particularly those in mobile families, from falling through the cracks,” says Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin.
Getting people off the grog
Current alcohol restrictions will continue under Intervention Mark 2, while penalties for grog running will be strengthened.
Local alcohol management plans will have to meet “stringent guidelines on harm reduction and the protection of vulnerable women and children” and will only be approved by the Commonwealth Indigenous Affairs Minister if they do.
A new income management measure will allow NT authorities to refer people for compulsory income management for alcohol related problems, on a similar basis to the way this currently occurs under the child protection measure.
Source: Australian Government media releases.
UPDATE: The “stringent guidelines” that local alcohol management plans will have to respond to are “currently being developed”, according to a spokesperson for Minister Macklin.
The new income management measure for people with alcohol related problems could see up to 70% of their income being quarantined, thus reducing the amount of money available for them to buy alcohol.
Gongs for Centre's tourism businesses at 25th Brolgas
Central Australian tourism businesses have taken out several category wins in the 25th annual Brolga Tourism Awards, announced in Alice Springs last night.
First time entrant Alice Springs Airport won the Qantas Award for Excellence in Sustainable Tourism.
Two other first timers won in their category: Alice Springs YHA for Backpacker Accommodation; and Rapid Ascent, organisers of the Ingkerreke Commercial Mountain Bike Enduro for Festival and Events.
In contrast to these newcomers, MacDonnell Range Holiday Park took out the Tourist and Caravan Parks category for the 20th time in 25 years.
Ian and Lyn Conway, owners of King’s Creek Station, received the Tourism Minister’s Perpetual Trophy, which recognises long term personal and professional commitment and dedication. King’s Creek Station welcomes almost 300,000 visitors a year.
But Shadow Minister for Central Australia, Matt Conlan, says the Brolgas “failed to mask the cracks that have developed in the Centre’s tourism industry over the past decade.
“The industry in Central Australia has been in decline for years and now some tourism operators say they could hit the wall if there isn’t a significant short term improvement.”
He says nothing better illustrates the government’s “incompetence” than the recent airlines crisis.
“Tourism Minister Malarndirri McCarthy was virtually silent for weeks when Tiger Airways was suspended from flying and totally addled by the Qantas shutdown.”
Other winners from the Centre were:
• Alice Springs School of the Air for Tourist Attractions;
• Lasseters Casino for Deluxe Accommodation;
• DIY Tour Guide, Laurelle Halford’s creation, for Specialised Tourism Services;
• Kings Canyon Wilderness Lodge for Unique Accommodation;
• Nyinkka Nyunyu Art & Culture Centre in Tennant Creek for Indigenous Tourism.
Tattersalls Finke Desert Race was highly commended in the Festivals and Events category.
And four local businesses received encouragement awards:
• Haven Backpacker Resort for Backpacker Accommodation;
• Alice Springs Convention Centre for Meetings and Business Tourism;
• Wayoutback Desert Safaris in the Tour and/or Transport Operator category; and,
• Longhorn Bikes for a New Tourism Development.
Business category winners of a Brolga automatically become finalists in the 2011 Qantas Australian Tourism Awards.
Pictured: Entrance to the Alice Springs Airport, showing recently installed public art work.
Source: NT Government media release.
Great ideas for the town. Now will someone please make them reality?
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Using the $100m Julia Gillard earmarked for the “Malaysian solution” to build a center for asylum seekers in Alice Springs, which could become the source of sorely needed labour, and moving closely together the dates of the town’s iconic events such as Henley on Todd and Camel Cup, giving tourists a reason for staying longer.
These were two ideas floated, by Robert Gates and Peter Grigg, respectively, at yesterday’s public meeting called to seek ways of getting Alice Springs out of its doldrums.
About 70 people turned up for the brainstorming, briskly moderated by Chamber of Commerce CEO Kay Eade and hosted by the Town Council. When she asked how many business owners were present only eight hands went up.
“Where are the rest?” asked Ms Eade. “They are letting the town down.”
She said Alice Springs is competing with towns and cities around Australia, all looking for ways of coping with a sluggish economy. She said we should invite people to The Centre for a 12 months working holiday: that could lead to a job for them, or even to starting a business.
The introduction came from the main promoter of the meeting, the irrepressible Alderman Murray Stewart. A bout of laryngitis didn’t slow him down a bit. Resolved not to stand again for alderman, and being non-committal about any plans for seeking an Assembly seat, Ald Stewart said the next municipal budget, which will be brought down by a new council, should be seen as an opportunity for cutting the rate payers some slack: a two year freeze of rates on commercial premises would be a good idea.
And that saving would need to be passed by the landlords to their tenants, says Ald Stewart.
Power and Water could announce free electricity between 6pm and 9pm, enticing businesses to extend trading to these hours far more convenient for shoppers.
The town is a “sleeping hollow right now,” said Ald Stewart. “We need new people.”
In some parts of country Victoria land is given free to people setting up businesses.
People urgently needed – teachers, doctors, nurses – should be attracted to Alice Springs with tax breaks increasing with the length of stay, up to 75% after 15 years.
The Desert Sports Foundation Ald Stewart is heading up could play a role in giving the town a lift, he says, with events such as beach cricket in the “under utilised” Todd River.
And control of marketing the town should be in the hands of its people.
Jimmy Cocking said Alice’s growing recognition as a solar city could enhance it as a tourist destination and lead to manufacturing of renewable energy equipment here.
He later said minting a Central Australian dollar could a a good gimmick to boost tourist spending.
Phil Walcott, independent hopeful in Greatorex, says the council should increase its rates base by including many who are exempt.
Janet Brown and Domenico Pecorari, not usually on the same wavelength, agreed that the town needs a plan for its future development, so that individuals as well as commerce can prepare for the future.
Mr Pecorari said most businesses have a plan – the town doesn’t.
Mayor Damien Ryan said the council does not have planning powers and seemed content to leave it at that.
Owen Cole said around 2008 Canberra appeared interested in setting up in Alice Springs a national centre for indigenous art but nothing had come of it.
Peter Grigg said the town should push hard for this project: “Other centres are vying for it.”
Difficulties of getting staff, the importance of shopping locally and hemorrhaging customers to the internet were recurring themes.
Matty Day said visiting backpackers and young people living here are often ignored: “They are the people most likely to shop online and they are not happy.”
Eddie Fabijan, referring to an earlier comment that we should bring V8 Supercars racing to the Alice, said our climate is ideally suited for testing all manner of things in hot operating conditions, including vehicles. That’s something that wasn’t helped by the government introducing speed limits on the open road.
Hayley Michener said locals should support locally grown produce.
Mike Mitchell said local businesses are mostly operating in isolation, and there is a good case for collaboration, for example, art traders, tour operators and accommodation houses could link up to their benefit.
Rex Neindorf said becoming a state “would kill us” by being swamped by other states: Being a Territory still “has a frontier feeling about the place. Let’s keep our identity.”
A group was formed after the meeting to drive these ideas further.
Of course, the initiative will be judged by how many of them will become reality.
Photo: Monte’s is proof that in business, if you have the formula right, success is assured. The dozens of pushbikes tied to the fence most days are pedal powered proof of this.
ED – We’re obliged to Julia Winterflood for pointing out that the pubic meeting we referred to was in fact a public meeting. It was a typo – not a Freudian slip.
Cool heads consider global warming
By KIERAN FINNANE
Perhaps because this can be a hot place anyway, there was little heat in the Alice Springs conversation with the Climate Commission; and perhaps because it’s an expensive place to live anyway, there was no whinging about the “great big tax”. The science was clearly accepted; people’s interest was in ‘where to from here’.
Were the commissioners worried, then, that they were preaching to the converted? This was put to them from the floor, with the speaker expressing concern over the polarisation of the debate in Australia.
Gerry Hueston, recently retired President of BP Australasia, representing a business perspective on the commission, pointed out that both major parties accept the science and both are committed to reducing emissions by 5% of the 2000 level by the year 2020. The debate is in how to go about it.
We’ll never get “perfect policy” coming out of the democratic process, said Mr Hueston, but we can get policy moving in the right direction. At the moment, short-term political issues are getting in the way but that will shift. In the USA, despite division at the national level, a lot of individual states will soon be more progressed in their climate change adaptations than Australia is, he said.
Commissioner Dr Susannah Eliott, an expert in science communication, said it was important not to be too focussed on the media’s tendency to highlight difference (rather than convergence). She wasn’t worried if the audience was “converted”, as they would all be “communicators” and providing them with good information would lead to more conversations in the community, based on better knowledge.
There was some concern about the impact of the Clean Energy Act, passed this week, on the poorest people in the region. Mr Hueston explained that the legislation has taken this into account through the tax system, raising the tax threshold and decreasing taxes at the lower end. This measure should more than compensate for rises in electricity costs, he said.
The perception that people in remote communities needing to travel to town for services will be hit by rising fuel costs was corrected by Chief Commissioner and former Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery: the tax is on the big polluting companies; fuel for personal vehicles is exempt. Fuel prices may go up but that will have nothing to do with putting a price on carbon, he said.
Disproportionate impact on remote communities
Professor Lesley Hughes, a biological scientist who has contributed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that it is acknowledged that climate change will impact disproportionately on the most vulnerable, among them people in remote communities, and that the commission will be releasing a report highlighting this situation – though not necessarily providing answers.
Mr Hueston was asked whether the business community accepts “the science”, given the misinformation abroad in the national debate. He said the majority either accepted the science or accepted that climate change is a “significant risk”: when you’ve got “97% of the world’s best scientists” saying that the science is “unequivocal”, then you realise you have to “take out some insurance”, he said.
He said most businesses in his field have been factoring in a price on carbon for a number of years now. What businesses want most is certainty about policy and price, he said.
Professor Hughes was challenged on her statement that with climate change Central Australia can expect more and more intense fires. Fire scientist Grant Allan of Bushfires NT suggested that this was a “southern view”, pointing out that our fires are driven by rainfall generating high fuel loads. A hotter drier future would present fewer rather than more opportunities for the landscape to burn, he said, emphasising also that fire is an important land management tool that, regardless of climate change, we need to continue to use and learn how to use it better. Professor Hughes took his point, acknowledging that adaptations need to be regionally specific.
There were a number of questions about urban density. One speaker criticised the Australian trend towards bigger houses. Professor Flannery said this had come about on the back of cheap energy but that it will change as energy prices rise (as they have done recently in NSW by 40% – nothing to do with a carbon price).
Far-flung Kilgariff wise?
Domenico Pecorari asked the commissioners if there was “any wisdom” in the creation of Kilgariff as a suburb “far-flung” from the town. He prefaced his question by asking whether there were any aldermen or politicians in the room. There weren’t – “Why am I not surprised? The people making decisions about the town … are the least informed in my opinion,” said Mr Pecorari. (Environment Minister Karl Hampton was represented by his minder, Mandy Taylor.)
Professor Flannery answered diplomatically: there would be contact with other groups in the community, including politicians, during the commission’s visit; and, any development now is a “splendid opportunity” to develop low environmental impact, energy-efficient urban design solutions.
Should people even live in Alice Springs or should we all move to high-density urban centres, asked a woman from the floor.
Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, was familiar with some research in Canberra showing that people living in high density housing used less water and less electricity than people living in the suburbs. He said one of the big issues with densities is transport, a big greenhouse emitter. High density living provides the opportunity for the development of very good public transport and greatly reduced emissions.
Mr Hueston expressed his amazement at the continued development of new suburbs on the outskirts of Melbourne without “any proper transport infrastructure”.
Scott McConnell suggested that the growth of the human population “was the elephant in the room”. Professor Flannery agreed that it’s an issue. Most of it will come from the world’s 40 poorest countries, where women have an average 5.5 babies. Providing benefits to these women through a proper foreign aid program is the best way the richer countries can help hold down the increase in population, he said. (History shows that with improved education and economic opportunities women choose to have fewer children.) If this happened, population could be limited to eight billion by 2050 (the most optimistic scenario), as opposed to 9.3 billion.
Mr McConnell also suggested that we (in the developed countries) may have to “give up something” in order to allow people in “the third world” fulfillment of some of their development aspirations.
Professor Flannery thought that we could start by paying for pollution, which would lead to the development of cleaner, cheaper technologies with a much better chance of sustaining a population of eight billion.
Locking up productive land for carbon farming?
Another speaker took up the population theme, linking it to food production and asked if there was any sense in government spending money on locking up productive land for carbon “farming”.
Professor Flannery said he wasn’t familiar with local circumstances, such as the carbon sink developments on Henbury Station, but that he’s talked to lots of farmers and graziers, who are looking at the opportunities of doing both: viable food production and carbon sequestering. For example, some graziers in northern Australia would be happy to lock up the “rough country” for carbon sequestering, while continuing to run their herd on more accessible country.
As we develop more experience with carbon farming – for example, changes in burning regimes – we’ll find more opportunities for doing both: it’s not an either/or situation, he said.
Jimmy Cocking of the Arid Lands Environment Centre asked about the emphasis of the Clean Energy Future policy on mitigation (reducing emissions) with “not a lot in there about adaptation”.
Professor Hughes noted the funding support from the current and previous government of adaptation research, but Mr Cocking was concerned more about money being available, through something like the Sovereign Wealth Fund, to future generations when the economy may have deteriorated and there may not be the money to pay for adaptive infrastructure.
Mr Hueston was sympathetic to this, saying that Australia runs the risk of squandering the short-term benefits it is getting out of the mining boom.
A question was asked about the possibility of large-scale solar power stations.
“Anything’s possible at a price, said Mr Hueston, but even with a carbon price solar is still not seen as an economic “base load provider”. He said a new power station built today would likely be gas-fired, a bridging solution until renewable energy sources can deliver base load. Battery and storage technology is critical and a lot of research is going into that right now.
Carbon storage (drawing carbon out of the atmosphere by mechanical means and storing it underground) was the subject of another question. Mr Hueston said there a “hello of a lot” of work being done on this globally, not as much in Australia but it’s “bubbling along”.
“It won’t be that long before we see a trial on an industrial scale,” he said, but answers to the challenges lie in lots of different technologies and activities – there’s “no silver bullet”.
