Australia is not “failing”. Aboriginal youths are failing us.
They are not failing because of poverty. Australia’s social services are ridiculously generous. Aborigines are pampered every step of the way.
What are we to do when savages cannot adjust to civilisation?
Crime and racism are boiling over in the Australian outback
Smashed windows and ram-raids have become a nightly occurrence in Alice Springs amid tensions over the police shooting of an Aboriginal teenager, Bernard Lagan writes
They broke into his café in Alice Springs 40 times in 18 months. Then, within a week, Darren Clark’s two cars were stolen and his home was ransacked.
“I don’t hate these kids,” Clark said of the young Aboriginals who have laid siege to the dust-dry outpost immortalised by Nevil Shute’s 1950 novel A Town Like Alice.
“Seriously, they’ve broken into me 42 times now. I don’t hate the kids. I hate the system,” he said, echoing the view of many of the town’s 25,000 residents that Australia is failing impoverished Aboriginal youths in its increasingly lawless desert region.
Shute’s portrayal of Australia as a sun-kissed continent of opportunity helped to fuel the postwar surge of “Ten Pound Poms” taking up the country’s offer of assisted migration. More than 80,000 came, some to Alice Springs, the “bonza place” Shute described in the shadows of central Australia’s rust-red MacDonnell Ranges, 1,700 miles by road from Sydney.
Today, Alice resembles a garrison. Its shops, cafés and galleries selling Aboriginal art are no longer bustling. Most have installed soulless steel roller doors to stem the nightly tide of window smashing and vehicle ram-raids — the police say commercial break-ins have risen by 63 per cent in the year to July.
This week the town ran out of its latest defences — unsightly one-tonne concrete bollards that are mushrooming across Alice Springs as businesspeople such as Craig Jervis, a former rugby player who runs the town’s largest private employer, strive to stop the raiders.
“I’ve spent probably over 200 grand at all our venues, just to try and improve security,” Jervis said of his efforts to protect the half dozen hotels, motels and the town’s casino he manages.
But it’s not enough to stop many of his 550 staff from leaving. His purchasing manager, a victim of an assault by six young Aboriginals, is just the latest to quit town. Jervis said: “There are others that are planning to go because the wife just doesn’t feel safe here, or the kids.”
Like many others exasperated by the town’s soaring crime, Jervis supports efforts to help criminals curb their offending but his patience is exhausted. “I generally believe in what the programmes are trying to do, but in the medium to short term, [we need to] build another jail and lock them all up,” he said.
Darren Clark and his partner Kate have taken to sheltering and feeding some of the young Aboriginal offenders they’ve caught breaking into their café and bakery. He is sickened by what some of them have endured — especially girls who have suffered violence and sexual abuse at home.
“They’ve come from homes where there’s blood spatter on the wall or their uncle tried to rape them. It’s horrific,” says Clark.
“You’ve got these kids who are wandering around the streets as young as four. They’re unsafe. If you start that cycle at four years, how do you turn that kid around?”
The case of one Aboriginal offender, who was shot dead by police, has divided the town and revealed seething racism within the Alice Springs force. The death of Kumanjayi Walker in November 2019 is being investigated by Elisabeth Armitage, the coroner at Alice Springs court.
Walker had assaulted his girlfriend, broken into buildings, escaped custody and threatened police with an axe before officer Zachary Rolfe shot the 19-year-old dead.
Rolfe, a specialist immediate response officer, was among a crack team dispatched from Alice Springs to the Aborginal settlement of Yuendumu, 180 miles to the northwest, to arrest Walker. In their confrontation, Walker pricked Rolfe’s shoulder with a pair of scissors; Rolfe shot Walker three times, killing him.
The policeman was charged with murder. Prosecutors said his second and third shots were murderous. An all-white Darwin jury acquitted him in March, after Rolfe’s lawyers argued his training taught him an “edged weapon equals gun”.
Walker’s death still haunts the Alice Springs police.
Three weeks ago, the inquest revealed incendiary text messages between Rolfe and his colleagues about Aboriginals. The officers called Aboriginal people “losers”, “grubby f***s”, “c**ns” and discussed using force to “towel them up”.
In one message, Rolfe also revealed his apparent disregard for police rules, writing “it’s a sweet gig, just get to do cowboy stuff with no rules”.
Walker’s relatives cried out from the public gallery as the text messages were read out in court. The shooting and its aftermath has further polarised Alice Springs, a town already divided over high incarceration rates for Aboriginals. Aboriginals make up 85 per cent of prisoners in the Northern Territory of which Alice Springs is a part, despite accounting for only 26 per cent of the territory’s population.
One of the many security guards now employed in Alice Springs told The Timesthat rising break-ins and assaults were, in part, payback by Aboriginals for the police killing of Walker.
“They’re like a thousand cockroaches here now,” he said.
On Thursday, a row broke out in the Northern Territory parliament over how to stem soaring youth crime.
The territory’s 36-year-old chief law officer, Chansey Paech, who is part-Aboriginal, introduced new laws that will end the prosecution of young offenders and offer them counselling and psychological help instead.
“We’ve heard loud and clear that the old system is not working,” he said.
In a town called Alice, some applaud his courage, others condemn his foolishness.