Pictured: Top – Professors Tim Flannery and Lesley Hughes at the ‘Climate Conversation’ in Alice Springs on Wednesday. Above right – Gerry Hueston, formerly President of BP Australasia. Above – part of the crowd, some 300-strong, taking part.
The tightrope walker and the wheelbarrow
I found five wheelbarrows over these last three days. Five! That’s ridiculous. And it’s one thing to see old wheelbarrows by the side of the road and another to put them in the back of your van, take them home and then proceed to obsess over them. But I can’t help myself. Maybe I am carting about a heavy load and maybe these barrows are meant to be a help? Either way and evidently enough, I am quite obsessed. It feels like someone is putting them directly into my path. That’d be right. Just like me to conjure a conspiracy plot or concoct some deeper meaning. But what’s it all about. What do all these wheelbarrows mean?
Usually they’re useful as a device for carrying loads and are typically found on construction sites and in gardens. Designed to distribute the weight of the load between the wheel and the operator, the wheelbarrow enables the convenient carriage of heavier and bulkier loads than would be possible were the weight carried entirely by the operator. Thank you, Wikipedia, but that was not the kind of meaning I was after. I guess you can’t Google everything.
What am I going to with them all? I could give them away as Christmas presents, some of them are rather pretty. I could plant them up. One suggestion was a wheelbarrow fixing workshop, sell them or install them as art.
I realized I was actually quite attached to them when I gave one to my housemate. That was in the early stages of these happenings. I had only found two by then. I thought, one each, that’s fair, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t. It was one of the prettiest ones … but no, it’s OK, her flowers will be very happy in there. And yes, I gave one to the community garden.
But I can’t shake the sense that something is trying to tell me something. Grow something? I’m already growing stuff. But OK, yes, I will go get some seedlings and plant out one or two of my new treasures. Leaving just one for deft maneuverings, swift reachings of great heights along narrow planks, weaving around obstacles and getting in and out of tricky predicaments with ease. Build something?
Have you heard the tale of the tightrope walker and the wheelbarrow? Well, he had a spectator who was hugely supportive of his balancing acts. Right up until the act that required the spectator’s participation.
“I’m sure you can make it across that there tightrope, wheelbarrow and all!”
“You really think so?”
“Yep positive!”
“Good, so now get in,” the balancing man said to his all of a sudden silent fan. So a tale about trust, conviction and courage.
What about the tale of the man who worked a lifetime at a factory and every night he would leave pushing a wheelbarrow full of straw. At the gates the guard would painstakingly search the barrow and every night he would find only straw. The day the worker retired the guard said to him, “Mate for twenty years I’ve seen you walk out of here, every night pushing that wheel barrow, I know you’ve been stealing something but what is it?”
Old mate smiled and said “OK, wheelbarrows.”
A tale warning against overlooking the obvious.
So in light of these tales and my finds, I’m looking about with trust, conviction and courage, eyes cracked wide open, head careening and neck cramping, desperate not to overlook the obvious. All the while building something …
Alice metal bands launch their own label
Reigniting the local scene with national interest
By KIERAN FINNANE
Not for these guys the move to the city, the haircut, the compromise that comes with chasing after airplay: they want to stick with what they believe in, the angry, high energy music of their youth – metal – and its roots in small town isolation and boredom.
They are the various talents that make up the three born-in-Alice bands – Miazma, Uncreation and The Horror – and have come together to launch their own label, The Black Wreath.
This will be done with a live performance, of course, this Friday – 11.11.11 – at Annie’s Place from 7.30pm. But it will also stream live on the internet in a four camera shoot, edited as it happens and played into metal scene venues interstate – to date, Happy Yess in Darwin, the Squatters Arms in Adelaide and the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart. There’ll be a six track EP, t-shirts and stickers to souvenir, all featuring The Black Wreath artwork. This thorny wreath has its symbolism – the three inter-woven circles representing the three bands, the 12 spikes representing the members of the bands and the whole encompassing all 13 members of the collective. “We are all the 13th member,” says Pirate, who’s been pushed forward as the label’s media contact.
“There’s a special connection between us, we grew up together, we switch members between bands. It’s not ego driven, we’re helping one another instead of serving ourselves, we’re part of a community – it’s more rewarding that way.”
At the same time there’s a healthy rivalry between the bands. They all want to out-do one another and that’s pushing them further: “Every band has stepped up to another level,” says Pirate.
He speaks compellingly of the group’s commitment to “reignite the local scene”. They’re well on the way, with 500 people turning up to their last gig at Annie’s Place, an 18+ event in mid-September. Since then they’ve finished building their studio – a completely soundproof room-within-a-room, made mostly from found and recycled materials and including a control booth behind glass. “There’s that much insulation, carpet and silicon in there, the boys can turn up their amps louder than ever while the guys in the control booth can have a conversation,” says Pirate.
It was here that they laid and mixed the tracks for the EP, only resorting to big city expertise for the final mastering. The members threw in what they could in terms of money and combined their talents to get the various jobs done: between them they’re skilled in film-making, production, artwork, building, promotions and of course, music.
They’re loving having their own space where they can jam 24 hours a day and record when they’re “feeling it” – no waiting for time slots and with total creative control. All of them have made “demos” over the years but this is the first time they’ve produced a professional recording. They’re pretty pleased with the result: “We know we’re worthy.”
Why their own label? Why not go with an established metal label? It’s all part of their commitment to the local scene, to not treat it as a mere launch pad, the place where you start before going on to bigger, though not necessarily better things. But part of the strategy is to spark local interest by generating national interest.
The fan base is already diverse. Sure, there’s a bunch of young people but there’s also “heaps of hippies” and even “old people” – Pirate speaks with relish of guys with long grey hair who get into the head-banging.
“It’s high energy music – anyone can enjoy it,” says Pirate.
What about the volume though? Can that be a barrier?
“It’s always loud, that’s the way it should be,” he grins.
“You either feel that or you don’t, there’s no middle ground.”
Pictured: Top – Uncreation performing in Alice. Above right – The Black Wreath studio. Photos by OLIVER ECLIPSE. Left – Miazma. Photo courtesy The Black Wreath.
Court of good hope
A breakthrough in dealing with alcohol-related offending?
By KIERAN FINNANE
It’s a court like no other that I’ve been in: while everyone is waiting for the magistrate, there’s banter with the offender, about his tattoos, his girlfriend, his new job. They all join in, the legal aid lawyer, the court clinician, the police prosecutor and the correctional services officer. The offender is an open-faced, smiling young man in his twenties. He’s clearly well liked.
When Magistrate David Bamber enters, the good cheer continues. He speaks directly to the offender who responds for himself. The tone is conversational. The offender remains seated.
“So you haven’t had a smoke for four weeks,” comments Mr Bamber. He reads off the results of the defendant’s urinalysis: “You’ll be clean soon.”
The offender replies with enthusiasm: he’s sure that at his next visit the readings will be near zero. He started his new job this week. Mr Bamber wants to know where and what the hours are. He’s pleased with what he hears: “What reward would you like?”
Everyone laughs – they’re all pleased. The offender hesitates.
Perhaps he’d like to not have to come to court so often, suggests Mr Bamber, that’ll help him settle into his new job.
“Excellent!” comes the reply.
“I’ll give you a go at a month,” says Mr Bamber.
His testing will continue fortnightly. If his levels get to zero, the regularity of the testing will drop as well.
“Keep it up,” urges Mr Bamber, and with another “Excellent!” the young man leaves.
Is he top of the class, the shining exception, or will there be others like him – getting their lives back on track, dealing with their drug and alcohol habits, earning their “get out of gaol cards”?
Drug offences did not bring him before the court. The charges were aggravated entry of a dwelling with intent to commit an offence, stealing, and obtaining a benefit by deception. But his drug use must have been deemed to be a significant factor in his offending, for this is the SMART Court. SMART stands for “Substance Misuse Assessment and Referral for Treatment”.
The offender’s case would have been heard in the Court of Summary Jurisdiction and his sentence deferred while he’s been given a chance to comply with his SMART orders, among them total abstinence. There’s a system of rewards, like those he received, but also sanctions: non-compliance with orders can earn gaol time.
The next offender enters. He’s older and at a glance would appear to have had a tougher life. He’s also had “bad luck” recently, as Mr Bamber notes, having been in a car crash.
“You weren’t tempted to have a steadying drink?” asks Mr Bamber.
Tempted, yes, he admits but he didn’t give in and the tests confirm this: no alcohol or drugs have been detected in his system. He’s recently missed an appointment but he had a legitimate excuse; his treatment is going well. His offences were driving with a high range blood alcohol content and driving while disqualified as well as contravening a Domestic Violence Order.
For the time being he’ll be kept on a schedule of fortnightly visits to court, which might “loosen up” later. He’s not working but otherwise is doing well. Despite the accident, “you haven’t been stressed into drinking or doing drugs, well done”, says Mr Bamber encouragingly.
The next offender has also been found guilty of driving with a high range blood alcohol content as well as other driving offences and failing to obey the direction of a police officer.
He agrees with Mr Bamber that he’s doing well.
“Is it a struggle any more?” asks Mr Bamber.
“No, not all, Your Honour.”
The first couple of months were apparently difficult. Now he’s on monthly court visits and weekly testing: “I’ll stick with that,” he says.
“You seem to be cruising through the whole process. People have different levels of struggle but you seem to be doing as well as anyone.”
The man looks gratified: “Thank you, Your Honour.”
These three have all been Caucasian. The next man is Aboriginal, in his late thirties, early forties perhaps, convicted of drug offences. The upbeat mood continues.
“Your urine tests are going down,” notes Mr Bamber.
“No worries, ey!”
“You haven’t been tempted?”
“Nuh, keeping myself busy, doing a course.”
He’s been on weekly urine tests; he’s rewarded by going to fortnightly testing. If everything’s going well at the next court visit, the court appearances will be spaced out to monthly.
“Thank you, Your Honor, have a good day!”
Is this all too good to be true? As they work through the list, some cases are more difficult.
A young man has been discharged from the DASA rehab program for possession of a rubber mallet, deemed to be a weapon. He says he found it and just wanted to add it to his toolbox and stashed it under his bed. This had Mr Bamber scratching his head. Being thrown out of a program can earn sanctions of up to 14 days’ gaol time, but this case is “a bit unusual”. The young man, whose partner and little boy have accompanied him to court, is told to keep having his tests and turning up to his appointments, while the SMART Court team works out whether he can go back to DASA or what other orders can be put in place.
A young Aboriginal woman comes in. She’s been convicted of possession of methylamphetamines and cannabis. This is her first review. She’s missed one appointment, but kept one; her tests aren’t clean. She admits she’s still smoking and using “a bit of meth”. Her agreement with the court is not to consume, Mr Bamber reminds her: “This is a zero program.” She says she’s been told by a program worker that she can cut down gradually, as it’s “hard to go cold turkey”.
Mr Bamber asks the team whether she’s getting mixed messages. The court clinician says there can be issues for some people in going cold turkey safely.
But sanctions are imposed: she earns one day for the cannabis use, one for the amphetamines, one for missing an appointment. All three are suspended. Mr Bamber notes that she has cut down and that she’s been honest – “That’s good”. He smiles encouragingly and gets a little smile back from this otherwise anxious-looking young woman.
An Aboriginal man comes in. He’s in his late forties, early fifties perhaps, his hair starting to turn grey. He’s been convicted of driving with a high range blood alcohol content and driving while disqualified.
After a “bad start” he’s doing well: “You’ve kept all your appointments, you’ve been enthusiastic, you’re feeling well.”
Does he want to say anything?
“No,” he whispers.
For his earlier breaches he’d earned 10 days’ gaol time, suspended. Now he’s rewarded for total compliance by getting three days back.
An Aboriginal woman appears. She’s been convicted of driving with a medium range blood alcohol content and driving while disqualified. 
She’s started a job this week, as a kitchenhand. She’s negotiated with her employers to get Thursdays off and work Saturdays, so that she can attend court fortnightly and in the alternate week, attend Holyoake for counselling.
A CAALAS lawyer speaks on her behalf: she’s made a slow start, but the barriers have been identified and strategies put in place.
“I understand it’s difficult …” says Mr Bamber.
“I can stick to it,” the woman says in a firm voice. “I go back to work tomorrow.”
Whether by coincidence or not, the most disappointing cases come last. One woman, also convicted of driving with a medium range blood alcohol content and driving while disqualified, has not turned up for court. Her CAALAS lawyer has not been able to contact her; a field officer is sent to see if she can be found.
Meanwhile, a man has instructed his CAALAS lawyer that he wants to opt out of the program, finalise his matters in court, do his time and ultimately leave gaol without conditions.
The SMART Court is adjourned and the Court of Summary Jurisdiction convened.
The offender has actually completed a three month rehabilitation program at DASA and an Indigenous Family Violence Program but he has breached other orders and also committed new offences – driving with a high range blood alcohol content, driving while disqualified, giving false information to the police (knowing he was in trouble, he gave his name as John Smith) and breaching bail. To all these charges he now pleads guilty.
His life story, as recounted by his lawyer, is bleak: he never knew his father, and was in his mother’s and grandmother’s care until the age of 10. But they were drinkers and he and his brother and sister were ultimately removed from their care, separated and put into foster homes. He did not go past primary school and spent some of his youth living on the streets. All this was in South Australia, where from an early age he was in frequent contact with the criminal justice system.
He moved to the NT six or seven years ago, met a woman from a remote community, had a son with her and also went through “men’s business”. He and his partner have since separated but he has continued to be involved with his son, his “main focus”. He’s been working for his board at Stuart Lodge and formed a new relationship with a woman from a station to the north of Alice Springs. It was in her company and that of her family members that he got drunk at the Wauchope Hotel, consuming about 12 beers. His companions wanted to drive to Alice Springs. They were already drunk but bought a slab to keep them going. One of them, a woman, was at the wheel initially, but he took over, deeming himself more able to drive than she was.
Suspended sentences for other matters are restored and he earns further penalties for his new convictions.
But he has a plan, when he gets out of gaol he wants to take his son to visit his family in South Australia … He is taken away by police and the much grimmer business of the Court of Summary Jurisdiction continues.
Only the longer term will tell to what extent the SMART Court can reduce re-offending and increase rehabilitation in the NT. Once they emerge from the structured program and have to leave behind the support of the team, some people will no doubt find it harder to keep on the straight and narrow. But it seems a hopeful start has been made.
Violent offending excluded from SMART Court
Chief Magistrate Hilary Hannam is a passionate advocate for problem-solving courts, such as the SMART Court, believing that “if properly resourced and available to the widest range of offenders [they] will be an effective tool in dealing with much of the criminal conduct in the Northern Territory”.
She regrets that NT legislators excluded violent crime from the offences eligible to be dealt with by the SMART Court.
Substance misuse does not cause crime but there’s a correlation between the two and the relationship appears to be “particularly strong for violent crime”.
“There is also a great deal of evidence that suggests that alcohol plays a major role in much of the offending by Indigenous people,” said Ms Hannam during a speech she made earlier this year for Drug Action Week.
Alcohol-related offending and in particular, alcohol-related violence appear to be the community’s greatest concern in the NT, said Ms Hannam, and it’s “unfortunate” that the model is not available to violent offenders.
“This is not to say that the court is wishing to allow all or any seriously violent offenders into the SMART Court, but would have preferred to have retained the discretion to allow some offenders who otherwise fit the criteria for the program and who have committed violent offences to be able to be admitted in some cases.
“This is particularly the case with Aboriginal offenders whose alcohol misuse is connected to their offending.
“I am also very concerned that many young offenders who, due to their impulsivity, also often commit violent offences and potentially could gain great benefits from a program such as this, but will be excluded.”
A problem-solving court is not an NT invention. They exist in USA and elsewhere in Australia and have been extensively evaluated.
Ms Hannam reported on the evaluation of the NSW Drug Court by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research:
“In its most recent research, published in September 2008 … results confirmed earlier research in showing that, controlling for other factors, participants in the drug court were less likely to be reconvicted than offenders given conventional sanctions.
“In particular, the drug court participants were 17% less likely to be reconvicted for any offence, 30% less likely to be reconvicted for a violent offence and 38% less likely to be reconvicted for a drug offence at any point during the follow-up period.”
She also mentioned some other positive outcomes from drug courts in Australia and overseas, including:
• improvements in participants’ health and wellbeing;
• monetary savings in prosecution, law enforcement, prison and court costs; and,
• social benefits such as the long-term reduction in drug use, increases in employment, education and the reunification of families.
Only firefighters decide on how to deal with individual fires
By KIERAN FINNANE
Have firefighters watched some trees in the Todd burn? “Yes,” says Senior Station Fire Officer in Alice Springs, John Kleeman, but only when any further effort to fight the fire would be “to no avail”.
Have firefighters’ decisions on how to respond to individual fires had anything to do with agreements or instructions from the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (AAPA)?
“No,” says Mr Kleeman and “No,” says AAPA.
The Alice Springs News Online has spoken to Mr Kleeman and Dr Ben Scambary, the CEO of AAPA in order to clarify a heated debate that has developed in response to our report of November 7, ‘Spot a tree? Chop it down!’.
Mr Kleeman condemns as an “absolute crime” and “a blight on the environment” the deliberate burning of trees in and along the river. He says the fire service responds to all reports of fires and either puts them out or renders them harmless. He is aware that many trees in the river are sacred but he is “not privy” to which ones are and which ones are not.
“We treat them all the same,” he says, but “unfortunately” many of the very old gums are riddled with white ant and hollowed out and once fire gets well established in the base it’s extremely difficult to extinguish.
“We have tried blocking them off and filling them up with water but it’s been to no avail.
“We have 3000 litres in our tankers and I’ve sent crews back again and again, but once that chimneying effect has started, it’s all but impossible to put out. ”
While firefighters have given up on some trees, he says they have also saved many: “I assure you we do the best we can with the resources we’ve got.”
He says the fire service notifies the Town Council if a burning tree or “carcass” presents a danger to the public. It’s then council’s responsibility to remove the danger. He recognises that the carcasses could become significant hazards if they are picked up and carried in a future flood, and also that it looks “shocking” to see “all those magnificent gums lying on their side – a real tragedy”.
Dr Scambary, in a written statement, says that AAPA has a “good working relationship” with both the fire service and the Town Council.
“The AAPA has never issued an instruction not to respond to fires or other emergency circumstances due to sacred site protection matters. On the contrary, the protection and survival of sacred sites and sacred trees is of great importance to Aboriginal custodians and the AAPA.
“The AAPA will continue to work with both the Town Council and the Fire and Rescue Service to support coordinated and planned action for community safety and the protection of sacred sites.”
On the matters of fire prevention and the removal of dead trees, he says:
“The AAPA has issued Authority Certificates to the Town Council for fire abatement management works in the Charles and Todd Rivers; and for emergency and public safety works within the town.”
The certificate for the rivers, issued following coordinated discussions with council and the fire service, and in consultation with Aboriginal custodians, allows for “managed reduction of the potential fuel load” and the “creation and maintenance of suitable fire control lines”.
“These works can include the removal of dead limbs and other matter close to trees.”
The certificate for the town allows for “trees to be felled, and removal of hazardous materials or substantially dangerous debris in circumstances where these trees pose an immediate threat to public safety”.
Says Dr Scambary: “Custodians of sacred sites in Alice Springs support the prevention of uncontrolled and deliberately lit fires in the Todd and Charles Rivers as many trees (and other features) in these areas are sacred sites.
“Custodians have expressed distress about the loss of sacred trees and have consistently called for action to prevent damage to sacred sites. Custodians also take seriously the need to make areas safe in emergency circumstances.”
Pictured: Top – A severely damaged old tree in the Todd River, alongside Tuncks Causeway. Above right – The same tree: new growth can be seen spouting from the seemingly devastated trunk.
LETTERS: Dr Boffa honoured. Offer in Todd Mall: Want a girl? How many generations, Steve? And the bicycle track's missing link.
Sir – As the Todd River finds its way through Alice Springs, it’s easy to divide it into three sections. Two have received significant attention, while the third appears to have received almost none.
The first improved section lies north of the Stott Terrace bridge, and especially that part extending north from the Wills Terrace causeway. It’s here that Alice stages the Henley-on-Todd, where the cinema on the river is screened and where festival events spill over from Anzac Oval. It’s also here that on the eastern side the public park lands have become a pride of the river.
The other improved section runs from the Taffy Pick culverts south through Heavitree Gap. It’s in this section that some of the accumulated sand brought down in previous floods was loaded onto trucks and carted away about 10 years ago. The benefit of this is plain to see with deep cleared channels ready to let the next flood escape through the Gap.
I’m convinced that in the major flood a couple years ago, this dredging helped keep our feet dry.
The section in between these two, and especially that part between the Tuncks Road causeway and the Taffy Pick culverts, is a mess. It’s here we find the most number of tree skeletons left by the arsonists who keep trying to burn us down, and river channels that look like choked storm water drains.
It’s also in this section that one of Alice’s many impressive bicycle paths is missing a link. This path circles the river from the Schwartz crossing in the north to the Taffy Pick culverts in the south. The missing link is in front of Annie Meyer Hill between the Olive Pink Gardens and the Bridge to Nowhere off the south-eastern corner of Stott Tce Bridge.
Bicycle riders, dog walkers, pram pushers and those out jogging and walking share this public amenity with artists putting the final touches to works they hope to sell. I know Council has repeatedly asked the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority for permission to finish the job, but so far to no avail.
As an avid bicycle rider, I can only hope this area is not the focus of an intractable cultural demarcation dispute. Surely with good will from both parties a way can be found to complete this circuit.
Hal Duell
Alice Springs
Sir – The People’s Alcohol Action Group (PAAC) in Alice Springs is delighted and very proud that its spokesperson, long-time alcohol
reform campaigner Dr. John Boffa, has been named NT Australian of the Year.
He has been a tireless and absolutely dedicated campaigner for alcohol reforms for many years, and has made a huge contribution to getting urgently needed changes on to the local and national agendas.
He’s a very smart bloke, and his ability to absorb incredible amounts of complex information and persistently get it out clearly in the public
arena is quite extraordinary.
This is a great honour for John, for PAAC, and, very importantly, it recognises the growing support for a floor price for take-away alcohol,
other reforms such as changes to trading hours, and the need for early childhood development programs for vulnerable kids.
We congratulate John and hope for many more wins in the future.
Jonathan Pilbrow
PAAC Convenor
Sir – The Todd Mall was offering a bizarre mix for choice a couple of Sundays ago. Some of it was appealing, some maybe not.
The Sunday Market itself had a quiet, friendly early-summer feel to it. While replenishing a depleted stock of Harissa, my favourite jeweller showed me some of her lovely new work featuring antique Ethiopian glass. Christmas is just around the corner, and the option is a tempting one.
Then making my way south from the Sails I came to Gregory Terrace and looking west saw nothing on either side but closed doors and vacant shops. The impression was of a town in trouble.
I know it’s being said that the Internet is killing retail, but those shops used to book tours and sell indigenous art. Is the market for both dwindling, or have they gone on-line too?
Having by now been joined by others, it was time for lunch.
Then came the most bizarre experience of the day. While holding a table with a seven year old boy, and trying to fathom the fashion statements being made by some of the staff, I was joined by a local who began by claiming we were old friends and did I have two dollars.
This was disappointing because I had naively thought we were past this.
When I explained that I live here and don’t do humbug (my seven year old companion was beginning to look a bit startled), he changed tack and offered me a girl. When I declined, he offered me two. Fortunately the lad didn’t understand because he did keep on until the others joined us.
Among them were the young boy’s mother who is clearly expecting and another mother holding her young son. Neither were impressed when I explained what was on offer.
Realising he was out of luck, the man left us. The police have been informed, and our discussions are continuing.
Lunch came and the food was good, the coffee even better.
I never did quite fathom the fashion statements.
Hal Duell
Alice Springs
Sir – Please note the following quote: “As a third generation Alicespringsian I grew up with great expectations of where this town was going, and we were going places.”
This comes from Steve Brown’s latest series of sprays on the Alice Springs News website with regard to the clearing of vegetation at the ANZ carpark. My astonishment of this extraordinary claim is only matched by amazement that nobody has seen fit to correct it. Steve Brown is – just like myself – a first generation born-and-bred local in Alice Springs.
Steve’s parents are Jim and Marion Brown. Jim Brown “came from near Launceston in Tasmania to Alice Springs with the fixed intention of having a dairy farm” – he arrived here in February 1946, according to his publication “Pasture Improvement in Central Australia”, published January 20, 2002.
Marion is the sister of the late Bernie Kilgariff – they arrived here from South Australia on one of the first Ghan trains in 1929. They established a dairy at White Gums, west of town, where they reside today.
The dairy was not established without some assistance. In July 1946, a few months after the arrival of Jim Brown, another person arrived in the Alice who was to become one of the most influential people in the history of the NT – it was Colonel Lionel Rose, who had just been appointed by the Chifley Labor Government to become the Chief Veterinary Officer of the NT and the founding director of the Animal Industry Branch under the Commonwealth’s Northern Territory Administration.
Rose was based in Alice Springs, as Central Australia was then the main centre of the struggling beef cattle industry of the NT. It was to Rose that Jim Brown appealed for help to establish his dairy – Rose was non-committal at first, but a couple of weeks later Jim received a phone call from Rose to come and collect his dairy herd that had just arrived on the Ghan.
Thus was White Gums’ future assurred, according to the information I’ve been told by one of “Rosey’s men” (as the employees of the AIB under Rose came to be known).
Rose’s accomplishments were numerous – when he passed away in May 1980, he was honoured with the NT’s first official state funeral in Alice Springs, and he was interred in the (then) brand new Alice Springs Garden Cemetery on the south Stuart Highway, directly opposite the Arid Zone Research Institute.
AZRI was founded by Rose in 1948, it used to be known as the AIB Farm. Rose had originally envisaged it as the “Ultimate Research Centre” to conduct scientific research specifically for the Centre and the NT – his vision presaged that of the Desert Knowledge Centre by half a century! (Nothing new under the sun in this country, be rest assurred).
The impending tragic demise of AZRI with the initial construction phase of a new suburb directly across the highway from the Alice Springs Garden Cemetery just couldn’t be more ironic – the suburb is, of course, to be called Kilgariff, named after Bernie Kilgariff, who was once a political colleague of Colonel Rose.
Rose was the Member for Alice Springs in the former NT Legislative Council during 1962-65, when Bernie was an appointed non-official member of that same body. In 1965 Rose became a founder and leader of the short-lived North Australia Party based in Alice Springs but was defeated by Labor candidate Charlie Orr in the elections of that same year (the last occasion Labor has won an Alice urban seat).
Orr in turn was defeated by Rose’s protege, Bernie Kilgariff, in 1968. Bernie remained the Member for Alice Springs until 1975, when he became the first senator for the NT. (He was elected outright, the new Labor senator Ted Robertson won the second senate position after distribution of preferences).
Bernie is also a founding member of the Country Liberal Party in Alice Springs in 1974, presaged by Rose’s ill-fated NAP almost a decade earlier.
Today we are witnessing the dismemberment of AZRI for the new suburb of Kilgariff, which is unequivocally the worst planning decision in the history of Alice Springs.
It’s a disgrace and a disaster, yet a decision which has long and loudly been supported by Steve Brown in his mindless campaign of develop, develop, develop, at all costs and hang the consequences!
We love to blame Darwin and / or Canberra for all our ills – it’s our favourite art – but we are, truth be told, our own worst enemies. To quote the New Testament: “Before telling anyone to take the stick out of their eye, first take the log out of your own.”
I am so sick to death of the hypocrisy and cowardice of this blighted town.
Alex Nelson
Alice Springs
Did they go too far?
By ERWIN CHLANDA
“There’s nothing like totally exhausting yourself whilst exploring the eerily beautiful landscape of Rainbow Valley Conservation Reserve in the Northern Territory.”
So says Linda Collis, from Redlynch, QLD, who with this snap (at right) won the competition “There’s nothing like Australia” run by the Federal Government’s Tourism Australia.
Trouble is, she and her mates in the photo are in breach of the regulations for visiting Rainbow Valley.
They seem to be off the short marked trail to which people are restricted.
However, the Department of Natural Resources said today (Nov 9): “They do not appear to have breached the regulations in this photograph.
“This area is considered to be a part of the public area adjacent to the walking track, where visitors are allowed to go.”
But the photo below shows a visitor snapped by our reporter two years ago, at what seems clearly the end of the path.
“Mushroom Rock. Please return along same track,” says the sign.
The restrictions resulted from the transfer of ownership of this park and most others in the Centre to Aboriginal people, an NT Government decision.
Parks NT, which manages the reserve, says fighting buffel grass is one of the reasons for the drastic access limitations. The only way Ms Collins could get “totally exhausted” on that short path is carrying a very heavy weight and running backwards and forwards.
Tourism Australia Managing Director Andrew McEvoy does have a point when he describes the campaign’s objective as Australians “promoting what is special and unique about their country last year to the rest of the world”. Not many countries would restrict access to some 90% of a national park to a minority of Indigenous people. Sign below: “Wurre” is the Aboriginal name for Rainbow Valley.
Mother's assault on toddler not what it seemed
By KIERAN FINNANE
It was a case that attracted widespread reporting and commentary back in June: a young mother was arrested and charged for an alleged assault on her 16-month-old son. The details of the allegation, made by the child’s father and revealed by a police media release at the time, were shocking: the father said his wife had hit the child over the head a number of times with a can of soft drink, picked him up by one leg and slammed him into the ground three times and then into a fence, before holding his head under her arm and punching him to the head.
In court last week there was no-one in the public gallery to hear the evidence about what happened – apart from the Alice Springs News. In the witness box the father stuck broadly to his original story while the young woman firmly denied most of it, admitting only to shaking the pram in which she was pushing the child and slapping him on the cheek three times. She also admitted to threatening to kill the child, with the words “I’ll kill your son”, but she said, “I didn’t do action”.
The father’s story was very similar to his account of another alleged assault on the child six months ago on Elcho Island. The mother again disputed most of the alleged facts, admitting only to drawing the child by one leg across a bed in order to pick him up and later, while screaming, holding him tightly to her with her arms and legs in an attempt to prevent anyone from taking him (“they might think I would do silly stuff”). She did finally hand him over to a relative.
She denied having been drinking or having smoked ganja on both occasions and the court heard no evidence that she had done so, other than the father’s account. However she pleaded guilty to both “aggravated assaults”, the aggravation being that the victim was a child and she was an adult.
Magistrate John Neil wondered what the basis for her guilty plea was in relation to the Elcho Island incident as on her own evidence “at its highest” it did not seem to be an assault. The young woman’s lawyer was wondering too: he’d been under the impression that the Crown would have further witnesses, as other statements had been taken.
In the end all that was before the court were two often conflicting accounts given under oath, with some elements in common.
Mr Neil found his way between them, in the end satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that, on Elcho Island, the way in which she held the child, while screaming, was adverse to the child’s interests and the way in which she had pulled him across the bed involved excessive force. These acts constituted an assault. He could not be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that any of the father’s other allegations in this instance had happened, given that the defendant firmly denied them.
In relation to the Alice Springs incident Mr Neil found that the young woman had used the child to put pressure on her husband, by harming and threatening to harm the little boy. He noted deficiencies in her account: she put her admitted acts of shaking the pram, slapping the child and uttering the threat as all happening while she followed her husband who was on his way to call the police. Clearly something had happened to cause him to be going to call the police, said Mr Neil.
Under questioning the woman had reversed the chronology to have herself slapping the child before her husband left the house to call the police. Mr Neil accepted that explanation, unable to be satisfied “to the requisite standard” of events having been otherwise. He found beyond reasonable doubt that the shaking of the pram – which had the “potential to do harm” – and the slaps to the face amounted to violence perpetrated on the child. He said any slap on the face is “inappropriate at best” and “wildly reprehensible at worst”.
A psychiatric report had been provided to him. On its basis he said the young woman has “significant emotional issues” but is not mentally ill. “Most worryingly” the report suggested that she does not have good insight into the needs of the child and showed little remorse. This lack of insight points not only to what she did do but to what she might do, he said. “That’s what’s so worrying.”
The young woman is apparently not open to counselling and no orders were made in this regard.
He sentenced her to 14 days for the earlier incident and two months for the later one, to be served concurrently. However these sentences come on top of an eight month sentence she is currently serving for other unrelated offences (committed before the birth of her child), for which she was only arrested and charged after her arrest for the assault on the child.
The child is now in the care of his father, with the Department of Children and Families “keeping an eye on the situation”.
‘Cursed’ food sparks fight – twice
Sitting through this hearing was like being a fly on the wall in a ghastly domestic dispute. The young woman’s husband was colourful in his accounts and was allowed fairly free rein, including many times getting to his feet, trying to talk directly to his wife, and telling the woman’s lawyer that he could read his mind and knew “white people’s tricks”. The young woman mostly sat with her back turned to him, but every now and then she left fly, including calling him a liar, despite her lawyer’s attempts to keep her quiet.
The husband hardly covered himself in glory – not that that is relevant to the court’s business (“I have no interest in offences that may have been committed by the first witness,” said Mr Neil). Both incidents happened during the day and both times, the husband was sleeping, while his wife was out getting food. On both occasions when she came back, he was not satisfied with the food.
In Alice Springs it was a cold winter’s day. They were in a house with no power and there was nothing for breakfast. At about 10 in the morning the young woman left the house in Van Senden Avenue to look for food, pushing the little boy in his pram. She went first to Yipirinya Hostel, a couple of blocks away, to see if an uncle could give her “feed and money” but “he got none”. Her aunt told her to go to Abbott’s Camp – some 12 blocks away – to see her aunt’s mother.
It turned out this woman was at the Gap Hotel. She waited for her at BP shop: “Aunty, this little boy hungry, he got no feed.” The woman took her to shop at Piggly Wiggly’s and she walked back to Van Senden Avenue with five shopping bags. By now it was about 3pm. She said she pushed the pram inside, with the shopping. She was tired and asked her husband, who was still in bed, to cook for her. That’s when he got “wild at me”, saying that the “feed had been cursed”.
In the witness box her husband said he asked where she had found the food. He said she answered, “Why you want to know?” He repeatedly asserted that for a “black Aborigine man” these are “very bad words”. They put in his mind the idea that the food might be poisoned, that his wife might be trying to kill him. (“That’s all you think about!” his wife threw back in the court. “You make up stories!”) He said she looked “wild from my words”, accusing him of thinking her “families are blood-suckers” and she was “chucking” the food all over the floor.
So they were back to where they started, cold and hungry. And now they were also fighting.
She said she tried to hurt him but he was “too powerful”, that was why she used their son to put pressure on him to go and “look for feed”.
On Elcho Island, his country, despite a restraining order against him, it appeared the couple were living together. On the day of the assault there was also a shopping trip that preceded the argument between the couple. This time, the young woman had money, it was “payday week”. She told the court what she had bought – flour, Weetbix, milk, sugar, eggs, etc. The prosecutor suggested she had also bought some marijuana. She admitted that she had bought one bag. She also said she had kept $30 in her pocket for playing cards and that her husband was “sulky” with her because she hadn’t given him money for Kava (a natural sedative that at strength can be ‘psychoactive’, inducing feelings of happiness). She firmly denied that she had smoked that day – she was saving it for later – and she denied having had a drink. In Alice Springs, similarly, she denied being under the influence: “No smoke, no ganja, nothing”. When she went around “looking for feed” she was “a normal person”.
Her husband said she was heavy smoker and drinker, sniffed petrol at times, she did what she wanted to do and he couldn’t stop her.
In his descriptions of the assaults on their son, he suggested she had used the boy as “a shield” to block him, the husband, from hitting her. He wanted to hit her to make her behave.
She said that on Elcho Island, after she had pulled her son to her by his leg and taken him up to her shoulder, her husband had used a belt to “whack” her in the face because he “felt I did it [pulling the child] rough way”.
Asked by the woman’s lawyer why, on Elcho Island, he was just “looking” at what his wife was allegedly doing and did not try to intervene, the husband said that it was his wife’s “problem, not mine”. In Alice Springs as she was allegedly slamming the child into a fence, he said he was “running away” – to the public phone.
Spot a tree? Chop it down!
By ERWIN CHLANDA
It’s official now: if you find a tree still standing, chop it down.
The latest victims are 25 well-established gums in the poetically named Road 4 in the Larapinta town camp.
The camp is not blessed with an abundance of flora: new houses, built under the $150m Federal initiative to upgrade the camps, now near its end, has produced neat new buildings on barren and dusty blocks.
The 25 trees along Road 4 were a welcome relief.
Now all that’s left are stumps.
Territory Alliance Manager Allan McGill said today (Nov 8) the trees were cut down “to allow for the installation of new electrical power lines and water services.
“In keeping with standard design practices, the installation of power and water must follow the new alignment of the road.
“Stumps will therefore also need to be removed to make way for the new water supply.”
Mr McGill did not explain why the services could not be installed on the opposite side of the street where there are no trees.
He says the Territory Alliance “has all necessary Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority certificates and no sacred trees were disturbed.
“TA also engaged with residents prior to lopping the trees to advise the work being done, when it would be undertaken and why it was needed.”
Town council self censorship: ‘In confidential’ lame excuse for hiding facts from the public.
Above: This is what the center of Charles Creek camp looks like. Below: This traffic way is hardly ready for handover, unless having power poles planted in the middle of a road is the latest fad in town planning.
COMMENT by ERWIN CHLANDA (updated Nov 9)
The Town Council has a nifty way to hide behind closed doors matters that should be in the public domain.
“Can’t talk to you about that, mate. It’s in confidential.”
The latest such issue is the handover to the council of the town camps which have recently undergone a Federally funded $150m facelift.
The question is, is all the infrastructure up to scratch before it becomes the responsibility of, and a financial liability for, the rate payers?
Shadow Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Adam Giles (pictured) says it’s clear the roads are not, and the town camps lease holders, through Tangentyere, should be asking: “What went wrong with all that money?”
It’s a question Mayor Damien Ryan, the aldermen and council staff are not allowed to discuss in public – under threat of penalties including a gaol term.
But the other half of the story is this: these elected members can at any time take matters out of confidential, which makes their assertion that their lips must remain sealed just so much hypocrisy.
Council CEO Rex Mooney is a pleasant, thorough and very cautious man.
He may present a report – such as the one last week about the town camps – in confidential session.
The “normalising” of the camps, becoming part of the municipality, is clearly a public issue on which the aldermen would, surely, benefit greatly from public input as they make their decisions.
So why is the council not open about this?
There have apparently been meetings for the past couple of years, about ending the camps’ shameful state as ghetto enclaves on the margins of the town.
What was said at these meeting? It’s a secret.
“Classes of confidential information” are defined by Local Government Regulations.
It’s a very short list – eight lines. Most points are no-brainers: information that could harm staff or cause commercial prejudice.
The ones nominated by Mr Mooney were “prejudice the maintenance or administration of the law; or the security of the council, its members or staff; or the interests of the council or some other person”.
How so? What prejudice? Security? Who exactly is in peril and how? What interests?
Answers to these questions cannot be given. Why? Well, it’s in confidential.
Mr Mooney further cites Clause e: “Information provided to the council on condition that it be kept confidential.”
He told the News that no-one had actually asked for the information to be kept secret.
So, was it ‘anticipatory compliance’, that great term coined by British journalist George Monbiot describing the conduct of Rupert Murdoch’s employees? Does Mr Mooney believe that’s the way to go when dealing with a pathologically secretive NT Government?
No, says Mr Mooney, it was a sign of his “respect for the nature of the discussions”.
It’s a noble gesture, but what about respect for the people who may be picking up the tab for the camps, the rate payers?
At the moment the camps are rate-exempt.
There are apparently discussions with the Feds for ex-gratia payments. Where are these discussions at?
Private developers of residential subdivisions are made to jump through hoops before the council takes over roads and drains.
Is there going to be enough money in that $150m Canberra kitty to produce the same standards expected from private developers?
In this current information vacuum the Alice Springs News is happy to provide some advice to the town fathers and mothers.
It looks like the council staff controlling litter and illegal camping will have their hands full if this choice site in Charles Creek Town Lease is any indication.
Meanwhile, local identity Russell Bray is engaging in some stinging citizen journalism about power poles with this video.
Musings from behind a coffee machine
This week as it was Halloween I was going to go out to the area known as ‘little America’ and look at the decorations and maybe make some querulous comments about the relative sprawling, leafy grandeur of the suburb but as it was a dark and stormy night … well of course it was dark, why do scary tales always start like that? Actually it was just a very, very rainy night. Perfect bath weather, a night for staying home, drinking red wine, eating cheese for dinner and early to bed. So instead of Halloween and little America, I’m writing about some of the things I contemplate over a couple of 10-hour days behind a coffee machine.
One was the day of the ‘race that stops the nation’. And in other parts of Australia it is quite noticeable, everything truly does stop for those few minutes of hooves and hearts pounding, of fortunes being made or unmade. Not so noticeable here, I thought. It was hard not to notice though how busy I was. There must have been a couple of tour buses stranded alongside all the doctors because what literally did ‘stop the nation’ was the grounding of the whole Qantas fleet. And during such
staying-in-bed, indoors kind of weather!
For the stranded folk with their ears pressed into mobile phones and brows furrowed into worry, I wondered what a curious last impression
they got of Alice Springs. What with the pouring rain and atypical chill in the air, it was no wonder I was still pumping mugs of coffee and hot chocolate for cold hands to clasp till late into the afternoon!
And imagine a five million dollar a year salary! What the hell does someone do with five million bucks a year? But I’ll move on – there’s
already plenty in the papers about Qantas and the global backlash against the 1%.
On Sunday I’d seen quite another segment of Alice Springs – people cruising about, arms laden with seedlings, water melons, rock melons,
zucchinis. Chilling and having a coffee or two before herding home the new additions to the veggie garden. And a mob of kids all shiny with sweat, full of an unfamiliar confidence, striding down the mall in their football uniforms, laughing, looking about and meeting eyes.
While some of the town were carving grimaces into pumpkins and as it continued to threaten rain, more musings … often I witness a lot of
stress, especially in travellers. But lately it’s worry I’m seeing and I see it all the time, not just in travellers. In older people it is
sometimes bewilderment at a world changed so much from the one they grew up in; there’s irritable vagueness in sleepless mums; and then there’s the impatient, running late, don’t want to go to work, having a bad day types. All I can do is smile at their rude blunt heads and make them a killer coffee and wish them a good day.
But that’s only if I myself don’t belong to that group of bewildered, irritable, tired, impatient and late types. That’s quite a big if, isn’t
it? Oh well, still striving for membership of that group of clear-headed, easygoing, didn’t go to bed late, patient and relaxed types. Mmm but then maybe I just drink a lot of coffee …
'Looking after children was her life's chosen job'
Ronda Ross remembers Sister Eileen Heath, 29.11.1905 – 22.10.2011
By KIERAN FINNANE
Ronda Ross was a little girl of about six when she arrived at St Mary’s Children’s Home in Alice Springs. She remembers getting out of a taxi with her older brother and sister, Clive and Fay, and being immediately surrounded by a swarm of other children. Then she heard a voice saying, “Stand back, children, let her breathe!”
It was a “beautiful, gentle voice – always”. It belonged to Sister Eileen Heath, who has passed away just short of her 106th birthday at the end of November. Ronda last saw her in Perth when she was celebrating her 104th.
Sister Eileen always made the smallest girl at St Mary’s feel special.
One way was that during prayers in the chapel she would put the little
girl in a white dress with lace and red ribbon through the collar and
sit her on a small wooden stool next to her. For a while Ronda was this
special girl – “until I was dethroned by Marjorie Horrell!”
Perhaps this is why, so many years later, the tears flow when Ronda
speaks of Sister Eileen’s passing.
“She did so much good. She never raised her voice, even when she was
disciplining you – though other staff did, mind you.”
Ronda and her siblings had been taken to the home in about 1950 or ’51
by their father, Mervyn Andrew, a water-drilling contractor. The son of
Abraham and Bertha Andrew, who started Curtin Springs Station, he had
married their mother, Myrtle McDonald, daughter of the Arltunga
publican, Sandy McDonald, and Korulya, an Eastern Arrernte woman.
They had five children.
“He and Mum had divorced and he ended up with the kids. He wanted to get
us educated and heard that Sister Eileen would look after us.”
This voluntary placement in the home was different to the circumstances
of many other St Mary’s children, who, as children of mixed descent,
were removed from their Aboriginal families. Some of them, says Ronda,
blame the directors of the home for their part in this but Ronda
completely absolves Sister Eileen: “She was just doing her life’s chosen
job, looking after children.”
Life at the home had its strict rules and routines. Everyone did chores:
“Little ones mainly collected firewood for the boiler”. Later the girls
would help with all sorts of cleaning tasks, polishing shoes, ironing
shirts stiff with starch, setting tables, preparing cut lunches for
school the next day.
“We were bussed into town every day and if you missed the bus, you
walked.”
But there were also lots of enjoyable times, from playing rounders after
school to sitting around an open fire in the staff quarters for picture
nights: “We’d watch Charlie Chaplin and cartoons and we’d be given
boiled sweets.”
Occasionally there were also visits to the cinema in town, to see a
musical, or picnics at Emily Gap or Simpsons Gap – “We’d make a fire and
cook potatoes in the ashes.”
Sister Eileen was good at getting resources for the home and one of
these was her old blue Dodge in which she’d go to town for supplies and
other errands. It was used for St Mary’s participation in the annual May
Day parade, decorated with flowers and blue and white crepe paper
bells: “The older girls would dress in white and stand in the back
singing ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’.”
There were holidays too. Sometimes Ronda and her siblings went to their
mother, who was living in Queensland. Other children would go to their
families too but those who didn’t or couldn’t would go to Adelaide with
Sister Eileen.
Ronda remembers swimming at the beach and being called “a little
blackie” by another child.
“I was upset and dog-paddled back to Sister Eileen and told her. I can’t
remember her exact words but it was reassuring, something like, don’t
worry about it, be proud of who you are.”
Ronda can’t recall any harsh punishments in Sister Eileen’s time: “Only a
smack on the bottom, though the boys might have had a tougher
punishment. There were tougher staff, but not her.
“Later on, I can remember having to scrub 20 chairs in punishment – I
probably deserved it!
“And we all dreaded being forced to drink a dose of epsom salts for
things like raiding a neighbour’s fruit trees, but I can’t remember this
happening in Sister Eileen’s time.”
Religion was an important focus in the home: “A lot of people resent
that, but I don’t think it hurt anyone. I remember we learnt to give. We
all had a penny to put in the plate each week – it was the same bag of
pennies used over and over. We’d all have fun comparing the year of our
pennies.” Ronda left St Mary’s when she was 15. She didn’t see a lot of
Sister Eileen in her early married life, while she was busy raising her
four children, but she later “did heaps of typing for her” when Sister
Eileen became a welfare officer, based in a building where the
courthouse stands now.
“She had instilled kindness in me, a charitable nature – I like to help
people where I can. And she was like that. She started Prisoners’ Aid
here and would visit prisoners in her free time. But she never forgot to
have fun too. I remember going to see her in a Gilbert and Sullivan
musical. She was one of the Three Little Maids in the Mikado.”
Sister Eileen eventually left Alice, going back to WA. Ronda visited her
there on three occasions and had been intending to go back for her
106th birthday. Now she’ll wait for a local memorial service to be
conducted at the Anglican Church.
One of Ronda’s very best friends is Peggy Butcher (later Jones) whom she
met at St Mary’s: “Even though she was older than me, she was smaller
and I took her under my wing. When she was upset she’d try to run away.
I’d have to tell her, ‘Peggy, you can’t walk back to Borolloola!'”
The two went together to Perth to celebrate Sister Eileen’s 100th: “She
knew who we were straightaway and enquired after all the other kids
who’d been at St Mary’s with us. She was godmother to almost all of us
through mass baptism. When we had our big St Mary’s reunion last year,
she told us she wished she could have been there.”
Pictured: ‘Belles’ of St Mary’s (married names in
brackets, if known) from left, Sister Eileen Heath, Ronda’s sister Fay
Andrew (Hampton), Shirley Dixon (Stuart), Ruth Forrester (Swan), Rosalie
Kunoth (Kunoth-Monks). Next to Rosalie in the back row are Wendy Bourke
(Espie), Doris Branson (Campbell), Eileen, or possibly Ivy Foster
peeping from behind the garland, and Mona Bathern. There are three
little girls in shadow next to Rosalie and then in front, Marie Liddle
(Palmer), Peggy Foster and Patsy Clements (McDonald). Standing in Front
of the Dodge is Mrs Lillian Schroder, who travelled with Sister Eileen
and helped her in her work. Photograph courtesy St Mary’s Children Home.
Above right: Peggy Jones and Ronda Ross (right) with Sister Eileen at her 100th birthday celebration.
Many people are doing two jobs and too many are doing none
Jobs galore and not many takers: The town’s biggest construction project right now is Lasseters’ $35 million development. The new resort style pool is part of it, due to open at the end of this month. Claire Ryan Photography.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
A young Aboriginal woman holding down her permanent job as check-out staff in a big supermarket is a rare glimmer of hope in the Alice Springs job scene.
That’s the picture from where Kay Eade is sitting as Executive Officer of the Chamber of Commerce.
“A lot of people have two jobs to keep this town going.
“Many businesses have scaled down, passed up bidding for big jobs, closed their premises and are working from home.
“They can’t get staff.”
Yet there are 543 “job seekers receiving Newstart Allowance and Youth Allowance” in The Alice, according to the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).
The department’s “Central Australian Remote Servicing Team” lists 1649 job seekers and Yuendumu, 85.
That adds up to 2277 for the region.
More detailed figures are hard to come by. Some of the private job agencies were reluctant to give details.
One of them, CatholicCare NT, says 4,500 people 15+ years of age are registered as looking for work for the Alice Springs employment services area which includes remote communities.
That is double DEEWR’s figure.
CatholicCare NT’s Carl Russelhuber says the approximate break-up is 10% of registered jobseekers are skilled, 25% semi-skilled and 65% unskilled.
The agency currently has about 30 vacancies – 11 skilled (these are CatholicCare NT positions), 10 semi-skilled and nine unskilled.
About 120 Alice Springs employers have placed vacancies with CatholicCare NT in the past two and a half years.
Ms Eade, after eight years in Alice Springs and 25 in the NT, has an unblinkered view about the situation.
“Some people’s understanding of work ethic is very minimal,” she says.
“They have grown up with that mentality.
“They don’t understand what it means to a business owner when you don’t turn up, when you take a sickie.
“Welfare needs to be dried up,” says Ms Eade.
Recently the chamber offered a Retail Certificate Three course with 23 places in a bid to relieve the dramatic staff shortage in that sector.
Not a single person enrolled.
Then the chamber engaged Aboriginal consultant Ken Lechleitner to give a course for employers about how to induct Aboriginal workers, and give the bosses an introduction into local culture.
About 20 business people attended.
But when they finished the course they couldn’t find any Aboriginal employees on whom to practice their newly acquired skills.
Businesses are “screaming out for staff” and much of the local economy would collapse without the 475 visas allowing foreigners into jobs here.
Ms Eade says many young people have no idea what the point is of going to school.
They believe there are no jobs out there for them: “Australia cannot sustain the growing welfare sector.
“When you leave school you’ll have to work – that’s what we need to tell 12 and 13 year olds, be responsible for your own lives.
“We have to start somewhere.”
The shortage of workers is greatest in the retail, restaurant and hotel industries, and in “admin”.
Construction has wound down – the Lasseters hotel and casino extension is the only big project on the go.
Ms Eade says the jobs are simple, requiring a minimum of skills that can be picked up easily with the standard school education.
But the qualities most often absent are reliability – showing up every day.
Yet it’s not all doom and gloom.
An admirable exception, says Ms Eade, is the initiative of the Smith Family, run by Jodie Lennox in the Centralian Middle School, the former
ASHS, for younger kids, aged around 12 and 13.
“They openly talk about issues, the parents are involved, they tackle projects, learn life skills and what’s expected of them when they go to
work,” says Ms Eade.
“It creates self-confidence, life skills, not to turn into angry young people.”
A youth curfew is council policy … despite vote against Ald Melky's motion
By KIERAN FINNANE
A youth curfew is official Town Council policy. It’s called a “Night Time Youth Strategy” and one of its measures is to have unsupervised children 15 years and under “taken into protective care and custody if found on the streets of Alice Springs at night” between 10pm and 5am. It’s been on council’s books since November 27, 2006.
It appears Mayor Damien Ryan was unaware of that: He tweeted on September 2, well before the matter came before the council again later that month: “I do not support a Youth Curfew, this proposal is not a #alicecouncil position.”
As council prepared to formally vote down Alderman Eli Melky’s youth curfew motion on Monday, Ald Murray Stewart reminded his colleagues of the anomaly. If they were going to vote against Ald Melky, they really should also put a recision motion to the meeting on this policy: it would be “disingenuous” not to.
Mayor Ryan, in the chair, knocked that idea on the head. He asked for debate on Ald Melky’s motion to be limited to presenting new information.
Ald Melky attempted to oblige by responding to points previously raised by Mayor Ryan in objection to the proposed curfew.
Attempting to provide a cost-benefit analysis of youth services, Ald Melky added things like the wages in the youth sector to the refurbishment costs of the Youth Hub to come up with a figure of $150,000 per child (with 6000 odd in Alice between the ages of five and 15) – money wasted in Ald Melky’s view as there remain 100 to 150 young people contributing to increased crime.
A curfew would address both the “social welfare” of these children and the “lawlessness on the street”, said Ald Melky.
“I did ask for new information,” commented Mayor Ryan, “I didn’t find a lot in there.”
Ald John Rawnsley expressed his frustration with having to hear this “gross distortion of reasoning … so far removed from analysis of how a curfew would work” and reiterated his view that if a young child is on the street at night, it points to the need to improve child protection services, not to the need for a blanket curfew.
Ald Samih Habib Bitar, in favour of a curfew, launched an attack on politicians who have “failed this community”, refusing to respond to “the cry of the people in the street whose houses are being smashed every day” and wanted to know why council was “not doing its job and calling on the government to do something”.
Mayor Ryan suggested that if Ald Bitar had not got anything from council’s debate on the issues two weeks ago, he wouldn’t now, and the pair exchanged heated remarks.
Deputy Mayor Liz Martin, speaking over on-going rumbling between Alds Rawnsley and Bitar, reiterated her opposition to a curfew as penalising the “future leaders of this community” and pushing vulnerable young people to the places where they would be out of sight, out of mind.
Ald Bitar lashed out: Where’s the $14m Youth Hub, he wanted to know, what’s happened to it? (There is some activity at the Youth Hub, but clearly not enough to impress Ald Bitar.)
Both Alds Rawnsley and Martin had expressed their offence over the suggestion that if they didn’t support a curfew, they didn’t care about young people.
Ald Stewart attempted to dowse this fire by commenting that everyone on council had the “best interest of children at heart” (Ald Rawnsley thanked him).
Ald Stewart went on the argue for a youth curfew as without one, there is effectively an “adult curfew”, with adults reluctant to enjoy the town’s nightlife because of danger on the streets.
The issue was finally put to the vote and a division called. No-one had changed sides: Mayor Ryan and Alds Rawnsley, Martin, Sandy Taylor, Jane Clark and Brendan Heenan voted the curfew down, watched from the public gallery by youthful campaigner against the curfew, Gavin Henderson, and a handful of young friends and adult supporters. MLA Robyn Lambley, architect of the 2006 Night Time Youth Strategy, was also in the gallery.
Reports on the youth curfew debate of late 2006-early 2007:
http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/1346.html http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/1348.html
http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/1405.html http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/1406.html
Bad news for native title group reformers
UPDATE 15:10 CST NOV 4
By ERWIN CHLANDA
The Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC) says only the directors of Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation (LAAC) can call meetings of the estate groups for the purposes of nominating LAAC directors and members.
This means the 10 people selected last week by the group seeking to reform the organization cannot be considered as having been nominated.
ORIC head Anthony Beven says: “The Mparntwe estate group held its nomination meeting on 25 October in Alice Springs. ORIC officers attended the meeting.”
The Alice Springs News Online has learned that the officers were asked to leave the meeting and did.
Says Mr Beven: “The meeting was adjourned by the members to 3 November 2011 [yesterday] as not all the apmereke-artweye and kwertengerle were in attendance at the meeting on 25 October.
“I have no knowledge of a Mparntwe estate group meeting being called for Monday, 31 October by the directors of Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation under rule 15 of the rule book [governing the nominating].
“The meeting on 3 November was the properly constituted meeting of the Mparntwe estate group for the purposes of rule 15 of the Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation rule book.
“I am aware that the Mparntwe Aboriginal Corporation held its annual general meeting on Monday (31 October 2011).
“The Mparntwe Aboriginal Corporation and the Mparntwe estate group are two different groups but have similar membership.”
The Alice Springs News Online understands ORIC officers did not attend yesterday’s Mparntwe meeting.
REPORT POSTED NOV 3:
The group seeking to reform Alice Springs’ native title organisation, Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation (LAAC), is confident that it is getting the upper hand.
“It’s about returning the traditional structure back to the control of the native title holders rather than an alleged select few,” says Ron Morony (at left), a special director of the Antulye estate group.
The organisation has been in turmoil over allegations that a small clique has assumed control amidst suspicions of unauthorized spending of funds, bullying, stacking of meetings and ignoring the traditional power brokers known as the Apmereke-artweye and Kwertengerle.
The Alice News has been informed the estates groups of Irlpme and Antulye have now each selected 10 people from their respected estate groups of directors in readiness for its AGM on November 16.
The third estate group, Mparntwe has not been able to agree on selecting their 10 because of ongoing internal difference, according to Mr
Morony.
Mr Morony, who is a financial consultant based in Canberra, says a Mparntwe meeting last week “exploded” after just 30 minutes.
“
A number of senior Arrernte people had attempted to bring about some balance in the Mparntwe group but that failed, but this week they met and were able to make a number of important decisions.”
Michael Liddle (above, right) says that members of one family have been too dominant in that group, to the disadvantage of five
or six other families in the moiety.
Says Mr Liddle: “One family group assumes that they are the rightful people to speak on behalf of the Mparntwe Group.
No-one has given that family group permission to conduct itself in that manner, or to speak in that manner with such authority.”
Mr Liddle says the reform group have selected 10 members that were evenly representing the Mparntwe Group.
Mr Morony says it appears former LAAC CEO Darryl Pearce is organising an alternative meeting to overturn these elected nominations.
However, Irlpme and Antulye are of the same mind about reform being necessary, and will have the majority vote in Lhere Artepe.
Mr Liddle says because of the dominating family groups lack of knowledge and protocol of Aborignal structure it is preventing the progress and development of Lhere Artepe Corporation from being a benefit to the Central Arrente people.
Mr Morony says it is likely that LAAC and the three estate groups will commission a review of the business dealings and companies set up in the last few years, involving the purchase – with a massive Aboriginal Benefits Account grant – of three suburban supermarkets, the holding of 40% equity in the Yeperenye Shopping complex, and the construction of the Stephens Road residential subdivision.
A civil engineering company owned by an entity linked to Lhere Artepe is in liquidation.
“I receive regular requests for information about what is happening in these companies and as a representative of the shareholders I have great difficulty in responding as the information simply isn’t made available, or if it is, it is so vague that you can’t make sense of it,” says Mr Morony.
Council will look at tree register and by-law
By KIERAN FINNANE
The Town Council has supported Alderman Jane Clark in her request for a report from officers on establishing a tree register, with pruning or removal of significant trees being subject to council approval. Ald Clark put her motion to council after contact from constituents expressing their concern over the destruction of mature trees in the ANZ carpark last weekend.
Steve Thorne, Chair of Northern Territory Urban Design Advisory Council, who headed up the consultant team on the revitalisation of the Alice Springs CBD, has also suggested the establishment of a tree register, as part of an effort to halt the “death by a thousand cuts” that is occurring in our town centre.
Mr Thorne has followed the ANZ tree saga on the Alice Springs News website and wrote: “While I can’t comment on the specifics of the trees on that site, other than that they were specifically identified as being important to the creation of a new streetscape in Parsons Street, their removal raises important issues for Alice Springs.
“I should say that I am deeply saddened by their removal. In an arid climate where trees take such a long time to grow, the removal of mature trees is a matter which requires careful consideration.
“The shade and beauty provided by all trees in Alice, be they exotic or native, has great value, not only physical and cultural, but economic. The cooling effect they have on the ground has been experienced by all who live in Alice, and cannot be dismissed as a trivial issue.
“The slow removal of quality buildings and trees in the public realm in Alice Springs has previously been described as ‘death by a thousand cuts’. This refers not only to the removal of good things to look at and experience, but to the economic consequences as Alice becomes less attractive in the broadest sense.
“For these reasons alone it may be time for the community to record those places and objects which give Alice Springs its character. I feel that a survey should be undertaken and the significant trees in Alice should be mapped, photographed and registered.
“Just as people have endured the harsh climate in Alice, so those trees which have survived for so long demand the same level of respect. It is part of the compelling story of Alice Springs.
“I just hope that if a building is built on the ANZ car park, that it is carefully considered, not only for its functionality but that it is at least as attractive as the trees which stood there until last week.”
At the council meeting, Mayor Damien Ryan suggested that the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (AAPA) be consulted about the tree register, lest the council be “reinventing the rules”.
Ald Clark was quite clear that AAPA’s responsibilities are with regard to trees that are sacred or significant in the Arrernte tradition. Council has a responsibility to look after other trees “for the long-term benefit of the community”. The focus should be initially on the CBD, she said, and the register needs to be backed up by a by-law, protecting trees of a specific age and type.
Ald Eli Melky expressed his concern about the “total disregard” of the revitalisation plans demonstrated by the carpark owners (Yeperenye Pty Ltd): “I was particularly concerned it could happen under our nose,” he said, urging council to pursue this “serious issue”, with stricter controls, and possibly a by-law.
Only Ald Murray Stewart dissented, worried about council “getting into people’s backyards”, and adding to the “vexed issue around trees” (clearly a reference to various controversies over sacred trees). He asked council “not to go too far” in making things “even more difficult” for the “future development of the town”.
In the same meeting Ald Stewart proposed the formation of a taskforce, comprised of a representative each from the council, the Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Central Australia, as well as a number of business representatives, to boost business confidence. Business needs “a shot in the arm” and it needs to happen as soon as possible, urged Ald Stewart.
Nobody mentioned the $5m ‘shot in the arm’ that council is sitting on until the middle of next year – the revitalisation projects. If work had started on these as soon as council had made its decision about which projects to prioritise, perhaps the owners of the ANZ carpark would have been brought on board and we would not have lost those mature trees. And perhaps the CBD would be abuzz with the prospect of new ways of doing business and enjoying the areas around the northern end of the mall.
Posted Monday, October 31:
Felling of trees: disappointing and sad, says Mayor
Mayor Damien Ryan has expressed his “disappointment” over the felling of mature red gums at the ANZ carpark, especially given the CBD revitalisation plans for connecting the river to the town in which the trees were to play their part.
“They are the landlord, it’s their prerogative,” he said, referring to Yeperenye Pty Ltd who own the carpark and adjacent real estate, “but it is sad that a different solution could not have been found.”
Alice Springs News Online had asked the mayor and all aldermen whether there should be a by-law to protect mature trees in the municipality, including those on private property. Mayor Ryan said he would need more information about whether a by-law should be created. Alderman Eli Melky expressed his in principle support for a by-law, with obvious provision for the removal of trees that present a danger to the public.
Ald Jane Clark, responding from Thailand where she is studying, said the town needs a tree register in association with a permit system, “stating that permission must be sought from Council before pruning or removing certain types of trees”.
“This would enable Council to consider circumstances and also to save trees we may not yet have added to the register. Creating a register would be expensive and time consuming but certainly worthwhile. I worry for the trees on the Melanka site as well – they need care and protection.”
Ald Sandy Taylor said her “personal opinion is that mature trees should never be chopped down because of the harsh climate we endure here in Alice Springs and the length of time it has taken to grow the trees, many of them much older than myself”. She likened the sudden removal of the trees as similar to the damage done to the tail of the caterpillar site on Barrett Drive (destroyed by a government contractor in December 1982 when the road was being built) and to “the night raiders who demolished Turner House” (a restaurant in Hartley Street controversially bull-dozed in the 1980s).
Both Mayor Ryan and Ald Taylor raised the question of whether the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority has been consulted about the removal of the trees. Research Director at the authority, Dr Amanda Markham, said the landowners sought an Authority Certificate to undertake the tree removal work, and that a certificate was issued following consultations with senior custodians.
Custodians had said there were no sites identified on the lot: “The trees were noted as either exotics or as being planted. However, I can confirm that the large river red gums in the YHA [opposite] and those along the river are sacred sites.”
Of course, an Authority Certificate should not be the last word on the protection of trees. There are many ways that trees, including those recently planted and even exotic trees, contribute to our environment – providing shade and beauty for a start. Sacred trees have a special status and are protected by law. The question now is, whether other mature trees also should be afforded some formal protection.
Photo: Google Earth shot from space shows the trees providing shade in the ANZ carpark.
Earlier stories: Chainsaw rules and Felled trees: Q & A.
Felled trees: Q&A – land owners mum on revitalisation plans
By KIERAN FINNANE
The ANZ carpark – from which all vegetation including mature trees was cleared on the weekend – is owned by Yeperenye Pty Ld. Alice Springs News Online put the following questions to the company this morning:
1. Why were mature red gum trees chopped down in the ANZ carpark?
2. Was management aware that it has been recommended that these trees be protected as part of the revitalisation plans for Parsons Street?
3. Does management believe it has some responsibility as a corporate citizen to cooperate with public plans for the revitalisation of the CBD?
3. Did management consult with the Town Council about its decision to destroy the trees, given that council is the project manager for the revitalisation projects?
4. Does management consider it a service to its customers to remove all shade from the carpark when this is a desert town?
We received the following reply from Yeperenye’s Marketing Manager Nicole Walsh:
“The property in question is privately owned by Yeperenye Pty Ltd which reserves the right to make all decisions in relation to it.
“The trees in question have caused major water ingress problems to the adjoining ANZ and Leichhtodd Plaza buildings (resulting in rectification works in excess of $100,000) and some of the larger trees were diseased, causing potential health risks to passing pedestrians from boughs and limbs snapping.
“A beautification program for the property including the planting of smaller, safer trees and shrubs will be completed shortly which will benefit those ANZ customers who are the only ones allowed to park on it.”
The Alice News has asked for further explanation regarding the water ingress problems and the diseased state of the trees and also whether the smaller trees intended to be planted will offer shade.
Pictured: The scene of destruction last Saturday – view from Leichardt Terrace.
Chainsaw rules in Parsons Street
By KIERAN FINNANE
UPDATE: See separate story for statement from the landowner, Yeperenye PtyLtd.
How we love a bull-dozer or a bobcat and a chainsaw in this town! Mature trees, including red gums, have been chopped down in the ANZ carpark on the corner of Parsons Street and Leichardt Terrace. Yet these very trees were supposed to be protected for their contribution to the Parsons Street “biodiversity corridor” that is envisaged as part of the revitalisation of the CBD.
The plans for this and other projects identified after a three year consultation process are currently on display at the Town Council, which has $5m in its kitty to start the work.
The idea of the biodiversity corridor is to connect the ancient red gum west of the Sails with the Todd River. Mike Gillam was commissioned to develop a creative brief for the project and wrote about it extensively for this site on October 13. In the brief he advises specifically that we “protect existing mature red gums including those in the carpark behind ANZ. These provide a vital stepping point in the sightline between the [ancient red gum] and the river”.
It’s now too late.
Anyone who has lived for any length of time in this town will not be surpirsed: remember Turner House, Marrons Newsagency, Lizzie Milne’s block (still vacant), the Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre (still vacant), the trees in Gregory Terrace (never replaced), all the trees in the Todd that no-one has tried to adequately protect.
The Alice Springs News Online asked Mr Gillam to comment on this latest site to fall victim of the bull-dozer mentality.
Says Mr Gillam: “Given the magnitude of the problems facing Todd Mall and Parsons Street I find it demoralising that the red gums have been removed just a couple of months after I highlighted the value of these trees to the street. I’d be surprised if my observations were not communicated but it’s possible.
“In the absence of tree protection by-laws, private landowners will keep pleasing themselves. It takes many years for a Eucalypt to reach this size and on a whim it can be removed in an afternoon. Where are the checks and balances that would test the logic of such decisions and their potential impact on the whole street?
“Unfortunately there is very little advocacy on behalf of trees anywhere in Alice Springs – look at the management of the Todd River. Greening Australia has now completely withdrawn from the town and despite the importance of trees to our regional identity there is no arborist on staff anywhere.
“The slowdown in the Alice Springs CBD is not unique – all over Australia, retail zones are struggling, some streets and malls are dying. Business owners need to step out of their silos and also look to the health and vigor of their neighbours, their street and their community. We need to ensure that the revitalisation of Parsons Street is not undone before it begins. In isolation, the loss of these trees may seem trivial but decisions like these can rapidly accrue in the negative.”
The Alice News will seek comment from the proprietors and the Town Council on Monday.
Pictured: Top right – the scene of destruction this afternoon. Below – the trees as they were, connecting this site to the stands of trees along river bank at the end of the street. 
He walked the line …
Tall Tales but True: Brought to you by the National Transport Hall of Fame in Alice Springs.
Christopher (Chris) Kuhn started work for the Commonwealth Railways in 1928 and went on to work for them on the Marree to Alice Springs section until 1953.
His job was to use a horse and scoop to clear the ever-shifting sand drift and debris from flash floods and windstorms off the track so the Ghan train could get through. The Old Ghan train was notorious for literally being stopped in its tracks and it was Kuhn’s job to ensure the train could get through gaps in the sand dunes. Sometimes the track collapsed because termites had gnawed through wooden sleepers.
If the train got stuck a goat, or other game, would be shot so the passengers could be fed. Those were the days too when all litter from the train (ablutions, kitchen waste and tins) were dropped through chutes to the track. It was a harsh and thankless environment: working in freezing cold or searing heat and open to the elements.
Chris Kuhn and his wife Mary lived at Irripitana just south of William Creek for many years. Following the line as it progressed towards Stuart (now Alice Springs) it was a harsh and nomadic life and yet they managed to raise 12 children. 
The family were known by all Commonwealth Railway staff and regulars who used the line to be friendly and welcoming and willing to lend a hand to anyone in need. Following the tragic loss of a daughter the family moved into Alice Springs.
Mary worked as cook at the old Alice Springs hospital where she cared for sick Aboriginal children. The Kuhn children grew up to be pioneers in their own right. Their eldest daughter Jean married Les Poole who was one of the town’s first electricians. Their son Chas was instrumental in starting the Old Ghan Preservation Society in Alice Springs and works today on maintaining the modern locomotive fleet on the Adelaide to Darwin run. Chris retired in 1953 and was drowned in 1955 when a flash flood in the Todd River washed his car downstream. Kuhn Court in Alice Springs is named in his memory.
Blackened country greening up
It doesn’t take much for buffel grass and couch to get going again even after a fire has been through. Our photo shows a devastated burnt tree in the Todd River – there are many along the town stretch of the river – with buffel and couch regrowing (and setting seed) following recent light rain. How soon will we – and surviving trees – lose the fire-break benefit of recent burns, whether controlled or otherwise?
The Alice Springs News Online asked the Department of Resources about what rate of grass regeneration we can expect in the large areas of burnt country in and around Alice Springs, given that a weak La Nina event is predicted for the summer.
We received the following statement:-
History shows us that periods of exceptional pasture growth followed by a big fire season only come around every now and again or on average every 20-30 years. Such occasions are often etched into our memories, whether we have heard the associated stories from the old timers or experienced such an event. Periods of exceptional pasture growth occurred in the 1920s, 1950s, 1973-75 and more recently 2000-02.
In 2010/11 Central Australia received one of its best growth events on record, and in many areas pasture growth has been the best in living memory. Consistent yields of over 4000kg/ha have been estimated over much of Central Australia with little variation in quantity due to different vegetation types. Fire generally only requires 1200kg/ha to carry. This has resulted in very few natural breaks across the landscape in which to stop a fire once started, and the reason why we are experiencing that large areas of country are being burnt from a single fire.
Apart from the loss of watering facilities, short-term fodder loss from wildfires has the greatest impact on the pastoral industry. Factors that influence the rate of pasture growth are numerous and include:
• soil moisture
• rainfall
• temperature
• vegetation type
• soil type
• pasture health
• fire intensity
Water is the greatest influence on pasture growth. Central Australia however has an extremely variable climate making it very difficult to predict rainfall. It may take many months or even years for pasture to recover adequately to provide fodder for stock unless there is adequate existing soil moisture or rainfall is received.
Recovery for pastures in poor health or that have been exposed to a high intensity fire may take longer than pastures in good health or that have been exposed to lower intensity fires. In particular, perennial plants (eg Kangaroo Grass [Themeda triandra], Curly Windmill Grass [Enteropogon acicularis] or Buffel Grass [Cenchrus ciliaris]) will respond quicker from their root reserves than annual plants (eg Bunched Kerosene Grass [Aristida contorta], Button Grass [Dactyloctenium radulans] or Flinders Grass [Iseilema spp.] that need to germinate from seed.
Areas around Alice Springs that have experienced cool, patchy fires in August and September are already beginning to green-up with fresh pasture. This growth is predominantly from the root reserves of the perennial grasses that can appear within approximately three weeks following adequate rainfall. The growth from these fires has been enhanced due to the presence of existing soil moisture from early rain prior to the fires. Small amounts of rainfall received recently will enhance this growth. The annual grasses in these areas may require additional rain to stimulate germination from seed stock and may take up to six weeks to emerge following adequate rainfall, before useful forage is produced.
'No evidence that curfews reduce crime" – Jodeen Carney's Youth Justice Review
By KIERAN FINNANE
It costs about $200,000 per year to lock a young person up.
It costs about $83,000 per year to care for a young person.
The Youth Justice Review released by the Territory Government this week rejects the notion of a youth curfew, finding “no evidence that curfews are effective in reducing crime”. This conclusion obviously applies to blanket curfews as the review notes that Apart from the courts already have the power to impose curfews on individual offenders.
The review was conducted by a team chaired by former Country Liberal MLA and Opposition Leader Jodeen Carney, who has a legal background, and included a lawyer, a legal research officer and a number of project officers.
Will the conclusion of the review be enough to put the youth curfew notion to bed? Probably not, for as the review notes, public perceptions of youth crime are “somewhat different” to the facts: that the numbers of offenders are “relatively low” as is the nature of their offending.
A snapshot of youth offending
There are around 53,000 young people under 15 years of age in the NT. In 2010–11, the review reports, 639 young people were apprehended by police; 1192 matters were lodged in courts of which 665 were finalised; and an average of 39 young people were in juvenile detention on any day.
Indigenous males make up 76% of those involved in the youth justice system. Males are more likely to have been apprehended for property crime, with theft and unlawful entry with intent being the most common youth offences. Traffic and motor vehicle offences form the second biggest category, increasing by 100% from 2006-07 to 2009–10.
Females are more likely to have been apprehended for acts intended to cause injury, and traffic and motor vehicle offences.
Young people aged 15 to 16 years are the most likely group to be apprehended, while Indigenous offenders are more likely to commit their first offence at a younger age than non-Indigenous offenders, and are more likely to have been charged multiple times.
The review acknowledges that youth crime is on the increase. In 2006–07 police apprehended 587 young people; this number rose to 797 in 2009–10.
There has also been a general upward trend over the past five years for court lodgments involving young people, with a particularly large increase in 2008–09. This trend is similar to the upward trend in policing data and “indicates that the increase in youth offences encountered by police in recent years did not relate to minor offences, since they warranted prosecution through the courts”.
The Territory is not an exception, says the review: from 2006–07 to 2010–11 three other Australian jurisdictions showed increases in children’s court matters.
The number of young people in juvenile detention is also on the rise: from an average daily number of 18 in 2005–06 to 39 in 2010–11. The review reports that NT Correctional Services is expecting this number to rise to 70 in 2011.
Those in detention are more likely to be Indigenous; they are more likely to be on remand than serving sentences; and they are in detention accused of more serious crimes, such as acts intending to cause injury.
The cost of keeping a young person in custody is estimated at $555 per day or about $200,000 per year. Compare this to the cost of the “most intensively supported” young people in the care of the Department of Children and Families – around $83,000 per year. The difference is worth bearing in mind in relation to the cost of implementing the review’s recommendations.
The recommendations
The one most likely to stick in the public’s mind is for there to be more youth rehabilitation camps (not “military style boot camps”, says the review, which “can be damaging to young people and have no impact on their offending or rehabilitation”). It recommends a short term (8-10 days) therapeutic camp program for both the greater Darwin area and Central Australia, as well as a longer term (6-18 weeks) therapeutic residential program in both regions. These camps should be regulated by legislation.
The review notes that therapeutic interventions can achieve reductions in offending of 25% to 65% – “an obvious incentive for government
to invest in a workforce that can provide such therapeutic programs”.
Another recommendation is to invest in police-run youth diversion programs, which the review says should be expanded and made available for a greater range of offences, in particular traffic and vehicle offences which make up 15.4% of total youth offences in the NT, with non-Indigenous youth the more likely culprits.
The popular belief is that diversion amounts to a “slap on the wrist” but the review quotes data from the NT Police for 2005-10 that says nearly half the youths referred to court re-offended, compared with just over one quarter who had been referred to diversion. However, police noted that youths who attend court have “higher re-offending risks”.
The review looks at ways for diversion to be improved. A bail support program is one, as if a young offender does not have family support they are unlikely to be referred to diversion. A bail support program would employ specialist workers to help locate a responsible person to sign a bail undertaking, or to act as the responsible adult themselves when no one else can be found.
When diversion was first introduced in 2000, the program was relatively well funded and staffed. This has waned: “It no longer has its own statistician, nor does it have a superintendent or senior sergeant leading the unit. NTP advises that often positions are unfilled and that ‘in the past three years there has been difficulty attracting staff to the youth diversion area as it is not seen as a core policing function’.”
Initially driving offences were eligible for diversion but the Youth Justice Act which began in 2006 precluded them. The review quotes NT Police as saying: “If [driving unlicensed] offenders were to again be eligible to be diverted, a driving program could include a drink driving focus, an additional positive outcome”.
The North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) also expressed concern about the inability to divert these offences, which often sees “these [first time offender] males ‘springboard’ to future like offending, such as drive disqualified and drink driving”.
The magistrates’ submission to the review also supported diversion for traffic offences: “Programs of this nature would be useful not only to ensure that young persons become properly licensed for example, but also to address public safety by providing education about use and driving. Not all youth have the advantage of parents who can assist them on the process to becoming a fully licensed driver.”
The review also recommends that the Family Responsibility Program and Family Support Centres be expanded. There are ony two of these centres at present, one in Darwin and one at the Youth Hub in Alice. Families can be referred to them if they’re experiencing “difficulties” with their child. Families enter into a Family Responsibility Agreement (FRA) which may involve a parent or parents undertaking counselling, therapy or attending a course or program of “personal developments aimed at addressing certain destructive or damaging behaviour”. A parent might also be required to “exercise proper care and supervision of the youth” – for example, ensuring that they go to school, or keep away from certain people or places.
The program began in 2008. In 2009–10, there were 23 FRAs, involving 61 people. This rose to 81 In 2010–11 (67 new,14 carried forward), involving 197 people.
The Youth Justice Court can make orders requiring parents to do the sort of things outlined above, with fines for breaches, but none have ever been made. The review accepts that this is “a measure of success” of the agreement system, while suggesting that the potential for orders to be made may act as incentive for families to enter into agreements. An independent evaluation of the program will be undertaken later this year.
To expand any or all of the above the Territory has to build its workforce capacity, another recommendation of the review, which notes the vulnerability of the youth sector in “maintaining physical and mental capacity for extended periods in high pressure environments” – in other words, not burning out.
The review wants evaluation be built into all programs, and recommends the establishment of an external monitoring and evaluation process.
A further recommendation is the development of a new youth justice strategy, establishing benchmarks and targets to improve access to services, to reduce youth crime, decrease the number of young people in detention, reduce the number of Indigenous offenders, and increase the number of young people entering and completing diversion programs.
More effective, streamlined administrative arrangements need to be put in place, with a single youth justice unit located within an appropriate government department says the review. The present situation is described as “confusing” and youth “are not the core business of any one agency”.
There needs to be better data collection and information sharing, including between government departments and with non-government organisations.
At present, for example, despite fairly comprehensive data in the quarterly crime statistics (henceforth to be published only annually), there is no detailed separate dataset for youth crime (apart from the quarterly daily average number of detained youth offenders).
What's cooking – radioactive fish, colonial scones and jam ?
To be honest I’m almost too depressed to write anything this week. I’m back on about food. What can I peaceably eat without turning my life into a obsessive compulsive over-analysis of all things good or bad or both at the same time for me, others, and the environment? Caffeine is bad for you. But fair trade organic coffee is good for somebody else. Raising animals to eat is highly costly in terms of water, feed and land usage. What about fish? OK then, what if it’s sustainably farmed? Probably still bad as oceans potentially become radioactive.
But let me start at the start. With last weekend’s camping trip to celebrate my birthday came amazing food: pancakes with mangos and blueberries (did you know that although blueberries are very high in antioxidants they are also among some of the most heavily sprayed fruits?), a saucy (sustainable?) snapper stuffed with coriander, chili and lemongrass. Some bacon (yes free range organic one) cooked to crispy perfection. But it was the tea with scones and jam and cream at Hermannsburg that undid me. I actually find scones with jam and cream really delicious; it’s the colonial associations around them that I can’t stomach.
Anyway so then that set me off on other culinary occupants of other countries, such as French baguettes and croissants in Morocco or Cambodia. But then food can also be a tool for creating bonds between people and is often credited with bridging cultural differences. Listening to the radio the other day I heard someone describe the kitchen of Occupy Melbourne as the epicenter of the entire protest. By joining people through the common denominator of food it’s drawn in the homeless population and is seen as generally tightening the bonds of the Melbourne community.
The bigger picture stuff of food security is boggling too when there is apparently enough food in the world to feed everyone, the problem being around corporate power plays, distribution systems and the political trade systems that have divvied up the world’s food bowls. Standing in the supermarket for the first time in over a month, I had an actual physical sensation that goes beyond this rational mind stuff. I felt that sensation of being afraid, imagining what would happen in Alice Springs and the surrounding communities, if all the shelves were one day empty.
Who will inherit this planet when people of nations like Tuvalu (that have done so little to induce climate change) have become climate change refugees and are denied refuge in countries like Australia (which has the highest carbon emissions per capita in the OECD)? Will it be the powerful/rich who survive the upcoming scramble for resources? Or maybe this civilization will just end like many less global civilisations have ended, a mere blip on the history of the planet’s radar …
I don’t think these despair-type feelings are unreasonable in the face of ghost nets snaring marine life, deep seabed mining in the Pacific, uranium mining and dumping at every other turn. The question is what to do? I’m not sure how to combine a desire to head for the hills, creating a place secure enough to avoid the resource scramble and the desire to work to prevent it … And now (optimistically?) I am going to try and find a free-range organic whole chicken with a responsible ecological footprint to cook at the request of a friend for her farewell dinner.
Public, not government, to do the heavy lifting in water saving scheme
By ERWIN CHLANDA
The public will be doing the heavy lifting in the bid to reduce water use by one sixth of the current consumption over the next two years. Just 14% of the 1.6 billion liter reduction will come from the Power and Water Corporation, by phasing in recycled water for irrigation south of the Gap. This is despite the fact that Power and Water will get the lion’s share of the $15m Alice Water Smart funding. Half of that comes from the Federal Government, some from the consortium involved in the program, and the rest is matched by Power and Water whose contribution can be “in kind” rather than cash. That raises the question whether Power and Water is declaring as its contribution the assets and services for which it is being paid by Canberra. Funding for the dearest parts of the project certainly is all going to Power and Water. These are listed in a media release from Environment Minister Karl Hampton in July:- • A $6.5m infrastructure project that would allow some large water users to use recycled water. • A $2m project to regulate water pressure and reduce leaks. A $1.2m project “to reduce water use in parks and gardens using smart technologies” will be under the auspices of the town council. Power and Water will also introduce “water pressure management and leak reduction throughout the Alice Springs water reticulation system”. This will hopefully avoid such massive leaks as the one in the Ilparpa pipeline, which remained undetected for a long time, whilst helping to make the nearby swamp a mosquito paradise. The rest of the water savings – 86% – will come from consumers cutting back, mostly by turning down the lawn watering tap which is currently using up more than half of the town’s supply. Meanwhile, almost twice as much as we’re trying to save, close to three billion liters, is being evaporated each year in the sewage treatment plant, water lost to the town forever as the vapour drifts wherever the wind may take it. The town seems doomed unless we tap that major source of water – fully recycling our waste water to drinking water quality – a solution commonplace around the world, including places far less dry than Central Australia. While the end is not nigh, it is foreseeable: the bottom line is that we are depleting our underground water at a rate 20 times greater than nature replenishes it. We’re drinking very old water – and pouring it onto our lawns. “Since pumping began at Roe Creek in 1964 over 250,000 ML of groundwater has been extracted, with minimal replenishment. This is half of the Sydney Harbour!” says Alice Water Smart (AWS). That’s 250 billion liters. Water expert John Childs says if we continue our current rate of consumption, and if we tap all the nearby underground supplies, we may have enough water for up to 300 and 400 years. That would mean a very substantial investment in bores, pumps and pipes to go beyond the current Roe Creek bore field (which is the best we have in terms of quality and accessibility), to take in Rocky Hill (not as good as Roe Creek) and everything in between. There is more water further west in the Mereenie basin but distance from town and flow rate make it a marginal resource, says Mr Childs. Power and Water is funding AWS. It is operating out of the Arid Lands Environment Centre offices, but while ALEC is a community-based pressure group, AWS is a promotional instrument of the government (which owns Power and Water), with a budget of $2.7m over two years. In a nutshell, we’re using the cheap water now and the objective of AWS is to avoid a major spend on new and less prospective sources for as long as possible. AWS, run by Les Seddon, recruited from NSW, gives itself a jaunty image. It seeks to rope in the private consumer as well as corporate ones and offers beteen $50 and $250 towards such gadgets as low flow shower heads, washing machines with a 4.5 star rating or higher WELS rating, rainwater tanks, and pool covers. But the elephant in the room remains the water waste through the evaporation ponds. Mr Childs says the opportunities, discussed now for well over a decade, are still staring us in the face:- • A fully-fledged recycling plant, to drinking water standard, would put an end to our most glaring water waste. • It could be set up on a couple of hectares of land. • Water not pumped back into the town could be stored in the aquifer underneath the Old Timers. • The two square kilometers now taken up by the ponds, freehold land unencumbered by native title, would be available a variety of uses, including housing. All this seems to make it worthwhile to investigate whether land sales, at the current high prices, could more than pay for rehabilitation of the land and for the recycling plant. And we would be doing away with the notorious stench emanating from the open ponds.
The Alice Springs News Online published a comprehensive dossier on the sewage plant in 1998.
Photos: At top – this seepage pond near the planned suburb Kilgariff is part of the recycling scheme under Alice Water Smart. Inset: Google Earth photo showing the expanse of the sewage evaporation ponds. Around three billion liters of water are wasted each year.
People in bush shake down those who help them: allegation
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Aboriginal land councils are reportedly asking huge rents for land needed to house public servants in the bush, and providing the very services – education, health and police – the land councils are clamoring for. Independent MLA Gerry Wood says such land should be under a peppercorn rent.
But the NT Department of Housing (DoH), which negotiates rent with the land councils, says in a statement to the Alice Springs News Online: “Traditional owners have not accepted a ‘peppercorn rent’ for lots [pieces] of land occupied by Government infrastructure” although past leases “have been negotiated on a peppercorn lease payment basis in recognition of the significant government investment in remote housing.”
We have learned that on one community police are short staffed, and another one needs more teacher housing, as negotiations with the Central Land Council (CLC) are deadlocked over rents to be charged. Mr Wood, speaking about local government services to people on Aboriginal land, said in the Assembly last week that land councils are seeking to charge “very large amounts of money” to provide unserviced land for public servants providing essential services to locals. And Senator Nigel Scullion told last week’s estimates hearings that while the Federal government had made lease payments to land councils under the Intervention, traditional owners had still not received that money because it was seen by the land councils as being not enough, although the rents had been set by the NT Valuer General. Senator Scullion says the land councils are clearly “bloody minded”, blocking services the taxpayer is prepared to provide to the land councils’ own constituents. “They have plenty of land and they are screaming out for teachers,” says Senator Scullion. He says he has asked the Federal Government to intervene. Canberra has powers to direct the land councils, says Senator Scullion, as they are Federal statutory authorities, but the government has refused to act.
The DoH says the land councils are in discussions with the Australian Government in relation to retrospective payments for five year leases.
The notion that government facilities should be on land which has security of title started with the Intervention which began in 2007. There are three types of leases, according to the website of the DoH:- • whole-of-township leases with the Executive Director of Township Leasing (on behalf of the Australian Government); • housing leases with the Australian Government or NT Government; • five-year leases, considered sufficient security for minor works to go ahead, are held in about 50 communities by the Australian Government. Some of these will expire in August 2012 and others in February 2013.
Says the DoH: “In 2010 the Australian Government agreed to pay retrospective payments for these leases and payment was made based on values provided by the Australian Valuation Office.
“The Land Councils have challenged these values.”
Where the Australian Government holds leases, it has delegated responsibilities associated with property and tenancy management to the NT Government for remote public housing. There are 16 NT communities that have been allocated capital works under the SIHIP housing program requiring that new investment “must be supported by appropriate land tenure arrangements”, either a whole-of-township lease or a housing precinct lease. 
A 40 year housing precinct lease provides the minimum tenure required, says the website. Ken Davies, the DoH CEO, says the process followed in delivering new Government Employee Housing (GEH) projects includes:- • When funding has been secured the NTG requests a lease from (in Central Australia) CLC for the purpose of constructing GEH . • The CLC then consults with the traditional owners who either agree to a lease in principle or reject the application. • Leases are negotiated under Section 19 of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. • The leases are between the parties, the relevant Land Trust, the CLC and the NT Government. There are no precedents for the time it will take to enter into a lease for GEH. New GEH in the region will be required to support the significant new infrastructure projects, says Mr Davies, but he did not specify the number of dwellings needed currently. Mr Wood says “government assets, non-profit assets, should not be charged any more than a peppercorn lease. “It seems that the Commonwealth government believes that any government assets out there on Aboriginal land should be hit for a large sum of money. “What they do not understand is that some of these [shires] do not have much money and if they have to pay leasehold money to a group of traditional owners or the land council, that means fewer services. “These are non-profit bodies, the [shires] and they are providing services to the very people who want to charge them a large amount of money. “Notwithstanding, most of those people, unless they are paying a fee through Northern Territory Housing, are not paying any rates to that [shire].” A spokeswoman for the Department of Education says the Arlparra School (Utopia) currently has 141 enrollments.
This includes primary students from the Utopia Homeland School. She says: “There are two vacant teaching positions.
“There are housing constraints but there are plans for an additional six dwellings once land tenure is finalized.
“The proposed site for the houses is Aboriginal land held in trust by the Central Land Council.”
The Alice Springs News Online has invited the CLC to comment.
Says the DoH: “The NT Government is currently finalizing its position on lease payments. “Housing leases are required to underpin construction of new remote public housing.”
Pictured: Teacher housing in Hermannsburg (top). Chook farmer and Independent MLA Gerry Wood (above right) and Senator Nigel Scullion.
Business confidence – a case of swings and roundabouts
By KIERAN FINNANE
If some businesses are closing in Alice Springs, others are opening and others still, adapting to the times. In the middle of the Todd Mall, former curator at the Araluen Art Centre, Kate Podger, is opening an art gallery in the venue vacated by Peta Appleyard.
There’s also movement on the corner of the mall and Parsons Street, at the site of the QC restaurant which closed some time ago following a fire.
On the fringe of the mall, in Todd Street, while a tourist business has recently closed, Rocky’s has opened a gelato bar, and while his internet cafe has closed, Cameron Buckley has refocused on his coffee shop, expanding its offerings, giving people more reasons to go there.
Kate Podger has gone into partnership with Thijl Duvekot (her life partner) and her Melbourne-based sister, Frances Dooley. The gallery’s point of difference will be working directly with Aboriginal art centres – going there will be like a visit to a mini Desert Mob. The initial response from art centres has been enthusiastic, says Ms Podger.
“We want to get everyone on board, from the high end, with art centres like Tjungu Palya, through the mid-range to low-priced but attractive works for the tourist market.”
There’ll be a few curated exhibitions, timed to coincide with events that draw culture-seeking visitors to Alice, like the Beanie Festival and Desert Mob. Otherwise, the intention is to offer “the big picture of central desert art” within a “good ethical framework”.
The look of the gallery will be “more action-packed” than the spare, elegant style established by Peta Appleyard but it won’t be a bazaar: large works will be given room to breathe and works will be hung to complement one another, rather than be grouped according to the source art centre.
The mezzanine, formerly used for administration, will be a display space with the potential to host small exhibitions. The initial focus will be on Aboriginal art, but further down the track exhibition opportunities will be offered to local non-Aboriginal artists.
Ms Podger is looking forward to a “gentle launch” within the fortnight, certainly in time for the annual Papunya Tula show on November 25, followed by a major launch next year.
The gallery, whose name is still under wraps, is a few doors up from Papunya Tula and right next door to Gallery Gondwana (at one stage thought to be closing but still open, with a renewed focus by owner Roslyn Premont). Ms Podger says the proximity of the three will create an appealing art nexus in the mall: people can plan a morning or afternoon around gallery visits and a meal or drink at the nearby cafes and restaurants.
She is looking forward to the revitalisation works in the mall, focusing initially on the northern end and Parsons Street. She says as vibrancy returns to the area her business will respond, staying open into the evening hours to cater for restaurant-goers and visitors returning from day tours.
She acknowledges the “tough economic times” but says she’s done her homework and is confident that the gallery will be a viable business, building on her good relationships with art centres and knowledge of the art and artists.
She says the market “has contracted a bit” especially at the high end but she points to the consistent sales at Desert Mob over the last three years. Her gallery, similarly to the annual art centre exhibition, will span “all the major price points”. There will always be “swings and slides” in the market but “good art endures” and will maintain its value: “It’s work that is over-hyped that suffers dropping prices in times like this.”
While she has asked art centres to send her “fantastic work” for the opening, Ms Podger wants the gallery to work with emerging artists as well: “Getting a sale for them is important for nurturing their talent, giving them confidence in what they do.”
Down in Todd Street Cameron Buckley is coming up for air after working 50 hours a week, keeping open the internet cafe just across the way from his coffee shop. The business was paying its way but when the lease was up for renewal he opted for a saner lifestyle.
That’s given him the energy to do more at the coffee shop, which he opened five years ago. Till now it has made its name on just good coffee and a certain vibe – coming from a combination of look, music, reading matter, Mr Buckley himself and his customers.
Now he’s doing toasted sandwiches and (when his local cake maker is in town) cakes and muffins. If you buy a coffee, there’s free internet access on one of three computers. And there are DVDs for hire. Not just any old DVDs – Mr Buckley is a cinema buff and the range reflects his taste, with the aim being to add a new release title each week.
“A business is an organism,” he says, “it needs to be able to adapt to circumstances.”
The year to date has been like “one long off season” – with both tourist and local custom down – so now was the time to consolidate and refresh. He believes in keeping money in town and has always used locally-roasted DuYu coffee, owned by Doulton Dupuy. Now Mr Cameron is glad to be able to source local cakes and muffins.
It’s important to find “your niche”: rather than going into direct competition with a similar business, fill in “the holes”. He gives child care and storage facilities as examples – there are waiting lists for both.
He and joint venturer Cy Starkman last year put their toe in the water with an entertainment business, Pop Cinema, which combined film screenings with art display, live entertainment, food and drink. That’s been put on hold while they work on a permanent venue in George Crescent, which they’ve dubbed Television House. It should be ready to open early next year.
He doesn’t underestimate the challenges but is optimistic: “One thing that always succeeds in hard times is the entertainment industry.”
Pictured: Top – Kate Podger and staff member Peter Astridge working on the hang of large works from Tjungu Palya in the new gallery. Above – Cameron Buckley in his coffee shop (he’s holding a polaroid photo of himself in his coffee shop).
New intersection for Kilgariff suburb
Construction is set to start on the intersection leading to Alice Springs’ new suburb of Kilgariff. Tenders are being called for a cross intersection at the new junction of Norris Bell Avenue and the Stuart Highway with construction set to begin by the end of the year. The project will include the construction of slip lanes and central islands, as well as the relocation of water mains, installation of ducting and electrical supplies to new street lighting. It builds on the $4.5 million sewerage works underway to ensure houses can be connected to services as soon as the land is developed. Minister for Central Australia Karl Hampton says the new suburb will accommodate up to 3000 people.
“We’re committed to driving down the cost of living,” he says.